I recently finished teaching my last section ever; and, like Cincinnatus, I now plan to retire to my farm, at least until student evaluations come back. Section, for those of you lucky enough to have graduated in the golden age before student-teacher interaction was valued, is the extra hour or so associated with a three-hour-a-week lecture class during which students have the opportunity to discuss informally the issues raised in lecture. The session is typically supervised by a graduate student whose job it is to respond to any questions left unanswered by the professor. No other Stanford institution (except maybe Hoover) inspires such justified dread.
The goal of section, and here I’m paraphrasing the Student Handbook, is to learn the art of concealing one’s ignorance. As with most things, students are several steps ahead of their section leaders in this area, having mastered several rhetorical techniques. These include the Unnecessary Supporting Clarification (“Following up on what Mike said, I agree that slavery was due to, as well as the result of, a combination of economic and cultural factors”), the Unassailable Emotional Declaration (“I just find it really hard to relate to Genghis Khan”) and, most devastating of all, the Redirected Question (“To thoroughly answer that, I’d have to know more about religious affiliation in late-19th-century England. Could you talk a little about that?”)
Faced with these tactics, the section leader has countermeasures. No graduate student worth her salt is unfamiliar with the Specific Example Query (“Which economic and cultural factors exactly, using the texts from this week’s reading?”) or the Awkward Segue (“Speaking of Genghis Khan, we’ll have a short nap time.”) Of course, the section leader’s WD-40 is the Pathetic Waffle and Resort to Irrelevant Information You Actually Know (“Theoretically, of course, everyone in England was a member of the Anglican Communion, which, interestingly enough, reminds me of a situation very similar to that faced at one time by the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, whom I happen to be studying . . . ”).
A large part of section’s awkwardness is due to its peculiar atmosphere of forced interaction. Students are expected, and sometimes required, to speak: their grade often depends on participation. In case you’ve forgotten what this feels like, try filling a lull in dinner party conversation this weekend by asking “to hear from anyone who hasn’t said anything yet.”
Despite all this, there is such a thing as a good section. Graduate students have been known to while away the wee hours in their filthy garrets by compiling “section all-star teams.” This is more complicated than it seems: the perfect section consists not just of the best students (too many of these, in fact, and there’s the potential for mutiny, particularly during spring quarter) but also the rare lunatic who adds spice (my go-to guy was a poli sci major who believed that the moon landing was a hoax perpetrated by Fidel Castro and the Masons) and a curmudgeon (often, an older “nontraditional” student who can be counted on to sneer at references to popular culture, thereby usurping pariah status from the section leader).
As both a Stanford undergraduate and graduate student, I’ve had the opportunity to suffer through section on both sides of the conference table. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the section leader governs best who governs least. Some of my finest sections were the ones in which I hardly said a word, when the students simply took over, taking apart arguments and challenging conventions as if engaged in a real conversation—smart people discussing ideas intelligently, as if this were Stanford University or something—and all I had to do was turn off the lights and lock the door when it was over. It gives me great pleasure to think that right now, somewhere on campus, such a section is meeting, and I have absolutely nothing to do with it.
CALEB RICHARDSON, '97, plans to finish his PhD in history in ’06.
