Like Students, Like Professor
In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, a first-year writing instructor who styles himself "Professor X" writes a long diatribe against first-year writing students entitled "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," asking:
My first thought, reading this, is: isn’t that a good question? Isn’t that precisely the kind of question that students should be asking aloud instead of with their eyes, and that instructors should be thinking seriously about and answering thoughtfully, rather than dismissing as sheer laziness or stupidity? Why should future police officers read Joyce and Faulkner? Surely there are texts that they might find more relevant, which would still allow the instructor to push them intellectually?
Part of the problem may be that these courses have a set curriculum, mandated by the department, and the instructors are not allowed to deviate from it. Even if that’s the case, however, surely even the most traditional (and irrelevant) readings can yield some kind of interest, if they’re taught with any kind of attention to the students themselves, what they know and what they care about, what they’re already reading and writing in their ordinary day-to-day lives?
Part of the problem, too, is that teaching these courses isn't terribly lucrative. They are, as Professor X says, the basement of the ivory tower. That means that the competition to teach one or two of them is never particularly fierce, and writing-program administrators often have to take whatever warm bodies sign up to teach them, providing they have the minimum qualifications (an M.A., preferably but not necessarily in English). That also means that the people do who teach them may or may not know anything about teaching first-year writing, and may or may not consider it incumbent on them to learn. If you're only getting paid four or five hundred bucks a month to teach the course, is it worth going out looking for extra training so you can do it better? As Professor X says, no one even seems to notice what he does anyway, so why worry?
Another part of the problem, though, patently, is that Professor X is cut from the same cloth as his students. He admits this:
He 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 any farther afield.
By the same token, it’s probably too much trouble for him to go any farther afield in other ways as well: by, say, studying composition and rhetoric and learning some of the best teaching practices established by five decades of research and scholarship in the field. The whole comp/rhet field for X is too far afield. He doesn’t want to put out that kind of effort: he just wants a paycheck. And then, mirabile dictu, he finds himself in class with first-year students who are just like him, only with fewer years of education under their belts, and he despises them. He doesn’t even recognize the similarities between them and himself. They’re just "trouble."
The article is not all whingeing: "Class time passes in a flash—for me, anyway, if not always for my students. I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point." Here’s a man who loves literature so much that he loves lecturing on it. Hence, presumably, his choice of occupation.
But is a love of literature enough for any teaching job--even an upper-division or graduate literature class? Don’t you sort of have to love the students, too? If you love the subject matter and despise your students as much as Professor X does, isn’t that pretty much a recipe for disaster?
And what good, really, is a love of literature in a first-year writing class? Okay, the college where he teaches ENGL 102 requires him to teach his writing students to read and write about literature, but does that make it a literature class? No: it’s a writing class, a reading-and-writing class, whose readings happen to be literary. What he needs here is not a love of literature but a love of reading and writing of all kinds, including Sports Illustrated and Cosmo, including texting and facebooking--and, of course, a love of the people who do that reading and writing, his students. Or, all right: you can’t love them? At least respect them. I personally think that if you don’t love your students, you shouldn’t be teaching, but all right: at least find something to respect in each student sitting out there paying your salary.
And one other thing: it’s pretty clear from Professor X’s article that he mostly lectures. These are first-year writing classes, and he lectures to his students, and leads discussion. This is a model he learned from his own literature professors, presumably—obviously not from competent first-year writing instructors who know something about best practices for the writing classroom—and he more or less slavishly parrots that in his own teaching, then gets annoyed when his writing students don’t respond as he did, back in the day: don’t respond as avid literature students.
X, tell me: if you signed up for a class on everyday math, balancing checkbooks, doing your taxes, that sort of thing, and your professor lectured you on differential equations, wouldn’t you be bored too?
"Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes,” X writes. "Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence."
Okay. Yes, many of our students are ill-prepared for college. That is certainly the case at the University of Mississippi, not a "college of last resort"; friends at Harvard tell me that the same is true there as well. So what are we going to do about it? Moan about the destruction of reading culture by television and the Internet? Sure, if you’re into that sort of conservative nostalgia and are of a blaming mind. But aren’t teachers hired to teach people, whatever people walk in through the door? It ain’t pretty, true; it’s very difficult to get students who have never read much, or paid much attention to language, to write a coherent sentence. But there are ways to do it, most of them involving the ability to draw on what they already know, what they’re already good at, and teaching them strategies for infusing their writing with it.
(The main one we use in Writing as Drama: create a named drama. Create a named writer and a named reader, and put them in relationship with each other. How do they know each other? How do they feel about each other? What happened last time they met? What happened the time before that? What do they expect to happen next? How old are they? What sex are they? What do they look like? What do they do? What do they want to do to each other? It’s amazing how even nonreaders learn how to write in this sort of named drama.)
Clearly, though, X doesn’t really want to help his students learn to write better. He just wishes he were doing something else. He longs for the "objective" subjects: "How I envy professors in other disciplines! How appealing seems the straightforwardness of their task! These are the properties of a cell membrane, kid. Memorize ’em, and be ready to spit ’em back at me." What some of us think of as the creative flexibility of reading and writing is to him only a burden. He wants right and wrong. He wants absolute rock-hard certainty, so his students can never negotiate with him. He wants to be a scientist. He wants to be an accountant.
But, since he’s too lazy to go back to college and get a Ph.D. in accountancy, he’s stuck with the degree he’s got--and, of course, the students he’s got, at whatever colleges are nearest his home.
The sad thing is, he realizes this, sort of:
Right. We’re of a piece, but I give the grades, so my students are the ones with the deficits, not me. We’re of a piece, but it’s just too much work to rethink my teaching in this place, to rethink how I see my students, so I’ll just blame them for everything. We’re of a piece, but I’m disinclined to do anything about it, so I’ll just write a bitch-and-moan piece to The Atlantic and keep slogging on.
And I won’t use my actual name. I’ll call myself Professor X, and sound hip and above-it-all. Above all, I’ll hide behind a pseudonym for fear I might lose my pathetic second job, which I despise as much as I despise my students, because my despicable students are my job.
My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading "Araby" or "Barn Burning," their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?
My first thought, reading this, is: isn’t that a good question? Isn’t that precisely the kind of question that students should be asking aloud instead of with their eyes, and that instructors should be thinking seriously about and answering thoughtfully, rather than dismissing as sheer laziness or stupidity? Why should future police officers read Joyce and Faulkner? Surely there are texts that they might find more relevant, which would still allow the instructor to push them intellectually?
Part of the problem may be that these courses have a set curriculum, mandated by the department, and the instructors are not allowed to deviate from it. Even if that’s the case, however, surely even the most traditional (and irrelevant) readings can yield some kind of interest, if they’re taught with any kind of attention to the students themselves, what they know and what they care about, what they’re already reading and writing in their ordinary day-to-day lives?
Part of the problem, too, is that teaching these courses isn't terribly lucrative. They are, as Professor X says, the basement of the ivory tower. That means that the competition to teach one or two of them is never particularly fierce, and writing-program administrators often have to take whatever warm bodies sign up to teach them, providing they have the minimum qualifications (an M.A., preferably but not necessarily in English). That also means that the people do who teach them may or may not know anything about teaching first-year writing, and may or may not consider it incumbent on them to learn. If you're only getting paid four or five hundred bucks a month to teach the course, is it worth going out looking for extra training so you can do it better? As Professor X says, no one even seems to notice what he does anyway, so why worry?
Another part of the problem, though, patently, is that Professor X is cut from the same cloth as his students. He admits this:
I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.
He 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 any farther afield.
By the same token, it’s probably too much trouble for him to go any farther afield in other ways as well: by, say, studying composition and rhetoric and learning some of the best teaching practices established by five decades of research and scholarship in the field. The whole comp/rhet field for X is too far afield. He doesn’t want to put out that kind of effort: he just wants a paycheck. And then, mirabile dictu, he finds himself in class with first-year students who are just like him, only with fewer years of education under their belts, and he despises them. He doesn’t even recognize the similarities between them and himself. They’re just "trouble."
The article is not all whingeing: "Class time passes in a flash—for me, anyway, if not always for my students. I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point." Here’s a man who loves literature so much that he loves lecturing on it. Hence, presumably, his choice of occupation.
But is a love of literature enough for any teaching job--even an upper-division or graduate literature class? Don’t you sort of have to love the students, too? If you love the subject matter and despise your students as much as Professor X does, isn’t that pretty much a recipe for disaster?
And what good, really, is a love of literature in a first-year writing class? Okay, the college where he teaches ENGL 102 requires him to teach his writing students to read and write about literature, but does that make it a literature class? No: it’s a writing class, a reading-and-writing class, whose readings happen to be literary. What he needs here is not a love of literature but a love of reading and writing of all kinds, including Sports Illustrated and Cosmo, including texting and facebooking--and, of course, a love of the people who do that reading and writing, his students. Or, all right: you can’t love them? At least respect them. I personally think that if you don’t love your students, you shouldn’t be teaching, but all right: at least find something to respect in each student sitting out there paying your salary.
And one other thing: it’s pretty clear from Professor X’s article that he mostly lectures. These are first-year writing classes, and he lectures to his students, and leads discussion. This is a model he learned from his own literature professors, presumably—obviously not from competent first-year writing instructors who know something about best practices for the writing classroom—and he more or less slavishly parrots that in his own teaching, then gets annoyed when his writing students don’t respond as he did, back in the day: don’t respond as avid literature students.
X, tell me: if you signed up for a class on everyday math, balancing checkbooks, doing your taxes, that sort of thing, and your professor lectured you on differential equations, wouldn’t you be bored too?
"Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes,” X writes. "Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence."
Okay. Yes, many of our students are ill-prepared for college. That is certainly the case at the University of Mississippi, not a "college of last resort"; friends at Harvard tell me that the same is true there as well. So what are we going to do about it? Moan about the destruction of reading culture by television and the Internet? Sure, if you’re into that sort of conservative nostalgia and are of a blaming mind. But aren’t teachers hired to teach people, whatever people walk in through the door? It ain’t pretty, true; it’s very difficult to get students who have never read much, or paid much attention to language, to write a coherent sentence. But there are ways to do it, most of them involving the ability to draw on what they already know, what they’re already good at, and teaching them strategies for infusing their writing with it.
(The main one we use in Writing as Drama: create a named drama. Create a named writer and a named reader, and put them in relationship with each other. How do they know each other? How do they feel about each other? What happened last time they met? What happened the time before that? What do they expect to happen next? How old are they? What sex are they? What do they look like? What do they do? What do they want to do to each other? It’s amazing how even nonreaders learn how to write in this sort of named drama.)
Clearly, though, X doesn’t really want to help his students learn to write better. He just wishes he were doing something else. He longs for the "objective" subjects: "How I envy professors in other disciplines! How appealing seems the straightforwardness of their task! These are the properties of a cell membrane, kid. Memorize ’em, and be ready to spit ’em back at me." What some of us think of as the creative flexibility of reading and writing is to him only a burden. He wants right and wrong. He wants absolute rock-hard certainty, so his students can never negotiate with him. He wants to be a scientist. He wants to be an accountant.
But, since he’s too lazy to go back to college and get a Ph.D. in accountancy, he’s stuck with the degree he’s got--and, of course, the students he’s got, at whatever colleges are nearest his home.
The sad thing is, he realizes this, sort of:
But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.
Right. We’re of a piece, but I give the grades, so my students are the ones with the deficits, not me. We’re of a piece, but it’s just too much work to rethink my teaching in this place, to rethink how I see my students, so I’ll just blame them for everything. We’re of a piece, but I’m disinclined to do anything about it, so I’ll just write a bitch-and-moan piece to The Atlantic and keep slogging on.
And I won’t use my actual name. I’ll call myself Professor X, and sound hip and above-it-all. Above all, I’ll hide behind a pseudonym for fear I might lose my pathetic second job, which I despise as much as I despise my students, because my despicable students are my job.
posted by Doug Robinson at
1:41 PM
1 Comments:
Professor X is no Patrick Stewart in the X Men series. Although interestingly enough, both teach students who aren't going to rise through the Ivy League of social norms, but instead are there in preparation for their "police" jobs.
However, there's still a place in the system for The Atlantic's Professor X. He's not interested in teaching them writing, but he's teaching them to navigate a rhetorical setting. Joyce better prepares police officers than our composition essays in our textbooks do for how to see language not as fact, but rather as a manipulatable surface that can transform perceptions, performance, and hence reality itself.
People improve their writing skills solely through practice, and there's only so much practice a student can get in a single semester. As you yourself have pointed out in a conversation, it's more important that we teachers communicate a love of writing--which in actuality is a love of manipulating language as its own surface of reality. A love of writing is a love of interpretation.
The actual pen to the paper is only part of the act of learning to write, and sometimes we push their pens to the paper so much that they swear they'll never do it again.
As long as we don't all become Professor X, there's plenty of room for Professor X in the educational system. He might be a nice reprieve from the rest of us.
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