Professor X (30 page)

I have one question. How on Earth does anybody know anything about anybody's teaching?

The last time I looked, nobody was watching anything that goes on in the classroom.

I have worked as an adjunct instructor now for a decade. I have been observed twice, once by each school. My department chair at Pembrook observed me on the second night of my adjuncting career. I was teaching English 102. She stayed for 20 minutes and took off, which seemed to me a fair amount. She was just making sure that my hiring was, in broad strokes, in the realm of the reasonable: that I knew what it meant to analyze literature, that my hygiene was good and I didn't advocate the violent overthrow of the United States government, and that I could address a class from the front of the room and didn't suffer from hysterical dysphonia or anything like that. She winked and gave me a thumbs-up on her way out of the room.

Instruction is of necessity a private enterprise. Virtually no one, except for the students, ever sees it being done.

This is as it should be, for the sake of the students. Learning is one of the first things we start doing after birth. It is a primal human act. It requires a near-total surrender of will, a reversion to an earlier state of being: the adult's baggage of pride and skepticism, his measured consciousness, do little but get in the way. The beautiful agony of learning can be a brutal and messy business, and intruders have no place in the classroom. The presence of any outsider disturbs what is a delicate mechanism.

Learning is a struggle and a battle; it can no more be done in public than I can wrestle publicly with a piece of prose. As I write this, my wife would like me to sit in the wing chair in her office with her while she reads the Sunday
New York Times
on the Internet. But I can't fight with words in her presence. Writing uses some of the same muscles as learning, and a bad session of it can be as humbling as losing a bar fight. At some point, my verbs and modifiers and half-formed ideas will get the better of me and start pummeling. I can't let my wife see me get the shit beaten out of me.

In the fall, my busy season as an adjunct, I spend many weekends watching my son play basketball in various leagues. Sitting in the bleachers, I often have a folder of compositions on my lap to work on at halftime; as I grade them, I sometimes become aware that I am being watched. My seatmates stare at me with fascination—and it must be plenty fascinating to distract them from their own kids' dribbling and shooting—as I scrawl grades and transfer the numbers to my ledger. Invariably, I get comments: some rueful, some marveling, some a little chastising. There is a sense that I am performing, in public, a forbidden and private act. One man said to me, “I just didn't picture that's how it was done.” I don't know what he pictured: the reading room of the British Museum, perhaps; the faint strains of Mozart in the background.

Teaching is a mysterious profession. I have worked in offices, warrens of cubicles, and have always been able to judge the status of my colleagues—who's up and who's down—from their body language. I could always tell who worked diligently and who didn't, who was on a roll and who couldn't even get started because every new task seemed to be going so badly. I cannot judge the performance of my fellow teachers with anything like the same certainty. At Pembrook College, I work with the same crew of adjuncts year after year: the business teacher who favors pastel suits and matching high heels, the ex-priest who talks like a tough guy and teaches religion and philosophy, the retired executive who specializes in the history of the Middle East and the history of Islam. We teach in the same classrooms leading off the same hallway semester after semester, but it would be the height of absurdity for me to make the smallest inference about how competently they are conducting their classes.

Every school has its coterie of “great teachers,” but of course few have ever actually witnessed them doing any teaching. Their performances are the stuff of legend, like those of Laurette Taylor, the tragic, alcoholic actress who first played Amanda in
The Glass Menagerie.
Taylor died in 1946 and left behind virtually no filmed work: a couple of silent films and a brief screen test. Few who actually saw her in
Menagerie
are still alive to talk about it, yet her name continues to be spoken with hushed reverence. Some in the know persist in calling her America's greatest actress on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. I suppose there is something comforting about such romantic legend making. The problems of education are knotty and thorny—impossibly complex—involving students' background and home life and motivation. How comforting is the myth of the great teacher!
If only we had a few more of those, we'd be in good shape.

But I'm not so sure. No one sees what goes on except the students, and their judgments are fallible. It's difficult even to know if perfect competence as a teacher inspires perfect learning. Is the teacher who explains things thoroughly, completely, and clearly actually necessarily better for the students than one who doesn't? Could the teacher who forces the students to complete the job on their own actually be better for some learners? Absolutely. Could the instructor who spells everything out; who covers every possible circumstance, exception, and quirk of a subject; whose approach seems in short a model of clarity, actually foster a more haphazard approach in some students? Absolutely.

There are many ways to get results. The magic of teaching is vastly overstated, mostly by teachers, and by those who staff programs that have an economic interest in teaching prospective teachers how to teach. In the general dumbing-down of second-tier-college academics—the transformation of college into years five, six, seven, and eight of high school—a wafting, smoky presence has come to obscure the atmosphere in college classrooms. College instructors never used to worry about their teaching; expertise was enough, and the assumption was that a college student would be able to extract meaning from any course, no matter how uninspired the professor—the professor becomes, sometimes, beside the point. The fog of pedagogy, once the province solely of schools of education, has settled on the college campus. I call it a fog, but in truth it sometimes grows as thick as a stew: a stew of jargon, gobbledygook, and theorizing. It has been brewed of necessity. Rather than facing squarely the painful issue of whether unqualified students are being admitted to college programs, administrators have obscured the question with the fog that comes between the expert at the front of the room and the end-users in the desks.

The act of teaching has become separate and distinct from subject-matter expertise. If the students cannot satisfy the requirements of the college curriculum, it is not necessary to assume that they do not possess the requisite skills. Let us instead say that the teacher's pedagogy was faulty, that he did not teach well enough.

I think I know about writing and literature. I have been writing all my life, wrestling and tinkering with prose, beating it like bread dough, sometimes in delight and often in utter frustration. I have been reading and analyzing literature all my life. I can spot foreshadowing at fifty paces. You want a theme? An epiphany, perhaps? I've got a million of them. Analyzing literature has never paid me very well, and has never seemed all that useful a skill. A rather dull party trick, really. But I know how to do it, and motivated students locked in with me for 15 weeks will take baby steps toward knowing how to do it as well.

My department chair was dead wrong. I didn't do a good job teaching Business Communication, because I didn't know the subject. It wouldn't have mattered what sort of gyrations I did in there. I could have pulled a Jaime Escalante and taught in the helmet of a bicycle messenger. I still wouldn't have known what I was doing, and you don't have to be in the classroom with me, indeed even anywhere near the classroom with me, to recognize this as a recipe for disaster.

A
T ABOUT 10:30 ONE NIGHT I sat with a student in a classroom in the Pembrook Arts and Sciences building. Class was over for the night. We were alone. Between us, on my desk, like something neither one of us wanted to touch, was the research paper he had handed in.

“This seems to be plagiarized,” I said.

I've seen plagiarism before, usually about once per class. Cowering at the thought of having to do the research paper, some students leave it until the last minute, and, thoroughly overwhelmed and in a panic, copy out stuff from some corner of the Web. The plagiarists don't even use the research databases. They don't copy from legitimate academic journals. They just take the first thing that Google belches up. I've seen large chunks of papers plagiarized from course outlines and syllabi from other colleges. Two students over the years have plagiarized from the same Wicca / Magic / Herbalism / Tarot Card Web site that glancingly mentions one of the assigned poems and turns up near the top of the search results in Google's magical algorithm. One student lifted a large swath of his paper on conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria—and I mean three or four pages—directly from the transcript of a segment from National Public Radio's
All Things Considered.

Plagiarism is always simple to spot. My students' writing skills are so rudimentary that the bits lifted from other writers gleam like gold nuggets in a prospector's pan. Obviously, I grow suspicious when I read, from a student who can't even identify first-person narration, the rather smug observation that such-and-such a work remains one of the poet's most anthologized works, but that its dominative romanticism gives little hint of the more practiced verse to come. One writer talks about
Death of a Salesman
in the most childish manner imaginable, and then opines that the play offers a postwar American reading of personal tragedy. Oh, does it? The writer also notes, in another casually piercing insight, that the play romanticizes the rural-agrarian dream but keeps it, tantalizingly, just out of Willy's grasp.

Another writer, analyzing a poem about a marriage ceremony, writes about those who are observing the wedding. She says that the poet ascribes to the gathering feelings of tenderness for the newlywed pair. The overwhelming majority of my students are not capable, on their own, of using “ascribes,” “tenderness,” or even “newlywed.”

When I lecture on
Hamlet,
I sometimes tell the students how editors must decide among the different approaches of the First Folio, the First Quarto, and the Second Quarto, and how scholars have gone so far as to identify different typesetters because of the characteristic errors they have made. All of this seems highly irrelevant to most of my students, but I am involved in much the same sort of detective work when I read their papers.

The research paper before us was, however, unlike anything I had encountered. Next to it on the desk I placed a paper I had downloaded off the Internet. The papers were identical, down to the eccentric line spacing and typos, and the quirk of thinking that Flannery O'Connor was a man.

“I found this on
Cheathouse.com
,” I said.

He studied the two papers. He was in his thirties, my student, angular and lean, with a hard body and a large head. He wore old-fashioned black horn-rimmed glasses—the sort you see in 1950s high school yearbooks.

The building was deathly quiet. Classes had dismissed for the night. No stray custodian passed by. No security guard. Downstairs, I knew, the ice cream vending machines were doing that weird thing they do when it gets late, filling with steam as they defrosted their coils for the night. There is no other time to meet with students. Adjuncts don't have offices or office hours, and meetings before class aren't practical for anyone. Some students can barely get to the start of class on time; some know that they can't but take the class anyway.

My student licked his lips. “So what are you saying?”

“This paper is not your work.”

“So there's no credit for it?”

“Well, no,” I said, a bit irked by the question. “There's a bit more to it than that. I have to report you. The administration could conceivably toss you out for academic dishonesty. If the charges are sustained, of course.”

His expression darkened. A small feeling of cold dread swept over me. Again, I listened for footsteps in the stairwells. I sipped the dregs of my cold, dead coffee, the one that had been sitting untouched on my desk since early that evening.

My student was a criminal. A small-time criminal, yes, but a criminal nonetheless. His eyeglasses, which seemed designed to impart a look of seriousness, started to look sinister. He told me that he worked—for a school, in fact, as some sort of classroom aide—but who knew whether that was even true? A teacher would be on a faculty list somewhere, and could be Googled, but not an aide. And he didn't even carry a backpack, the way most students did; he carried three loose textbooks, like teenagers on
Leave It to Beaver.