Other People's Students

[dr_pretentious]

On MLK Day, I went, as usual, to the local B&N to do my longhand writing shift. The place was packed with teenagers who had the day off from school. At one of the larger tables sat a group of five kids, probably sixteen years old. (I'm pretty good, these days, at guessing the ages of adolescents. Wasn't always.) These kids were doing some sort of collaborative project on Locke, and were arguing about the proper relationship of the state to the individual conscience, as if the whole world depended on it. Which is a good thing, since the whole world does. Three boys, two girls, various apparent ethnicities, various obviously different temperaments, and an absolute intensity of shared focus. About John Locke.

"But that's not part of the theory!"

"Yes, it is!"

"Show me the sentence where he says that."

"Well, if it is part of his theory, then..."


So maybe it's not all over for my country.


On Saturday, I went to a sleep lab. (Those of you who notice when in the day my entries tend to get posted will all be saying, It's about time you went to a sleep lab!) The lab tech guy who wired me up to all the electrodes was a young alumnus of Fair-to-Middling State University.

"Oh, really?" I said. "I used to teach freshman expository writing there."

The lab tech guy shuffled his electrodes nervously. "I got a C in Expos."

This was the moment when I realized the person who was about to glue(!) numerous electrodes to my skin now knew I had taught the most universally hated course, and the most widely required course, the university offers. Revenge fantasies are not uncommon among people who do not do as well in Expos as they expect to.

So I said, "In Expos, a C is something to be proud of. It's not an easy course to pass." Which is true. Especially for people whose high schools shortchanged them, Expos is brutally demanding and fast-paced.

I confess, I was anxious not to antagonize the guy with the glue, so I commiserated with him about the horrors of Expos. The relentless writing pace for him had also been a relentless grading pace for me, etc. But it occurred to me that this strategy assumed he was a basically empathic person, and I couldn't be sure about that.

So I asked what his favorite classes had been.

"I loved Markowitz's classes, in History. He was a big socialist, and he would always get into arguments with students from former communist countries who thought communism sucked, and then he'd say capitalism sucked worse, and they'd fight the whole period. Like it mattered to them." He sounded so wistful, like the great misfortune of his life was that it hadn't mattered to him.

Then he said, "I was a history major, which is how I ended up here, gluing electrodes to your head at two in the morning."

"Yeah, I got my degree in English, which is how I ended up as an SAT tutor."

"But you said you write, too? You're a writer."

I said something about the industry, the market, the odds, the idiosyncrasies. Crammed the main reasons for my refusal to brag into one sentence. I wish I could remember now was that sentence was. It would be handy at family Thanksgiving dinners.

Then, because two in the morning is a little too early for sleeping, he got to watch the traces of my brain activity in the monitor for the hour it took me to write myself to sleep. I wonder what he saw.

Comments

[jr0124.livejournal.com]

Is a C in expos really something about which to be proud? Honestly? Wow.

I had a sleep study done a few months ago. I still contend that I would have slept tons better without that damned wire up my nose. I think I could have dealt with damned near everything else, but that thing up my nose kept me from satisfying sleep.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

A C in Expos can be something to be proud of, depending on how the student ends up there.

If the student figures out how to get the lowest grade that can possibly pass, and then refuses to do anything beyond that, then, no. Especially if the student has attitude about having ended up at his/her safety school, feels that s/he ought to be given a free A in Expos because s/he stooped to bring his/her good SAT scores to the university, then a C is absolutely not something to be proud of. A lot of the students at Rutgers College were like that. The ones at Douglass and Cook Colleges, not so much. The ones at Livingston, not at all. Once I transferred to the Livingston branch of the Writing Program, I was a much happier teacher.

If the student went to high school in, say, Camden or Newark, and never heard of parts of speech before the first week of Expos, and was never asked to write anything more demanding than a summary of somebody else's ideas while s/he was in high school, and had to work up the gumption to leave a street gang to go to college, then, yeah, a C is a major accomplishment. Once I caught on that the students at Livingston College knew they needed help and were willing to work for it, I had a lot of students with backgrounds like that. They worked themselves ragged from a starting point of functional illiteracy to emerging competence at college-level work. Some of those kids worked all the way up the rubric to write papers as strong as any A paper out of Rutgers college. A lot of the ones who didn't probably would have, with a full-year rather than one-semester Expos course. They had years of practice to make up for, through no fault of their own, that the wealthier kids had had access to but ignored.

My wild extrapolations on President Bush's "gentleman's C's" at Yale are left as an exercise for the reader's imagination.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Hurray for passionate teenagers! There's a teacher out there who deserves an award for channelling teenagers' natural passions into education.

I am relieved that you didn't get maimed or killed on the way to the sleep study. I will admit that I worried that night. I drove 20mph all the way home, and by the time I turned off Cranbury Road, I could barely see yards ahead of me.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I was pretty worried after you called, but by the time I got on the road, it wasn't that bad.

It might also have made a difference that you were driving inland, while I was driving along the edges of salt marsh and seashore, where it's usually a little milder. The bridges were all frozen over, but everything else was just wet, heavy slush.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness for that. I was imagining all sorts, and hoping for the best. I passed 3 abandoned cars and one accident on the way home.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Chris Hollingsworth? I think that's the name. He's not somebody I knew, but we had friends in common.

One of the saddest things about Expos is that high school teachers all over the state tell their students bogeyman stories about the course in order to scare them into submission, so that by the time a freshman shows up for the first week of classes, s/he's already got years of fear and hostility built up. And they've been told all their lives that college will be the moment when they'll finally be free, and here they are stuck in this very demanding required course that they have to keep taking until they pass. Oh, the wrath! Without the preemptive wrath and assumptions and absurd urban legends about what is, now, a very transparent grading rubric, the course would not have to be an exercise in suffering for so many students. It could just be work.

Of course, not everybody cares to work, but lots of people don't mind it. I'm not at all surprised that you got what the course was about.

There are things I'd change about that writing program--mostly administrative and labor-relations stuff--but the writing courses themselves are sound. Although I don't miss the 70-hour work week or the unprovoked student hostility of the first week of classes, I did like making literacy on that scale.

[anthonyjaycee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think 2 am is a little on the early side for going to bed as well. Unless I have a headache. Heck, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don't even finish up until midnight... Even when I was working at a "9 to 5" job, I was still getting to bed at, like, 1 to 2 am most of the time. No big surprise that I was getting in at, like, 10 am, and eventually usually closer to 11 am.

Of course, it seems that eventually it's not so much about figuring out what one's preferred sleep schedule is, as it is about realizing how subconsciously angry one is with the world of the workplace in general... especially rush hour traffic. :P

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