STUDYING STUDENTS

By Roger Rosenblatt

Their heads are bowed at their desks like the flowers I have given them. This is an in-class writing assignment: write a page on what the flower smells like. It is an exercise in stream of consciousness for my students at Long Island University's Southampton College. The school is small and unadorned, spread out on a rise overlooking a bay; it is about to come in to flowers of its own in the reluctant spring thaw.

Write what it smells like; go into the past; follow your nose. This is what you will do as writers. You will plunder the past to explain the present and make the present more intense. Think of stream of consciousness as a detour off the path of the narrative. Go where it takes you, and when you get back, the main road will have changed.

So they sniff, dream into the pictures their minds unearth, and write. A boy's hand is fixed to his forehead, covering one eye. A girl touches her lips with her pencil. They are all very still, separated from one another and from the classroom and the cold sun streaking in.

While they do their exercise, they become mine. Write what they look like: 15 young people in jeans, sweatshirts and sweaters, bodies hooked over a white sheet of paper, pursuing memories, dressing them up and watching to ascertain that their hands are following their instructions. The flower is laid aside on the desk, its work done. The students are off now like hounds. They follow the scent to funerals, weddings, proms. One girl will remember lying in the night grass under a blue moon with her little sister. Another will recall a last dance with a midshipman in Navy whites. A boy will alter the scent to that of lilacs, and swoop back to a childhood Eden near his father's rectory.

This is where education becomes private; this is the nub of it. It is out of sync with the conventional images of education in America. Write about those images: the teacher is a pale, bloodless deacon, drained by unrequited longings, preposterous, out of things. She is the withered maiden; he is Ichabod Crane, humiliated to death by the village nitwit. The only way he gains respect is to become Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle and beat up the classroom hoods. There are exceptions like Mr. Holland's Opus. But the rule is Arnold in Kindergarten Cop.

For their part, students are depicted as at their most alive when they have as little to do with school as possible. Huck and Holden light out for their respective territories; Ferris Bueller is the god of glorious truancy. Or make an Animal House, and trash the joint. School is anticreativity, antifreedom, anti-American--an attitude only logically contradicted by a society that insists on higher education for all and accreditations up to the eyeballs.

Not that the derision is difficult to understand. Education is a setup for ridicule. Old people stuck in place deliver old information to new people about to move up and out. The adamant vs. the supple. The strait-laced vs. the unlaced, over whom they exert a flimsy and temporary authority. Every classroom is an implicit smirk. Write what you feel; I feel that I am going to sit here and accept whatever that tired old bird dishes out, and then I'm going out on the green to toss a Frisbee, flirt, chomp on an Arch Deluxe, live. I'm going to leave him in his own dust.

Meanwhile, the teacher, ever desperate to exhibit vital signs, forages for inspirational material. How to convey that this stuff is essential? How to get across that what is not practically useful is most useful? They are salmon in the springtime, and Professor Backwards has one small porous net. To catch even one or two. Is that worth a life, Mr. Chips?

I'm a half-time teacher, an amateur. It is the lifers who hold up the citadel, they who remain in the dusty stillness of the classrooms after the kids have tromped out. Amid the riot of The Nutty Professor, Eddie Murphy caught that look--all knowledgeable, all wistful, hopeless within his own superiority. Everything he makes vanishes except his size. As he chalks one line of an equation on the blackboard, his belly erases the other line. He is a visual fat joke. But he has something to teach them. He takes them seriously.

"Take another minute to write. Then let's see what we've got."

They hunker down. Still so much to say. They have long ago left the smell of the flower behind and are hurtling down streams of consciousness as if taking rapids. Their necks and shoulders are locked. Their hands are disembodied and skitter from left to right like the automatic returns on electric typewriters. Finally, they stop and wait, heads up in bloom.