I ended last year with some reflections on how to end a semester. Here I offer some reflections on how to begin one. They were provoked by a chance encounter with an introductory Spanish grammar text. This presumed disaffection is projected as normative. You probably find grammar boring , the opening insinuates, but do not worry, everyone else does too, even the teacher.
This amounts to an invitation to practice projecting my own prejudices onto everyone else. I suspect that this kind of move has complex motives.
Perhaps there is some compassion for those students who have not thrived amid the preoccupation with grammar that traditionally characterizes formal schooling; if so, that is no small thing.
Perhaps the intention was to downplay the topic to reduce initial fears; this, too, would be a worthy motive. But there are more constructive ways of couching either intention.
I fear that overtly negative openers like this one are all too often motivated by a desire to construct common cause through a kind of world-weary camaraderie. If I, the teacher, fear that you, the student, place little value on what I teach, the path of least resistance is to fall in with your disaffection in an implicit plea for solidarity. I evade having to muster the courage and hope needed to affirm the worth of something that others might denigrate.
