by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
One of the tricks to this game is choosing the right essays to work on together. If a composition is too poor, our final product will differ too much from the original, and the students will suspect their instructor of trampling the piece to death for his own glory—entertaining, perhaps, like a magician who can transform a silk scarf into a dove but cannot convince the audience that the dove and the scarf don’t remain separate entities. Essays that are too well written don’t really work either. Light prose touch-up jobs, the mere ironing out of pronoun agreements and clipping of long sentences, give a distorted view of how much work a typical piece requires.
Very occasionally, a student will submit an excellent first draft, and I will present it to the class. A good piece of writing gives hope to all. The teaching of writing is unfortunately a negative business, with the vast majority of student essays illustrating many more don’ts than dos. Effective writing teachers must not let the smallest problem pass while, at the same time, remaining encouraging and upbeat. This might be the most difficult tightrope to walk in all of teaching. Students do not succeed just by writing a lot; they’ve got to be shown their errors for the work to be productive.
As I start to revise a piece in front of the class, I experience a moment of uncertainty. Will this actually help anyone? Isn’t every sample of unskilled composition unique? The answer to the latter is no. The shortcomings of student writing fall into familiar and universal patterns. The thesis hasn’t been sharpened to a point that guarantees a rigorous organization of thought. The paragraphs may start out with some unity, but after a bit the writer’s attention wanders, and he leads the reader down a warren of back alleys and dead ends. The modifiers dangle. The prose may limp along in the passive voice, or, owing to a paucity of vocabulary, use ten dull words where three good ones would do.
The ideas in the essays are commonplace, when they exist at all, and the lack of ideas makes for a prose that churns in place. The writer metaphorically clears his or her throat, adjusts the microphone, fiddles with the lecturn, consults notes, afraid to get to the point because really there is no point.
The writing is larded with clichés—not the ones listed in the writing texts, which really present no danger because no one actually uses them, like more fun than a barrel of monkeys and sly as a fox and good as gold. No, I’m talking about contemporary clichés, the ones we don’t even notice as they float untethered around us: she was there for me and I couldn’t get past it and that was in my comfort zone and it is what it is. The writing is deeply flawed, but as I work at the front of the room to peel away layers of verbiage, the class becomes eager to join in the process.
We discuss and justify every change. We’re not in a hurry. We may get to only three compositions in a three-hour class. To wrestle with a piece of writing takes time—a scandalous amount of it. As we work, I direct the class’s attention to the clock. Look, we’ve spent 40 minutes on the first paragraph. Now it’s 50. All of a sudden, it’s an hour. To edit an essay effectively is sure to take several hours.
They are horrified, but that is the truth. It is what it is.
Writing clearly and well requires great effort, a level of effort which many of my students are not acquainted with. One of the comments I find myself making often about first drafts is that they appear to have been “hastily composed.” Writing is unique in this way: 15 minutes at a computer and there exists something, a palpable chunk of writing, to be handed in; turning in such a piece of work is the equivalent of turning in, for an algebra assignment, random jottings of numbers and letters—gibberish, really—and hoping it passes muster. After a while, the students start to put more time into their assignments. They’re afraid not to. That a crappy paper, even with the name of the author obscured, might find its way into the hands of the 22 other members of the class, all gleefully editing like crazy, is a real threat.
Threat? Did I say that? It’s a crude teaching strategy but occasionally effective.
Writing, as we all know, isn’t just a physical act, the clickety-clackety-clack of hands on a computer keyboard. Writing is thinking. Writing is saying something worthwhile. While we work on these compositions—editing, rewriting, tightening—I also spend a great deal of time on the front end: the conceptualization. I try to teach students how to do a better job, when they have the freedom, of selecting their topics. A great subject makes for better writing. My students think of their essays merely as exercises to be gotten through with as little exertion as possible. A subject with some depth, a topic about which they have some expertise, will generate livelier and—this is the intriguing part—more competent writing. My students are the protagonists of their own complex and fascinating lives. They view their own existence, as we all do, with a great deal of nuance, a fine and discriminating eye. They are capable of great wit. The hard part is to get them to channel all that marvelous stuff—all that life—onto the page.
Though sometimes enough life is too much life. I once made the mistake of editing with the class an essay written by a mother about her child’s protracted death from leukemia. The essay dripped with grief; the child had died years ago, but she had obviously never gotten past it. We started working on tense agreement and chronological inconsistencies, but could build up no steam for the project. Our complaints about the essay’s organization seemed carping and disrespectful. The sadness of the subject made the whole class question the worth of our larger endeavor. What did proper usage matter in such a world of tragedy? Writing seems powerless against the gods.
Personal subjects are a good start toward powerful writing. But part of college is a requirement that students write about subjects they know little about at first. Not every college essay can be about one’s life. Sometimes, the essays have to be about things like wind turbines, and this is where the students really hit a brick wall. I recently asked my Pembrook students to write an essay comparing and contrasting Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, based on a pair of biographical articles that appeared in the New Yorker. I thought they would enjoy the release from the oversaturation of possibility in the personal essay. These two articles were their complete universe. I thought, as I often do when I introduce these sorts of assignments, that I was doing the class a favor. How much would I have enjoyed a New Yorker–based assignment in college? Instead, my students found the task hopelessly onerous. They found the articles as difficult to get through as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The assignment overwhelmed them.
Michael Holden refers to the great “information void” of his students. He cites previous studies revealing some of their, ah, misconceptions (Heinrich Himmler invented the Heimlich maneuver; the Great Gatsby was a magician; Jefferson Davis played guitar for the Jefferson Airplane) and then cites the results of his own study. He administers the Information Subtest of the Weschler Adult Information Scale (WAIS-R) to his own students, and anyone who has ever listened to a Jay Leno monologue can tick off the results without my repeating them: 69 percent couldn’t name the number of members of the United States Senate, 34 percent couldn’t say how many weeks there are in a year, 66 percent couldn’t name the person “usually associated with the theory of relativity.”2
It is difficult if not impossible for a college student to compare two justices of the Supreme Court if he or she has never heard of such concepts as eminent domain or liberalism, and cannot rightly say just what it is a district attorney or appellate court does. The act of writing is difficult enough; to do so without a bedrock layer of hard knowledge with which you are intimately familiar and comfortable is just about impossible. So we go back, invariably, to the personal essay. The students must have free rein to write most often about themselves; otherwise, we would get nowhere.
A writing professor of mine once spoke of attending a fiction workshop led by Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. Heller was a thoughtful and careful technician, said my professor, but he didn’t concern himself with high-sounding obscurities. He spoke not of theme or texture. He lived in the world
of what worked. “We’ve been waiting too long to hear some of this stuff down here,” he would say in his gravelly voice, pointing to a flawed paragraph and seeming like a man about to disassemble a fuel pump. He was itching to get his hands dirty. “Chop some of it off and stick it in the intro. Move this description from the start to the finish, cut this part out, and turn this business right here around. And then I think you’ll be good.”
My professor was the one who gave me the fuel pump analogy. “It was sheer genius to watch,” he said. “Every change he made was perfect. And the fuel pump ran a lot better when he was done with it.”
We writing teachers could do a lot worse than to start turning out classes of skilled syntax mechanics, their hands soiled with the filth of discarded adjectives and the grease of potent verbs. My goal is that none of my students ever again experiences that desperate feeling of hopelessness that strikes the novice writer, that none will have to ask the despairing question “What should I do next?” Ideally, they will always be able to loosen a few bolts on a piece of prose and start checking fluid levels.
Once in a while, I experience a moment of writing triumph. Not often, mind you. That’s why I remember them. One night, we were editing an essay about creating inexpensive Halloween costumes. The author of the piece, Chad, was right in the thick of things. In search of a transition and greater clarity, he had just inserted a three-sentence paragraph in the piece that seemed to cause more new problems than it solved. His sentence formation wasn’t quite on point, and his diction was limp. The whole thing was fuzzy—so much so that I found myself at a loss for any specific suggestions. I suppose I was tired: his weak writing swirled around my head and left me temporarily speechless. I threw up my hands and said what exhausted editors have no doubt said since the dawn of the printed word:
“You’ve just got to make this better.”
Chad nodded and bent over his notes. The class quieted. He considered what to do. He made all kinds of dissatisfied faces. He squinted. He looked toward the ceiling, only marginally aware that the rest of the class was watching him. He shifted in his seat and tugged at his baseball cap and groaned with what could have been appendicitis. The class laughed but the spell remained unbroken.
He was in the throes of some sort of agony. Was it writing agony? I was hopeful. He looked thoroughly miserable, which was a good sign. He wrote something, stopped, and wrote again.
“All right, listen to this,” he said, and read aloud.
He had done it. He had tamed his prose. He had made the thing better. Chad’s paragraph was shorter and crisper and fully—okay, 85 percent—logical. He had replaced a verb of being with one of action—“pierces,” as I recall—and a fine, fine verb at that. He had abandoned my guidelines and done more than I asked. My little bird had ventured out of the nest and flown a little. Like a carpenter or roofer or auto mechanic or chef, he had a total picture of what the piece should be. He had taken the first step toward developing a feel for the writing.
17
Do Your Job, Professor!
ON VERY RARE OCCASIONS, I do have the classic, yearned-for teaching experience with a student who performs poorly but has potential and is willing to make the effort. I am sometimes able to spur them on. I remember one middle-aged mom named Gwen, a woman of Christmas sweaters and a tidy chin-length bob. She was initially suspicious of the class. “How are you supposed to do well in this if you’re not a good writer?” she asked rhetorically, not exactly to me but to the gods in heaven, as she gathered her things at the conclusion of a class early in the semester.
She wrote a paper on the virtues of handwritten letters over e-mail. The paper really wasn’t much good; it was vague and imprecise, filled with spongy half-formed thoughts served up like half-baked holiday cookies. She was inhabiting that alternate reality, the Land of Writing Assignments, that place so different from real life, where the object is not to amuse or enlighten or impart truth but just to fill the page with words, sentences of varying lengths that state the obvious in the most commonplace fashion. I saw that she wanted to do well, and I saw that she could, but she didn’t know how. We talked after class. What was it that spurred her to write about this topic? For ten minutes, she danced around the issue. Letters were just more interesting than e-mail, she said. What more was there to say? She wouldn’t get anywhere near the truth, but I interrogated her as though I were a cop, and finally wore her down. A truth emerged: she still had letters written to her by her dead mother, and she found herself reading them more and more frequently.
She told me about the letters. She started to well up. As her drill-sergeant and muse, I was delighted, for I knew we were approaching someplace good. But maybe we had overshot the mark. She was still more a daughter than a writer.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. “Let’s not lose it. Give it to me on the page.” And so she came back a week later, with a paper that hinged on the similarity of her mother’s long and graceful hands to the long, graceful shapes of her looping cursive script.
Oh yes. Now we were cooking.
Moments like this do not happen often. Clearly I am not working miracles. I have great faith in my methods and what I am doing. But sometimes I do doubt myself. Who wouldn’t?
When my original article “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, I received a good deal of negative mail. I was the embodiment of bad teaching and moral turpitude.
The only kind of student with whom I’ve had little to no success is the one who shows zero interest in bettering himself… sort of like Professor X and his telltale lack of reflection on how he might improve his own practice.
In short, this article serves to suggest that a large portion of the (working-class) population is unteachable—and this simply isn’t true… . And there are a number of ways to teach such students to write coherent sentences. If one knows what one is doing, one can accomplish this with most students in 15 weeks. Professor X should be giving himself—not his students—those failing grades.
I feel sorry for Professor X’s students. He thinks his responsibility is to evaluate their results on his writing assignments. Good teachers know their responsibility is to help the student learn.
At my college, our class size is either 25 (pre-transfer) or 30 (transfer-level), and we consider it a failure if more than two students do not manage to pass. We do that by having individual meetings with each student, using collaborative learning to enhance active learning, and emphasizing multiple pathways toward learning.
Professor X is a white-collar criminal who couldn’t qualify for the ivory tower and make it as a scholar, so he is employed to serve a screening function at the bottom of the system.
Instead of demonstrating his students’ inability to succeed in academia, Professor X’s jeremiad provides convincing evidence of his own weaknesses as an educator. While his gloomy blend of fatalism, guilt, cowardice, and low selfesteem is perhaps not unique, it should not be seen as representative of the mind-set of those who toil in the less prestigious strata of higher education. The image of the red-pen-wielding “button man” wringing his hands while handing out F’s is as inaccurate as it is unfortunate.
Professor X bemoans admitting students to “classes they cannot possibly pass.” But perhaps many of them could pass these courses if Professor X had the faintest clue as to how to teach them.
I hadn’t been prepared for such a response. My mind reeled. Could it possibly be true that most students can be taught to write in 15 weeks? What were the multiple pathways? Tell me, please.
A white-collar criminal?
I was also the subject of numerous virulent dispatches from the blogosphere. This one is typical:
I usually don’t get that riled up by magazine articles, but after reading “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” I was fuming… . Why am I so mad? I have spent most of my professional life in adult education and instructional design… . This is a GROSS failure of teaching and the man should b
e fired ON THE SPOT… . He has the students write a research paper as their first assignment. If your students have trouble writing coherent paragraphs, why are you starting with papers? Why not have them start with learning how to write a grammatical sentence. (Play Mad Libs to learn the parts of speech) Then teach them how to write a good paragraph. Then teach your students to outline. Then have them write a five-paragraph essay. THEN move to a “college” paper. Once they have the fundamentals of writing they can write anything but you will never create good writers our [sic] of them if you do not teach the fundamentals.1
Mad Libs. In college? Hadn’t thought of that.
Then the academics started to weigh in. One English professor at Eastern Michigan University said, on his blog:
There was quite a bit of discussion about this piece on one of the professional mailing lists that I’m on, and the basic conclusion was that Professor X doesn’t really know what he’s doing as a teacher and/or doesn’t know what he’s talking about.2
… [T]he course he was teaching sounded just horrible to me—not at all close to the “best practices” in the teaching of writing, and no where [sic] near the progressive program we have at EMU.3
And then the most wounding of all, a post by the director of first-year writing at the University of Mississippi. He was knocking not just me but my students as well, though I don’t think he really meant to:
[Professor X] landed in these classrooms in exactly the same way his students did: out of inertia; out of laziness; out of a sense that it was too much trouble to go farther afield.4
Comments like these worried me. Maybe I wasn’t as prepared as I should be. Maybe I should look into the science of rhetoric and composition, verse myself in pedagogy. And so I did. I immersed myself in theories and practices. I read lots of scholarly writing, digested lots of different opinions, philosophies, strategies.
