Well, the condom came off the class. No safe teaching in one class Friday. But, it was a “wow” class. I’ll just say that I had to put aside the planned beginning of a project presentation and let spontaneity kick in when a student asked a question at the beginning of the class about what was to her a critical “personal” situation in another class. All hell broke loose before I could open my mouth. Hands shot up, people called out, cliques of whispering side conversations began. I did more sitting back at watching and listening than participating and guiding. It was a cacophony of total and partial agreement and disagreement: African-Americans agreeing and disagreeing with each other; African-American ladies agreeing and disagreeing with non-African-American ladies; ladies agreeing and disagreeing with guys; African-American guys disagreeing with the non-African-American ladies; self-proclaimed liberals agreeing and disagreeing with self-proclaimed conservatives. I won’t belabor the point. No bloc voting or lock-stepping unanimity anywhere at anytime among anyone on any part of the issue. Everyone seemed to be that proverbial variation on a theme and exception to the rule. All weekend I thought about that discussion and the cacophony of responses in journals to it that cut across any lines anyone could draw: liked, disliked, excited, bored, asserting, questioning, interested, insightful, stunned, “no big deal,” “what a class,” “could care less,” “that was an important class,” “see no point.” I was particularly sensitive to what had occurred because of a brief discussion of “traditional” versus “real” diversity that I and my good friend, Todd Zakrajsek have been having on and off since Lilly South.. This is what I came up with about that spur-of-the moment fifty minutes as I hit the streets this pre-dawn morning.

First it was the philosophers; now it’s the scientists. They tell us that human beings are social animals, that we’re hotwired to connect. We have a natural desire for attachment. We instinctively feel and are affected, and sometimes mimic, even to a small extent, the mood, manners, and actions of the people around us. The result is that most people are pretty nice when they go eyeball-to-eyeball, one-on-one with each other, when they know each other’s names, when their faces are clearly seen, when they rip out labels, when they step out from being boxed in and separated by stereotypes to relate personally person to person, when they experience the joy of being in each other’s presence.

But, what is so often ignored on our campuses is that none of this applies when the natural individual heterogeneity is replace by an artificial homogeneity, when people become impersonal, when they relate to herded into corrals of generalities, when labels are slapped over and hide their names and faces, when the are converted into numbers, when they are bureaucratically identified as “units,” when their uniqueness is torn from their souls, when their spirit is amputated, when their blood is suck out from them, when they are de-boned into stick figures. It’s as if the operation of an entirely different part of the brain kicks in and triggers a different set of values. People become different people to each other. Warmth, love, awareness, caring, support, encouragement, joy, empathy, respect, sensitivity, closeness, and nurturing–those things that make life in the classroom worth living–are replaced by weeding out, coldness, insensitivity, distance, unawareness, indifference, and, as I teach in the Holocaust course, worse.

The result is that so many of us profs get student behavior so wrong; they step away from and don’t reflect on or think about or don’t get involved with the world of emotion, social relationships, personal lives, motives, morality, expectations, imagination, faith, and love; they surrender humanity and reality to statistics, charts, diagrams, as well as to distorting assumption and presumption; they drop their guard–if they ever had it up–against treating students as a consistent, constant homogenous group or collage of groups. Consequently, they commit a host of “attribution errors.” That’s why when it comes to “students” and what I call “traditional diversities” we have to find ways to replace mathematics with humanity, break down fences, destroy boxes, cast aside stereotype and generalities, and get beyond labels. After all, to be realistic, teaching is about the unique individual, whom I call “the real diversity.” That in itself makes teaching an art fraught with impromptu, messiness, inconvenience, discomfort, and uncertainty rather than a science directed by neat, structured, and guaranteed predictability.

To all my Jewish friends, Susie and I wish you a very happy Passover. And, to all our Christian friends, we wish you a happy Easter.

 Louis