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

[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.