A Priori

 I cannot remember what I knew when I was seventeen or eighteen.  I distinctly remember trying to seem more worldly and knowledgeable than I really was; as a matter of fact, I still have a habit of nodding in knowing agreement when I am talking to smart people who are saying things that I don’t understand.  I look knowingly, stroke my mustache, and mutter things like “mmmmm... right,” but, unlike when I was young, now these charades usually end with me saying, “wait, what?  Really?  Holy Crap!”  I am confident enough with what I do know to admit that I don’t know stuff.  I like to learn new things, and I am old enough that I can begin to see how ideas and philosophies are interconnected, how learning builds upon itself, and how prior knowledge gives context to new thoughts.    All teachers are frustrated and amazed by turns as they uncover what seem to be inconceivable and unacceptable gaps in students’ knowledge, and it is hard to remember what it was like to begin to discover the world of ideas.

I am teaching Into the Wild to my seniors.  I have mixed feelings about the book, but I am fascinated by the narrative, and I am interested in the debates that it generates.  Krakauer writes fairly simply, but he assumes that his readers, as American thinkers, understand Thoreau, Tolstoy, and London.  I don’t mind giving students abbreviated explanation about who these writers were, but how do I spark the interest that will make them dive in later?  I can’t teach War and Peace, Call of the Wild, and Walden just so that I can get to a three week Krakauer unit.  And of course, to understand these authors, there are a multitude of texts that students need to have under their belts, and so on, ad infinitum.  How can they understand Western Romanticism without understanding the writers and thinkers of the Reformation?  How can they get whatever music that they are listening to now without having heard Johnny Rotten or without listening to what The Zombies had to say?  Some kids will jump in in the middle of the maze of thoughts, because how else can they jump in besides in the middle? They will pretend to know whatever is needed and then start following the never-ending series of paths in the maze of written ideas.  Some kids will get bored and turn to other things, some will learn new languages or old dead ones as they hunt for the logical train.  I hope there are more of the latter than the former.  Whatever happens, I need to be patient and not expect them to have specific stuff before they get to my class.  They have a lot of stuff upon which they will build, and they can always get the rest later.