Blog #2: "Quan, Our World Is Not Your World"

By Quan Cao, ELL Outlook™ Contributing Writer

To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Summer is almost over, and my wanderings will become more focused in preparation for another school year. I find myself rushing in and out of town and connecting people and places in my mind's eye. Yet one theme keeps coming back, or more exactly, the juxtaposition of several. I find myself sitting in daylong meetings and facing groups of people where, again and again, questions abound about "meaning." What is the "meaning" of my Vietnamese identity? Why is it that we cannot recognize "diversity"? Are we more equipped now to face a changing world, or are we having trouble controlling events and forcing each other to squeeze into our idea of "meaning"?

Ads on television and even Web sites are selling based on demographics. Information keeps streaming in nonstop, but is information knowledge, and does knowledge have meaning?

I sat in my quiet classroom this morning and pondered these questions. The disconnects, the gaps, the resistance come tumbling forth. The last two semesters, when I asked my World Literature Survey class students to put down for me on an index card the last book they read and how often they read, I discovered 50% of them had not read a book in five years, and 75% of them do not read anything more than magazines or the sports page on a weekly basis. My students all tell me they discuss politics much more than their American counterparts, and they are shocked by how little their friends know about the world. So what has meaning for them? English to get a job and a degree. Money and a job to stay in school. War and peace? Rich and poor? Crime and punishment? Religion?

"Our world is not your world, Quan," they say to me, but when I ask them to give me just a bit more qualitative meaning about their world, they seem stuck. I put a chair in the middle of the room and tell them I would like them to write 300 words or a five-paragraph essay about the chair. They look at me as if I have lost my mind and maybe they should stop by Drop/Add while they still have a chance.

I sat there in the classroom and my mind ran through the rituals of a class beginning, the many scenarios of how the semester will play out, planning and plotting how I will get all my students to read, and to think about meaning, and to discover their voice in a different tongue, and to verbalize their "meaning" in a way that is just self-centered enough so they will not forget who they are, and selfless enough so they will find a central thread and a common denominator with their peers and their other teachers.

I tell them that I have one more goal than the ones they have intrinsically for their education, to make an A, to write a five-paragraph essay, to pass the final state exit exam. I want them to know at least three people in my class, so that by the end of the semester they will have three more friends than the first day they walked in the room. Maybe I am still trying to relive my first day in "Introduction to Plato" when I was 16, but I do know this. I remember very little of what I studied as an undergraduate. Out of the 100+ teachers I had, there were a handful who had something meaningful to say, who showed me by their words and their actions that they got it.

From those teachers, I have learnt this: We all struggle for meaning, especially those of us who teach and impart meaning to others. But I know that moments like this, when I am all by myself, asking myself questions about meaning, prepare me for moments when I am with my students, silencing my inner voice, listening to their voices and their questions. And I finally understand the meaning of Simon and Garfunkel's song "The Sounds of Silence."