Here I go again on my own

It's that time of year again when I prepare to piss in academia's collective cornflakes. Yes, the Beloit "Mindset List" is out for the class of 2014. Ostensibly created 'way back when to keep college instructors "aware of dated references," it instead inspires my annual full-body cringe, because in spite of its intention, it appears to me to be a thinly-veiled excuse for the most educated people in society to gloat over the ignorance of their charges. Why? I don't know, but it's probably because they fear death.

But let's get this out of the way first. I know it's a list, and on the internet lists validate everything, but explain to me what can possibly be meant by "11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis." Sorry, but W? T? (to the) F? Can I say that "John F. Kennedy never lived" because I was born in 1964? Could Chaucer say that the Norman Conquest never happened? Can baby boomers everywhere say the Holocaust never happened? (I know genocide is a touchy subject, but check out, if you will, #32).

Isn't there a better way of saying what you mean, whatever that is?

Or are we really just implying that college students are incapable of knowing anything they didn't personally experience? If you really believe that, why are you spending your time trying to educate them?

Listen: public higher education is suffering greatly at least in part because academics in many fields spent more than a generation insisting on, even reveling in the very irrelevance of their gloriously postmodern enterprises. Maybe they were saying it because it was "true," but given that there is (it turns out) no such thing as "truth," I doubt it. It's just unfortunate that they were so successful in teaching a generation of policymakers that part of the lesson. Now everybody knows that you don't need to know about Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Elizabeth Bennet, or Molly Bloom, the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Industrial Revolution, in order to be a successful legislator or even president. You want to chuckle wisely over the stuff these students don't know? They're the least of our worries. You want to alienate them on the first day of class? Hand this list out and gloat a little because at least you know who Beavis and Butthead are.

Guess what, folks: we think our students are ignorant? Well, our professors thought we were ignorant. Their professors thought they were ignorant. Educators have always bemoaned the crappiness of their students and the moral decay of the system (check out Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle, 1955). Their ignorance is our livelihood. The Gawain poet says that heroes were really heroes back in King Arthur's time. Yes, those were certainly the days.

Oh, but I forgot. Like the Depression, like Watergate, like the K-car, those days probably "never happened."

The list? There's some interesting stuff there, I guess ... but gang, it's about how out of it we are. And if you're getting ready to walk into that classroom and rock their worlds and change their lives, think twice about leading off by using this list as a "Let me tell you how little you know" toy. I don't know whether that approach will fit with their "mindset."

And for the record, I hate the word "mindset."

Relatable

I hate it when perfectly nice people say irritating things. They might talk about the "drinkability" of some piss beer. They might say "and et cetera." Or they might describe things to which one might relate as "relatable."

When I'm sitting in a meeting of people (often not from the academic side of the house) who talk about this situation or that textbook as being "relatable," I just want to say, "Oh, it's relatable? Then go ahead and RELATE IT."

Look: the Iliad and the Odyssey are "relatable" in that they are stories that one might relate. "The Three Little Pigs" is relatable ... not because one might identify with this or that little piggy, but because one might relate, or recount, a children's story. First Year Seminar is not relatable. A Practical Introduction to Literary Study is not relatable. (Shameless, I know, but at least there's no hyperlink.)

My cousin, in contrast, is not relatable, relative though she be. E equals emmereffin' emcee squared isn't relatable, though it is related to relativity. Get it?

Folks, the boulder that is the English language is rolling down the hill, and all we can do is throw ourselves in front of it to slow its inevitable downward momentum. Come all you sissified Sisypheans: can you relate?