1/2 of life is showing up: 50%= F, pt. the last

Now, let's look at the bigger picture. Consider the criticism that higher education often falls under--that it doesn't teach much of anything. Well, maybe there's something to that. I think educators need to take a hard look at what they're doing and ask, "if my students don't come to class, what necessary component of their education is unavailable to them?" If the answer is: "nothing," then something must be done. Perhaps the teacher needs to raise the bar, perhaps the teacher needs to think in new directions, maybe this is a case of getting straight what it is they want their student to learn. In any case, without this investigation, we pass students who do little more than show up and the results of our "labor" shows.

My own goal is to send my students away from my class with the ability to think with some depth about the things they encounter. I teach analysis and use what I believe to be the most fertile subject for analysis: literature. I teach them to find implied meanings all by themselves without need of me or the crutches that they are all but handed by the various corner of their culture. I want them to think for themselves.

I am not, then, teaching "Bartleby: The Scrivener," but analysis using "Bartleby" as an example. In this case "Bartleby" serves me equally as well as Midnight's Children might serve someone else. What's more, the lessons I teach using Melville's story should build skills that one might use in reading Midnight's Children as well as the various charts, graphs, memos, newspapers and everything else we "read" out there in the real world.

Finally, there are other solutions besides the one I have suggested, all of which are a variable wealth of practices for criticism. I would like to point out 1, and even with just this 1, mention it only briefly. Inside the humanities, the move to bring students into class has started a trend of artificially inflating the intellectual component of the classroom. I'm talking here not of assigning Midnight's Children instead of Bartleby. Rather, I'm speaking of assigning "high end" critical texts which have little to say but which require the teacher to play the part of an interpreter: cultural studies, gender/queer theory, semiotics, post structural anything, etc. Note with these works, that the student is confused enough to come to class but, as there is no panacea for Foucalt, the student's confusion cannot be cleared up; they are just as likely to come to class hoping for answers that are unavailable as they are to realize such answers will not be given. In the latter case, they stop wasting their time and decide, wisely I think, to stay home.