Professor X (24 page)

Perhaps I am too timid. Perhaps I am too old-fashioned, like a member of the family in Elizabeth Bishop's poem “Manners,” sitting in the early years of the century on my horse and wagon, speaking politely to everyone while the newfangled automobiles zoom by, covering me with dust. I don't want to talk about race and I don't want to talk about social class, either.

The compilers of our nonfiction anthologies include, in addition to the professionally written essays of people like E. B. White and William F. Buckley, examples of what is called “student writing.” I don't know if these things are real or made up. If they are real they seem heavily edited; there's a homogeneity to them, like a page of letters to the editor. These student essays, in an effort to appeal or have relevance to students such as my own, tend to have about them an unmistakable tinge of the struggling lower orders. A supposedly lighthearted essay concerning the writer's difficult encounters with corporate computer systems features collection agencies, funds in bank accounts that desperately need to clear, car insurance about to be canceled, and perilously empty food cupboards. One essay, particularly poignant, explores the reasons behind the writer's lengthy history of academic failure; in the end, he winds up in a community college, and though things appear to be looking up a little, he's having trouble with some of his courses, and trying to figure out why he even has to take such courses as College Literature.

In one essay, a clerk in a convenience store deals with poverty-stricken customers who come in to steal or ask for food. Another deals with the hazards of working as a telephone solicitor. Another piece talks about someone who records too many programs on his DVR, programs he never gets around to watching; I can't help but notice that the writer is not addicted to reading books. A love of books, or indeed any mention of the written word, never comes up in these essays.

Some of my students come from poverty, and the last thing I want to do is remind them that they are poor. I'm pretty sure they already know. I take a different approach from somebody like Ira Shor, a rhetoric and composition big shot who teaches at the College of Staten Island in New York. Shor seems to feel it is his duty to bludgeon his students with fresh insights about their lack of advantage. He thinks a lot about class and its implications: his biography on the College of Staten Island Web site says that he was born in the Bronx, attended “weak public schools for New York City's white working class,” and “grew up in a rent-controlled apartment among all-white families. . . .” At the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he offers seminars in “literacy and conquest” as well as “whiteness studies, domination and oppositional discourses . . . and the rhetorics of space, place, and resistance.”
¹

Shor writes about the importance of teaching about “evolving knowledges of social class”
²
to his community college students. “Why is the theme of social class urgent for classroom study, particularly at two year colleges, but also more generally in higher education?” he asks rhetorically.

I do agree, speaking from a spot squarely in the recession, with his point that “the current economic and political climates threaten the fragile work-family-school nexus in which college students live . . . ,” but I'm just not sure why English classes are the place to enlighten the downtrodden. We are in a “new class war,” he says; community colleges are underfunded; education for the working class is suffering.

One damning piece of evidence he presents is that basic writing and first-year composition courses at the College of Staten Island are taught by the English department's “new army of seventy-two adjuncts.” The gauntlet has been thrown; I take that as an insult, sir! “All in all, then, we teach about social class to empower students to know themselves in their times,” writes Shor, “to dream large and act wisely as alert citizens, to evolve into capable workers who build lives that nurture life, in a democratic society at peace with itself and the world.” Me, I think my role is to teach tense agreement and topic sentences, and to instill in my students a writer's sensitivity to language, so that words like “rhetorics” and “knowledges” will start to sound funny to them.

The fact is that anyone in America can attend college if he or she so desires. That battle is won. The time has come to start worrying about paragraph unity and dangling modifiers.

T
HE CULMINATION of my college writing class is the assignment of a research paper. Students are expected to assemble books, journal articles, and Web sites and, using the words of experts, studies, and statistics, assemble a coherent argument about something. The research paper illustrates the difficult time my students have with college. I spend no fewer than five out of fifteen classes teaching various aspects of the thing, and still, many of the students make a complete hash of it.

The English department teaches the research paper so that the students will be able to write papers for all their other classes. The idea is for students to take English 101 early in their academic careers so that we can give them the tools to do research in whatever their disciplines turn out to be. Both English departments I work for take this responsibility seriously, and feel that they are performing a service to the rest of the school. I have heard teachers in the other disciplines remark that the English department shouldn't be so puffed up, as they are doing a really shitty job of it.

The research paper assignment is meant to teach the fundamental mechanics: how to find sources, paraphrase or quote them, and make a list of cited sources, all the while not plagiarizing. Students must develop a strong thesis for their papers, and not just write what is called a “passive report,” the sort of thing one knocks out in fifth grade on Thomas Edison.

I always do an introductory class on research. We all trudge down to the library and sit at the computer terminals. I ask my students about their computer skills, and some of the older ones say they have none, 'fessing up to being computer illiterate and saying, timorously, how hopeless they are at that sort of thing. It often turns out, though, that they have sent and received e-mail and Googled their neighbors, and it doesn't take me long to demonstrate how to search for newspaper and journal articles on Lexis-Nexis, EbscoHost, and Academic Search Elite. For my younger students, computers are second nature, and I remember one young man, particularly on the ball, who held his index fingers together in the shape of a cross as though warding off a vampire when asking me what my take was on Wikipedia. Even my younger students, though, fall short of the sort of cybercompetence one associates with collegians. Many have spent lots of time goofing off in front of computer screens but have fallen short of developing any actual expertise.

I explain to the students that their job is to imagine they are hosting a party. They are to take my arm and introduce me as a stranger to scholars A, B, C, and D, who fall on one side of an issue, and scholars E and F, who stand firmly on the other.

“That's some dull party,” snorted my Wikipedia fellow.

The first problem I encounter in teaching the research paper is explaining to my students, as they pull up peer-reviewed articles, just what these things are. They have no familiarity with academic journals. Now, neither did I when I first strolled into college, but I did see that there were whole bunkerlike depositories of the things in the library, and small armies of pale clerks darting about, assigned to the storage and retrieval of the bound volumes. Once I got into the swing of my major, I always had my nose in an old issue of
Shakespeare Quarterly
or the
Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.
The things had heft, and weight. You could hold them in your hand; you could imagine a postman popping them into a mailbox. Some of the older ones gave off a particular smell, a faint tang of dust and mildew and oil from a thousand fingertips. Certain of the hotter articles would on occasion be ripped out, and this sort of vandalism reinforced the worth and import of the writings.

My college had a whole floor devoted to periodicals. I loved it up there. I loved reading the old English journals; I loved distracting myself from work with the few consumer publications the library had, the shelves and shelves of bound
Life
and the
New Yorker
and
Commonweal.
But today, at least in the school libraries I frequent, all is virtual. Journal articles are nothing more than a particular arrangement of pixels, no different from a Facebook page. My students never see a whole issue of a journal. They see a smorgasbord of different articles, like unrelated songs on an iTunes playlist, served up by the search function of WilsonWeb or ProQuest or whatever database they are using.

With the advent of remote access from home computers, research has become a lot more private. Students don't see their professors doing research anymore. I used to see my own professors spread out on tables in the library, jotting notes on index cards and looking thoroughly miserable. This helped me in my own work.

A few of the more seasoned nursing students have heard of the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
But they are in the minority. I still have to explain to the class not just about the use of scholarly journals but about where the things come from in the first place. I try to give them some idea of how the professoriate works. “All those books in the library—they've got to come from somewhere, right?” I say, and the class smiles indulgently, as though I am a dotty old uncle making a joke they do not quite understand, for they have no truck at all with books or any sort of intellectual commerce. They don't go anywhere where there are books, not even the college library. I once had a student who handed in a paper late, and this was his explanation: he got a late start because he couldn't
find
the college library.

I try to devise good, paper-ready topics for the students to help them out, but it's not easy. I wind up assigning things from history or sociology or current events because these are areas in which every student should be able to conduct discourse. Maybe the topics are a little spongy, but they have to be. What are we going to write, a paper on chemistry? Mathematics? Social or cultural anthropology? Too technical. English itself, meaning literary analysis, is far too technical for nonmajors to attempt. It wouldn't be fair to many students to assign a paper about
The Plague
; however, I see nothing unreasonable in expecting any college student, after conducting the research, to be able to compare the Tehran and Yalta conferences, or analyze whether or not municipalities should fund sports stadiums, or figure out whether school vouchers would be a cheap alternative in the long run, or present evidence as to whether boxing should or should not be banned.

When I initially suggest topics, and I talk about one that has even the faintest odor of the historical, some of my students complain that they are not into history. When I suggest a topic from current events, they sometimes ask, “What if you're really not on top of the news?” Fair enough; when I was in college I was too busy to be on top of the news. So I prod and poke around with them, hoping to find something suitable.

One education major who was planning to be a high school teacher (but wasn't into history) realized, after some leading questions from me, that she actually did know something about the history of federal education legislation, and ultimately that was what her paper was about. She said to me, with relief, “When you said history, I thought you meant just presidents.” Other students have a harder time of it; they can't seem to place their chosen field of study in any intellectual context. We return to the old problem that my students do not read very much. They do not understand that most educated people read a fair amount. For my students, reading is just another thing that they happen not to be into, the way some people aren't into scrapbooking or Pilates or watching
Lost.

The research paper is a mix of high- and low-level skills. The more complex skills, the synthesis of arguments and the development of a thesis, are simply beyond some of my students at this stage of their academic development. Some are poor readers. Some cannot read a journal article—or even a
People
article—and summarize the author's stance. An alarming number of my students have trouble Finding the Main Idea.

Authoring a paper is one thing. Making sure it adheres to the Modern Language Association rules is quite another. That's a low-level skill, and they don't do so hot at that either. My students seem to have a lot of trouble formatting the works-cited page at the end of the paper, giving information about the books and periodicals used in the paper. Each entry follows a slightly different format, depending on what it is: a book, a journal from a research database, an online journal, a newspaper, a selection from an anthology. It can be very annoying work, as I am reminded as I type the notes to this book. But it is doable. My students' research materials fall into no more than five categories. They're not citing anything tricky, like e-mails or unpublished dissertations or transcripts of interviews they have personally conducted. They're citing books and Web sites and articles from the databases and that's about it. I give the students a sample “works cited” page. I tell them: make sure yours looks
exactly
like this one. We spend one, sometimes two classes writing works-cited entries and putting them on the board.

After much drilling, they
seem
to get it, but when the papers are turned in, the works-cited pages are a disaster—even after I've looked at their first drafts and told them their format is incorrect. They don't make changes. They don't fix it. They do not make any goddamned changes. Why not, I ask you? Why not? I understand why my students don't do what they can't do. But why don't they do what they
can
do?