Professor X (22 page)

Toward the end of my College Literature class, I introduce students to postmodernism, with its dismissal of the patriarchal master-narrative in favor of a multitude of small, local narratives, a “constant interplay of voices and worldviews,” as critic Ian Marshall puts it, conceived “ . . . to deliberately evade the possibility of unity and monolithic meaning.”
⁶
I tell my class: the postmodernists (and we cannot help being postmodernists all of us) believe in not just one story but many stories—or
texts,
as they would say—with none having primacy.

The students dutifully write down what I say, and at the outset this concept of postmodern fragmentation is just another vague literary idea with no particular relevance, a term on their vocabulary list along with
litotes
and
synecdoche
and
sonnet.
We read Margaret Atwood's “There Was Once” and Lorrie Moore's “How to Become a Writer” and various stories by Tim O'Brien and excerpts from
Persepolis.
I tell them that we are all living in the thick of postmodernism, and try to convince them of the significance of its orthodoxies. What I don't tell them is that postmodern modes of thought are largely responsible for their being in a college classroom in the first place.

Recently, at a developmental session for adjuncts, I was handed a thick packet, an explanation and endorsement of something called the Learner-Centered Paradigm. It was taken from the book
Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses: Shifting the Focus from Teaching to Learning
by Mary E. Huba and Jann E. Freed. The Learner-Centered Paradigm is meant to replace the Teacher-Centered Paradigm, which is now thought to be bad—very bad indeed.

In my packet, the two paradigms were compared point by point.

In the Teacher-Centered Paradigm, knowledge “is transmitted from professor to students.” Doesn't that sound terrible? Who's the dunderhead who came up with that one? In the Learner-Centered Paradigm, students “construct knowledge through gathering and synthesizing information and integrating it with the general skills of inquiry, communication, critical theory, problem solving, and so on.” The students, like squirrels, are expected to gather information as though foraging for nuts and berries, out of which material they are to construct knowledge while the instructor stands by idly. Learning is somehow whipped up out of some ether in the classroom.

In the bad Teacher-Centered Paradigm, the emphasis “is on the right answers.” Who in God's name ever thought that would be any good? In the Learner-Centered Paradigm, the emphasis “is on generating better questions and learning from errors.” The nice thing about this approach is that raw material is plentiful: errors of all kinds—errors in usage, errors in thinking, childish errors in spelling—flow in my classroom like oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the Teacher-Centered Paradigm, the professor's “role is to be primary information giver and primary evaluator. . . . Only students are viewed as learners.” In the Learner-Centered Paradigm, the professor's “role is to coach and facilitate. Professor and students evaluate learning together. . . . Professor and students learn together.”

Obviously, if professor and student are learning together, the professor's position as an authority figure is at risk. When I grade a student's work as acceptable or unacceptable, I am asserting my expert's narrative as having ultimate primacy, and that transaction, so unbalanced, so rooted in inequality, does not sit well in our contemporary minds. It is difficult for me to fail students because there is always an explanation for their bad performance, or for my perception of their performance as bad. Death to unity and monolithic meaning!

And what could be more monolithic in meaning than a poor grade?

Later on in the packet, instructors are given a hundred or so tips for the first three weeks of class. These are adapted from something inelegantly called the “Teaching Effectiveness Network” of Sinclair Community College, which has been adapted by Joyce Poulacs of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln's Teaching and Learning Center.

I understand how we got to such a place. I understand the impulse to make college a welcoming and unthreatening environment. I can't even say that I think, in theory, it's a bad idea. Who would endorse the idea of anyone, under any circumstances, being frightened? And I understand the economic factors: that if we're admitting to colleges hordes of students who have no business being there, college really has to be welcoming. The effect, though, is to leech all authority from the instructors by having them dance attendance on the students, and to render them impotent.

Over and over, the idea is reinforced that the relationship between students and teachers is collegial. Rather than teach, instructors are asked to wait on the students, to understand them, to seek their approval, and to befriend them, if they will have it—all of which makes the issuing of grades a dicey proposition.

Granted, I've never heard of any other professors, adjunct or tenured, who actually do any of this stuff. But nonetheless, the college zeitgeist is impossible to ignore. Night-school teachers are particularly vulnerable to a kind of academic Stockholm syndrome. I feel it acutely: that we are all in this together. On a hot summer night in July, I teach
Hamlet
to a class of nine in a stifling room without air-conditioning. The ventilation system is being overhauled; what better time to effect repairs than when no “real” students are around? I can't argue with that. Ours is the only class meeting on this floor. A great silence seems to envelop the room. The students must feel that they are the only ones in the world doing work on this steamy night. I feel the same way. We are one in our misery. How on Earth did we all wind up here? We break at eight o'clock and wander the halls aimlessly. There is nowhere to go. I peer absently into the locked computer lab, where 30 screen savers dance on monitors. I have spent the class break sitting on a toilet even though I don't have to go; I need a few minutes alone.

We are the Academy of the Night, a sobriquet worthy of Anne Rice or Stephenie Meyer. We are of the college but not completely; ours is a ghostly reality. Little more than squatters, we inhabit the place but don't own it. At 8:15, when we return to our labors, I start to think of the classroom as a tiny becalmed lifeboat holding the ten of us. I can almost hear the creak of the old timbers, the water slapping at the side. I talk about the
Ur-Hamlet
and the First Folio and Shakespeare's opinion of actors who would ad lib. The students twirl their pens and shift in their seats as their hindquarters drift off to sleep. We are, all of us, in a small and quiet hell. I care deeply that the line in the First Quarto reads, “To be or not to be, ay there's the point,” but the students most assuredly don't. They're just trying to get to a place where they can make a buck. I find myself viewing the study of literature as one more indignity visited upon the proletariat, like too-frequent traffic stops and shoes with plastic uppers and payday loans.

Not long ago, I had dinner with a tenured professor of journalism at a four-year college. She had her own take on grading. Her grades were based solely on student improvement. A C-student who makes what she amorphously defines as “progress” receives a B; any hardworking B-student can get an A, whether or not the work actually merits it. She seldom fails anyone. Most of her students, she admits, are really not prepared for higher education. She is lending a helping hand. And because I know that in every system devised by man, somebody's getting screwed, I asked her: what about the occasional good students, the ones who can assemble a parsed sentence, who may actually deserve an unsullied B or A?

“They don't need my help,” she said, and I would swear that she sniffed.

She is the decider, in George W. Bush's notable coinage, of who needs help and who doesn't, and suddenly, without notice, we have moved far afield of the job description for a college professor.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1975, 31 percent of college teachers were female; by 2009, the number had grown to 49.2 percent.
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There are more women teaching in college than ever, and it is quite possible that their presence, coupled with our discovery of the postmodern narrative, has had a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought. Strong winds of compassion blow across campus quads. Women are more empathetic than men, more giving, simply more bothered by anyone's underdog status. Many of the female adjuncts I have spoken to seem blessed and cursed by feelings of maternity toward the students. Women think about their actions, and the consequences of their actions, in a deeper way than do men. Women may not be quite as inclined to sigh and, with a murmured “fuck it,” half-angry and halfmiserable, possessed by the fatalism of someone throwing the first punch in a bar fight, mark an F in the grade book.

I administer grades fairly, but how difficult it is. Everyone and everything is in ascendancy, and I must pull them back to Earth. Grading writing fairly is as hard as writing itself. For the writer, the blank page is like a window to the teeming world, and he or she must sidestep distraction to harness only what will support the thesis. The writer sees too much, as does the instructor. In every assignment submitted the instructor sees all that surrounds the writer: the past, the future, possibility, disappointment, local narratives, desperate circumstances, sinking hopes, even the ghostly rattling chains of previously failed English courses. The view for the grader is kaleidoscopic; all that authorial backstory makes for quite a din. Who could possibly concentrate? The challenge for the teacher is to dredge for the work: for the quality of thought and expression, and not the writer's circumstances. The work and only the work.

No good deed goes unpunished, by the way. My student who wrote the D paper was not at all happy with her D. She was, in fact, rather outraged. She e-mailed me, saying that a professor friend of hers had gone over the paper and pronounced it good to go.

A professor. Him, or her, I would really like to talk to.

The outcome of it all was that I graded more fiercely the next semester. The F's were F's, the D's were D's, some of the borderline D's were F's—though, I knew I would soften. . . .

I had an art teacher in high school who once said something I think very important. He was teaching us to sculpt clay, and he said as we began, “There are several important things you want your sculpture to do.” I was young at the time, and enraptured with my newly acquired vocabulary of art. I thought he was going to talk about form and function, about depth and resonance. He went on: “Here's the first one. Your sculpture has to stand up solidly. It can't wobble.” I was disappointed at the time, but have come to see his instruction as profound, and the words of not just an art teacher but an artist. Art can't wobble. Writing can't wobble. We expect our houses to be plumb, our tables solid—why not our paragraphs?

F
EW PEOPLE NOT INVOLVED with college English in some fashion have occasion to look at the textbooks we use. I've worked with a number of different books, and found them a rich vein of cultural information above and beyond what they purport to teach.

I take my hat off to those contemporary writers who manage again and again to crack the college anthology market. I had never heard of Suzanne Britt, but her name will be instantly recognizable to anyone who teaches English 101 as the author of “That Lean and Hungry Look,” the comic comparison of fat people and skinny people that can be found in the compare-contrast section of whatever textbook one happens to be using; ditto for “Neat People vs. Sloppy People.” The author's bio tells me that Britt teaches English part-time at Meredith College in North Carolina: an adjunct made good! The essays are mildly amusing and exactly the same, which I suppose doubles Britt's marketability for textbooks. It's a sweet deal for a writer, to have such ephemera reprinted year after year, thereby hardening into classic work. It's good economically, of course, but how nice to have one's writing remain a part of the consciousness of generation after generation of college students. Britt could easily have been forgotten completely, but her whimsy lives on, tucked away in a corner of thousands upon thousands of collegiate minds, not to mention a more prominent place in the minds of English instructors. I've been teaching both of Britt's pieces for a decade, and can more or less recite them by heart.