Professor X (8 page)

The students wrote everything down in their notebooks.

We read the whimsical “Neat People vs. Sloppy People” by Suzanne Britt. I find Britt's piece funny, though not as funny as the next piece, “Batting Clean-up and Striking Out” by Dave Barry. Barry's essay wanders off in directions only he can go; his ability to deliver bits of adolescent silliness using the hoariest comic forms—all with a wide-eyed earnestness—and have it all come out actually funny may make him the most singular literary talent of our age. It goes without saying that the class had never heard of Dave Barry. They laughed, a great many of them, rather heartily. Some didn't, perhaps because they simply didn't find him funny or perhaps school had always been so tense for them that they had long ago shut off the receptors that react spontaneously to anything presented in a classroom. This was mere schoolwork, quite divorced from life. I envied the opportunity those who had enjoyed the Barry piece now had: to go out and scarf up everything Dave Barry had ever written. And yet I knew that this was not going to happen.

Finally, we read “The Black and White Truth About Basketball,” Jeff Greenfield's famous analysis of black and white styles of basketball play, first published in 1975 in
Esquire.
And now I had a new writing ambition: to write an essay that would be published, edition after edition, in college textbooks for a minimum of twenty-five years.

We'd dredged everything we could out of Barry, Greenfield, et al. We'd looked for examples of thesis statements and topic sentences, which wasn't easy; writers often leave these items unstated, drawing in the reader. And though we could generate some topic sentences where Jeff Greenfield hadn't, my students didn't exactly understand why they had to—which is why using the essays most texts include as models is problematic: the writing is simply too subtle and too idiosyncratic. I would think it a bad bet for anyone to try to imitate Dave Barry: my students, Vladimir Nabokov, me, anyone. The benefits of our reading would, I knew, be small and indirect; reading this handful of essays must be better than reading none, and we were trying to make up, with a small clutch of baby steps, for a lifetime of not reading.

Now it was time for the students to plan their own essays. The textbook had boiled the compare-contrast essay down to a series of steps, with examples and tips and Venn diagrams and checklists. My students had been instructed, by the chirruping text, to develop a plan of organization and stick to it. As we used to say in the old neighborhood: No shit, Sherlock.

We considered the list of topics in the text. “The main characters of two films, novels or stories.” “Computers: Macs vs. PCs.” “City life and rural life.” “Malls and main streets.”

“The topic has to come from deep within you,” I said. “It has to be a comparison that only you can make. In specificity lies the universal.” I repeated that last sentence, and they wrote it down dutifully. “Talk to me as though I were on a barstool beside you, or across the table in the diner at three in the morning. Be that detailed. Give us the comparison that's been eating away at you for years. Give us the whys and wherefores.” I was a new teacher of writing, but I knew that much: that the writer must be obsessed by the topic. As Jennifer I. Berne of the University of Illinois says, “Control of topic is essential in writing workshops because the writing student must feel that they have the most knowledge in the room about what they are writing.” She quotes Lucy Calkins, who wrote in her book
The Art of Teaching Writing,
“By supplying a topic from my experience and giving it to my students, I indirectly taught them that their lives aren't worth writing about.”
³

The period was over. The students arose, full of determination to succeed at their task. They were nothing short of abuzz. The building contractor said that he had never felt better prepared for a writing assignment in his life. If only, he said with some anger, someone had done this sort of work with him twenty years ago. The entire cast of his life might have been different.

Well, yes, I thought to myself. But at least you encountered me now, before it was completely too late. Professor X can't be everywhere, you know. In a lifetime, how many students can one man lead out of the writing wilderness? (My interior voice was sounding so rich and plummy!) I try my best.

The following week, they brought their essays to class. Were some of them actually swaggering a little? The mood in the classroom was bubbly. New friendships seemed to have sprouted. I collected the essays, their first drafts, and went off with them to the copy machine. We were going to use the workshop format, with everyone looking at and helping to revise several of the submissions.

I had told them to write from personal experience but warned them that everyone in class would see their work. I also warned them about the pitfalls of writing workshops. “I've taken a boatload of college classes in my time,” I said, “and only in writing workshops have I seen people cry.”

Not every student's piece would be a success, I knew, but I wanted to share the joy in real time with those students who had made progress.

I returned to the classroom and handed each student a pile of photocopies. “Keep them in order, so we don't get confused,” I said crisply. I gave instruction. I had wavered on whether or not to have the students read their essays aloud; I decided not to, for the time being. “Everybody read with a pen or pencil in hand. If great language jumps out at you, note it down. If something is unclear, note it down. If you have questions after reading a paragraph, jot them down. Let's read through the pile and come back and do individual pieces.”

I knew what was certain to happen. Inspired by my passion for writing, the students had labored mightily, and turned in the best work of their lives. I would see that they had made small but discernible progress.

How I would love, dear reader, to deliver a different report from what I am about to write. I would love to say how blown away I was by their work. I would love to concede that the grammar was rough, and that as first drafts the essays needed lots of spackling and releveling but that we had tapped into their experiences and the stuff they had written was pretty neat. That's what I thought would happen. I pictured us as being comfortably swaddled in a quilt of narrative. I had worked hard to teach them. They seemed eager to learn. Surely the lot of us would progress
somewhere.
It had to be. We were all playing our roles, as though we had played them thousands of times before.

Our narrative had derailed. The story took an unexpected twist.

The papers were even worse.

Once, after I'd been instructing for a few years, I eavesdropped for the first time on another English 101 class. The instructor was a very experienced woman of about my age who had seen it all. She was rather a classic adjunct type. Slim and intense, unsmiling, she wore a long brown skirt with as much material as a schooner's sail, mustard-colored tights that pilled, naïve-looking flat shoes. She wore no wedding ring. Her voice was throaty, from years of smoking or teaching. I couldn't shake the feeling that she'd had a tough go of it. Her first-night speeches to her class were remarkably similar to mine, but she did have one ringing catchphrase all her own.

“Please do me a favor,” she said to the class. “Don't hand in garbage.”

I hadn't told my students that. I'm not sure it would have mattered.

For there is no other word but garbage for what my students handed in. My older students did all right, I suppose, but even their work had fallen off. It was bad. When I categorize the lot of assignments as barely literate, that's an average; some papers were not literate at all, and I'd be hard-pressed to say what exactly, in their compare-contrast essays, was being compared or why. Words were randomly assembled and weirdly spelled, and does no elementary or high school teach the capitalization of the first person singular pronoun anymore? Some essays seemed, in their obscure reasoning, to make connections that would be apparent only to a lunatic. Was it the best work my students could do? That's a slippery question. The fact that they handed it in seems to indicate that, yes, on some level, it was the best they could do. But scattered liberally through the poor writing was much evidence of lack of care: crazy misspellings of grammar-school words, misspellings that the spell checker would catch but for which it could offer no alternative; words repeated, like the pounding of a sledgehammer, nine or ten times in a paragraph; crucial words omitted; batches of words pressed together in the hopes of forming a sentence, like old slivers of soap jammed together for one last shower. There were times I suspected an easy explanation to the whole mess: that the writers had not had their fingers placed on the home keys while they typed.

Here was my first hard lesson in life as an adjunct professor in the basement of the ivory tower. The students are poignantly desperate for success. Many of those I teach have done poorly in high school; college is not a goal for which they prepared single-mindedly for eighteen years. College is a place they landed in. I teach those whose names don't come up in the debates about advanced placement courses, adolescent overachievers, and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose high school transcripts show poor attendance, indifferent grades, and blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. But now, shanghaied into college classes because of the demands of the workplace, they have seen the light—in a panicky sort of way. They want to do well. I want them to do well, and I teach subjects about which I am crazily passionate.

Many nights for the past decade, I have taught in a classroom crackling with positive energy. No matter where I lead, the students follow. If in my literature class I choose to spend an hour on the splendidly written opinion by the Hon. John M. Woolsey in the case of
United States of America v. One Book Called Ulysses
(“. . . whilst in many places the effect of ‘Ulysses' on the reader is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac” [the students don't get it at first; “emetic” throws them for a loop until I prod the memories of the young and not-so-young moms: “Ipecac!” they cry]), or if in my college composition class we detour off into such an arcane point of grammar as restrictive vs. nonrestrictive relative clauses, the students stay with me. On those nights when I am in the teaching zone, the class will follow where I lead.

For a while, I thought I was all the legendary charismatic teachers rolled into one: Mr. Chips and Conrack and Jaime Escalante and Robin Williams in
Dead Poets Society.
I assumed my results would match theirs. But now I better understand the immense hazard-strewn distance between teaching and learning. On any given night, I may very well be entertaining, informative, illuminating, and even inspirational on the subject of essay writing, but ultimately my gyrations are those of a semaphore signalman on the horizon, and it's every man for himself on a dark battlefield navigating past indolence, despair, fear of failure, fear of success, lack of foundational skills, lack of time, lack of aptitude, the allure of Internet surfing, lack of sustained interest. It's hard to teach writing for the same reasons it's hard to change any human behavior at any time. The students' essays are poor for the same reason my sporadic efforts to learn French have invariably stalled. Though she owns books and floor mats and has taken lessons at the YMCA, my wife can do no yoga.

When the essay that prompted this book was published in the
Atlantic Monthly,
education-minded bloggers were bent out of shape by my characterization of the students' writing as being so profoundly poor. Alex Reid, an associate professor of English and professional writing at the State University of New York at Cortland, wrote that he supposed “what makes such students the ‘worst' is that they are distant from a certain ideological notion of students. They are perhaps unlikely to share in conventional notions of literacy and academic discourse.”
⁴

My notion of college-level discourse is indeed conventional, and no, the students don't share in it at all. Professor Reid's language is academic and polite, and the very essence of
euphemism,
which I try to get the students to stop indulging in. Mike Rose, who has written several books on education and literacy, clucked his tongue at me for being disrespectful to the students and spoke of the methods he used when teaching remedial college classes: