The Garden of Forking Paths

            My freshman comp teacher (whose name I have mercifully forgotten) believed himself to be a deep thinker. During class, he often dispensed wisdom about things he found witty, interesting, or absorbing while maintaining the façade of an academic elite. On a rainy day, he once said in a serious tone:  “The thing I hate most about rainy days is the rain leaves little brown circles on the toes of my tennis shoes, and they won’t wash out.”

He was study in contradiction who kept changing the rules.  This created frustration for students trying to determine exactly what their instructor required to get a good grade.  At the beginning of the semester, he promised a term paper at the end of semester would count for a large percentage of the final grade.  This produced hope that, while he gave out very low grades on essays, a good term paper could save us. 

But then, near the semester’s end, he suddenly had a mathematic epiphany and realized that allowing the final term paper to count so much would negate our earlier efforts.  This was exactly what we desired!

 

The most memorable thing about the class, however, was a single short story.  While we were required to purchase a literature book, we read only one story in the book.  We spent long, tortuous weeks reading and re-reading that story: The Garden of the Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges.  We studied the story line by line, word by word. With mind numbing determination, we discussed every nuance of the story, whether intended by the author or not.

 

"Red," he would say. "What deep, philosophical implications do you see in that word?"

 

This exhaustive examination of an obscure short story produced in most of his students a deep desire to bang heads against the brick walls of the class building.  The teacher’s motivation for such in-depth study of the story was lost on his students.

 

But the reason became clear to me a couple of years later when I learned that this instructor had written a thesis on The Garden of the Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges.  So we, his students, were unwitting and unpaid research assistants in his pursuit of a doctorate.

 

When I realized how the instructor had subtly coerced students to assist in his research while pretending to teach, I was outraged.  I felt disillusioned, cheated, even used.

 

He used his position for personal gain.  And the world seems to be sadly full of people like that today. What do you think?