by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
It must be said that colleges make no exception for their own: every semester, I teach a fair number of college employees in search of their own certificates, credits, degrees, and accreditations. Spending their days in the college culture, most of them do okay, thank God.
How intense it all is! I came from a rather different world. I was an English major in the 1970s, and the idea of making a living from my degree was a hazy one, which is one of the major reasons I now work a second job. I spent four leisurely years imbibing, along with my major’s requirements, the classic mixed assortment of liberal arts bon-bons: a bit of sociology here, a dip of the toe into ancient history, a painless science requirement, calculus (which was truly difficult; I took it my first semester, before I had learned to choose courses more wisely), cultural anthropology, an Old Testament seminar, Introduction to Theater. I cared not a whit about any individual grade. I saw no endgame. College was for me a four-year equivalent of the Grand Tour, and I spent that time very much outside society, wandering intellectual pastures, exploring my interests and aptitude, having fun and delaying the start of adulthood.
My students, in contrast, are up against it. The clock is ticking. The pressure is on. They need, desperately, to get through their programs. They work during the day and attend school at night in the hope of at least moving into nicer cells in their daytime prisons. Their college life has an urgency mine never did. My students, some of whom have never written anything actually cogent, have to pass College Writing to be a firefighter or court officer or prison guard. Others need to get through College Literature, to make sense of “The Waste Land,” in order to have any hope of saying good-bye to shift work and maintaining a normal relationship with their children.
When I give a failing grade to a student, I am not just passing judgment on some abstract intellectual exercise. I am impeding that student’s progress, thwarting his ambition, keeping him down, committing the universal crime of messing with his livelihood—not to mention forcing him to pay the tuition charge all over again. The stereotypical ivory tower is a realm far removed from workaday concerns; in the tower’s basement, where I labor, any poor grade I issue may mean disastrous economic consequences. So I think long and hard before giving poor grades. I agonize. I get that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. When I fail someone, I suffer Dickensian visions of starving children, missed mortgage payments, dunning creditors.
I know that part of what the college pays me to do is maintain academic standards. As I tell my students: teachers don’t fail students, students fail themselves. I know that by passing the incompetent I will cast a shadow of defilement upon the degrees of those more talented souls who have managed to navigate college successfully. But there are times when issuing a failing grade seems inhumane. I am forced to fail plenty of students, and I am well able to do it; that said, I have certainly given C’s that should have been D’s and D’s that should have been F’s.
I often require students to write comparisons of poems. Normally, I assign works that live in college textbooks yoked together in thematic pairs: the meditations on fatherhood (“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden and “Digging” by Seamus Heaney), or John Ciardi’s “Suburban” and Margaret Atwood’s “The City Planners.” Last semester I used “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress” by Ted Hughes and “Wreath for a Bridal” by Sylvia Plath. The poems are standard college fodder for comparison. They are a thematically matched duo: both deal with weddings, and they are often paired in literature texts because of the circumstances of Plath and Hughes’s own marriage. Plath’s poem is rather obscure, and typically overdone: a dreamlike evocation of a marriage and consummation with nature imagery that is lush and overripe. Hughes’s poem is a dryly comic recounting of a threadbare ceremony that would seem to recall his and Plath’s own nuptials. I give the class lots of biographical information about the two poets, and provide guidance questions. What, I want to know, is the stance each poem takes with regard to love?
One of my students, a woman in her midtwenties, obviously came to class each evening directly from work. She dressed in dark pantsuits and wore the tallest, pointiest high heels I have ever seen. Her paper set this year’s benchmark for confused student prose. A hallucinogenic lit-crit puree of Finnegans Wake and Bridezillas, for long stretches it was indecipherable. As I was reading the thing, I started to grow angry, which is hardly the rational and correct approach—but sometimes I just can’t help myself.
I tried to imagine the circumstances that would result in her submitting an assignment of such desperately poor quality. The thing read like the free association of a disordered mind. I pictured her writing it in a bar, or while driving to class or skydiving. Maybe she composed it as one long text message to herself. By any rational standards, this was failing work. Failing.
I calmed down and gave her a D.
I hear the cry: grade inflation!
Her writing was deficient in many areas. The problems with the assignment didn’t stem from the fact that she knocked this one off in a hurry and it didn’t come up to her usual crisp standards. This student could not write standard English, yet she had already successfully completed English 101, College Writing. Someone on the faculty (and for one panicky moment I feared that it might have been me) had determined that she could navigate expository prose at the college level. The evidence of my senses disputed this mightily. Nonetheless, I was haunted by a nagging sense of unfairness. Was it right for me to fail her based on her wretched prose when she had already been certified as at least marginally competent in this area? The college had signed off on her completion of the writing requirement, and now I wanted to renege on the deal. None of it seemed quite fair, but passing this woman along didn’t seem quite the ticket either: sending her out into the world thinking she could write at least competently—with the transcript in her hand that says so—was like sending a toddler out of the house for the first time on her own after a five-minute lecture on traffic safety.
Other factors pushed me toward the D over the F grade. I looked at her work and detected faint, pinprick reflections of my own teaching. She repeatedly referred, for example, to the voice of the poem as “the speaker.” Bingo! I grabbed at it like the last bit of meat on a picked-over turkey carcass. She did that one thing correctly. She didn’t refer to the poet, or the narrator, or the author, or to Ted Hughes, or, as some of my students are inclined, to Ted. (Langston, Tennessee, and Ernest have also turned up in papers.) She wrote about “the speaker.” Mentioned it repeatedly, in fact. I make a big deal of that in class: how we can’t confuse the writer of the poem with the speaker of the poem, and how one way poets can be thought about is in the distance between their lives and verses. She had been listening. She had emerged from my class with an everso-slightly deeper understanding of poetic mechanics. Not much deeper, I admit; deeper by about the thickness of one coat of paint. We could say only, based on her paper, that she seemed to have understood one concept. I would never for a moment have considered giving her an A or a B or a C, but how proficient does one have to be to simply eke out a passing grade? If she was to come to understand more fully, over the duration of fifteen weeks, five concepts, would that be sufficient?
I receive worse work than that. I get papers that are out-and-out F’s, things that are just as badly done but lack any value at all: poorly written summaries without even the smallest attempt to probe meaning. From this sort of work I get not even the briefest wink of reassurance that the students paid any attention in class.
Here’s one student’s anonymous evaluation of my college literature class, and I don’t get the feeling he or she is pulling my leg:
Course was better than I thought. Before this I would of never voluntarily read a book. But now I almost have a desire to pick one up and read.
My students almost think of my interest in reading and writing as eccentricities, as this evaluation makes clear:
I really like [Professor X], this is why I took the course because I saw he was tea
ching it. He’s kind of enthusiastic about things that probably aren’t that exciting to most people, which helps make the three hours go by quicker.
Even for someone like me—someone whose pulse quickens a little at the thought of Lolita or Catch-22, someone who vows to read Ulysses all the way through in retirement and wonders (in passing, but certainly a few times a year) whether there can possibly be anything in all this adulation of Marilynne Robinson—writing about literature is not something I was born knowing how to do. It’s a knack, and it takes lots of practice, like driving a stick shift; it seems impossible to master at first but can eventually be done without thinking. It took me years to be able to drift into the contradictory state of consciousness that combines close reading with a trancelike receptivity to themes and subtext and patterns of symbols. Now I can do it in my sleep. My student might be able to get good at this, or at least better than she was, but I doubted that she would ever have interest enough or time to, and I have started to wonder why she should bother trying.
Is it fair to penalize the students for being unable to grasp, in fifteen weeks, the passwords and coded language and shibboleths and secret handshakes of the world of Introduction to College Literature? The students I encounter in English 102 have spent a lifetime in English classes thoroughly in the dark; they stand outside the great Masonic hall of literature with their noses pressed up to the glass. I’m a good person to lead them inside, but it will take time.
I have always wondered about the ultimate disposition of my students. I have wondered, sometimes, at the conclusion of a course, when I have failed such a large percentage of my students, if the college will send me a note either (1) informing me of a serious bottleneck in the march toward commencement and demanding that I find a way to pass more students, or (2) commending me on my fiscal ingenuity, since my high failure rate forces students to pay for classes two and three times over.
What has happened is precisely nothing. I have never felt any pressure from the colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don’t mention all those students who have failed my course and I don’t bring them up.
Our American unwillingness to count even the most hopeless of us out in the educational marathon may be one of the most debilitating ideas in contemporary culture, a jagged gash through which vitality and truthfulness and quality slowly drain away.
I find the ultimate institutional indifference to marginal students something of a good sign. Yes, there are remedial classes, and writing labs, and interventions by the academic advising people, and meetings with at-risk students. But how much can or should the colleges do? In the end the students’ fates are in their own hands, and if they aren’t willing or able to put in what could be a tremendous amount of work, they will not pass. They must sink or swim.
Sink or swim. When was the last time you heard that in contemporary America? When was the last time we heard of a clearly defined, rigid, nonporous boundary?
My two colleges maintain their standards. Dean Truehaft said it long ago on the night of my initial orientation: give them what they deserve. I often joke that some of my students take English 101 and 102 twice or three times, and what a financial bonanza for the college this must be. But the truth is quite otherwise. My 101 and 102 classes are taken early in a student’s time, and failure in those classes has a particularly discouraging effect. Students who fail repeatedly simply give up after a while, and do not graduate. In Boston, remember, 88 percent of local students did not finish community college. Eighty-eight percent! An occasional bonus of double-tuition notwithstanding, community and lower-echelon colleges would find themselves more solvent if more students graduated. A nod, a nudge, a wink, a whisper to the instructors, and everything would be hunky-dory.
But such is not the case. The colleges for which I work maintain their integrity. A passing grade is a passing grade, and a good grade means something; in my experience, grade inflation is not pronounced. When the Boston Globe opines that colleges “need to step up with some big ideas on how to turn entering students into graduates,” my blood runs cold. If the pressure mounts on colleges, and community colleges in particular, to get all their students through the program, grades will inflate tremendously and degrees and certificates will be worthless.
In educational circles, English 101, freshman English, is known as a gatekeeper course. Students who can’t get through it can’t move on. So I am a gatekeeper. I will teach my students. I will work with them as much as I can. (Remember, I don’t get paid for office hours.) I will guide them to resources. But I will not pass them if they have not earned a passing grade.
We’re not talking nuance here. My students who fail do so with an intensity that is operatic. They lack skills on a grand scale. To check if students are keeping up with the reading, I give unannounced quizzes. Sometimes I ask if characters are alive or dead at the end of the work. Hamlet—alive or dead? Polonius—alive or dead? Gabriel Conroy—alive or dead? Talk about not going into detail about a character’s motivations or epiphanies. We’re talking simple existence or lack of. And yet my students fail.
My colleagues are with me. A supervisor once asked for a bunch of midterm exams to see if she agreed with the grades I was giving. She said I was doing a good job, but she had one quibble. One of my D’s should have been an F.
The students who attend class faithfully, who try, who actually go to the trouble of rewriting their papers, who put in the effort—they do improve as writers, but they just may not get far enough to pass.
When I assign compare-contrast essays, or cause-and-effect essays, or persuasion essays, I tell my students what every writer comes to understand: that for greatest effect and maximum clarity, they must write about what they know. And they do. They write freely and openly and without self-consciousness about their lives: about failed plans and disappointment, about dysfunctional homes and unwanted children (who always, at the end of the compositions, turn out to be the greatest gifts they have ever had), about addiction and poverty and just how wrenching and difficult life can be.
A harried-seeming young woman, Goth in the extreme, who always comes late and never says a word, writes that she has a couple of hundred bucks saved up from when she was in grammar school and she’s probably going to be broke and exhausted for the rest of her life. A Chinese student writes of her childhood outside Beijing. She remembers delivering lunch to her father every day, and how his coworker always said, admiringly, that he had the smartest little girl in the world. Now, in America, she feels nothing but illiterate.
Another student, a child of divorce, buys a ticket for her father to take his girlfriend to see U2, but winds up going with him herself and mending some fences.
A woman in her late twenties named Kerri writes of her experiences as a mother. There are several young mothers in the class, and on the breaks Kerri and the others gravitate to one another. They talk shop: of nutrition and playdates and tantrums and sibling rivalry. Their conversation is lively. As the semester progresses, I note their growing addiction to one another’s company; the breaks can’t come fast enough for the group to assemble and compare notes. They seem pleased with life. They glow with satisfaction and take a vaguely superior stance toward the younger women in the class, who are not yet in the game of motherhood. Kerri makes the others laugh and has a large laugh herself.
From reading her writing, I know what her new friends probably don’t, that stay-at-home motherhood has been something of a disappointment.
Now when I look at Kerri, I see not just a student struggling under the weight of school and family responsibilities. I see a woman gripped by a quiet, middle-class despair, the same despair that spawned the work of Betty Friedan and some of the dark domestic poetry of Anne Sexton, whose “Cinderella” we read in class.
Kerri smiles and jokes with the other mothers, but now I’m in on her secret. I see her struggling with guilt about what she feels, carefully watc
hing the other mothers and searching for clues to answer the big question: Are they really as fulfilled as they seem?
Sometimes students have to tell me directly about their lives when life intrudes on their work. A student writes on the final test of the semester:
This may or not be my best work. I tried though. Although I was prepared, I got laid off this morning and had a brutal day because of it. Thank you… .
I sometimes feel, as I read my students’ writing, that I know them better than anyone else. I sometimes feel as though I am the only one to whom they tell their deepest fears. This can’t help but interfere with the process of grading.
Toward the end of my College Literature class, I introduce students to postmodernism, with its dismissal of the patriarchal master-narrative in favor of a multitude of small, local narratives, a “constant interplay of voices and worldviews,” as critic Ian Marshall puts it, conceived “ … to deliberately evade the possibility of unity and monolithic meaning.”6 I tell my class: the postmodernists (and we cannot help being postmodernists all of us) believe in not just one story but many stories—or texts, as they would say—with none having primacy.
The students dutifully write down what I say, and at the outset this concept of postmodern fragmentation is just another vague literary idea with no particular relevance, a term on their vocabulary list along with litotes and synecdoche and sonnet. We read Margaret Atwood’s “There Was Once” and Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer” and various stories by Tim O’Brien and excerpts from Persepolis. I tell them that we are all living in the thick of postmodernism, and try to convince them of the significance of its orthodoxies. What I don’t tell them is that postmodern modes of thought are largely responsible for their being in a college classroom in the first place.
