My colleagues and I teach undergraduates the fine arts of writing, speaking, and presenting. In this work, we talk explicitly to students about readers and audiences. Much of our work, in fact, involves making students aware of those people to whom they “transmit” their messages, reports, essays, and research. I doubt, however, that I’ve ever taught my students how to be good readers and audiences themselves, even though I hope I model the habits of a good reader and listener.

Today, at our neighborhood school, 670 students gathered in the big gym for the annual Thanksgiving assembly. Mr. Cavanagh, the principal and master of ceremonies, communicated a simple message to this young audience: “Be silent and attentive, and if you can’t be silent and attentive, at least be silent.”

School-age audience, 11.26.2008

Not in fear, but out of respect for Mr. Cavanagh’s words, they did sit still, and most were attentive. Some children were as young as 5 and some as old as 14. (It’s a K-8 school.) No blurting, no elbowing, no yanking at teachers’ sleeves.

After an hour, Mr. Cavanagh — an experienced educator who probably realized the energy that goes into being a good audience — called for a “one minute wiggle break.” Everyone stood up, stretched, turned to friends and talked, shifted in their places, and sat down again at the signal. The musical and theatrical numbers continued for another 30 minutes or so. The singers and players were wonderful; the audience performed beautifully, too.

In class, giving my students some advice on adding context to their scientific reports on Pfu DNA polymerase, I suggested that they return to their course texts.  “Make sure you digest the lab manual.”

I heard myself and smiled.  I looked around the table; some of them were smiling, too.

“I mean,” I said, “Make sure you read the lab manual carefully and digest the information in it. Please don’t actually eat it.”

The mind works associatively.  My verb/object error opened an unlikely file drawer in my head, one that contains moments from NBC’s 30 Rock.  Deciding to digress — and I rarely exploit my students as audience, but this time I did — I told them where my internal attention had landed.

30 Rock: Liz and Jenna

“Did anyone see that 30 Rock episode where Jenna is on the Japanese paper diet?”

I looked around.  They waited; they smiled; no one said anything.  I continued.

“Jenna is one of the stars of a television comedy show, and she’s trying to lose weight.  All she eats is paper.  In the show it’s called the Japanese paper diet.” I paused.  “And so, after I told you to eat the lab manual, I pictured you all eating paper and thought of this.”

Students laughed.  It was so nice of them.

Later, in the van with Jimmy and the two girls, I share the classroom anecdote.  From the way back, Lydia hoots.  “Mom, it’s not called the Japanese paper diet!  It’s called the Japanese porn star diet!” Lydia, who also watches the show, is correct.

Oh, god.  I always meddle, unconsciously, with gags, stories, and jokes, and get them wrong.  My own twists make sense to me, but not usually to anyone else.

In this case, however, I’m so glad I misremembered the diet’s name (although I did remember the gist of the joke: Jenna was eating all the paper she wanted).  There are some things you can say to your students, and some you cannot.  To mention a porn star diet in a science writing class, in any class??  Totally inappropriate.  A paper diet, though?  Just quirky, I hope.

I offered to drop Eli off at school on my way into Cambridge this morning. As we got closer to the high school, right around the time of the first bell, activity intensified: cars, bikes, crossing guards, pedestrians, teens, teachers. As we were stopped at an intersection, a student crossed it diagonally. Tall, slight, curly-haired, and hunched under the weight of his pack, he continuously blinked, grimaced, and adjusted his head on his neck as he made his way across, as though the sun and the concrete world were just too much for him and intruded on his private musings.

“Look at that funny kid,” I said to Eli, and I pointed.

“Yeah, I noticed him,” he replied.

“Someday he’s going to be one of those absent-minded professors,” I said.

Eli paused. He smiled. “And yet, his students won’t not like him.”

I knew what he meant. “He’ll be both. You’re right.”

And on my way to work, alone in the car, I thought about being a student and, along with my friends, loving our funny, weird, and quirky teachers and, as a way to show how much we had studied the objects of our affection, performing for each other our elaborate impersonations of the well-loved teachers’ mannerisms. We would laugh, and the laughter was never mean-spirited. It was gleeful, buoyant, and conveyed recognition. And I dare say the impersonations and laughter knit us together, too.

Every teacher has their “duh” moments, and probably at least one per semester. You say something to your class, and it’s immediately apparent by the looks on their faces that you’re so wrong, or uncouth, or just not with it. By being wrong or simply inexperienced, however, you sometimes learn the coolest things.

Like this semester, in my section of the writing component of an introductory genetics course (which was hard for me to teach, as a newcomer to MIT, and hard for the students to get), I had this brilliant idea to make, with the class, a glossary of sorts for the scientific report that each student was writing on a very similar set of experiments. I had noticed, as I was reading their drafts of the report’s introduction, that the student writers varied dramatically in their use of a technical vocabulary. So I stood near the white board, marker in hand, and asked them, “What are the terms and concepts you think you should cover in this report?”

It was a way of them teaching each other — and me, too — the material, and it worked. As I wrote on the board each term they offered, I asked the speaker to say something about the term, “polymerase,” for example. That student might say, “It’s an enzyme in DNA.” And then another student might add, “It’s what causes amplification.” And then I might ask, “What’s amplification?” And so on. Everyone took notes!, without prompting.

I had a question, too, about this one term that cropped up in almost every one of their drafts: “wild type.” Hmm, what’s this? I immediately associated it with other terms I know, like wild card, wild thing, and wild horses. Crazy, out of control, the outlier. I said, “Someone explain to me this term: wild type.”

There was silence. Smiles. Looks around the room. A few giggles.

“Uh, wild type is just basically the version of a gene as it occurs in nature,” explained one student. She was hesitant, not in her knowledge, but as a way to show tact. Another student added, “It’s a gene that’s not mutated.” This is, I gathered, common knowledge (although not, then, to me).

I laughed out loud at myself. Then they laughed. It was a “duh” moment, but it turned out to be a good one, too.

I remembered this today as I was driving home along a winding back road and occasionally checking my speedometer to make sure I was adhering to the limit. And then I was thinking of (a few) people I know who try to respect posted speed limits. And I broadened that category to people I know who honor common courtesies, follow procedures, recognize the importance of Scrabble rules, and so on. Sometimes it can feel like a burden to always remain within bounds. It’s a weird comfort, though, to realize that even though you may not be a wild thing, you’re always the wild type, through and through.

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P.S. Does anyone remember “Devil Inside” by INXS? I was a fan of that band in the 1980s, and Jimmy and I went to Great Woods to see them when I was in my mid-20s. Even then, I somehow felt too old to be in that crowd.