Professor X (28 page)

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.

O
N 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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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: