The Pig-Headed Professor and the Good Old Boy
By Mark Browning
A week ago, my dear acquaintance Buckley shuffled off this mortal coil. To effect this ultimate life transition, I will confess that I gave Buckley a healthy push. In fact I pushed and pulled on him for the better part of an hour. Buckley, you see, was a Red Wattle hog, the unlucky one of a pair we purchased back in April. Baxter, Buckley’s cousin, put on weight faster, looked more vigorous, and possessed the wattles that give Red Wattles their name. When Baxter’s superiority became evident, Buckley had a bit of elective surgery and was from that point consigned to a future in our freezer.
How do you take a 275-pound hog to his final destination? We believed we had the answer to that. Having erected side walls on the truck, we backed up to an opening in the pen, lowered a walled ramp down into the muck and mire, and attempted to lure the candidate up the ramp with some food. Given his experience during his previous journey in the truck, I suppose we should not find his reluctance surprising. Once Buckley recognized that we wanted him up that ramp, he steadfastly refused to place a single cloven foot onto it. We pushed and prodded and poked, and he barely moved. Thomas and I both tried to muscle him up the ramp only to have him fly into a frenzy of movement. Fortunately, the worst outcome we saw was when I fell into the rather unhygienic floor of the pig pen.
After about an hour, Buckley was exhausted but resolute in his I-will-not-be-moved attitude. I was exhausted and found myself suddenly ambivalent about getting Buckley to Alewel’s Meats in Warrensburg. That’s when Tom Dent showed up.
If there has ever been a good old boy, Tom Dent would be it. He’s rotund and ragged and rustic. We had hired him to do some grading on our driveway, but he couldn’t resist the sound of a squealing pig. He offered to shoot Buckley right there—I’m serious—and lift him up with his Bobcat to do the butchering. We declined that gracious offer, but did welcome his help in loading. Tom called for a free hog panel, a sixteen-foot by four-foot panel of stiff wire welded together. In two minutes, he directed us to hem Buckley in with this chunk of fencing. Quickly, Buckley had nowhere to go but up the ramp. With my knee pushing into his hams, he grudgingly plodded up the ramp and onto the truck.
Driving to Warrensburg with Buckley standing behind me in the truck bed, I realized my folly. I had attempted to out-muscle an animal that is all muscle, bone, and leverage. My chances of winning that fight were remote. Tom Dent, a man who might have graduated high school, did what I should have done and out-thought the pig. Pigs are smart, but they’re no match for people, even, as I’m sure Tom Dent thought on his way back to finish the driveway, people with college degrees.
I’ll confess that I often do something equally foolish, although considerably less smelly, in dealing with my classes. I cannot force an unwilling student to think critically or go the extra mile in revision. I can’t make them read in a deeper manner than they’d prefer to read. I can threaten them with quizzes and tough grading standards, but even that cannot regularly elicit the passion for knowledge work that I’m hoping to see. I can’t out-“muscle” these willful creatures.
I can, however, out-think them. I can box them into corners from which deep thought is the only means of escape. I can pique curiosity that produces far more concentrated work than my threats ever do. Through years of experience, I have learned many techniques for out-thinking my students and getting them into the metaphorical truck, not for processing into bacon but for processing into more capable and flexible humans.
Why then do I still find myself thrown on my tail in the classroom, exhausted from having tried to muscle them into compliance? Perhaps I’ll mull that over a thick pork chop and get back to you later.