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 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.

Even the Student Who Fails Learns a Valuable Lesson

At NSU, Dean Sandra DeLoatch has denied Steven D. Aird tenure because of "the overwhelming failure of the vast majority of the students he teaches." This decision did not come out of the blue. Over the course of his tenure track, Aird repeatedly had received pressure to raise his passing rate to DeLoatch's standard of 70%.

Aird argues that this would require grade inflation. From five different professors, Aird gathered the statistics on two standard exams for a core-curriculum freshman-biology course. In the Fall of 2005, the median grade was an F.

Attendance probably plays a significant role in this low performance. According to Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed, "Other professors at Norfolk State, generally requesting anonymity, confirmed that following the 80 percent attendance rule would result frequently in failing a substantial share — in many cases a majority — of their students." Aird's attendance record shows that the average student attends his class only 66% of the time.

Aird interprets the problem to be one of where to set the bar. He produces a clever sports analogy to support his position:

“Show me how lowering the bar has ever helped anyone,” Aird said in an interview. Continuing the metaphor, he said that officials at Norfolk State have the attitude of “a track coach who tells the team ‘I really want to win this season but I really like you guys, so you can decide whether to come to practice and when.’ ” Such a team wouldn’t win, Aird said, and a university based on such a principle would not be helping its students. (Jaschik)

According to the logic behind this analogy, students are merely potential players who can get cut from the team.

University spokeswoman Sharon Hoggard maintains that NSU upholds the accreditation standards imposed by SACS. She feels that Aird's pedagogical strategy "goes against our [NSU's] very mission, which is to provide an affordable high-quality education for an ethnically and culturally diverse student population." The diversity factor is relevant since NSU is a historically African-American university that caters to students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

However, race is not the heart of the discrepancy. The heart of the discrepancy is a conflict between opposing pedagogical strategies. According to Hoggard, "Every student doesn't learn in the same way. It becomes the duty of the faculty member to find ways to ensure that his or her students are understanding the material." In other words, Hoggard would argue that the only bar to be set is not for the student, but rather for the teacher. While Aird puts the onus of performance on the student, Hoggard and DeLoatch put the onus of performance on the teacher.

What is the role of the teacher in a university classroom? What is the role of the student?

One way to explore the first question is to figure out to whom or what the teacher is responsible. Aird would argue that the teacher is responsible to the material. He sets the bar for the students to jump into the material at a certain degree of proficiency. Those students who can't or won't jump high enough are banned from the material--presumably because the material is sacred enough that careless or un-knowledgeable hands shouldn't touch it.

Hoggard and DeLoatch would argue that, with American citizens' diminished access to math, science, and reading-comprehension skills, and with minorities' even further reduced access to these skills, the teacher works not for the material or even for the student, but rather for our country or a particular race. In this scenario, the teacher has a responsibility to prepare the student for the active engagement that democracy demands of its citizenry. In order to salvage our nation's economy in the face of outsourcing science and research, this active engagement includes the student's adaptability in our highly competitive global economy.

From this perspective, the teacher sees our society through the avatar of the student. It's a fascist perspective in the sense that we are all just servants of our nation's or a particular race's history. If we eliminated the concepts of the nation state and race, and the teacher envisioned instead a global society through the avatar of the student, the perspective would be Stalinist. In both perspectives, the student loses his or her individualism.

When American students lose their individualism, they get angry. They don't like it when we teachers say, "Don't focus on what I want. Interpret me solely as a tool to facilitate your servitude to our country/world." They dismiss us as fascists or communists--because structurally, we are.

Of course, Aird's strategy also ignores each student's contingent identity. The student's face either disappears in the face of the material, or gets excluded for the failure to do so.

Ironically, this exclusion preserves the student. In other words, Aird's pedagogical strategy does more to maintain the student's individualism than Hoggard and DeLoatch's, specifically via the exclusionary act of failing the student. For this very reason, some students might prefer Aird's pedagogy--because it preserves their ability to resist, which endows them with the agency of choice: they can choose to pass or fail the course. When students can't fail as easily, because they're infrastructurally surrounded by a totalitarian university's "student support system," resistance is futile, and so too is the individualist desire to take control of one's own fate. The student becomes reduced to an object that gets cradled or mishandled. The only individualist voice such a student can assume is a victimized one that blames the teacher, university, or even the injustices of the social system.

Obviously there is a way to merge strategies. The teacher doesn't have to remain aloof, deny each student's different personality, or avoid technology that produces infrastructural support for the student's engagement with the material. These aren't necessary factors in drawing the clear line in the sand that endows the student with the freedom of choice. But students need a high bar, not because the material is too sacred for unworthy hands to contaminate, but rather to evoke the concept of aspiration, and to encourage the student's understanding of the role of his or her own determination. This isn't exclusionary. Quite the contrary, even the student who fails learns a valuable lesson.

The Venkatesan Affair

On April 30 of this year, The Dartmouth Review published a lengthy interview with a former Dartmouth professor and alum, Priya Venkatesan, when it became known that she was planning to sue seven students from her four sections of first-year writing for aggressive, abusive, and disrespectful behavior in class. She has since decided not to sue, but the incident has received a lot of press, including this in thedartmouth.com and this in The Wall Street Journal. A detailed profile of her is here.

Who knows what really happened here. The students say Prof. Venkatesan blathered on and on in an impenetrable jargon and would not allow questions, and exploded with anger if anyone disagreed with her; Venkatesan says that the students were arrogant and full of their own importance and treated her disrespectfully. The superficial impression Joseph Rago offers in the WSJ piece is that Venkatesan considered disagreeing with her disrespectful; Venkatesan herself says that she is always happy to explore differences of opinion, but that the incessant questions were interrupting her lecture (in a first-year writing class!?) and some students really wanted to learn from her, so she made a new rule: no questions during the lecture; all questions will be held till the end.

There is a wealth of interesting material here. Venkatesan is Indian, and suggests that her predominantly white upper-class students reacted badly to her out of racism; she admits in the interview that she has no real evidence of that, but suspects it. Given the nature of her English in the interview, I'm guessing there may have been a certain amount of xenophobia in students' reactions to her accent and syntax; at least down here in Mississippi any foreign instructor, no matter how wonderful his or her English is, is subjected to this. "I can't understand a word she says!"

What interests me most in the incident, though, is Venkatesan's commentary on her interactions with Tom Cormen, director of Dartmouth's first-year writing program:

Tom Cormen was consistently rude to me and he was very unsupportive of my teaching in the Writing Program. I am perplexed as to why he would give me an offer to teach four sections in the Writing Program and then show absolutely no support, no professional support, and I wasn’t even looking for personal support, no professional support or guidance, and trying to do my best job to be a writing instructor. Now to give you the background, I taught writing in my graduate school at the University of California San Diego. I was what they call a teaching assistant. The students get graded by teaching-assistants in the research universities, not like Dartmouth where the professors grade the students. I was a teaching assistant at the University of San Diego, and I have three teaching evaluations. They were all spectacular. They were all spectacular. They were all positive. I could fax them to you. I don’t mind, I could honestly fax them to you, but no professional support or guidance from the beginning. But, I was confident in my ability to teach expository writing, so I went about it with very little support or direction from the department. That is, in itself, very unusual to have a writing program that does not have a structured orientation program for its new writing staff. Very, very extraordinary. Very out of the ordinary. Very unusual. Usually if you go to schools that have established writing programs or institutes for writing they will give you a two to three day orientation that introduces you to teaching that gives you some pointers, some advice, some suggestions on how to be the most effective teaching instructor. These orientations are not meant to dictate your teaching philosophy or ethics. They are meant to orient you, to guide you in the teaching process to be an effective expository writing teacher. There was no orientation. That in itself is questionable. It is very questionable. It raises flags about the quality of the writing program. I did approach some administrator saying where’s the orientation. She gave me this blank, actually it was a phone conversation, so I can’t see a blank face, but it was like a blank expression over the phone, like I don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no orientation.

She's right, of course: properly run writing programs do offer consider professional support and development. A presemester workshop is the absolute minimum.

She goes on:

So Tom, when the students started complaining about me to Tom, Tom did bring me to his office a couple of times and said, “Tell me how things are going.” But what is unusual about what Tom did as a professor, as a writing program director, is that he did not side with the colleague. That is also very, very strange. That is odd. In any professional academic setting it is not academic de rigueur to go against a colleague when students are bitching about them. I don’t know how else to put it. ... Tom did not side with me. He did not show any official support for me. When incidents happen, when suspect incidences were happening, he would essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy. He used very strong language in telling me what I needed to do to meet the needs of the students. I think yeah, you need to meet the needs of the students. But sometimes students have a different agenda than just learning. Who knows, what the agenda of the students are. I can’t read their minds. That is very strange because when I talked to my colleagues in California, they came back to me and they said, “Why isn’t your boss supporting you?” And I said, “I don’t know.” That is really strange that the boss doesn’t support you, we’re colleagues.

Here I start to have qualms. It's the WPA's job to support the instructor blindly? The WPA has no responsibility to the students, or to the program as a whole? Venkatesan obviously has an us-against-them mindset here, and is angry at her WPA for not sharing that mindset.

Obviously, I wasn't there when Tom Cormen "would essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy," or when he "used very strong language in telling me what I needed to do to meet the needs of the students." Was he shouting at her? Was he using foul language? And what exactly does she mean by "essentially try to dictate my teaching philosophy"? That word "essentially" suggests to me that he wasn't trying to dictate how to teach, but was trying to push her in a certain direction, which she experienced as trying to dictate how to teach. There is this widespread ethos that says "my classroom is my kingdom, I do what I want and nobody dictates to me," which makes the WPA's job difficult. Grad students typically don't have that attitude yet--I'm guessing Venkatesan didn't have it when she taught as a GI at UC San Diego--but adjuncts often do, and professors almost always do. If the WPA's job is to look out for program coherence and fairness and evenness, and to push on everybody to keep improving and expanding their pedagogical strategies, and the instructors' attitude is "don't dictate (and anything you do to push me past what I'm already doing will count as dictating)," there will be problems.

And it looks very much as if Venkatesan was "teaching" first-year writing by lecturing and then answering questions. No exercises or group activities. No brainstorming on paper topics. No freewriting. No peer-review or peer-editing. Lectures and "discussion"--I'm guessing, here, but I threw those scare quotes up around "discussion" because all too often "discussion" is construed (by the instructor who likes to lecture) as a series of leading questions to which the students provide the right answers, all in the service of the instructor's lecture. "Discussion" in this sort of case is a sham, a way of pretending to be open to the students' ideas and opinions while actually simply dictating to them. If in fact Venkatesan did and does think this way, and did and does teach first-year writing this way, then obviously real questions and critiques from the students would come across to her as aggressive bullying. I'm supposed to be in charge of this class!

One of my colleagues from San Diego told me, and I’m not sure I agree with it, but she told me, and please don’t quote me with saying that I agree with this, don’t take it out of context, but she said the classroom is not a democracy and the way she runs her classroom is with an iron fist. I’m not like that. I’m not the iron fist, but I think my genuine attempt to teach them—I think they tried to take advantage of some of my ability not to be this iron fist. I think a lot of professors are like, I’m the boss of the classroom and you listen to me, and that’s probably the norm. I’m a little more lenient, I’m a little more liberal, and I think this was kind of taken advantage of. I think also that many times when I was lecturing, many of the students would take over the class.

While they took over the class, the students that were questioning me would not question the student, but they would consistently question me. In other words, in that setting, the student had more authority than me. Usually the student that questioned me was a white male. When this white male spoke he was given more authority of knowledge, more respect than I was given.

The thing about authority, though, is that sheer institutional authority is never enough. Students outnumber you in the classroom. If you really want to dominate them, cow them into submission, you need a gun; you need armed guards ready to bludgeon them into silence. Barring such police-state tactics, if you can't coopt their resistance, they will dominate you, either by "taking over the class" or by checking out, staring out the window, doing the crossword, texting each other, chitchatting. If you really want to dominate them, you have to do it by stealth, by coaxing them into complicity with your authority.

And of course in some sense all teaching is social regulation. The instructor is in charge, is hired by the university to lead the students through a series of steps from less understanding and fewer skills to more, and to assess their performance along the way and at the end. But there are lots of ways to stage that regulation, some more iron-fisted than others. Venkatesan complains that Tom Cormen is a computer science professor: "My first response is what is someone who has a computer science background going to know about teaching writing? What are they going to know? They haven’t been trained in literature or composition rhetoric." By implication, of course, Venkatesan has been trained in "composition rhetoric." But if she has, surely she has heard about Peter Elbow, and the idea of writing without teachers? Utopian as Elbow's idea from the early seventies undoubtedly is, it's an important landmark in the field, but one that Venkatesan has apparently never heard of--or else, perhaps more likely, has heard of but dismissed as too soft, not rigorous enough.

Ultimately an instructor's most important pedagogical tool is her or his own personality. Whether that personality is shy or bold, domineering or self-effacing, serious or funny, it has to be crafted into an effective teaching tool, or the teacher will fail. My sense, frankly, is that Venkatesan doesn't yet know how to do this. If she wants to run her classroom in a more or less authoritarian style, fine--but she has to learn how to do it so that students go along with it. She can't just expect them to submit to her, just because that's what she did when she was at Dartmouth.

And it's the WPA's job to help instructors feel their way from this sort of fumbling and stumbling to an effective mobilization of their own personalities for classroom use. This is not "essentially dictating my teaching philosophy"; it is professional development. I would personally prefer a more egalitarian classroom, but if an instructor really wants to be the sole authority, it's my job to help him or her develop pedagogically effective strategies for doing so.