Professor X (6 page)

I stepped out into the corridor for a breath of air. I needed to compose myself. First night of class: I noted that most of the other adjuncts had already dismissed their students for the evening. One other teacher, at the far end of the hall, was still going. His rasp was indistinct. I heard not his words but just the rising and falling of his voice, which had a querulous quality to it as he explained some lengthy proposition. A corridor of classrooms at night is a lonely but exciting place. I had to swallow down a rising gorge of exhilaration. I coughed to cover my excitement. A writing cliché to avoid: I felt wondrously alive. Not necessarily particularly happy, but surgically opened, splayed, scalped, vivisected, and mounted. I was my own raw self. This was me, take it or leave it. I felt like I'd been confessing at a meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous, or any of the other sorts of assemblages that take place in empty school buildings.

I stepped back into my classroom.

“And now,” I told the class, “we write.”

The students, all business, took out notebooks and loose-leaf and folders and pens. Someone piped up with a question: would they be keeping a writing journal? They knew more about what was supposed to go on than I did. Had some of them taken the class before? I would learn in time that, yes, they certainly had. I told them that I didn't believe in journals. When you have that much writing lying around, you don't want to waste it, and so you try to shoehorn that writing into whatever projects happen to come up, and it seldom fits.

“We have to do a base-level writing exercise,” I said. “I have to get a feeling of where everybody is.” They nodded. They understood they had to participate in such tedious formalities. “Write me an introduction and then three good body paragraphs. Here's the topic: I'm exactly the same person that I was five years ago. Or, if you don't like that one, I'm a completely different person than I was five years ago.”

A hand rose: do you want a conclusion?

“No,” I said, briskly and with great authority. I had already learned, as a professor, to speak ex cathedra. Never had I given the idea of conclusions any thought, but instantly I apprehended the boundaries of the matter. “Conclusions are childish. Let the reader draw them. You shouldn't have to tell us.”

The woman with the tattoos and cardigan ventured a rather nervous comment. “My teacher always told us to turn our introductory paragraphs on their heads. She wanted us to use the same words, but mixed up, for the conclusion.”

She was about my age; this was the sort of
McGuffey's Readers
stuff teachers used to spout.

“If the last paragraph is just the first in disguise,” I said, “then why even bother with the middle? We haven't progressed even slightly.”

The students made notes. They wrote a first draft. They got up and stretched and wrote a final draft. They worked with great industry and seriousness of purpose. They thought before they wrote. They twisted their bodies as they wrestled with their undoubtedly twisted prose.

My first night of class, it seemed, was an unalloyed triumph. Christ, I thought. How fucking inspirational am I? Look at these people go! I sauntered down the hall, in the direction of the other teacher. I peeked into his room. He was instructing up a storm, teaching some sort of accounting. He was very tall and bulky, in a suit and Rockports and aviator glasses. His classroom had a whiteboard, which was covered with numbers in various colors. He held three colored markers clawlike between the fingers of his left hand. A rhombus of light from the overhead projector shone in the middle of the board. He nodded to me and went right on teaching. That man—God knows what his name is—has now been with me for a decade, teaching a classroom or two away. We greet each other tentatively when we pass in the hall. We chat while waiting for photocopies. We talk of the weather, and jovially complain about the work ethic of our students. We note the passing of time every September, and commiserate over the midsemester doldrums, and laugh together almost giddily when the term is over. We laugh, but it is clear that we both want more classes. I long to ask him: why are you here? Are you, too, under a house? Is it divorce, or gambling debts, or a civil judgment? Did you back your sensible Toyota out of the driveway and over a child?

Class drew to a close. The students handed in their papers. Some hung back, wanting to talk. Some of the older students burned to talk to me. They were nervous. Writing has always been a challenge. They said it various ways: I've got it up here [pointing to head] but I can't get it to come out here [making handwriting motions]. When I write I feel like I'm drunk. I never have enough to write, says a nurse's aide, but my husband can't understand it because he says I never stop talking. Such is the mystique of writing that the biggest men—the building contractor too bulky for his seat, for example—are reduced to jelly by its difficulties. Writing is
so
boring, one said. I want to jump out of my skin, said another; I feel like my body is inhabited by crawling insects of boredom.

I liked that last one. That's not pedestrian at all.

Oh, Dean Truehaft: leave early? Hah! We were twenty minutes over. Has a college class, in the history of higher education, ever been as excited about a curriculum? I was feeling pretty full of myself. I was happy. This wasn't like work. This was undiluted spiritual satisfaction.

“Okay,” I said to the class. “Are you happy you signed on?”

“All we want is three credits,” someone said.

E
VERYONE AT HOME WAS ASLEEP: the children upstairs, my wife in the downstairs bedroom, scant feet away. Her door was open. I could hear the sound of her light snoring, such a comforting sound, a gentle rasp followed by a pleasing gurgle. Two window air conditioners whirred upstairs. The roof of our Cape Cod house sliced through the bedrooms, not unattractively, in a 1950s sort of way, but since there was no attic, the rooms, pressed against the surface of the roof, were virtually uninhabitable without air-conditioning in the summer.

I put down my mug of coffee. I looked over, for the third and perhaps the fourth time, my stack of baseline essays. I did not then own a cell phone and had never sent or received a text message, but I needed the phrase that would become one of the greatest of electronic clichés.

WTF. What the fuck.

The essays were terrible, but the word “terrible” doesn't begin to convey the state these things were in. My God. Out of about fifteen students, at least ten seemed to have no familiarity with the English language. It seemed that they had never before been asked in school to turn in any sort of writing assignment. I can say that there were words misspelled, rather simple words at that. I can say that there was no overarching structure to the paragraphs, that thoughts and notions were tossed at the reader haphazardly. I can say that there were countless grammatical errors; sentences without verbs; sentences without subjects; commas everywhere, like a spilled dish of chocolate sprinkles, until there were none, for paragraphs at a time; sentences that neither began with a capital letter nor ended with any punctuation whatsoever. I can say that the vocabulary was not at a college level and perhaps not at a high school level. I can say that tenses wandered from present to past to past perfect back to present, suggesting the dissolving self of a schizophrenic consciousness. I can say that some of the mistakes concerned matters of form explained to me by Sister Mary Finbar on—as God is my witness, I can remember this—the very first day of first grade, matters such as the definition “a sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought” and the requirement that, before nouns and adjectives and adverbs beginning with a vowel, the writer is obligated to use the article “an,” not “a.” I can say all that, and you may still think to yourself: English teacher. What do you expect? Nitpicking bastard.

Perhaps, dear reader, you think the main issue is the arrogance and superiority of the aforementioned teacher rather than any problem with the students. Perhaps you think of me as Guy Crouchback, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's
Men at Arms,
who during World War II censors letters and observes snootily of the writers that some “wrote with wild phonetic misspellings straight from the heart. The rest strung together clichés which he supposed somehow communicated some exchange of affection and need.” I could quote broken sentences all day, but I won't. The words banged against each other in unnatural ways, twisted up like mangled bodies. There is something pornographic about viewing such poor work.

I think of a four-line utterance without a verb—the world's longest sentence fragment—and the old joke about the world's tallest midget comes to mind.

Nothing I can do can really convey—so that you can feel it, as I did, in the cold pit of my stomach—the true abilities of many of these students. Fine-tuning—that's what I had expected to be doing: turning workmanlike prose into something substantial, something rounded, something that occasionally even sang. Instead, that lonely night in my little Cape Cod, I drowned in incoherence. I was submerged in a flood of illogic and solecism and half-baked coinages, this last being a charitable spin on the use of made-up words.

There were exceptions. The older students were better. The woman with the tattoos and cardigan knew what she was doing, in the sense that she didn't make up any words, and she had some sense of having embarked on a piece of construction, something to be fashioned, like a birdhouse or a ladder-backed chair, something that needs to be plumb. To my relief, she had her tenses firmly corralled, her verbs and their auxiliaries lined up in formation like little tin soldiers. There was another competent paper, this one from a woman in her forties. Her fourth child, the last one, was poised to leave the house for college. She was a true minivan mom, the picture of unruffled composure. The personal essays she would hand in that semester portrayed all the complexities of suburban living. She wrote of Brownie troops and uniform swaps and soccer tournaments; she wrote of brokering complex favors with three other mothers so that none of their boys would have to miss an optional T-ball practice; she wrote of the struggle to make and serve dinner around four competing sets of extracurricular activities. With her youngest about to leave, she had gotten a job coordinating training sessions for medical and clerical staff of a hospital. She wrote how nervous she was about it, but I knew she would do fine. Compared to managing a household, taking guff from condescending surgeons and disgruntled X-ray techs would be a breeze.

The tattooed woman and the hospital administrator wrote nice essays, but let's not go crazy. Their essays were organized and cogent, but their writing was small. This was not truly college writing, if we define that animal as writing that manifests the intellect. Their writing was polite and muted and almost Shaker-like in its simplicity and barrenness. It's a gift to be simple, and the artist may rattle on about how difficult it is to achieve simplicity, but shouldn't college writing flex some cognitive muscle? “Indefensible”—that's the sort of word I expect to see in a college student's paper. “Apex.” “Trenchant.” “Heretical.” “Casuistry” (when in doubt, I always worked “casuistry” into my college papers). “Facile.” “Unassailable.” “Axiomatic.” Chewy words. Words that slow the jaw, like jerked beef. My professors no doubt caught the whiff of the undergraduate blowhard in my writing. But we are, after all, in the realm of undergraduates. Isn't it more appropriate for an undergraduate to wrestle with bulky concepts than to not have a notion of their very existence?

It's a good question, but I was facing a bigger one: what to do about the students who not only couldn't write, but who seemed to have no business in a classroom at all. How could I hope to teach them? Where would I begin? It would take me a year just to make up the deficiencies: a year of five-day-a-week meetings and six-hour classes, a year during which there was no expectation that we would actually get to doing college-level work, a year in which we would start again at the very beginning.

The enormity of the task was breathtaking.

I pictured it: “All right, everybody. Listen up. A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought.”

I read the essays again, drank my coffee, and went to bed. The next day my wife asked me, rather cheerfully, how my students were.

“Not so hot,” I said blandly. Of course, that didn't quite cover it. “Actually, they're kind of terrible. They're bad writers.”

The matter dropped. Over the course of the next few days, I thought about their work. Disjointed sentences—sentence fragments, really—swam before my eyes as I mowed our compact patch of grass, fiddled with the downspouts, freshened and fluffed the mulch around the boxy hedges. I may have worked much more industriously than was usual; the pile of bad work in my briefcase filled me with a sort of buzzing nervous energy. I didn't want to think about it. I started to resent the amount of time the students and their bad prose were weighing upon my mind. I watched with alarm as my per-hour teaching rate dropped.

A door had been opened to me, and I found myself surveying a landscape as drawn by M. C. Escher (that old favorite of undergraduates), in which the laws of logic and physical reality ceased to function, the sort of place where circular staircases ascended infinitely and fish transformed into birds and college looked a lot like junior high.

But I sang a happy tune to myself.

“I guess they just need to write the rust off,” I told myself gamely. I vowed to get them working at something approaching a college level. I would teach them. I would work hard. We would make a fresh start. I cried the perpetual cry of the instructor: I would succeed where others had failed.