Back when I was in college, my Senior year, I signed up for a discussion class on 18th Century British Novels, and for some weird reason, this particular class was held in a huge, spacious room in the Music building, an ambience that should have been airy, light, and creatively-inspiring, but it only proved to be a vacuous mood killer. That's putting it mildly. Also, all of the students who chose to take this class turned out to be an entire group of incredibly shy people. So there it was -- a spacious, sound-sucking, half-empty room + a group of introverts + the after-lunch, sleepy time.
Eighteenth Century British Novels was doomed from the start.
Each class, twice a week, no matter what the professor did, he couldn't get anyone to talk. And he was one of the most well-known, most well-liked profs on campus. But I swear, I bet that even if he went overboard and decided to show up naked, in this dull, dead class, no one would've said one...single...word.
Except one girl. Every class, without fail, she spoke for like fifteen minutes. Some days, she spoke twice, but still, there was no way she could fill up an hour and a half of torturous time.
Other than that, there was nothing but the dull sound of the wall clock ticking for minutes on end, and then the Professor would mutter a joke or something. I could tell that he felt this: I can't wait for this semester to be over. I think that he even said that out loud once. Imagine being stuck as the leader during an hour and a half of stone cold faces and silence. That would be worse than intense arguing, I think. Like a failed stand-up comic trying his heart out at his first show in New York City. Constantly, he was face to face with no reaction, blank faces, nothing. No one even seemed to be taking notes. No movement, no facial expressions, nada. I suppose, even a negative reaction would've been welcoming, I dunno.
Now, I admit that I was a part of it. I was definitely guilty of contributing to the silence. I too was sitting there like a duck at dusk, hungry and quiet, simply waiting for time to pass. Normally, I was known to comment during class, but the whole room's mood affected me, and the novels were confusing, difficult, and nonlinear; I wasn't into any of the books, and there were a few I barely even read, because when the professor made the assignments, the reading amount was so large -- around 200 pages a night -- so I just got overwhelmed and said, Fuck it, I'll skim. Everyone was overwhelmed.
Every other class that I took from the same professor was lively and inspiring. But it was the mood of the whole, the quiet rumble of rebellion, that made 18th Century British Novels go down in the history books as his worst class ever, and he admitted it. One day, the professor even commented as such. "It's like pullin' teeth," he said out loud in front of everyone. Some people quietly chuckled, but of course, no one commented.
Why didn't one person speak up and say, You give us too much to read. It's impossible to read and digest that much in one night. Why? Because no one wanted to admit that it was too much, or they didn't want to admit that they hadn't read at all.
And so the stalemate continued all semester long. On one side -- the baffled professor "pullin' teeth." On the other side -- quiet students who hadn't read because the assignment was too large, too much, and rather ridiculous. And in between -- a deep, dark, quiet hole in the middle of the circle in which we sat.
And then the semester finally ended, and the class was over, and we all went on to other classes, and so did he, and the whole dynamic changed, and the "worst class" never happened again. Why? I have no idea, because he continued to make over-the-top assignments on extremely difficult texts, ones that probably only he, a genius, could understand and complete. But there was one key change...
His jokes got better.
C.A. MacConnell
