by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
I went in search of enlightenment. I even went to the online catalogue for the first-year writing program at the University of Mississippi, which sent me to the Council of Writing Program Administrators and their WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition. I ran to the thing, hoping for a set of guideposts to help me in my own instruction. I went right to the Processes section of the course outline. I couldn’t get there fast enough. “By the end of first-year composition, students should …” Okay, here it was: the Holy Grail in seven points. Here were the outcomes of the teaching processes:
Students should:
Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text
Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading
Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and re-thinking to revise their work
Understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
Learn to critique their own and others’ works
Learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part
Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences 5
I started to think about the seven points. English 101 consists of 15 classes. So I supposed I had two classes for each point, which would leave me a week to administer a final exam.
Let’s look at the first one, the one about multiple drafts. Now, surely this is something that has been drilled into even the most indifferent student since first or second grade. It was difficult for me to imagine how this particular fact would be taught in any fashion other than by standing up at the front of the room and saying, “All right, students. Be aware. It takes multiple drafts to create a successful text.” The students may be underprepared, but they aren’t idiots. I could make short work of that one.
Number one was mere introduction. Number two had more meat to it. As far as I can tell, “generating” means thinking of what to write, and it’s hard to imagine what those strategies would be aside from (a) thinking, and thinking quite hard, about what would make a suitably complex and compelling topic, and (b) rejecting those topics which are too simplistic to provide the writer with anything but the most rudimentary starting point. The student must be willing to put in the time and the sweat and the sheer misery that comes with thinking of compelling topics to write about.
Next, the student must revise the work, and revision has one especially troublesome demand: a skilled writer must have read, possibly over the course of 15 or 20 years, enough good quality expository writing so that the patterns of complex thought and syntax used by skilled writers are thoroughly ingrained in his or her mind. Revision then has an aim: to bring the writing closer in quality and depth to that which all would consider good writing. What is the point of revision if the student does not have an archetype in his or her mind? Archetypes cannot be provided by instructors in 15 weeks. Some of the college students I teach, I venture to say, have not read ten books in a lifetime.
Which brings me to the strategies for “editing and proofreading.” Some of the educational bloggers who knocked me speculated that I hadn’t even read Mina Shaughnessy. They were right; I hadn’t. So I did. I went to her book Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. Shaughnessy is one of the goddesses of writing instruction. She was present at the creation; her book is a reaction to the academic fallout stemming from the decision, in 1970, by the City University of New York to move to an open admissions policy, which admitted
a wider range of students than any college had probably ever admitted or thought of admitting to its campus—academic winners and losers from the best and worst high schools in the country, the children of the lettered and the illiterate, the blue-collared, the white-collared, and the unemployed, some who could barely afford the subway fare to school and a few who came in the new cars their parents had given them as a reward for staying in New York to go to college; in short, the sons and daughters of New Yorkers, reflecting that city’s intense, troubled version of America.6
What had been called in the past remedial or developmental writing Shaughnessy labels Basic Writing (BW). She has no illusions about the students’ level of skills, commenting that “the pile-up of errors that characterizes BW papers reflects more difficulty with written English than the term ‘error’ is likely to imply.”
Shaughnessy believes that every student can improve his or her writing. I agree with her, of course; the question is whether there is enough time and money for this to happen when so many students have made it through high school without mastering the building blocks. Her work has been embraced by some educators who seem to feel that the belief that writing should be error-free is fascistic. Shaughnessy, it should be noted, doesn’t think that way herself. She bemoans errors in writing, calling them “unprofitable intrusions upon the consciousness of the reader… . They demand energy without giving any return in meaning… .” She understands the motivation of those who would like to think only about content:
Some [teachers] rebel against the idea of error itself. All linguistic forms, they argue, are finally arbitrary. The spelling of a word, the inflectional systems that carry or reinforce certain kinds of information in sentences—these are merely conventions that differ from language to language and from dialect to dialect. And because the forms of language are arbitrary, the reasoning goes, they are not obligatory… .
When one considers the damage that has been done to students in the name of correct writing, this effort to redefine error so as to exclude most of the forms that give students trouble in school and to assert the legitimacy of other kinds of English is understandable.
Nonetheless, she says, errors in writing must be dealt with. We’ve got to understand what the student is trying to say.
To try to persuade a student who makes these errors that the problems with his writing are all on the outside, or that he has no problems, may well be to perpetuate his confusion… . In any event, students themselves are uneasy about encouragements to ignore the problem of error, often interpreting them as evasions of the hard work that lies before teachers and students if the craft of writing is ever to be mastered.
I was no closer to the holy truth: how does one teach fledgling writers to make their writing understandable? I went to Mina Shaughnessy’s section on “Suggestions for Reducing Error.” It was right there in chapter 4, on page 128. It seemed a little late in the book to embark on the subject, but I was eager to learn.
We come finally to the question of how to help students reduce their errors to a level that is tolerable to their readers… .
I grew excited. She was going to give me knowledge from the mountaintop.
… and here the individual talents and training of teachers, the learning styles of students, the time allowed in a writing program or department for the mastery of grammatical forms, and a variety of other considerations preclude my recommending The Way or The Book or The Grammar.
My heart sank. Can’t you always tell when a writer, before ostensibly telling you something, cautions you that she won’t actually be telling you anything?
Here are her suggestions. First,
When the intent is to spot and correct errors, grammar (which is used here to mean any effort to focus upon the formal properties of sentences) provides a useful way of looking at sentences.
How right she is. The point seems blisteringly obvious. In what other language can we talk about sentence structure and logic than the language of grammar? The problem, of course, is that the teaching of grammar has become an enormous taboo in American public education. I taught in public school back in the late eighties; grammar lessons were exchanged surreptitiously among the English faculty, like Soviet-era samizdat, and it was well known that to be caught teaching the stuff was, for a new teacher without a permanent appointment, the quickest road to dismissal.
Few of my students at Pembrook and Huron Stat
e know the first thing about grammar. Forget about predicate nominatives. Forget about case and mood. They don’t know how to find the subject of a sentence. So on those occasions when the class is completely lost as to how to repair a particular sentence, or even why the sentence is wrong in the first place, we need to do an emergency grammar lesson. Things get very muddied very quickly because the class and I don’t share a language. I can’t use the term “subject,” because that would confuse and frighten them. I must refer to it as “what the sentence is about.” Verbs they kind of understand on a basic level but then we arrive at agreement between subjects and verbs and the class is quickly lost and discouraged. The language of grammar seems a hopeless tangle—as does any language if you don’t know it. Many of my students have never been taught the rules of English; I might as well be asking them to write in Latin.
Shaughnessy makes an excellent point about grammar instruction:
The grammar students study for the purpose of reducing error should accomplish two objectives: introduce them to several key grammatical concepts that underlie many of their difficulties with formal English and equip them with a number of practical strategies for checking their own writing.
“Key grammatical concepts”—that’s what teachers are supposed to impart, as though you can teach a few biggies, the greatest hits, David Letterman’s Top Ten list, and get their writing in pretty good shape. This is a misconception, as Shaughnessy goes on to explain.
This is not easy advice to follow, however, because grammar itself is a web, not a list, of explanations, and often a seemingly simple feature of instruction will be located at the interstices of several grammatical concepts.
To decide whether a subject agrees with a predicate, Shaughnessy says, the student must be familiar with no fewer than five concepts: what the term “agreement” means, what a subject and a predicate are, whether the subject is singular or plural, how that is indicated in the noun’s form, and how the number of a verb is indicated.
Students must understand that a sentence is a “structure” rather than a mere string of words; Shaughnessy calls this “the most important insight a student can gain from the study of grammar, an insight that is likely to influence him not only as a proofreader but as a writer.”
I was looking for some magic, for a tool kit—to use a currently hot educational term—for showing novice writers how to repair their prose. And what did I get? Essentially, a recommendation that poor writers need a grounding in grammar.
The college-writing machine would have you believe that skilled teachers can teach any student, no matter what his or her level of preparation, and that is simply not true. There are no easy answers or magic bullets, whatever cliché suits you.
18
Grading the Teacher
AFTER A SCHOOL has grown comfortable with an adjunct instructor, he or she will start to seem indispensable.
Often, scheduling of classes taught by adjuncts is done not by deans or department chairs but by harried secretaries, who become tempted to use the more dependable and money-hungry adjuncts to fill in holes in the schedule. In the process, the adjunct’s credentials may start to lessen in importance, his or her actual areas of expertise growing a bit blurry around the edges.
I was hired to teach English 101 and 102, but was eventually tapped by Pembrook to instruct some journalism classes and a business class, Business Communication. The last was a disaster. To this day, I don’t exactly know what business communication consists of, which is perhaps a tip-off that I shouldn’t have been teaching it. The course had something to do with business correspondence, something to do with memos, and something to do with corporate hierarchies. The textbook veered from abstruse complexity (Stryker and Statham posit an integrative theoretical latticework called structural symbolic interactionism [SSI] …) to that which was comically self-evident: (All forms of communication involve a sender and a receiver).
Not being an expert in the subject—not even being minimally versed in the subject—I couldn’t fathom what information might possibly lie outside the contours of the textbook. I couldn’t possibly have answered any questions posed by the students, but fortunately my teaching was so uninspired that none were raised. My methodology consisted of going through the textbook with the class, summarizing (as best I could) and restating the main points of each little section.
The experience was torture for both the sender and the receivers. Class time stretched hopelessly before me. All the while I taught, my heart raced with anxiety as I waited for a student to raise his hand and ask, “Why the fuck are we coming here every week and wasting our time?” This is exactly the sort of question I couldn’t have answered. When things got particularly desperate I screened movies that had some remote connection to the business world. Roger and Me. Working Girl. The Bonfire of the Vanities. I figured the class would be open to watching any movie I popped into the VCR, but Bonfire was so bad that the students actually asked me to stop it about halfway through. When a class goes bad, everything goes bad.
I gave everybody an A and wrote the whole experience off as a mistake. I vowed never to teach out of my comfort zone again.
The next time I ran into my department chair, the subject of Business Communication came up. She told me how disappointed she was that I didn’t want to teach it again.
“It’s really a shame,” she said. “You did a great job in there.”
I don’t want to make too much of her pleasant and offhand comment, but what she said caught my attention. How on Earth could she have the smallest idea of how I did in there? She never saw me teach. She wasn’t even on campus at night, when the class was offered; she never happened to walk by the room and catch the smallest snatch of the proceedings. Good thing. The truth was that I did horribly in there. I absolutely died in that room. The jokes sputtered and the silence was deafening. Feet scraped, ballpoint pens clicked, and resentment hung in the air like a woolen blanket, stifling the life out of us. If my Business Communication class had been a comedy club, I would not have been invited back. Ever. The trouble was, I was booked for a 15-week minimum.
Teachers are rated and graded, lionized and slandered all the time. Administrators at every level can tell you the names of their strongest and weakest instructors. That teachers at all levels vary wildly in quality is a universally accepted truth. The best schools, of course, are blessed with great teachers, dedicated teachers, effective teachers, selfless teachers, youthful and enthusiastic teachers, seasoned teachers, inspirational teachers, teachers of the year, teachers for whom 40 hours is just the beginning of the workweek. Inner-city public schools are said to be filled with burned-out teachers, lazy teachers, indifferent teachers, inept teachers, and, most damning of all, teachers just putting in their time for a paycheck. As a reaction to these terrible teachers, sometimes special academies are chartered, and the goal, of course, is to staff them with teachers great, dedicated, effective, selfless, youthful and enthusiastic, etc.
I have one question. How on Earth does anybody know anything about anybody’s teaching?
The last time I looked, nobody was watching anything that goes on in the classroom.
I have worked as an adjunct instructor now for a decade. I have been observed twice, once by each school. My department chair at Pembrook observed me on the second night of my adjuncting career. I was teaching English 102. She stayed for 20 minutes and took off, which seemed to me a fair amount. She was just making sure that my hiring was, in broad strokes, in the realm of the reasonable: that I knew what it meant to analyze literature, that my hygiene was good and I didn’t advocate the violent overthrow of the United States government, and that I could address a class from the front of the room and didn’t suffer from hysterical dysphonia or anything like that. She winked and gave me a thumbs-up on her way out of the room.
Instruction is of necessity a private enterprise. Virtually no one, except for the students, ever sees it being done.
This is as it should be, for the
sake of the students. Learning is one of the first things we start doing after birth. It is a primal human act. It requires a near-total surrender of will, a reversion to an earlier state of being: the adult’s baggage of pride and skepticism, his measured consciousness, do little but get in the way. The beautiful agony of learning can be a brutal and messy business, and intruders have no place in the classroom. The presence of any outsider disturbs what is a delicate mechanism.
Learning is a struggle and a battle; it can no more be done in public than I can wrestle publicly with a piece of prose. As I write this, my wife would like me to sit in the wing chair in her office with her while she reads the Sunday New York Times on the Internet. But I can’t fight with words in her presence. Writing uses some of the same muscles as learning, and a bad session of it can be as humbling as losing a bar fight. At some point, my verbs and modifiers and half-formed ideas will get the better of me and start pummeling. I can’t let my wife see me get the shit beaten out of me.
In the fall, my busy season as an adjunct, I spend many weekends watching my son play basketball in various leagues. Sitting in the bleachers, I often have a folder of compositions on my lap to work on at halftime; as I grade them, I sometimes become aware that I am being watched. My seatmates stare at me with fascination—and it must be plenty fascinating to distract them from their own kids’ dribbling and shooting—as I scrawl grades and transfer the numbers to my ledger. Invariably, I get comments: some rueful, some marveling, some a little chastising. There is a sense that I am performing, in public, a forbidden and private act. One man said to me, “I just didn’t picture that’s how it was done.” I don’t know what he pictured: the reading room of the British Museum, perhaps; the faint strains of Mozart in the background.
