Galloway’s response has caught attention because of his brutal honesty in addressing what he sees as the student’s overall functional weaknesses.   In short, he takes him down a few notches.  The full exchange is easily googled, but I want to focus on a specific piece of Galloway’s final advice

            “Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant,         navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these       are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners,          demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy        stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful.         However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your    potential which, by virtue of you being admitted to Stern, you must have in             spades. It’s not too late xxxx…”

Opinion on the web seems split, centered largely around discussions of Galloway’s known personality quirks.  The entire controversy, though, provides an opportunity to think about the appropriate tone and level of “honesty” in student-teacher communications.  As an adjunct at Baruch for five years, I’ve certainly felt the occasional urge to respond to particularly ridiculous requests with a similar sense of disbelief.  Galloway’s message, however, takes the impulse a step further, directly and personally addressing what he perceives to be the student’s overall failures.  His main point seems to be that, by exhibiting such a lack of decorum, the student is effectively handicapping himself, making it impossible to succeed in college or the larger world.

I find Galloway’s response generally appropriate considering the student’s rather arrogant assumption that “sampling” courses (by walking in and out of several classes mid-lecture) was reasonable behavior.  His most memorable advice (“get your shit together”), while perhaps obscene, communicates an underlying truth.  If the student wishes to succeed in the business world, his presumed career direction, he will have to drastically adjust the attitude and expectations reflected in his brief interaction with Professor Galloway.

This is not to say that it is always within a professor’s rights or responsibilities to dole out life advice to undergrads.  Yet, while the desire to tell students exactly what you think about them seems like a road fraught with peril, there is an undeniable mentorship inherent to a teacher-student relationship that leaves room for a certain degree of guidance.  Highlighting a student’s particularly wrong-headed approach can sometimes be, both personally and professionally, the right thing to do.  Under what circumstances such intervention is necessary is where the issue gets tricky.

I teach a course on the history of the Vietnam War that lends itself to sometimes controversial discussions.  Several semesters ago a student began challenging my selection of course material and subject matter through a series of increasingly antagonistic emails that essentially attacked me as some kind of un-American propagandist.  At first I was incensed, and my anger made me want to write a vicious and humiliating email in retaliation for such an affront.  After realizing that I was about to engage in what would essentially be an internet flame war with a student, I reconsidered.  Ultimately I didn’t think it was within my role to “correct” this kid’s absurd political notions, or to change the student’s beliefs about the Vietnam War.  However, I did find it important and appropriate to tell this student, in a decidedly softened email, that in communicating with a professor (or anyone else) a tone of personal hostility is not the most effective way to win someone to your side.  I held my tongue on the political points I wanted to score because I felt it was more important—and more in keeping with my position as an educator—to help this student correct his communication-related behavior, than what I perceived to be his misguided political stances. 

The pedagogical role has historically been fluid enough to accommodate a wide range of interpretations about the degree of intellectual contact between student and teacher.  As adjuncts in a huge urban system like CUNY, though, this relationship is circumscribed by a host of economic, social, and cultural factors that often override the adjunct’s ability and/or willingness to develop meaningful professional relationships with students.  Before intervening in the kind of “brutally honest” way that Galloway demonstrates, the best kinds of questions to ask yourself are:  how will this help the student in the long-term?  Does “brutal honesty” directly address important, correctable behavior, or are you just blowing off steam?

Finally, it’s important to consider that the Galloway controversy happened in the context of a business school, which operates under a different set of educational imperatives than most of us are accustomed to at CUNY. Galloway’s email was meant to address the student’s lack of professional decorum, which would ostensibly impact his dreamed-of career in business.  Certainly a student headed for a humanities degree would require a slightly different set of standards.  But the main lesson of Galloway’s now-infamous transmission is that teachers should be bold enough to tell a student to get his or her “shit together” if that is in fact the correct diagnosis and prescription.  It can be unquestionably difficult to judge if and when it’s appropriate to put on the counselor suit and start handing out life lessons, but if our ultimate duty is to better prepare our students for whatever challenges face them outside of college, it’s vital that we develop our ability to recognize and capitalize on the opportunity to assert ourselves in the lives of those students who are stumbling in the most profound ways.

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

There’s a certain beautiful, irksome symmetry about writing assignments. Whatever carelessness, vagueness, or still-inchoate pedagogical goals creep into a teacher’s assignment tend to return to her in the form of careless, vague, and poorly executed student essays.

Instructors are skilled at finding scapegoats for our students’ awful writing—the failing public school system, our university’s shoddy or spotty composition program, our students’ individual apathy or laziness—but ultimately a lot of what makes student essays bad, what makes them such torture to read, is faulty assignment design.

Back when computers had black screens with pixilated green block letters and demanded a lot of command-writing know-how, IT geeks called a similar phenomenon “GIGO,” for Garbage In, Garbage Out; that is, if you tell your computer to do dumb stuff, the computer acts dumb. An imprecise understanding of Eastern religious traditions nudges me to liken this to karma. For our purposes, let’s call this trend the assignment boomerang.

Dante Alighieri would call it divine retribution for professorial sins. I got smacked hard with the assignment boomerang a few years ago, the first time I taught Dante’s Inferno, a department-mandated text in City College’s World Humanities General Education requirement. For those not familiar with the epic, the protagonist—also named Dante—travels through the Catholic hell and describes, in Italian terza rima, the pain and anguish experienced by the many sinners he sees there. The sins grow progressively more serious, and the punishments correspondingly more gruesome, as Dante descends circle by circle down the cone-shaped hole of hell, until he reaches Satan in the ninth and final circle, the nadir of the cone. If you share my agnostic humanism, this plot may sound a bit repulsive, but the poem is full of suspense, drama, empathy, and what I can only describe as a sort of voyeuristic glee at encountering characters in such fantastic and spectacular misery.

After a series of lively discussions in class, my anticlimactic writing assignment dully asked students to analyze how the punishments suffered in Dante’s hell match the sins the damned had committed in life. Grading their responses was unspeakably tedious. Instead of resenting my job or the student authors, however, I had to face the fact that there was a real justice to my boredom. Since I’d required my students to lumber through my ill-conceived assignment, I in turn was condemned to wade through their inanities. Boiled down to a cliché (as, I assure you, all my insights can be): You do the crime, you pay the time.

My most frequent “sin” in designing writing assignments is failing to consider how dreary students find the writing process. Fixated on the advanced techniques of assignment design (clarifying goals and expectations, telegraphing grading criteria, extracting an appropriate learning outcome, etc.), I tend to skip over what should be the first questions of assignment design: Would I want to write this paper? Do I actually want to read the best possible answer to this essay prompt? It’s appropriate that, failing to account for my students’ possible boredom, I would suffer extreme boredom while grading their often competent essays. For sucking the joy out of the poem-reading and essay-writing processes, I was punished with a joyless grading session. Dante couldn’t have devised a more just hell.

So the following semester I made the writing assignment a bit more transgressive: “Have you ever told someone to ‘go to hell’ (or wanted to tell someone that)? Describe the scenario. What did the person do wrong? Use quotes and interpretations of Dante’s Inferno to describe what their punishment would be, and explain why.” The assignment still met my pedagogical goals—to have the students think critically about the text and articulate connections between its parts—but the students’ answers were so much more engaged, and reading their essays was much less a chore for me. Plus, as an accidental bonus, I think the assignment allowed the students to experience the cathartic, semi-therapeutic effects of imaginatively punishing people who’d wronged them—an effect that Dante himself certainly relished in imagining his hell, which is littered with personal enemies.

Of course, many students claimed to be too peaceful to participate: they’d never wished anyone eternal damnation at the hands of an angry god, and didn’t want to start ambling down such a vengeful path. But after a little prodding and brainstorming and encouraging of James Frey-style truth-stretching (also a common feature of first-person teacher narratives, ahem), everyone produced a victim.

As it turns out, the class included a number of scorned lovers. In The Inferno, excessively lusty sinners, including adulterers, end up in Circle Two, where their spirits whirl around in violent winds, in sight of, but never able to touch, the objects of their desire. I hadn’t predicted, though, that several of the cheated-on would call for Dante to reconsider the lenient positioning of the condemned cheaters; apparently the second circle, nestled between the “virtuous pagans” of Circle One and the gluttons of Circle Three, is far too cushy for such trash as these students’ unfaithful exes.

To my surprise, one essay boldly pointed out that, by making the students angry at people who’ve hurt them, I was forcing them all to join the ranks of “the wrathful,” who are condemned to attack each other without rest while covered in sludge in Circle Five. Sadly, as a consequence, I will spend eternity in one of the deepest parts of hell, the eighth pocket of the eighth circle, where I, with all the other “evil counselors,” will rove about zombie-like while completely engulfed in flames. Ouch.

The best outcome of the assignment came from students who had real-life sinners in mind, but couldn’t find a place for them in Dante’s seemingly exhaustive hell. There’s no spot in the medieval Catholic hell for, say, parents who don’t understand your long-term goals, or for bratty offspring. It’s not that Dante decided only to punish the very bad transgressors and let everyone else off the hook: even sinners as benign as indecisive opportunists are there, condemned to be stung constantly by swarms of insects and trudge through puddles of their own maggot-infested pus and blood. Since Dante’s Inferno didn’t speak to my students’ conceptions of right and wrong in many cases, the assignment forced them to notice the singularity of Dante’s hell, constructed for his very specific personal, theological, and political purposes.

I want to add a caveat here. I don’t believe that writing assignments are automatically interesting and pedagogically sound just because they require students to reflect on their personal experience. “Talk about yourself” is not, unfortunately, the magic answer for improving all my writing assignments. I know this because I’ve assigned some real clunkers. (Don’t ask your students, for example, to compare and contrast their own experience of New York City to that of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man; I can tell you, sometimes they feel invisible too and they also live in Harlem. It’s a commonly accepted but nevertheless wrong notion in composition studies that personal writing is easy, a sort of warm-up for analytical writing; in reality, to write a good personal, descriptive, and/or narrative essay is just as difficult, if not more difficult, than a good analytical one. My Inferno assignment worked as a personal/analytical hybrid because it asked students to do something very specific, both in their personal narrative and in their analysis.

In a later semester, I sheepishly admit that I was inspired by a New York Daily News headline on the day of Saddam Hussein’s execution. It read “Next Stop: Hell.” It made me realize that people still enjoy the schadenfreude of high-profile eternal damnation. So I expanded the Inferno assignment to ask students to consign various historical and contemporary figures to the appropriate circles of Dante’s hell. This added a component that I hadn’t originally considered, because it turned into an impromptu mini-lesson on both current events and notorious “sinners” from history. And, since students were again reluctant to condemn others, especially their favorite celebrities (one student on Paris Hilton: “Give her a break; she’s just living her life”), we had a provocative discussion about the waning cultural relevance of the concepts of sin and retribution.

Reading student responses to both of these improved prompts was actually enjoyable, so I’m going to go ahead and deduce that writing them wasn’t as boring as usual either. That’s the nice thing about Dante’s worldview: it is not just about sinning and going to hell; you can also do good and be rewarded. Now I know that thoughtful assignment design can lead us to divine essay-grading Paradise.

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

Fish’s perspective generates in me (an English composition, creative writing and literature instructor), an ambivalent reaction. On one hand, the transformation within academia brought on by waves of queer theory, feminist theory, culture studies, postcolonial studies, etc., was inevitable and has improved scholarly endeavors in ways that are profound and overwhelmingly positive. And importantly, the weaknesses Fish attributes to the focus of these disciplines—in particular, his belief that undergraduates are worse writers because colleges have instead tried to make them “better citizens”—may very well come from any number of reasons, including a general decline in the American public school system (not the use of, say, popular film in the classroom to teach cultural analysis).

But it’s important to note that Fish is not critiquing at its base the importance of these disciplines. Of the composition courses he examined before writing the editorial, he says: “instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues—racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.”

After six years of teaching college English—creative writing, composition, and literature courses—I agree for the most part with his main ideas. The first difficulty, of course, is that no two universities are alike, just as no two communities are alike. My former undergraduate students in the Midwest (Indiana and Missouri) were fair to middling writers, but their critical thinking skills left much to be desired. Much of this was due to a failure in the public education systems in those states (which are notoriously lacking), as well as a general culture which discouraged critique of authority—and by authority, I mean anything ranging from your high school principal to MTV to the National Rifle Association. I was (and continue to be) very fond of my students from these states and feel I can understand as a Midwesterner myself (though not accept) their reticence to question the status quo.

By contrast, I have my students in New York. I am often in awe of their sophistication regarding social issues at such a young ages, yet find they struggle somewhat more with basic mechanics and writing skills. The significant consequence is that, though my students here bring much diversity of experience to the classroom (in terms of age, race / ethnicity, sexual orientation, political orientation, and economic background), as well as a generally sophisticated and complex way of looking at politics, media, and the world around them, they have a very difficult time expressing this in their essays. This leads me to believe that my students do not need assistance learning how to think critically, in particular about their society or about pop culture. Fish notes that the emphasis in composition courses is often on these subjects, and I would agree wholeheartedly that there is something fundamentally misguided (if benevolently intended about such an approach. Instead, my students need help articulating their already interesting, complex, and idiosyncratic ideas about the world, at the most basic level. They need help identifying and using the nuts and bolts of the English language.

Both these groups of students have writing issues which are basic enough to fundamentally impinge on the expression of their arguments: passive voice, subject / verb agreement, spelling and punctuation, etc. I’m not sure in what ways (or why) the secondary education system is failing our students, but because I myself am trained to teach rhetoric, argumentation, and literary interpretation, I frequently find myself at a loss for how to address more basic problems.

Can anyone stomach another sentence diagram? I’m not sure when I last did a sentence diagram—after all, I’m only a bit more than a decade older than my students, and was thus more or less subject to the same public school upbringing. I’d be lying if I said I was entirely comfortable breaking down the more advanced nuances of grammar and sentence structure. Yet Fish acknowledges this, asking: “What good is it to be told, ‘Do not join independent clauses with a comma,’ if you don’t have the slightest idea of what a clause is (and isn’t), never mind an ‘independent’ one? And even if a beginning student were provided with the definition of a clause, the definition itself would hang in mid-air like a random piece of knowledge. It would be like being given a definition of a drop-kick in the absence of any understanding of the game in which it could be deployed.” Instead, he advocates for a slow and steady approach, in which a composition course is more or less a series of lessons that works on the sentence level, breaking down various structures both to see how they function in the English language and as pieces of a larger argument.

There is the issue of how diversity expresses itself in writing. My background and passion is in creative writing and poetry, so my own hesitations arise when I think of teaching a class that bulldozes difference—that attempts to eradicate unique expressions or ways of speaking in formal writing. After all, Flannery O’Connor wouldn’t have become the writer she is if she had abandoned all her Southernisms in favor of a more anesthetized, standard English. But the fact of the matter is I’m not teaching creative writing, and as O’Connor’s own essays make clear, she knew when and how to turn it off (and strongly advocated doing so). Fish addresses this in his third editorial, saying: “… you must clear your mind of the orthodoxies that have taken hold in the composition world…: ‘We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.’” He continues: “The issue is whether students… will prosper in a society where norms of speech and writing are enforced not by law but by institutional decorums. If you’re about to be fired because your memos reflect your “own identity and style,” citing (dialects of nurture) is not going to do you any good.

He in no way disagrees that the prioritizing of “standard English” is wielded unfairly against those who are less formally educated, but points out that while “it may be true that the standard language is an instrument of power and a device for protecting the status quo, that very truth is a reason for teaching it to students who are being prepared for entry into the world as it now is rather than the world as it might be in some utopian imagination—all dialects equal, all  habit of speech and writing equally rewarded. You’re not going to be able to change the world if you are not equipped with the tools that speak to its present condition. You don’t strike a blow against a power structure by making yourself vulnerable to its prejudices.… And if students infected with the facile egalitarianism of soft multiculturalism declare, ‘I have a right to my own language,’ reply, ‘Yes , you do, and I am not here to take that language from you; I’m here to teach you another one.’ (Who could object to learning a second language?) And then get on with it.” Despite the many ways that language changes—being itself a living, breathing, adaptable animal—it is still true that the American workplace has marked a certain writing style as being that which is useful, strong, intelligent, analytical and practical. And that style typically follows standardized sentence structure and grammar rules which, in my experience at least, we are increasingly failing to offer to our young students.

I am one of those English teachers that assigns reading—– and a lot of it. My students read Hemingway, Stein, Updike, O’Connor, Faulkner, Bambara, Tan, and the like; essentially, I assign as many words to them without inciting potential mutiny. And they’re accountable for it, and must write in class spontaneously and often about what they’ve read. This is simply because, like most teachers, I teach the way I learned, and I learned to write by reading, and then reading some more. The knowledge that our public schools and American culture generally is gently but consistently recoiling from the art of reading gives me energy and conviction about my courses.

But Fish’s essay has convinced me that it’s time to face my own demons and come up with some grammar and sentence structure exercises that at least approximate being interesting. I like this idea that teaching students how to write is akin to teaching them a second language—I may make this analogy in class tomorrow, before a lesson on sentence fragments. And then I’ll get on with it.

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many “good” teachers are not necessarily helping their students to be good learners. Often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in literature classes where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and, less frequently, others express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1–2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not “writing intensive.”

This argument is perplexing. Although there is a part of me that sympathizes with this complaint — after all, CUNY students have incredibly busy lives outside of school — I cannot help but ask: if these students really feel this way, what does that say about their expectations about college and college level writing? And what do those expectations mean for the future of higher education more broadly? Should we, after all, require less work when our students complain, or should we hold our ground? Is less work going to help them learn more and is the amount of work required for a class really up for negotiation? Where do we draw the line? And how much writing is the right amount of writing?

But these student complaints also raise a question that is specific to the work that so many of us do as writing and communication fellows at CUNY, and that is: has the creation and promotion of writing and communication intensive classes actually done as much harm as it has good? After all, aren’t writing and communication the very means of learning, and aren’t good writing and communications skills the hallmarks of a liberal education? Shouldn’t every class then be writing and communication intensive?

Despite the labors of countless writing program directors overseeing vast armies of Composition and Rhetoric PhDs, there are always those students who seem to have a hostile relationship to writing: they don’t like it and they want to do as little of it as possible. Perhaps this resistance is natural for some people; as Frank O’Hara says of poetry: “if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies.” To this I would add Stevens, but I digress. No one said students have to like writing, and bully for them if they would prefer to become filmmakers or beauticians, stock brokers or Broadway dancers, but in a liberal university that values expression, eloquence, and clarity of thought, they should at least be asked to think, write, and communicate. And they should be asked to do it often. How well they choose to write and with how much love and enthusiasm is up to them. Writing and communication should not be a requirement, but a method and an expectation, like doing the assigned reading, or preparing for an exam. We should ask students to write not so we can evaluate them, but so that they can put their ideas into words, helping to improve their writing skills while simultaneously reinforcing the course material and making it their own. To expect students to fulfill a writing requirement or to fulfill a communication requirement just two or three during their college career, only underscores the idea that the classes emphasizing these skills are another hoop to jump through, like the general arts and science requirements: “Rocks for Jocks” geology classes or “Music Appreciation.”

I have always thought that writing intensive curricula were a good idea in principle, and still do. However, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the way we have used writing and communication intensive classes are maybe not the best way to get students to learn. Instead of spending our time developing specific writing and communication intensive courses, which, in my experience are all-too-often not very intensive at all (some in-class writing and a few extra pages a semester tend to qualify as writing intensive for some courses), administrations should also be working with students and faculty to devise college-wide expectations for the kinds of writing, speaking, and interpersonal communication that should be practiced in all courses as often as possible. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, for instance, should automatically be designated as writing intensive, and professors should be encouraged to assign a minimum amount of regular written work for each. Likewise, instructors in professional programs and the sciences should be encouraged to integrate more speaking and interpersonal communication activities into their classrooms.

It seems clear to me that it has become all too easy for students to regard writing and communication as something distinct from the learning process, as a requirement to be fulfilled rather than a method of learning. Writing and communication intensive curricula, by compartmentalizing these activities, only reinforce the false dichotomy between writing and learning. If students are to learn to write, they must be required to write to learn. The question we should really be asking ourselves is how we can get students to recognize and embrace the idea that writing is not something you do for a grade at the end of the semester or during a written exam, but rather that it is an essential part of the learning process itself. Requiring students to write only in designated “writing” classes undermines this important fact and reinforces the often problematic relationship that many students have with writing.  

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

Where other cultures have an earth mother, the Aztecs have an earth monster. Their creation myth takes all our ideas about this familiar paradigm and goes topsy-turvy. The female creature from which the earth grew doesn’t nurture her people but terrifies them and demands ritual sacrifice. Quite frankly, this image is what made me fall in love with the Aztecs. Sometimes, when I look at the bottom of an Aztec sculpture, the most common place to carve this creature, I see a lot of myself.

I’ve always been jealous of instructors who can be all earth mother with their students: caring, nurturing, and meeting their needs with warmth and kindness. Yet, while I admire it, it’s never something to which I’ve aspired. Last year, though, I realized that while I could not, and didn’t want to be, an earth mother, I was actually quite happy to be an earth monster.

We’re all faced with challenges as instructors, but I think women are faced with an extra-special obstacle. Students often want us to baby them, and get frustrated when we make demands of them in the classroom. I always wondered: how can I be warm and caring and still maintain a cool distance that communicates that I have expectations? It’s a question of balance, and I’ve always found myself on the colder end of the spectrum. My students could never tell if I was laughing at them or with them. Even I didn’t know. My responses to comments or questions were almost universally sarcastic. And more than once I heard one student say to another, “No, YOU ask her!”

While I can’t entirely change my personality (especially without some major behavior modification therapy), I realized last year that I could adapt pedagogically to melt the ice a little. I was lucky enough not to have to transform on my own, and I don’t think I ever could have. A small interdisciplinary group of students worked with me to find the land of the warm-fuzzy, and I am sure they will agree that we always challenged each other. We’re talking about dealing with me, a girl who recognized the free-write as a pedagogically valid and useful tool, but dismissed it simply because it was too “hippyish.” Between the constant cracks about having a bonfire and singing Kumbaya, I’m surprised we ever made any progress. It wasn’t their job to make me softer, but it was all of our jobs to make each other better teachers.

Part of my reticence was disciplinary. Art history is largely taught in the dark, literally. The most familiar and most used format is the good old-fashioned slide lecture, which creates what Robert Nelson calls “the performative triangle consisting of speaker, audience and image.” It’s a strange relationship, and more frequently than not, this threesome becomes a very intimate coupling of the speaker and the image. And the student is ostensibly just there to watch.

I desperately wanted to get out of this habit. Of course, when we start in the classroom we teach the way we were taught, and the pattern was very easy to slip into. I was lucky to have colleagues who wanted to help me. Because we came out of different disciplines, we couldn’t always apply each other’s ideas but just discussing a different mindset became quickly transformative. Sometimes I backslid and found myself “triangulating” for an hour at a time. I was learning quickly that it’s easy to lecture; it’s harder to give up control.

In order to clarify my own values, I wrote a teaching statement. I saw myself changing even as I wrote it, saying something about aiming to create a classroom atmosphere where students were unafraid to be vulnerable, not scared to take risks. I steered clear of that clichéd safe space thing, but it was what I meant. I knew that meant a lot of things about my teaching style had to change. I was going to have to embrace things I may have previously scorned. I was going to have to let my students talk more than me. I was going to have to take the images off the screen and put them in front of these kids and trust what they had to say.

I was terrified, since I knew I was going to have to check my sarcasm at the door as well. Suddenly, though, I realized that the classroom wasn’t all about me. This sounds obvious when someone says it aloud, but how many of us honestly see our classrooms as collaborative spaces that are created with our students, not intricate performances choreographed for them? I was boggled by the question of creating a classroom community that wasn’t about me, where I wasn’t going to consistently win the most valuable player award. How does an instructor let her students direct warmth toward other students and make them love the class not her? Can anyone’s ego handle that?

I knew I had to try. I began introducing critical pedagogy into my classroom, and slowly witnessed change. Some of it was student resistance. You know how it was easy for me to lecture? Well, it was also easier for them to listen to me than it was to actively participate in a classroom community.

But before I knew it, the classroom looked completely different. I turned on the lights. My students were getting out of their chairs to point to the images on the screen. My students were getting out of their chairs without me asking them to do so. They were drawing in their notebooks and showing each other the results. Their chairs moved more easily with each group work assignment. Students wanted to write on the whiteboard. They spoke with confidence, as if their opinions mattered. Their opinions did matter. I was eventually hearing their voices more frequently than I heard my own.

Last semester was tough for me as a teacher. I fought hard to make fundamental changes that went against the grain of the discipline and sought to embed them into my classroom, taking into account the both my own needs, as well as those of my students. I can’t say I was surprised when on the last day of class I instinctively said, with no small heaping of snark, “All right, guys, it’s our last chance to hug it out.” Students stood up to file out of the room and approached me as I quickly added “Oh, with each other, not me.” After all, don’t touch the earth monster.

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

This isn’t really so much about teaching or pedagogy – the designing of curricula, the grading of papers and tests, or work in the classroom – as it is about the obduracy of mere matter, what the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich called “the tyranny of objects.” For before The Pile can become a collection of readable texts, before its Word may be made flesh, it must remain simply what it is, a stack of paper, one needing a rough sort of order and care so as to avoid complete dispersal, but little more. (For me, at least, although I know quite a few colleagues with Piles of their own, and the conditions appertaining thereunto.) Thus it happens that The Pile may take up extended residence on my desk, living there like some half-neglected, half-resented long-term boarder, one whom I didn’t invite and who I desperately wish would leave. Grading actual papers, their texts and webs of ideas (or lack thereof), is actually gravy, quite easy, in fact, a cinch, and generally fun to boot. But in The Pile’s pupal stage, before the resplendent butterfly of thought can emerge from the chrysalis of printed matter – and sometimes horribly printed: I’m shocked, shocked to find that people still use dot-matrix printers these days, like some abject denizens of a forgotten Soviet satellite state for whom the Cold War never ended – anyway, before The Pile can become the divine Logos, it must fester awhile, lie fallow, sit on brood. My attitude toward The Pile during this incubation stage follows roughly the famous Five Stages of Grief as outlined by the late lamented Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I say “roughly,” because it’s actually much closer to a single long unbroken period of the first four stages mixed indiscriminately together – with denial and anger strongly predominating – followed by a quick, bitter acceptance and the beginning of actual grading. I may like to imagine that The Pile needs this time so that it may grow to full maturity, but actually it’s I who need this time to stew, fret, and worry. The Pile is almost incidental, a blank slate, like Melville’s White Whale, upon which I can project some of my deepest, darkest fears and desires: my love-hate relationship with procrastination, my fears of failure and change, my frequent wish to lie still and be left alone, even my odd, growing feeling of being a dimly complacent cog in a brutal, inhuman machine, a mechanized beast with the reek of blood on its muzzle – all of this gets imprinted upon The Pile, all goes into the general morass of pity, fear, trembling, and bad vibes. The Pile is voracious, it is never not hungry.

But finally I’m moved to say fuck it all and go at The Pile directly, and actually grade the papers of which it’s composed, the papers that, like money loaned, have been entrusted to me for a brief time only, and which have to be paid back eventually. “Finally” and “eventually” can sometimes take as long as two or three weeks – I’m not proud – and it’s often the hangdog look on my students’ faces, the dawning realization that not only are they not being catapulted overnight into some pantheon of great writers, but that their eccentric, wild-eyed adjunct lecturer hasn’t even read their work yet, that motivates me, like a repentant drunk on a small-town Sunday, with all the bars and liquor stores closed, to clean myself up and get my act together. Sometimes I’ll fortify my assault upon The Pile with a quick jolt of martial inspiration – the testing of the bow scene in the Odyssey, for example, “no missing of the mark, see, and no long labor spent to string the bow” (a slacker’s mantra), or maybe Siegfried’s “Trauermarsch” from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, a real Teutonic stompfest, equal parts grim and grand, fitting music for the massive girding-of-loins and gritting-of-teeth needed before any grading orgy worthy of the name. Or sometimes I’ll dive right into The Pile’s textual heap, having spent enough time demonizing it, apostrophizing it, feeding it with my energy and my time. And soon after that The Pile is gone, and it’s as if it had never been to see me, and I wonder what all the fuss was about. And soon after that another Pile comes to stay, and I can begin the whole sordid, self-loathing process over again. I think I love The Pile, in all its messy manifestations, its lumpiness like buried sinful treasure, its refusals, and its silence. I really think I do.

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

In April of last year I packed two glass mason jars, a pint of heavy cream, some spoons, cheesecloth, bread, and salt before making my long trek to Queens College. As I switched between local subway and express subway, then subway to bus, the jars clanked against each other. I adjusted the cheesecloth to protect my lesson from breaking. I wished I had written a lecture instead.

I couldn’t write another lecture on “early modern Europe, 1500-1815” that week. I might drag myself to Queens College, but I couldn’t drag myself from behind a net of anxiety and depression that partly coincided with the moment teaching responsibilities had been shoveled on my 23-year-old corpse. My equally young psychiatrist planted pills over my grave, resulting in me coming alive with frightening, whip-like intensity, only to collapse back. I was suffering from what a later practitioner called “medication induced Bipolar Disorder,” an illness not yet recognized by the field or by my doctor at the time.

When I reached the office I shoved my butter supplies under my desk. I read memos from my mailbox. Checked e-mail. Made coffee. Talked to the secretaries. Smiled, or rather tried to pull my face into something resembling happiness, at the department chair when he mentioned he enjoyed the class on early modern fairy tales that he had observed the week before. I wondered what he would think if he realized that instead of talking about Little Red Hood taking butter to grandmother we would be making it that day. I felt like a wolf, that if cut open, would reveal 90 students desperate for a lecture on the Thirty Year’s War.

That spring culinary treatises like Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking and Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques guided me; I had little use for the self-help of Feeling Good and Oprah. I celebrated thickened béarnaise, studied the molecular structure of goat’s milk, and put shameless wedding registry abusers to shame with my kitchen tool purchases. I suspect that I found instructions for making butter online, since I don’t own Turn the Kitchen Clock Back 500 Years.

Making butter at home is simple. Leave heavy cream out overnight to warm and allow the fat molecules to become imperceptibly rancid, giving the butter a more complex flavor. Dump the warm cream into a jar or water bottle about double its volume with a very secure lid and shake for about 20 minutes. The agitation damages the fat molecules, which are otherwise suspended in liquid. After enough shaking you will produce a glob of butter sitting in real, uncultured buttermilk.

Now in the classroom, I couldn’t believe what I was about to do. I chastised myself for spending days staring blankly at Mario Batali and Giada de Laurentis on the Food Network instead of typing up the page and a half of notes that would have maintained the illusion that I could handle teaching. I held the big mason jar of cream over my shoulder and moved it like a martini shaker so that my students would replace their looks of disbelief with laughs. I handed the jar to the nearest student and instructed them all to shake for a few moments then pass it on. I talked distractedly about career possibilities in public history for people who like to convey historical knowledge in less conventional learning settings like “living museums” and Civil War battlefields.

I could have written a sociological study on how students reacted to The Jar. The girls in Uggs boots made faces, wrapped their manicures around the jar, gave it one shake, and passed it on. I felt bad for their boyfriends. The boys on the baseball team, which I liked to conflate with the softball team, shook so vigorously that they seemed to stop breathing, leaving their faces flushed deep pink. I reminded myself to discuss early modern gender roles next meeting.

The students who kept up with the reading, took notes during lecture, and answered questions thoughtfully during discussion shook the jar exactly as I did for a few moments, then passed it on. There were the people who looked unshakably uninterested — they passed the jar as soon as it was given to them.

By the time the jar traveled halfway across the room of 45 students something was happening. The shaking started looking like a violent stabbing motion rather than bourgeois cocktail construction. The softball players, Uggs girls, and my pets stared into the jar, some of them making noises as they imagined our project going straight to their hips. Some of the students slowly turned the jar to watch the glob of butter splash in the buttermilk that remained. The public history discussion died as students stood up to see their jar transformed.

As I took back the jar from the last student and poured out the buttermilk I fielded questions. Is this safe to eat? — yes. Are we going to die? — yes. But not from this. Is this the way people made butter in early modern Europe? — yes, although they had other, bigger vessels for agitating the cream. Isn’t butter what Little Red Hood was taking to her grandmother in the second version of the story that we read?

Yes. In an instant, the net of illness that had secretly separated me from them was gone, and off we went, racing to compare the ingredients of Miss Hood’s basket in each of three versions of the tale, talking about respective value of the foodstuffs in her baskets, and how the richer ingredients in later versions betray the movement of fairy tales up the social ranks to the King of France’s own secretary. I shared theories about the transmission of culture in early modern Europe. Hands bobbed for attention, voices blurted out questions and answers, and I scribbled some quick notes on the board.

We talked about household economy and the overlooked role of women as household managers in history. We passed through chalk and cheese England, the early modern market, and social divisions that resulted in some people eating roasted peacocks dressed in a robe of their own uncooked feathers while others ate so much gruel or polenta that their facial structure changed due to malnutrition.

I used water borrowed earlier from the department fountain to wash the remaining buttermilk from the wad of butter. I explained that buttermilk left in the butter would make it smell and taste musty after a few weeks. Then I flopped our butter onto a square of cheesecloth — gross! — and used two wooden spoons as paddles to squeeze any pockets of water and buttermilk from the interior of the butter. I scooped up our project, set it in a bowl and added salt. In this case, the salt was fleur de sel, the salt once collected from the sea for the kings of France. Salt was also important at the time because of forced salt taxes, including the French gabelle that would play a role in the French Revolution.

I sliced bread, stuck a knife in the butter, and invited my students to sample their work. They approached me like I was a plague victim offering a bowl of fluid from a lanced buboe. One bold, probably hungry student finally grabbed the knife, smeared the soft, faintly yellow butter onto a crust of bakery baguette. And another. Some students came back to the table a few times, others took samples to their friends and relatives.

After the classes ended I packed my bag with the jars, cheesecloth, knife, and spoons. The load was lighter now that the cream and bread were divided among the students. As I glided home I let the jars clank against each other; it sounded like music to me.

I didn’t reach every student that day. Some of them left the room as quickly as they could, uninterested in the class’s handiwork or prolonging their stay in History 101. But I could see that others were now bonded to the study of the past. In later class meeting they exclaimed over their new knowledge. Some made butter at home for their families. I like to imagine them telling the old versions of fairy tales to unsuspecting relatives and regaling them with the history of the Renaissance as they take turns shaking the jar.

In the year since my experiment, I’ve found ways to better integrate it into the curriculum. I’ve included primary source readings from an actual sixteenth-century cookbook on the day that we also use a Renaissance diary to talk about home life. But my pedagogical ideas are not without their detractors. One colleague suggested that perhaps next year I would discuss the Black Death by bringing in a rat infected with Yersinia pestis and having the students watch it die. I agreed that teaching 90 students in History 101 to make butter does not, on the surface, seem nearly as important a lecture.

I worried the next semester about my failure during the previous year to consistently lecture. I compared myself to my inexperienced psychiatrist, artificially leavening my students then leaving them deflated in the classes of instructors who might expect them to know who signed the Peace of Westphalia. So I started replacing discussions of sleeping arrangements and Marquis de Sade read-a-longs with lectures. I poured dates and names into my students and they gave them back to me in their quizzes.

It turned out that lectures in my class are like oxygen and the human body: a bit of it keeps the system pumping, but too much kills. When I couldn’t stand that I was covering glowing curiosity with chalk dust and turning faces down to sheets of notes I packed my jars, cream, cheesecloth, and spoon again.

I suspect that making butter may be the best idea I’ve had as a teacher. It reached kinesthetic learners, challenged the assumption that history doesn’t teach useful information, connected multiple lessons into one very tangible activity, and was a transmission of my love for my chosen field, in the package of my life-giving hobby, to students, some of whom now shout to me across the quad that they are history majors. And if, as postmodernists argue, history is little more than literature, shouldn’t studying it be fun?

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

“Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue, there is no communication, and without communication, there can be no true education.…For the truly humanist educator and the authentic revolutionary, the object of action is the reality to be transformed by them together with other men – not other men themselves. The oppressors are the ones who act upon men to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched.”
– Paulo Freire, from Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.”
– Allan Bloom, from The Closing of the American Mind

The controversial, enormously popular 1981 study by Harvard paleontologist Steven Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, puts forth a thesis of an educational system still largely predicated on antiquated notions of biological determinism – if no longer directly at work, its long fingers reach deep into the functional deployment of our curriculae to young people. It is a discussion at length about intelligence as a concept – one that draws into quick relief the continued prevalence of a notion of innate inferiority. In a parallel institutionalization to our social adoptions, we see in Gould what he refers to as the “fallacy of reification” (not dissimilar to Althusser or even Durkheimian adoptions of collective consensus) in the translation of abstract notions like IQ and other ability-gauging means into data collection on which policy can be built. This misuse and reliance upon questionable data is behind much of what troubles our schools – but what of the individual teachers? Is there no room, no hope?

How does this link up with the rhetoric of race and economic disadvantages? According to Jonathan Kozol, white parents are loathe to allow their sons and daughters to attend the same schools as the disadvantaged black children – in a story that reads like the fear of leprosy’s spread, Savage Inequalities posits these parents’ assumption of Gould’s predicate in their pockets, which are necessary to the upkeep of their own schools in their own districts, and that the school boards and so forth are paralyzed without their support. While the text’s oversimplification of the issue is duly noted, Kozol is in fact seconding Gould’s thesis, in so far as is it so widespread as to have reached the parents of other children in more well off homes. What is not covered is the loophole wherein the system does little to correct this mistake, an initiative which finds considerable scientific ground (as is desirable) in Gould’s analysis to counter this error. Kozol’s take on the situation depicts a beleaguered Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance in a vain and desperate attempt to convince these hard headed parents otherwise, to no avail. He describes a situation in which these [read: evil!] white parents refuse to see the truth, so deep-seated is their innate discrimination. As he bemoans, “the truth is that few middle-class parents in Chicago, or in any other city, honestly believe this. They see the poorer children as a tide of mediocrity that threatens to engulf them. They are prepared to see those children get their schooling in a metal prefab in a junkyard rather than admit them to the beautiful new school erected for their own kids.”

From the Foundation and Center for Critical Thinking, a nonprofit predicated on this notion, we find the useful concepts of “egocentricity” and “sociocentricity,” which are, basically, other ways to explain to the lay person the processes by which he or she, even as a child, has begun to unwittingly (and perhaps unwillingly!) appropriate the hegemonic ideologies of his of her society. In my classroom, I have seen again and again the process of critical thinking bring my students around, of their own accord, to a new relationship with the “reality” of which they were so recently certain.

Because discussions are run on the grounds of open dialogue and ultimately subjective theory, the students are encouraged to counter any of my suggestions or beliefs as well as their own, and thereby in the process discover the flexibility of narrative, definition, and rhetoric. As they begin to recognize their own ability to manipulate this information they become increasingly cognizant of the tendency of the definitions with which they engage on a daily basis to shift for the functionality of various governing bodies, structures, laws, and individuals. Crucial to this are an above the board negotiation with our egocentric and sociocentric modes, which can often be a difficult process.

An engagement with critical discourse is one that releases the student from the processes by means of granting them the ability to recognize them. Of course this is not posed as the be-all-end-all solution to the issues as herein stated, and surely many of players in the thorough integration of these tendencies in our ideological self-narration are in fact critical thinkers, as well, but herein is posed merely a tool towards change. I contend that these slight adjustments in outlook have the potential to, in widespread application, trickle up as effectively as the other trickles down.

Freeing the discursive voice: stories and observations from the classroom

I’ve been developing and teaching a course over the past five semesters that focuses on critical reading and writing approaches – I refer to both the class and the process as “writing to learn” – and so it is. To serve as a little background, the majority of these students are in the sciences, and come from more countries and backgrounds than you can imagine. They come in with enormously different skill levels and attitudes, academic ideas, intentions, etc. And they demonstrate a healthy, at times near boiling level of indignation at their lot.

What the majority of these students share is a tendency towards hostility in the form of complacency regarding the education system they find themselves in. some find the issues they are currently facing are the continuation of those they have come to expect in primary and secondary public education in New York. Those not from the U.S. are contending with racial and class stereotypes both in their social, academic, and otherwise everyday lives that are often at odds with differences as experienced in their home countries. The level of education received in many of these countries (and the degrees of formality therein) are sometimes radically different than ours, in particular in our public system.

What I have come to recognize in this complacency is in large part a negation of the self, or, in the very least, a negation of an empowered self-image of the Student as Scholar. Scholarship has become the least of many of my students’ concerns – a usually accidental occurrence. Most of these students are fiercely committed to making good grades and being successful – but unfortunately they have been conditioned to differentiate between this and actually “learning” the material.

Many have become accustomed to classes in which they expect to learn nothing and go home and teach themselves (memorization style, forgotten soon after) … quite linked to this is the curricular reality in which there is little to no writing in many of these classes, despite much evidence that the act of writing in order to cement and explore concepts significantly increases both deeper understanding and retention of material, irregardless of discipline.

However, with increased focus on success and GPA (both for material/practical purposes such as future employment and maintenance of scholarships) the nose stays close to the grindstone, despite deep-seated resentment and feelings of impotence regarding the situation. Many of these students end up with the conception that they are individually less skilled, or that they “dislike” the act of scholarship, but without exception I have found that this is because few to none have been given the opportunity to reconceptualize the process, or to apply themselves to the task of thinking critically.

It often comes down to that. They are shocked, later, when we’ve broken down many of their barriers and misconceptions, to realize how little they were thinking – both in class as well as in their daily lives. Skills for reading and writing critically, (my secret goal all along) it turns out are powerful tools for empowerment in every avenue of their lives.

We do an exercise in which they are to think about complaints they have in the administration, curriculum, physical plant, etc. at CCNY. The point is that the constant aggravation of “it is always cold in the library” or “there is no WiFi in all of the NAC [bldg]” can lead to “WHY is it.…” and that in response to this that they had critical, implementable ideas, that could be fielded to appropriate authorities and effect change.

In addition to this the students are given critical readings such as “What is a nation?” wherein culture, race, and nationality are put in perspective as social constructs necessary for bureaucracies and power to function, as well as those addressing contemporary education practices. We also read the New York Times, which less than 1% ever felt capable of previously. These new ways of thinking and new ideas cannot help but seep into their daily lives.

The students come to me explaining how their perceptions of other students, words, books, and themselves changes as a result. Rules for “technical” and other formal writing (the supposed point of the class) I argue can only follow. In the beginning there is resistance – at the end, with rare exception, hearty agreement.

A few anecdotes:

A Dominican student reports having watched a Spanish-language debate for the upcoming Presidential election with his family. After running up to me in the hallway to relate his revelation, he explains breathlessly: “And then! Professor, I considered our methods for critically evaluating what we hear…” This was a story of how, suddenly the rhetorical manipulation of the political speeches (another mid-semester discussion) became clear. He at once recognized this, realized what the group with which he had watched this event was consuming unquestionably, and saw: the illusion of words vs. intentions.

“I could understand what they wanted us to think they were saying, and realized what was being left out, and why they were focusing on these things. My family was getting excited and I stopped them and asked these critical questions and it totally changed everyone’s way of hearing the politicians. I can’t believe how many people must be hearing it the other way!”

A student from Trinidad explained how she was helping her young cousins with their schoolwork and taught them the critical writing “steps” I developed and teach the students to demystify long passages that seem difficult or complicated – even the youngest (a five year old) was listening, who later told his mother, reading the paper, to “cull and gather” in order to understand. [steps to setting aside main points and differentiating from factual bases].

Another student, from Yemen, employed the tripartite system I teach for visual presentations in another class – he felt so confident in the method that he included a poem he’d written both in Arabic and in translation, and presented and spoke the verses in front of a large audience. Earlier in the semester he would look at the floor and speak quietly.

Finding their voices is empowering beyond what they thought this class could do, and I am happy beyond my wildest dreams to be the conduit to these strong selves. Small victories! You need not change world hunger, as much as you might like to. But it is in these small steps, in the reality of immediate connection, in the fact of being there, that we can live in parallel to the superstructure, somehow not as contained by it in our ability to see its pulleys and gears.

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

It is likely that each of us, at one time or another, has engaged in a scathing rant regarding the exploits that the CUNY system inflicts upon those that are so crucial to its existence: namely, its students and adjuncts. Whether or not this implies that you secretly believe those private school kids down or up town have ideal learning and teaching conditions, and must thus be spoiled brats, is another story altogether; however, I, for one, during my most cynical moments in the not-so-distant-past, had imagined that CUNY must be the pariah of academia when it comes to treating its students and teachers humanely.

After five years of teaching at Queens College as an adjunct and GTF, I decided that the exhaustion I felt – incurred from part-time teaching (if teaching at CUNY can really be part-time) and various part-time non-CUNY jobs – had worn me out, and I couldn’t keep up with the rising cost of living in New York, to say nothing of feeling that such a path had led me away from completing the requirements of my Ph.D., I began to look outside CUNY in an effort to change scenery, salary, peace of mind, and my lack of health care. In leaving CUNY, I got what I wanted.

But wait. It can’t really be that easy, right?

In early August, I was offered a job as the assistant director of the writing center at a small, religious, women’s college in the city. On the surface, the job seemed to offer an experience totally alien to the one I had teaching at Queens College: the salary is one that could actually pay my monthly expenses, I have health insurance, and the administration even had business cards with my name printed on them. (I’d never felt so grown up.) I should also mention that the student population numbers just over a thousand and is comprised of white women whose parents pay a hefty price for tuition, and the curriculum has a mandatory religious component. Some changes I welcomed, and others made me quite uneasy. Ultimately, what I’m finding now, a few months into my new digs, is that institutions are more alike than they are different.

Before you castigate me for having medical insurance and the nerve to write this, let me tell you a few details of the world outside the CUNYverse prior to you dumping your class at the College of Staten Island and trying to find a job at a private school. If you thought CUNY is a corporate and bureaucratic mess, find comfort in knowing that we’re not alone. Although I certainly believed at the onset that I was hired into an academically sound environment, I soon realized that my new position was more the result of desperation on the part of the college than due to my stellar credentials. In other words, the bureaucracy needed a body in a room in order to serve those paying its livelihood. Sound familiar yet?

The college hired me at the end of the summer as the assistant to a director that they knew would not be returning in the fall. I, unfortunately, was not privy to such knowledge at that time. Perhaps I was naïve by not questioning the absurdity of having been hired to work under a person who had conducted every interview with me over the phone, or perhaps I was enticed by a college that, for the third interview, asked me to come in and meet with the deans, both of whom were women and welcomed me warmly to the college community.

You might be thinking at this point, “So what?! You don’t have a director. Like we have so much guidance at Brooklyn College. Get over yourself.” Again, please keep reading.

Upon finding out that I would be working sans director, I thought that this would be a wonderfully autonomous job. Yet, as anyone who teaches knows, the demands of the students often outweigh our desires to think of our needs as educators. I quickly realized that, while the administration may not have given me a second thought once they knew someone would be opening the office that read “Writing Center” on the door from 9am-5pm daily, the students still needed someone to help them. I found myself scrambling to train a staff of 10 student tutors, organize their scattered schedules, and manage their payroll without ever having any experience in a writing center. Sure, I had taught writing, had sent students to the writing center, and had even attended many workshops in the Queens College Writing Center, but I had never worked in this space before; yet, the college still hired me as the assistant director without direction. What exactly were they thinking?

I decided to seek guidance from my colleagues in a new, foreign, non-CUNY English Department. While all the faculty members were more than collegial, none had the slightest idea of exactly what the writing center did on a daily basis. The department’s only expectation of me and the center is to advertise the center’s services and somehow produce students with better papers than they had written before they walked in. The vague role of the writing center on my new campus is further obfuscated by its dominion over the college’s English proficiency exam, for after incoming students who are required to take the exam hand it in, I am the sole reader: a phenomenon completely opposed to that which we practice at CUNY. CUNY placement exams are read by a staff of certified readers who always have individuals on hand to consult. I quickly realized that I had just entered a new universe, one that, in its cultivation of a religious community, has neglected to form a pedagogical and academic sense of support. Thus, my new place of employment feels bent on servicing its students as quickly as possible in order to churn out the old and welcome the new. While CUNY may not be known for this drive-thru method of pushing students through to their degrees, CUNY is certainly no stranger to under-serving its students by exploiting its staff.

While I’m slowly seeing through the fog of this messy institution and understanding that CUNY isn’t so far off after all, I’ve also noticed that the students are suffering from the misguided priorities of this place. The students, many who have come from religious private high schools, are totally under-prepared for the expectations that this college puts on them. While the school emphasizes the value of its religious curriculum (students take an average of three religious studies courses each semester) and seems to overlook conversations about secular pedagogy, the young women seem to be floundering in their general education classes. Students come to the writing center in tears with the struggles they’re having in their humanities and social science courses, yet their teachers in these subjects are not likely to lighten the course load for the sheer reason that these are the very disciplines that are undervalued at the school.

There is a disparity between the expectations of the institution and what can realistically be accomplished within such a specialized curriculum. The uneven balance between secular and non-secular studies adds an uncomfortable layer to this observation, particularly when considering that the college is often thought of as preparing young people for “the world out there.” While CUNY works earnestly to implement Writing Across the Curriculum programs in an effort to give students the tools they need beyond the institution, there are academies right under our noses in New York City that don’t even seem to be aware that such notions of learning exist.

So is this enough to send me packing back to CUNY? Am I ready to quit walking the private school line and head back to our city’s Mecca of public higher education? And leave my health insurance behind? … I don’t think so. What I have learned from my short time working at a private college is an appreciation for the community of adjuncts, teaching fellows, and full-time faculty that the English department at Queens College fostered. Sure, I didn’t get to slide by and take classes, riding the current of private school funding, but I did participate in faculty development that allowed me to enter into an ongoing conversation about the work we do. In that regard, it is discouraging to know that I am part of an institution that overlooks pedagogical concerns in order to appear as a well-oiled machine. That aside, in my very limited experience, CUNY isn’t so different from schools with higher tuitions, college dorms, and other amenities. The institutions, both public and private, share many of the same flaws … if anything, the diversity and general ethos of acceptance that CUNY offers is what makes the failings of its bureaucratic system something worth fighting for.

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly

It was my first time teaching an evening class at a community college, and I was nervous. I’d heard about how tough these night students are: not your typical, fresh-out-of-high-school, no-extra-job, too-much-time-on-my-hands learners, but cynical, busy, non-traditional students, some returning after flunking out years prior and some just trying it out for the first time. I had been shocked to hear the failure statistics at my community college just a few weeks before: only 20% of them were likely to receive their associate degree in the next ten years.

Everybody said I should just give easy assignments and pass these students if they came close, because this was their only chance out of poverty, but I had a problem with that. I believed that the failure rate wasn’t due to poor student ability, but to the very prevalent notion that passive memorization amounts to education. These students needed to be challenged to think critically and learn to see obstacles as problems that could be solved.

So the first night of English class, I decided to challenge my students by telling them the statistics about themselves. I had students get out their calculators and find 40% of 30 students (our class size). The answer was 18, so I apologized to 12 students and told them they wouldn’t be returning the next year. Then we calculated 60%, and I apologized to six more students and told them they wouldn’t return the year after and, unfortunately, their failure to return wouldn’t be due to graduation because, as our next calculation revealed, only 2% of them would finish their associate degrees in the allotted two years. That 2% was a little more than half of one student. We went on to project that, according to current statistics, only six students out of the 30 would finish their degree. I was down to one row of students.

I knew I was taking a risk; everything could have backfired. But it worked! After that night, the class committed itself to turning every assignment into an opportunity to defy those community college statistics. In fact, at the end of the semester, the students elected to write their research papers on how they would surmount the obstacles between them and their chosen careers — everything from the money, GPA, contacts and time required of them, to job market projections and the average burn-out rate within their career choice. That class ended up being the most —

Wait. That’s a story about how marvelous I am, and how I saved my students from certain… certain something. Night class students aren’t scary at all, and I don’t even know if that research paper changed any statistics or not. Let me try again.

Last semester, I had a student who rarely came to class and never spoke, a young African-American man who slouched in his desk and surveyed the room from beneath his oversized cap. He was bored with everything, and he resisted my every attempt to involve him. I had a pleasant surprise, though, the day I assigned an exercise in audience awareness. I had students break up into groups to “design” cell phone ads — one geared toward business people, one toward stay-at-home mothers, and one toward Beyoncé fans. As the groups each presented their ads to the class, this fellow actually raised his cap and stared intently at the board where the drawings were happening. I didn’t know what to think, but when he came to me after class and announced he’d decided to go into marketing design, I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day. I was —

Wait, there it is again: the teacher-as-savior myth. Chicken soup for the teacher’s soul.

These stories are true (well, the second one is really exaggerated), and they do affirm my teacherly self-worth, but maybe it’s because of what I’ve come to expect from myself as a result of all those inspiring movies in which young teachers break convention and students rise above expectations: Dangerous Minds, Dead Poets Society, Mona Lisa Smile, Freedom Writers, et cetera. These movies have grossed millions, meaning a lot of people are buying this myth (literally), and I know I’m not the only teacher affected by it. One of my colleagues told me about her friend who interprets all her teaching assignments in teacher-as-savior terms. “My class this semester is so Dangerous Minds!” she declared, having already selected the actress who will play her part in the movie.

It’s odd that such a banal task as teaching is associated with a near missionary zeal for saving students. To teach is simply “to impart knowledge or skill to,” but these teacher-as-savior narratives rarely end in good grades or good jobs — rather, things like cross-cultural friendships, higher social standing, and saved lives. But it’s even more disturbing to note that another name for this type of narrative is “white-teacher-as-savior.” What are teachers saving our students from? The ghetto? Status quo? Conformity to class expectations?

What’s problematic about my stories is that I didn’t change any social conditions; I just helped my students fit nicely into an unequal society that will perpetuate itself and likely subject their children to the same inequalities. In other words, I taught a few people how to “play the game,” like most white-teacher-as-savior narratives. These coping strategies, shortcuts, and trapdoors within the system serve the same purpose as tapping the top of a soda before opening it. You help mitigate the frustrations of those at the bottom of the system — working-class and minority students — so that their individual lives are better, but they never build up the impetus they need to actually challenge the entire system. It gets worse. Foucault’s whole thesis was that it is impossible to liberate another human being; we can only transfer her or him from one subjugating system to another, so no student has ever been truly saved from subjugation by a teacher.

The good news is that teachers are responsible neither for saving students nor damning them with a failing grade or otherwise, and we’re still in positions to challenge inequalities by doing exactly what we profess to do: teach, and blatantly explain how to make good grades and good money, as well as why that system is unfair. This strategy is the kind of critical pedagogy sometimes espoused by Dewey, Freire, Shor, and a number of others.

First, though, I think it’s important to examine the metaphors in which we interpret our positions and decisions. Teacher as gatekeeper? hero? disciplinarian? nation builder? It would be nice to be a savior, but I’m trying to be a teacher-as-fulcrum. Remember that physics lesson? If I can manage to stay under the middle of the lever, I’m the pivot point for each student’s actions and the equal reactions. Teachers-as-fulcrums encourage good decisions but try not to interrupt the process of cause and effect because, like us, students have a right to learn from their mistakes.

So I made an agreement with my students this semester: they can do anything they choose as long as they own the consequences, good or bad. Skip class … miss grade-bearing assignments. Do homework … score well. Walk out of class with no explanation … evoke a negative response from the teacher. Anything, as long as they acknowledge their human agency and don’t rely on me to be the authoritarian crusher of rights or merciful redeemer who can save them in spite of their decisions.

Being inundated with all this teacher-as-savior rhetoric, however, it’s difficult not to feel responsible for every student’s actions. Last week, I asked a student to leave because he was disrupting the lesson and, certain he would never return, I was tempted to berate myself in savior terms: perhaps I had been too harsh; perhaps I should have sacrificed the lesson for my relationship with him. When he missed the next class, I mourned that I had lost one of my flock; I hoped he would return so I could extend mercy.

As a fulcrum, though, my teacherly worth isn’t contingent on his return; my job is to teach those who choose to be taught, not save those who resist me. There’s no role for Michelle Pfeiffer or Hillary Swank here, because it has nothing to do with my mercy or sacrifice, and everything to do with the student’s decision to learn, which, incidentally, he made by returning the next week. n

Share on Facebook

Print Friendly