The Art of Teaching Officer-cadets
The newness is beginning to fade – the shine is coming off those military shoes. It’s a good thing I’m writing now, before I forget entirely just how unique a teaching post I have. When I first arrived at the military college just south of Montreal, I was open-eyed, in awe, and out of my element. My students ‘formed up’ and marched to class. With severely shaven heads and stiff uniforms, they all looked the same. Their faces were shut-down, expressionless. There were so few girls in each class that I should have bonded with them immediately, but in fact the fewer numbers did not help: these girls were intimidated and silenced in the overwhelming masculinity of the circumstance. My teaching strengths – gender and modernism – were worlds away from the realities of these young military recruits. But I had grit and experience on my side.
Teaching Officer-cadets is unlike any other university teaching. The students come to class every day – it’s their job: they are paid to study and are expected to work hard. What an incredible relief this is for a teacher! No more standing on my head and spitting nickels to insure a good turnout each day. No more kowtowing to what the students think they should or shouldn’t learn – I can teach what an educated person in today’s western, liberal society ought to know. The students are there to listen, to learn, and the administration is behind me 100%. The only veto the students have is… to fall asleep.
And they do – fall asleep. It’s the common denominator, the leveller, the whip that rules us as teachers, because a sleeping student is not an engaged student.
If they like you, and generally like the class, the subject matter, and the lesson of the day, they are so apologetic.
“I’m sorry, Miss, but I had to form up at 5:30 this morning.”
“Why were you up so early?”
“I failed inspection, Miss. I spent 20 minutes making the corner of my bed, and I still failed inspection.”
On any given day, two or three students will nod off. My colleagues have suggested various solutions, ranging from slapping the desk next to the sleeping beauty, to making the guilty one stand, to assigning push-ups. I have tried each of these methods. When the other students see that you about to awaken a sleeping compadré, they get actively on board with the project, beating you to the task with an unnatural glee. If you choose to make the sleeper stand, you will only learn how well they sleep standing up. If you assign push-ups to the whole class, in the hopes that group punishment will lead them to police each other in future, you may experience the heady rush of power that, frankly, you would rather not have.
No, I prefer none of these. The beauty of teaching literature is that you have absolute freedom to vary how you deliver the classes and the subject matter: activity is the key. Instead of me delivering boring lectures, my students themselves will study the background and history of a work of literature and teach it in a presentation. Everyone listens happily. Instead of me pitching questions and answers with a handful of interested people, my students get into teams to study the literature from various angles; they then present their discussion to the class. When we read Shakespeare’s Henry V, it is while developing scenes for performance. When my imagination fails and I deliver a boring class, the students are much more willing to forgive me and, instead of allowing themselves to nap, they stand up and walk around for moment to stay alert.
Unlike students at other universities who seem to spend more time at the pub than at the library, these students must budget their time carefully. Besides their academic work, they are involved in military exercises, team and individual sports, and personal physical fitness. Sometimes they are restricted to the College grounds; other times they fan out across the town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and fraternize with the locals, revelling in opportunities for bilingualism. Never should they behave in a ‘manner unbecoming’ of an Officer of the Canadian Forces. This is the sword of Damocles which hangs over them.
As teachers, we have a responsibility to help our students to become critical thinkers. We want them to question society, leadership, government policies, and their roles in all of this. We teach them skills and trades, but we also teach them to think for themselves.
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Many of my students have the idea that they must give up social involvement. Well, they are told when they sign up that they can no longer participate in certain active associations – they can’t join public demonstrations, and they can’t publically offer their personal opinions on public matters; they can’t run for office. Some of them take this as a signal to give up thinking. Nothing could be further from the truth. In every way imaginable, an Officer-cadet must be more, not less. How can they be leaders if they have no clue as to what direction their followers are taking? How can they be decision-makers if they are not quick-witted, with great communication skills? How can they evaluate the fitness of the orders they are given if they do not have a strong grasp of ethics?
As these young men and women march into my literature class, respond immediately to instructions given, hold themselves upright, focus more on their uniforms than on their mental abilities, I can only think of the responsibility which is mine – to soften them, to develop their artistic selves, to awaken their sense of irony and criticism, and to open the door to compassion for the human condition.
The first task is to look directly at the forces of pride and propaganda that have brought them to the military in the first place. By looking at the poetry of the First World War, we see how recruits lined up to join the war, impelled by a militaristic upbringing and schooling system that, oddly enough, bears direct resemblance to the training these Officer-cadets are receiving: strict discipline, sports, sensitizing to the chain of command, classical subjects, oratory… an educational recipe handed down from Roman times. We look at the turn, the disillusionment, when pro-war poetry became anti-war, and Wilfrid Owens wrote about the gurgle of the gas in the lungs of a soldier. The poetry teaches the students about fear and pain. The students teach me about strategy, tactics, and innovations in weaponry.
We dive into the thorny era of the Vietnam War, when America was erupting on the home front with civil rights marches, riots, anti-war demonstrations, hippies, and drugs. We look at Casualties of War, read Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” and Joseph Komunyakaa’s “Nude Interrogation,” and we question what happens to the spirit of the one who takes another’s life. We ask ourselves, from whence comes the inhumanity of war which results in the massacres of civilians by trained combatants? My students teach me about the stresses of leadership and the breakdown of the chain of command in the field. They are learning to be leaders who continue to answer for Somalia and the life of a 16 year old boy who stole a radio.
We read Colleen Wagner’s play, The Monument, which echoes the Bosnian conflict and the way in which the male organ became a weapon of war wreaking havoc on the women, raping, impregnating, murdering. My students interview members of the staff who served in Kosovo and participated in the Canadian Operation Medak Pocket, when the Canadian military negotiated tactically with the Bosnian belligerents to affect a pull-out. The Bosnian troops still managed to deke into a few local villages for a last day of slaughter. By now, I am learning far much more than they. My contribution of poetry, prose, and stories seems weak in the face of the overwhelming cruelty they will face.
As I sit watching Starship Troopers with them, I realize that art imitates life/life imitates art. This teenage shoot-em-up is almost too close for comfort. The students here go through the same angst as the ‘federal recruits’ in the movie. The reasons why they join the military are various. They question what they are doing. They train hard; they are subjected to peer and societal pressures, none of which they are capable of recognizing, let alone separating themselves from. Except for the few who will ask for their liberty in the short year they are given to change their minds, their future in the Canadian Forces is a fait accompli. They will serve. They will command. They will make a difference. They trust me, in some way, to help them.
And they are so young. I was much older than they when I began to think. What can I give them now except the impetus to question? In spite of so much that seems contrary, I believe in the essential goodness of human nature, and I trust they will put it together.
Dr. Nanette Norris is Assistant Prof. of English Literature at Royal Military College St. Jean. Her first collection of fiction, The Auction and Other Stories, was published in 2009. She is the author of Modernist Myth: Essays on H.D., D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.
