Teaching the Communist Manifesto… to 9th Graders.

It is a horribly distasteful feeling to look into seventeen pairs of eyes belonging to the brightest freshmen I know… and see blank stares. Irritably, I cannot even interpret why they look blank; are they bored, apathetic, did they get enough sleep the night before, or do they just not see me as someone they can learn from? Of course, my real hope is that they are actually learning something, despite the evidence to the contrary.

I am a senior in high school, and the reason I was teaching The Communist Manifesto is because of my role as teacher’s assistant, and the teacher was out of town. I petitioned for the role of TA because I thought I wanted to be a teacher; but to be honest, I don’t know if teaching is even a profession I want to go into. I know I love to learn, and that I would love others to love to learn as much as I do. Not to mention the numerous ways my life has been changed by those who see their identities as “teacher” not just their occupation. But do I have the gifts and strengths to be a teacher myself? That is a question I hope I won’t have to wrestle with for a few years. But for the time being, I know I wanted to do my best in this role.

The class curriculum itself is quite fascinating in and of itself, even for me; the freshmen are learning things most people do not learn until college, if they learn it at all. The highlight of the year is the number of months they spent on the Enlightenment, reading literature that correlated with the time and/or themes of the Enlightenment. Now they are struggling through “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx, the most difficult reading they’ve had all year.

I began reading it myself, and it certainly was not a piece of cake. The language especially is the difficult aspect for a group of 14-year-olds who would much prefer the writing style of Ted Dekker than the antiquated language of Karl Marx (and… perhaps I secretly speak for myself as well). So not only did I face the challenge to lead a discussion over the message of Karl Marx and its long-reaching implications (which I was not even sure if I understood correctly), but I also had to be able to tell them what specific paragraphs and words meant. It’s one thing to read something and have a nice summary to use for inspiration in an abstract discussion; quite another to actually encounter the text itself.

When it got down to it, certain things were disastrous. I selected a number of quotes that I printed the day before on transparencies, only to find the next morning I had not allowed the ink to dry before stacking them on each other, leaving them smudged and pretty much useless. Then I had thought we would start from page one, spending the most time on the first section, and if time allowed, move on to the second. Apparently I was not present (or paying attention) previously, since the class had already talked about the first section. In hindsight I realize I should have asked someone to summarize, both for my benefit and theirs, but instead I was so flustered I just opened it up to questions and jumped right into the material. I’m not sure if this was a good strategy on my part, especially because in some ways I made it clear to them that I really had no idea what I was talking about. Not to say that I told them I was unqualified (although they could have taken it that way) , or that nothing could be learned; I just wanted them to know that my comments and explanations were undoubtedly imperfect, even if my experiences gave me a better context from which to interpret the passages more accurately than they could.

For the majority of the period, I opened it up to specific questions the students had, and after having them read the paragraph they were struggling with, I’d try and explain it in layman’s terms. I had a dictionary on my desk for the words I had never heard of, or did not want to explain poorly. All-in-all, I think it went… alright. of course, there’s always things that can be improved. But, on the positive side of things, we parsed out exploitation, discussed why Marx would want to abolish things like private property, the family, and eternal truths and religion. I even tried to talk about metanarratives with them at the very end, but with about three minutes on the clock I think I just confused them more than anything. Hopefully it was at least a starting point for further conversation.

My biggest obstacle was not knowing whether or not they actually cared about trying to learn the material. A lot of my experience as a student has shown me that in most classrooms, the learner is almost entirely passive. As I’m studying teaching, however, I’m realizing that if true learning is taking place, it is the student who is the main character in the classroom, and as such should play a very active role. As a student myself it is a little uncomfortable to do that in classrooms in which my peers are content to be passive, and in which the teacher has some sort of agenda that makes them prefer to be the main character in the classroom. Because I am chiefly a student, it felt like I was masquerading as a teacher for the period, and I had no way of knowing whether or not the students saw me as someone they could truly learn from or someone not worth their time. Ultimately I hope despite their passivity and my own experience, learning occurred, at least in a foundational way that can continue to be built upon.