The following is the most recent example of a largely positive experience my role as teacher provided me while instructing the full first year course, Identity & Experience: Examples Of Trait Based Discrimination In Modern Literature.  A unique experience, teaching a combination of several aspects of American literature, the core humanities, and cultural studies. 

It is a course meant to reference how fictional or non fictional examples of modern writings apply to how individuals and groups experience specific oppression, based on any of four central pillars of identity, those being gender, ethnicity (or as some prefer to call it, race), sexual orientation, and class.

Meant to provide both theoretical understanding of advanced concepts in the academic domains of feminism, gender studies, race relations, and what has become billed "queer" studies, as well as fine tuning ones ability to apply an intuitive and empathetic understanding to how those theories are experienced.

Obviously, those are goals that create certain prohibitive aspects when teaching in an objective sense, those understandings. So, in what was largely a very clear way of testing my own suitability for faculty level instructor status, I was given the task of developing what, for this new course, would be the final term exam.

In an example of a very insightful and amusing opinion, my lead professor correctly identified that task as being one with two specific outcomes. One, if successful, it would be seen as providing several examples of privilege, in opportunities that would be available to me. Two, if viewed as failing in that task, the way that would be realized? Until the end of my career, it would be a clear example of the reason I would be considered as never beyond anything but a shitty teacher. Obviously, a daunting way to view what would be a very important task.

In what was a very risky way to approach it, I did so in a way that would only result in an extreme example of one of the above outcomes. Thankfully, it was one I've since discovered was viewed overwhelmingly as an example of successfully meeting the task. And in what is the point behind this article, it was also an example of a few specific experiences that students have identified as large ones in their academic history, which provided insights around things they didn't expect, or ever really let themselves consider before.

The best way to describe this would be through what were my direct instructions to students writing the final exam.

Welcome to the final exam for Modern Literature/Core Humanities 101:

Identity & Experience: Examples Of Trait Based Discrimination In Modern Literature.

This exam takes the form of two specific questions, each equally weighted, and added together to form fifty per cent of your overall course mark, applied at the end of the term. The following are the specific directions that need to be followed very closely, if your answers are to be viewed as successfully meeting the specific objectives behind the questions.

Question #1.

You need to apply your advanced understanding of the theoretical concepts of gender, orientation, ethnicity, and class, as they apply in the novel The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood. Your answer should equally address the four theory domains of gender, ethnicity, orientation, and class, and be no more than two thousand words, constructed in essay format, and not requiring specific textual attributions. Remember that this question is  only meant to assess your academic understanding of specific theory, not your personal view of the relevance of that specific theory.

Question #2.

Is a question that again addresses your ability to apply your understanding of the same theoretical concepts of gender, ethnicity, orientation, and class, but this time, in an intuitive and empathetic understanding of how they relate to a perception of personal identity.

This next part of the description, is a very important aspect of how you answer this question. The specific vantage point you answer from, will be based solely on a hypothetical abstraction. One which is specific to the identity described on the fifth page of your exam booklet. It is an individually specific assignment of an identity that is based only on the fact of it not being something that applies in any way to you. For example, if you view yourself as a white, male, heterosexual, those are specific identities you must not answer from.

My specific way of evaluating these answers, has been designed to be intentionally very flexible, and is based on the expectation your answer will correctly apply what has been described to you above.

Two Things To Be Aware Of:

One, that any answer similar to "that's not my experience, so I can't answer that question", will be met with a specific grade of zero, for that portion of the exam, and therefore will result in a mark below the sixty per cent required grade for successful completion of the exam.

Two, I offer some advice. In completing the second question, most people will be met with a natural tendency to reject what is not their own experience with identity. Your ability to be successful at that question, is largely dependent on your ability to work through that first rejection you will feel. Give yourself a few minutes to focus on just that.

Good luck.

I should say that when it came time to write that final exam, both semesters of students could almost be heard making audible gasps, as they read the instructions. Though after getting centered around the idea, and after the majority received a very well deserved high mark in that question, the exam was one largely experienced as positive.

Certainly there were examples of students viewing it as completely unfair, and as one student put it, "just another example of unfairly indoctrinating the student body with the most leftist kinds of liberalist bullshit to hit university campuses". Fair to say, that students answer was one too specifically vague in their attempt to understand anything beyond their own tightly held little opinion. Also fair to say, that's a common type of statement from the students who, from the first day of class, sit in the back row, with crossed arms reflective of their intention to disagree with everything said in the course. A real fun breed of student to teach.

The more common responses were ones that had varying levels of unique and largely unexpected personal reactions, in how the experience offered them something they viewed as personally very positive. For me, that was an example of what I meant when I described the subtle, and unique ways positive student teacher experiences commonly occur.