While my understanding from reading your blog posts and talking with attendees is that Rafe Esquith’s presentation on Monday night was great, I also heard about part of his presentation that troubled me.
Apparently, Esquith relates a story about bringing the Hobart Shakespeareans to the Empire State Building, and he leaves the group alone to do some task. He has cultivated politeness in his students, so they stand off to the side being well-behaved when they are approached by the ticket-taker who questions the children about their quietness and asks them what kinds of video games they like to play and the like.
The students respond that they don’t play video games, and the ticket-taker tells them they need to behave more like children, or something to that effect. Esquith, meanwhile, has overheard the conversation, and it gives him pause. He asks the students what they prefer: to play and behave like children or to behave politely as he instructs them, making sacrifices to do the things they do.
One of the students responds that they are happy to do what they do, and after all, that person was only a ticket-taker, and they did not want to end up like that.
When I heard this anecdote, I was admittedly shocked by the elitism cultivated in Esquith’s student(s). While I think Esquith’s achievements are grand, I also believe in the value of “regular” jobs, and don’t really buy into the prestige value of one job over another. That is to say, I’ve known restaurant bussers and dishwashers who work just as hard as, say, the president of the United States or teachers who work just as hard as, say, an NFL quarterback. The celebrity or salary of one versus another really doesn’t mean anything to me. In the scheme of things, each person might be said to fill their role equally well. I would never consciously cultivate that kind of attitude in students, especially if I knew they were “watching me all the time and needed a model.”
I’ve worked in plenty of low-status jobs in the retail and service sectors, and plenty of people have treated me (I hope unwittingly, but often suspected otherwise) like dirt. “He’s just a waiter,” they would say. Or worse, they would try to take advantage of the server-customer social contract, complaining to take advantage of me because “the customer is always right,” expecting servers to be too stupid to see through their schemes and deceptions.
Too, despite our country’s alleged high valuation for education, there is also the adage “those who can’t do, teach,” implying, of course, that if teachers could do anything deemed valuable by US society (i.e. make money, accrue power, and buy stuff), then we would give up teaching to do it in a heartbeat. To me, this reveals a not-so-subtle conflict of interest between what we say we value and what we practice in truth.
This conflict of interest is not dissimilar from the attitude Esquith seems to be cultivating in his students and himself. He seems, in videos I’ve seen, to portray himself as a humble everyman, but egotistically tout every accomplishment and award. I’m not sure that dismissing the ticket-taker is reflective of the kind of values teachers should inspire in students, no matter how high their students’ test scores are or how brilliantly they can capture the emotions of MacBeth on the stage.
Did anyone else who attend take issue with this anecdote?
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