Professor X

by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

  We’d dredged everything we could out of Barry, Greenfield, et al. We’d looked for examples of thesis statements and topic sentences, which wasn’t easy; writers often leave these items unstated, drawing in the reader. And though we could generate some topic sentences where Jeff Greenfield hadn’t, my students didn’t exactly understand why they had to—which is why using the essays most texts include as models is problematic: the writing is simply too subtle and too idiosyncratic. I would think it a bad bet for anyone to try to imitate Dave Barry: my students, Vladimir Nabokov, me, anyone. The benefits of our reading would, I knew, be small and indirect; reading this handful of essays must be better than reading none, and we were trying to make up, with a small clutch of baby steps, for a lifetime of not reading.

  Now it was time for the students to plan their own essays. The textbook had boiled the compare-contrast essay down to a series of steps, with examples and tips and Venn diagrams and checklists. My students had been instructed, by the chirruping text, to develop a plan of organization and stick to it. As we used to say in the old neighborhood: No shit, Sherlock.

  We considered the list of topics in the text. “The main characters of two films, novels or stories.” “Computers: Macs vs. PCs.” “City life and rural life.” “Malls and main streets.”

  “The topic has to come from deep within you,” I said. “It has to be a comparison that only you can make. In specificity lies the universal.” I repeated that last sentence, and they wrote it down dutifully. “Talk to me as though I were on a barstool beside you, or across the table in the diner at three in the morning. Be that detailed. Give us the comparison that’s been eating away at you for years. Give us the whys and wherefores.” I was a new teacher of writing, but I knew that much: that the writer must be obsessed by the topic. As Jennifer I. Berne of the University of Illinois says, “Control of topic is essential in writing workshops because the writing student must feel that they have the most knowledge in the room about what they are writing.” She quotes Lucy Calkins, who wrote in her book The Art of Teaching Writing, “By supplying a topic from my experience and giving it to my students, I indirectly taught them that their lives aren’t worth writing about.”3

  The period was over. The students arose, full of determination to succeed at their task. They were nothing short of abuzz. The building contractor said that he had never felt better prepared for a writing assignment in his life. If only, he said with some anger, someone had done this sort of work with him twenty years ago. The entire cast of his life might have been different.

  Well, yes, I thought to myself. But at least you encountered me now, before it was completely too late. Professor X can’t be everywhere, you know. In a lifetime, how many students can one man lead out of the writing wilderness? (My interior voice was sounding so rich and plummy!) I try my best.

  The following week, they brought their essays to class. Were some of them actually swaggering a little? The mood in the classroom was bubbly. New friendships seemed to have sprouted. I collected the essays, their first drafts, and went off with them to the copy machine. We were going to use the workshop format, with everyone looking at and helping to revise several of the submissions.

  I had told them to write from personal experience but warned them that everyone in class would see their work. I also warned them about the pitfalls of writing workshops. “I’ve taken a boatload of college classes in my time,” I said, “and only in writing workshops have I seen people cry.”

  Not every student’s piece would be a success, I knew, but I wanted to share the joy in real time with those students who had made progress.

  I returned to the classroom and handed each student a pile of photocopies. “Keep them in order, so we don’t get confused,” I said crisply. I gave instruction. I had wavered on whether or not to have the students read their essays aloud; I decided not to, for the time being. “Everybody read with a pen or pencil in hand. If great language jumps out at you, note it down. If something is unclear, note it down. If you have questions after reading a paragraph, jot them down. Let’s read through the pile and come back and do individual pieces.”

  I knew what was certain to happen. Inspired by my passion for writing, the students had labored mightily, and turned in the best work of their lives. I would see that they had made small but discernible progress.

  How I would love, dear reader, to deliver a different report from what I am about to write. I would love to say how blown away I was by their work. I would love to concede that the grammar was rough, and that as first drafts the essays needed lots of spackling and releveling but that we had tapped into their experiences and the stuff they had written was pretty neat. That’s what I thought would happen. I pictured us as being comfortably swaddled in a quilt of narrative. I had worked hard to teach them. They seemed eager to learn. Surely the lot of us would progress somewhere. It had to be. We were all playing our roles, as though we had played them thousands of times before.

  Our narrative had derailed. The story took an unexpected twist.

  The papers were even worse.

  Once, after I’d been instructing for a few years, I eavesdropped for the first time on another English 101 class. The instructor was a very experienced woman of about my age who had seen it all. She was rather a classic adjunct type. Slim and intense, unsmiling, she wore a long brown skirt with as much material as a schooner’s sail, mustard-colored tights that pilled, naïve-looking flat shoes. She wore no wedding ring. Her voice was throaty, from years of smoking or teaching. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d had a tough go of it. Her first-night speeches to her class were remarkably similar to mine, but she did have one ringing catchphrase all her own.

  “Please do me a favor,” she said to the class. “Don’t hand in garbage.”

  I hadn’t told my students that. I’m not sure it would have mattered.

  For there is no other word but garbage for what my students handed in. My older students did all right, I suppose, but even their work had fallen off. It was bad. When I categorize the lot of assignments as barely literate, that’s an average; some papers were not literate at all, and I’d be hard-pressed to say what exactly, in their compare-contrast essays, was being compared or why. Words were randomly assembled and weirdly spelled, and does no elementary or high school teach the capitalization of the first person singular pronoun anymore? Some essays seemed, in their obscure reasoning, to make connections that would be apparent only to a lunatic. Was it the best work my students could do? That’s a slippery question. The fact that they handed it in seems to indicate that, yes, on some level, it was the best they could do. But scattered liberally through the poor writing was much evidence of lack of care: crazy misspellings of grammar-school words, misspellings that the spell checker would catch but for which it could offer no alternative; words repeated, like the pounding of a sledgehammer, nine or ten times in a paragraph; crucial words omitted; batches of words pressed together in the hopes of forming a sentence, like old slivers of soap jammed together for one last shower. There were times I suspected an easy explanation to the whole mess: that the writers had not had their fingers placed on the home keys while they typed.

  Here was my first hard lesson in life as an adjunct professor in the basement of the ivory tower. The students are poignantly desperate for success. Many of those I teach have done poorly in high school; college is not a goal for which they prepared single-mindedly for eighteen years. College is a place they landed in. I teach those whose names don’t come up in the debates about advanced placement courses, adolescent overachievers, and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose high school transcripts show poor attendance, indifferent grades, and blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. But now, shanghaied into college classes because of the demands of the workplace, they have seen the light—in a panicky sort of way. They want to do well. I want them to do well, and I teach subjects about which I am crazily passionate.

  Many nigh
ts for the past decade, I have taught in a classroom crackling with positive energy. No matter where I lead, the students follow. If in my literature class I choose to spend an hour on the splendidly written opinion by the Hon. John M. Woolsey in the case of United States of America v. One Book Called Ulysses (“… whilst in many places the effect of ‘Ulysses’ on the reader is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac” [the students don’t get it at first; “emetic” throws them for a loop until I prod the memories of the young and not-so-young moms: “Ipecac!” they cry]), or if in my college composition class we detour off into such an arcane point of grammar as restrictive vs. nonrestrictive relative clauses, the students stay with me. On those nights when I am in the teaching zone, the class will follow where I lead.

  For a while, I thought I was all the legendary charismatic teachers rolled into one: Mr. Chips and Conrack and Jaime Escalante and Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. I assumed my results would match theirs. But now I better understand the immense hazard-strewn distance between teaching and learning. On any given night, I may very well be entertaining, informative, illuminating, and even inspirational on the subject of essay writing, but ultimately my gyrations are those of a semaphore signalman on the horizon, and it’s every man for himself on a dark battlefield navigating past indolence, despair, fear of failure, fear of success, lack of foundational skills, lack of time, lack of aptitude, the allure of Internet surfing, lack of sustained interest. It’s hard to teach writing for the same reasons it’s hard to change any human behavior at any time. The students’ essays are poor for the same reason my sporadic efforts to learn French have invariably stalled. Though she owns books and floor mats and has taken lessons at the YMCA, my wife can do no yoga.

  When the essay that prompted this book was published in the Atlantic Monthly, education-minded bloggers were bent out of shape by my characterization of the students’ writing as being so profoundly poor. Alex Reid, an associate professor of English and professional writing at the State University of New York at Cortland, wrote that he supposed “what makes such students the ‘worst’ is that they are distant from a certain ideological notion of students. They are perhaps unlikely to share in conventional notions of literacy and academic discourse.”4

  My notion of college-level discourse is indeed conventional, and no, the students don’t share in it at all. Professor Reid’s language is academic and polite, and the very essence of euphemism, which I try to get the students to stop indulging in. Mike Rose, who has written several books on education and literacy, clucked his tongue at me for being disrespectful to the students and spoke of the methods he used when teaching remedial college classes:

  And because many of our students … did display in their writing all the grammatical, stylistic, and organizational problems that give rise to remedial writing courses in the first place, we did spend a good deal of time on error—in class, in conference, on comments on their papers—but in the context of their academic writing. This is a huge point and one that is tied to our core assumptions about cognition and language: that writing filled with grammatical error does not preclude engagement with sophisticated intellectual material, and that error can be addressed effectively as one is engaging such material.5

  Rose goes on at great length about the lots of other ways I could have achieved my educational goals. Remediation is what he wants me to do, but he seems to forget that I do not teach remedial or developmental classes, and cannot transform my bona fide honest-to-God fully accredited college class into one. The truth, of course, without any sugarcoating, is that the work submitted by my students is often so garbled that it is impossible to understand what they are thinking.

  I read the compare-contrast essays that the students had written. I knew that we would have to start at the beginning. A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought. I wanted to go back there. I felt the tug of the past. I wanted to start at the very beginning and replicate the nineteen years of language arts study. I couldn’t, of course, so I compromised. We would start not at the roots of language or usage but the roots of thought.

  I read one essay aloud.

  “Here we have a piece delineating the differences between cats and dogs,” I said. “ ‘Dogs are friendly, cats are not. Dogs greet their owners at the end of the day; cats do not. Dogs appear grateful for everything they get in life; cats do not.’ Now, what’s the problem with this essay?”

  “It’s not true?” said one student uncertainly.

  “Why isn’t it true?”

  “You can’t just say all cats are a certain way. You may have had a friendly cat.”

  I smiled to myself. She was young, not too long out of high school. You can’t just say. Are there any words more chilling to a writer? The high school teachers had schooled her in a curriculum of political correctness. She knew that she shouldn’t demean cats by stereotyping them. She was a nice young woman, I’m sure, and she’d never say a mean or unfair word about any living thing, particularly in a classroom setting.

  “I actually think what the essay says is true,” I said. “I’ve never known a friendly cat. No, the ideas behind the piece are, in some senses, valid. But in my mind the essay is not completely satisfying. Why is that?”

  I got several half hearted and confused answers.

  I was starting to get a little ticked at the students, I must admit. It seemed I was working a lot harder than they were.

  “Think of it this way,” I said. “You’re at a party. And there’s a beautiful person on the other side of the room—a person that you really, really want to get to know before the night is out. You sidle up to him or her. You introduce yourself. The person reciprocates. There is electricity. You feel a bit of magic. Your heart flutters. You really need something great to tell this person. You need the start of a conversation. You desperately require some witty repartee. And so you lean over to the person and, with all the suavity you can muster, you say, ‘You know, dogs and cats are really different. Dogs are friendly. Cats are not.’ ”

  The class laughed. The writer of the essay, whom I had not identified, laughed as well. He reddened rather dramatically.

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked.

  The laughter cut off. Confusion and uncertainty.

  “What’s the problem?” I cried. “You’re all laughing. What’s so funny?”

  My nice young friend who was on the side of cats answered again. I think she wanted to redeem herself. “You would never say that at a party.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s kind of … obvious.”

  Hallelujah. Now we were getting somewhere.

  “So why would it be good enough for this assignment?” I asked. “The writer must seduce the reader, just like you want to seduce someone at a party. I, as a reader, have a lot of other stuff I could be doing. Why should I read anything? I could be watching a movie or eating a good dinner or surfing the Internet. Why the hell would I want to read about dogs and cats?”

  They understood, the class. They got it. They knew that what had been written was absurd, but it was just an assignment, with no relevance to the real world. For the indifferent student, all work is busy work, empty effort to occupy time and, hopefully, garner some credit in the end.

  “I think you all just may have to think harder and work better,” I said.

  By semester’s end, I believe the class had made some small progress, but in truth it’s hard to say. They were a challenge, and I was brand new. Certain assignments they made a complete hash of, and I, because of my inexperience, couldn’t help them even a lick. Their research papers, for example, were utter disasters, because I didn’t realize at how low a level they were operating; to dip into educational-speak, I didn’t know how fragmented and disjointed their schematas were. When I explained to them how to develop a thesis and how to use passages from scholarly articles in journals to buttress that thesis, I didn’t realize that I was speaking a completely foreign language: th
ey had never seen, had never touched, had never even heard alluded to, this mysterious entity called a scholarly journal.

  As a new instructor, I regretted my incompetence. That semester, I failed only the hardest cases, those students who stopped handing in assignments or even coming to class. Some of the nursing students and the middle-aged moms, who tended to hand in papers twice the required length, finished with low B’s, which was already a compromise, as in my heart none of them did true B work. I gave one A. Everyone else swam in the polluted waters of C and C-minus and D.

  My administrative systems were not yet locked in place. I had given some students the benefit of the doubt. Some students claimed to have handed in assignments of which I had no record; I had to assume the mistakes were my fault. I was still a naïf. I did not yet realize that some students, behind their earnest masks of good effort, were coldly, ruthlessly—like any high school punk, like smarmy Eddie Haskell—playing me for a sucker. I looked at that marvelous college-Gothic architecture, the arches, the trefoil windows, the spires pointing to heaven, and I was still thinking of college as a place of elevated virtue—of nobility.

  My eye for grades was not yet sure. Some of those C’s and C-minuses should have been D’s; some high C’s could have crept up to very, very, very low B’s. But none of the students seemed to notice. I submitted the grades and never heard another word about any of it. I can do this, I thought rather merrily. Not too bad. I was happy to have gotten through it unscathed. We were in a college classroom, though we were often not doing college work. A visitor coming upon my class, in that stone fortress of an arts and humanities building, might think that we were enacting some sort of college idyll. We could, if the visitor squinted a bit, be at Harvard. But make no mistake: beneath the surface of that serene and scholarly mise en-scène roiled waters of frustration and bad feeling. I was teaching students who were in over their heads.