Taught my first class of the summer today and I think it went quite well. I was especially pleased with the class discussion. I gave the kids two short pieces to read (a story and a nonfiction essay) and then we had discussion; they had awesome, insightful, interesting things to say, and on the first day of class! It was great.
I gave them an in-class writing assignment, and one of the prompts they could choose was "remember back to a time when your heart was broken. If you had a chance to take revenge, would you?" Out of 21 students, 13 used this prompt, and only one person- one - said she'd take revenge. The other 12 mostly said things like "god/life/fate will take revenge for me," or "I'm getting my revenge, actually, by being happy now and being the better person" (which totally doesn't count as revenge!).
I wonder if they're being honest. Is it true that most people wouldn't take revenge? Is it strange that I'm surprised by this? What compels them all, when they are allowed to write either nonfiction or fiction (where, in theory, they are especially free to write anything they want), to take the moral high road?
I asked one of them to consider writing her essay from the "bad" point of view, because her piece was mercilessly good. She even calls herself a goodie-too-shoes (sic) at the end. As a result, the essay reads like a string of truisms. I recommended she have the "good" and "bad" self fight it out in essay form, just to see what she could come up with (I'm a big fan of playing around with writing, experimenting, and reshaping to see what happens).
Because, okay, I want to be a good person. I work at it. Hurting someone would devastate me. But. Excising demons (to be trite here for a momentito) through fiction? Oh my yes. When else in life does one get that kind of freedom? What makes my kids afraid to explore this impulse? Or do they really not have it?
I guess what I'm getting at here is that I think most of them have to be insincere about this. Or they want to impress me with their goodness. Or maybe we all construct ideas of ourselves that we use as shorthand to answer questions like this. For example, I think of myself as this kind of a person, so no, I'd never enjoy this or that or whatever. I see myself as a good person, so no, I'd never try to get revenge on anyone. But the thing is, there are so many little choices we make every day that are absolutely devastating to other people. The simple choice of whether to go to this restaurant or that one, or whether to buy our clothes from the mall or the thrift store, or etc etc; all these choices matter. These choices have far flung effects that we will never be able to see or really fully comprehend.
I can hear, for example, like all day long (who would be willing to say this to me all day? Ha.) that the lifestyle I'm living is an unsustainable one that causes suffering and torment around the world. Do I see that suffering? Does it feel like it is of me? No.
It's just an issue of ethics, really, to me. That these kids, right? That they can't conceive of getting revenge, or at least they say they can't conceive of it, but at the same time they are a part of this too-large-for-words killing machine and that would probably never factor into the decisions they make, the person they see themselves as, or anything else, really.
So what is my point? I don't think I have one. I don't know why I'm comparing Creative Writing essays and short stories to worldwide suffering and globalization. But I am. In an obscure way, this question reminds me of the hypocrisy of living in the US. I.E. "I'm a good person! I would never hurt anyone! But I don't want jails/mental institutions/trash dumps/etc in my neighborhood. And I don't want to have to give anything up in order to get more $ and more $ and more $."
Whoa. Okay. Thanks for hanging in there with me. It was a really good class. And I'm impressed with their work for the most part. I think this semester is going to be fun.
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