Harassing Trump-Supporting Students As A Form Of Pedagogy

The most recent issue of the magazine Guernica features an essay-letter written to “my fellow teachers” by Nell Boeschenstein, who teaches writing at Sweet Briar College. Boeschenstein reports that on the Wednesday morning after the election of Donald Trump she pondered a choice: “Did I walk into class today and say, ‘I know we’re all tired and feeling sensitive today, now let’s turn to page 46 and pick up where we left off’ or did I walk in and say, ‘There’s an elephant in the room that we’ve got to discuss?’”

You pretty much know what she will end up doing when she prefaces option #1 (“let’s turn to page 46”)with a verbal arm around the shoulder: “I know we’re all tired and feeling  sensitive today.” With all that sensitivity in the air, how could she justify business as usual? Page 46 will have to wait; discussing the elephant — Donald Trump — is obviously the only way to go. The path to that choice is smoothed by the first person plural “we’re” (“We’re ... feeling sensitive”) which creates a fellowship by claiming a knowledge she couldn’t possibly have. She can’t know what her students are feeling unless she was assuming, as she obviously was, that they would be feeling exactly what she felt. After invoking the fellow feeling she has rhetorically manufactured, she announces her decision: “I did the only thing I could do: I was honest... and told my students how I felt... I asked if they wanted to talk about it. They were silent.”

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