In the Basement of the Ivory Tower:
We think of college professors as being profoundly indifferent to the grades they hand out. My own professors were fairly haughty and aloof, showing little concern for the petty worries, grades in particular, of their students. There was an enormous distance between students and professors. The full-time, tenured professors at the colleges where I teach may likewise feel comfortably separated from those whom they instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight hours, tend to be younger than mine. Many of them are in school on their parents’ dime. Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault: too much time spent texting, too little time with the textbooks.
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.
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Interesting. I’d say it was good stuff up until the third page, when someone’s resentment over having to teach all these la-la-la-losers overtook him. Just once I’d like to read something like this where the author is able to hold off starting the pity party–”my students are failing, but I’m the one who really suffers.” Oh, fuck off.
It’s tough, though. I’ve seen it go the other way, seen students discouraged out of even making the attempt not on the basis of their abilities, but on the basis of their backgrounds. So obviously I don’t want to see that pattern reemerge, where we’re back to “your mother was a cosmetologist, so naturally you’ll want to be a cosmetologist, too.” When I grew up that was still in effect somewhat. On the up side, it seemed to me there was less looking down our haughty noses at vocational schools back then, too.
I wonder how early students like “Ms. L” are failed by the system, too, because reading that, my heart went out to her–I wonder if she was really as hopeless as she’s portrayed in that article? I wonder if this guy understood, let alone appreciated, how much courage a 40-something in her shoes had to screw up just to apply and enroll. I wonder if it would have made a difference had her professor been a woman instead of a man.
When I was younger and working administrative assistant-type jobs and I’d have to explain something computer-y to an older woman, I always tensed up beforehand, because they sounded just like this Ms. L–a lot of apologizing. Too much apologizing. “I’m sorry; I’ll get this; it’s just that I’m so old; I’m so hopeless; please be patient with me.” And I’d kind of like to go back and kick my own ass now, because all I could ever see at the time was how much of a hassle it was for me, and that isn’t how I should have been looking at it. I should have been trying to get women like that to overcome their own fear and their own hesitancy. Who knows what they could be capable of if they were ever allowed to get past the 40-plus years of constant beatdown from this fucked-up society?
Okay, I need to quit writing a crummy post in your comments now! Ahem. Thanks for linking that.
Having spent many years teaching college, I agree that it is not for everyone especially if one assumes a traditional four year path. There are also people who lack the interest, motivation, and even basic IQ level to make it. Those really aren’t the ones I see failing out though. I’ve taught at private and public institutions, in rich and poor areas, and one thing that is readily apparent is that without the “right” economic platform, college does not work for many students. Many of mine have worked 30 hours and attempt to carry the full time load that they need to maintain financial aid, and end up failing or dropping classes, which necessitates registering for extra classes the following term, etc and so forth. It’s a vicious cycle, and even worse for those coming from areas without a solid college preparation from high school. With better aid, better preparation, more support, more financial aid flexibility, and a different timeline, the picture could be a lot more successful. So, yes, under the system that assumes white middle class kids supported by their parents, “college is not for everyone” and those who try to beat the system often fail. Not that it ought to be that way.
As to the disgruntled writer, while finishing my PhD I also taught night classes to non-traditional students, but I think the heartwarming and motivating stories far outweighed the frustrations that he describes. Every night I walked in the classroom I was amazed by the dedication of the students, who were working to overcome all kinds of odds, and were grateful for the chance. Unlike most of the traditional daytime students.
I want to smack this dude. Please. I’ve been teaching night classes at Pasadena City College since I was 26. And yes, I’ve had to — gently — dash someone’s dream a time or nine hundred. But what’s missing in this piece is the sense that even the woefully unprepared can learn to delight in a new idea, a story, a vision of a world unlike the one they’ve lived in all their lives. Many of the students who enjoyed my class the most, and came back again and again for others, were borderline students. Their work was poor, but I didn’t let that get to me as it wasn’t about me, in the end.
My job — to give them a sense of the past, to give them a different vision of the world and their place in it — is the same for the A student and the F student. And I will admit I do pass many students with a C, students whom this fellow might fail, because I see the effort and the struggle and the improvement. Letter grades are capricious, moving targets; I have nothing to prove by flunking someone who doesn’t grasp every aspect of what I’m peddling. I am not the sole guardian of the tower and its standards, and though I am famously stingy with the As, I am liberal with the Cs — especially with the Mrs. L’s of the world. Is that the soft bigotry of low expectations? No, but it is a recognition that sometimes, our grading ought to take account of the reality of the background from which a student has emerged.
This guy really bugs me. I think he comes off very haughty and honestly his little story about Ms. L just makes me think he’s not a great teacher. Aside from the whole no internet experience thing, I don’t get the feeling even from his own take on things that he explained things well enough to her. It’s a fairly beginning English course, and sometimes you might need to hold some hands.
I can tell from my own experience as a student in a decent private university that many traditional students coming into college can barely write a coherent sentence. For a lot of people that first class is needed to even kind of prepare them for what writing college papers is really like, and they flounder because they either don’t care at all or they haven’t been properly prepared by high school and they just don’t “get it” yet. I think a lot of times a good teacher can overcome that second factor. I get the feeling that he may be quite suited to study and write about English and literature, but not so much with the teaching (and I think to an extent that happens a lot with professors).