Professor X (20 page)

Writing is a peculiarly unforgiving endeavor. Good writing is good writing, whether done by grade-schoolers, college freshmen, syndicated columnists, or Booker Prize short-listers. Though the grading criteria seem overambitious, an A college paper really should jump off the page. It should surprise. It should even jolt. Its language should, if not crackle with subtext and implication, at least please.

Based on strict adherence to such grading criteria, my students would forever be doomed to dwell in the place of F's and D's. Occasionally, very occasionally, a student may stand on tiptoes and crane her neck and breathe the sweeter air of a C.

I fail lots of students, more at Huron State than at Pembrook. But it's not easy to maintain my resolve. Failing all those in a class who deserve to is like trying to keep 23 helium balloons at ground level with your hands. They tend to rise.

First of all, twenty-first-century American culture makes it more difficult to fail people. Our society, for all its blathering about embracing diversity and difference, really has no stomach for diversity and difference when it constitutes disparity. We don't like to admit that one student may be smarter, sharper, harder working, better prepared, more energetic, more painstaking—simply a better student—than another. So we level the playing field. Slow readers get extra time on tests. Safe harbor laws protect substance abusers. Students who miss class for religious reasons, as it says in the boilerplate language Huron State suggests that I place in my course syllabus, may be absent without incurring a penalty. While fairness and inclusion are desirable, and while I have no argument with the impulse behind any single policy that strives to mitigate the capricious nature of life, the effect in the aggregate has been to render distasteful the whole idea of one human being passing judgment on the efforts of another. It is a reflex: to be understanding and compassionate about the curveballs life has thrown our fellow human beings. A noble reflex, but at odds with the very nature of grading. How can an instructor even enforce the simple concept of deadlines for assignments? Cars break down, don't they? Computers crash. Infants get sick. Our quest to provide universally level playing fields has made us reluctant to keep score.

And professors have become demystified. Surely that's not bad, right? Isn't it good that students do not quail in their professor's presence, that they feel at ease enough to send friendly, jaunty e-mails? A young man kept up a steady correspondence with me during the course of our semester together. He had questions about missed classes, he wanted to substitute a different paper topic for the one assigned, and so on. The e-mails invariably began with “Hey there”; his trademark sign-off was “Later, peace.” We seemed to be something like pen pals, two bros collaborating on the worthy goal of his passing the course, which he didn't. He didn't do the reading and failed a bunch of quizzes and the final exam. His final missive to me, no less breezy than his others, suggested that our friendship had suffered a breach. He was dissatisfied with his final grade of F. There was, however, a remedy. He asked me to change one of his paper grades from a C to an A-minus or B, which would raise his overall grade enough so that he passed the course.

When I attended college, grading was a fairly straightforward matter. Professors assumed that their students had successfully completed work at the more difficult end of the high school curriculum, and grades were in part based on whether those students had successfully progressed to postsecondary levels of thought and expression. There was a universal baseline of skill. I would no more have questioned an instructor about a grade than I would have questioned God. I understood that my Shakespeare professor knew in his very marrow that my paper on Sonnet 50 was a B. How could I even dream of changing his mind? (And he didn't use written grading criteria, either. The need for a set of formal written guidelines only arose when the papers the students were submitting no longer aligned with the instructors' internal scale. Written guidelines manifest desperation; they almost always appear in times of noncompliance. As the pool of college students expanded, skill levels declined, and instructors found themselves grading more and more papers that left them frankly puzzled.)

The professor was the expert; he sat on high, like a photographer perched on a stepladder to get the best view. I don't want deference. That's the last thing I'm looking for or deserve. But the fact that there really is no deference, that there is very little social distance between instructor and student, impairs the instructor's ability to dispense grades. Students view instructors not as oracles but as college employees bound by rules of fairness and disclosure. This is a good thing, but grades then become highly negotiable.

The whole system of grades may be too nineteenth century for our modern taste. Nevertheless, the system remains in place. I have to give grades, and I frequently have to give bad ones, but the system rankles and depresses me in a way it did not rankle and depress previous generations of college instructors. My resolve to give grades blindly, based solely on the work and without regard for the consequences to the student, is compromised; my stance as an arbiter of academic success is debilitated. Passing a failing student starts to seem like one more “accommodation,” like extra time given for an exam, to make college life fair.

I am keenly aware of how important these courses are to their livelihoods. Colleges have insinuated themselves everywhere, and the need for college credits is an important part of contemporary work life. The attainment of degrees and certificates is now routinely linked to promotions and higher salary scales. The licensed practical nurse may need 65 more college credits to get her R.N. The aspiring laboratory technician takes core courses in medical technology but also three years of prerequisite courses in the liberal arts and sciences—including English 101 and English 102. B.A. candidates in sociology with a specialty in criminology will be prepared, in the words of the catalogue, for “scholarly careers” in sociology, criminology, and social deviance, as well as jobs in victim counseling, corrections, and law enforcement. Virtually none of my students are headed for scholarly careers in social deviance or anything else. They will work—or are working—as bailiffs or federal marshals; in sheriff 's departments; as nurses of all kinds; in the billing or human resource divisions of large institutions; in county, state, or federal prisons; as court or correctional officers; or as caseworkers in the caverns of whatever social service agency will have them. Whether much of their college coursework will actually be of any use to them, other than qualifying them for the job, is questionable.

It must be said that colleges make no exception for their own: every semester, I teach a fair number of college employees in search of their own certificates, credits, degrees, and accreditations. Spending their days in the college culture, most of them do okay, thank God.

How intense it all is! I came from a rather different world. I was an English major in the 1970s, and the idea of making a living from my degree was a hazy one, which is one of the major reasons I now work a second job. I spent four leisurely years imbibing, along with my major's requirements, the classic mixed assortment of liberal arts bon-bons: a bit of sociology here, a dip of the toe into ancient history, a painless science requirement, calculus (which was truly difficult; I took it my first semester, before I had learned to choose courses more wisely), cultural anthropology, an Old Testament seminar, Introduction to Theater. I cared not a whit about any individual grade. I saw no endgame. College was for me a four-year equivalent of the Grand Tour, and I spent that time very much outside society, wandering intellectual pastures, exploring my interests and aptitude, having fun and delaying the start of adulthood.

My students, in contrast, are up against it. The clock is ticking. The pressure is on. They need, desperately, to get through their programs. They work during the day and attend school at night in the hope of at least moving into nicer cells in their daytime prisons. Their college life has an urgency mine never did. My students, some of whom have never written anything actually cogent, have to pass College Writing to be a firefighter or court officer or prison guard. Others need to get through College Literature, to make sense of “The Waste Land,” in order to have any hope of saying good-bye to shift work and maintaining a normal relationship with their children.

When I give a failing grade to a student, I am not just passing judgment on some abstract intellectual exercise. I am impeding that student's progress, thwarting his ambition, keeping him down, committing the universal crime of messing with his livelihood—not to mention forcing him to pay the tuition charge all over again. The stereotypical ivory tower is a realm far removed from workaday concerns; in the tower's basement, where I labor, any poor grade I issue may mean disastrous economic consequences. So I think long and hard before giving poor grades. I agonize. I get that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. When I fail someone, I suffer Dickensian visions of starving children, missed mortgage payments, dunning creditors.

I know that part of what the college pays me to do is maintain academic standards. As I tell my students: teachers don't fail students, students fail themselves. I know that by passing the incompetent I will cast a shadow of defilement upon the degrees of those more talented souls who have managed to navigate college successfully. But there are times when issuing a failing grade seems inhumane. I am forced to fail plenty of students, and I am well able to do it; that said, I have certainly given C's that should have been D's and D's that should have been F's.

I often require students to write comparisons of poems. Normally, I assign works that live in college textbooks yoked together in thematic pairs: the meditations on fatherhood (“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden and “Digging” by Seamus Heaney), or John Ciardi's “Suburban” and Margaret Atwood's “The City Planners.” Last semester I used “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress” by Ted Hughes and “Wreath for a Bridal” by Sylvia Plath. The poems are standard college fodder for comparison. They are a thematically matched duo: both deal with weddings, and they are often paired in literature texts because of the circumstances of Plath and Hughes's own marriage. Plath's poem is rather obscure, and typically overdone: a dreamlike evocation of a marriage and consummation with nature imagery that is lush and overripe. Hughes's poem is a dryly comic recounting of a threadbare ceremony that would seem to recall his and Plath's own nuptials. I give the class lots of biographical information about the two poets, and provide guidance questions. What, I want to know, is the stance each poem takes with regard to love?

One of my students, a woman in her midtwenties, obviously came to class each evening directly from work. She dressed in dark pantsuits and wore the tallest, pointiest high heels I have ever seen. Her paper set this year's benchmark for confused student prose. A hallucinogenic lit-crit puree of
Finnegans Wake
and
Bridezillas,
for long stretches it was indecipherable. As I was reading the thing, I started to grow angry, which is hardly the rational and correct approach—but sometimes I just can't help myself.

I tried to imagine the circumstances that would result in her submitting an assignment of such desperately poor quality. The thing read like the free association of a disordered mind. I pictured her writing it in a bar, or while driving to class or skydiving. Maybe she composed it as one long text message to herself. By any rational standards, this was failing work. Failing.

I calmed down and gave her a D.

I hear the cry: grade inflation!

Her writing was deficient in many areas. The problems with the assignment didn't stem from the fact that she knocked this one off in a hurry and it didn't come up to her usual crisp standards. This student could not write standard English, yet she had already successfully completed English 101, College Writing. Someone on the faculty (and for one panicky moment I feared that it might have been me) had determined that she could navigate expository prose at the college level. The evidence of my senses disputed this mightily. Nonetheless, I was haunted by a nagging sense of unfairness. Was it right for me to fail her based on her wretched prose when she had already been certified as at least marginally competent in this area? The college had signed off on her completion of the writing requirement, and now I wanted to renege on the deal. None of it seemed quite fair, but passing this woman along didn't seem quite the ticket either: sending her out into the world thinking she could write at least competently—with the transcript in her hand that says so—was like sending a toddler out of the house for the first time on her own after a five-minute lecture on traffic safety.