Professor X (16 page)

The movie comes in handy. Discussions are pretty lively.

My students are sometimes suspicious of ideas, those admittedly thorny and vexing things. The college classroom certainly seems an odd place for such sentiments to be on display, but I often encounter wide swaths of what can only be described as resentful anti-intellectualism.

Let me say at the outset that I am in no way opposed to anti-intellectualism. A philosophical stance is a philosophical stance; reading books and thinking about stuff are not pastimes for everybody. I do not worship at the altar of books. I have known people whose reading, meaty as it was, provided as much desperate escapism as obsessive ESPN viewing. I am not here to say that reading
The Alexandria Quartet
is inherently more worthwhile an activity than making flourless chocolate cake or collecting “Guinness Is Good for You” posters. Whatever floats your boat. I'm not willing to say that my intellectual pursuits have done me the smallest bit of good; in truth, they may have done little more than fill me with unrealistic ambition, impoverish me, and needlessly clutter my thinking.

However, remember: we're talking about college, where ideas are supposed to be the coin of the realm.

Our literature anthology spends some of its bulk early on fretting over a definition for literature. To that end, it juxtaposes a contemporary “literary” short story with an excerpt from a Harlequin Romance. The approach is snarky and could be effective, but the joke is lost on my students, who get the intent of the whole thing backwards. They can't make head or tail of the literature; the protagonist strikes them as too crazy. “People don't really act that way,” says a middle-aged woman in nursing scrubs, shyly (wait till we read Carver's “Popular Mechanics,” with the baby perhaps torn in half by the feuding couple), but the class is quite impressed by the realism of the Harlequin excerpt; it excites them, and gets them talking about literature in a way that no other writing will that semester.

I am no snob. I love Anthony Powell's
A Dance to the Music of Time
cycle of novels, but I love the 179-episode cycle of
I Love Lucy
reruns even more. Reading, however, is a prerequisite for doing college work. Lack of familiarity with the written word makes it impossible to write essays with any degree of sophistication. Michael Holden, assistant professor of English at Delaware State University, says of his students:

I am encouraged in my endeavors, but only a little, by the words of Thomas Bailey:

I suppose that helps. I am happy to do my bit for the larger society. I toil, unseen and forgotten, in the basement of the ivory tower after dark. Sometimes, ours is the only class in session. What must our building look like from the highway, one window lit by pulsing blue fluorescent light? I wonder how it will all end. What will become of my students? What grade does one give a college student who progresses from a sixth- to a tenth-grade level of achievement?

Sometimes, when I have to give bad grades, I feel like a beacon of morality, an unyielding standard, an ever-fixed mark, like the silver meter stick stored in the French vault from which all other meter sticks once derived. Sometimes, on the other hand, I feel like nothing more than a hardass.

I just came inside from a session of raking leaves. What a handy metaphor! Just as I am never sure what system to use to grade my classes each semester, so I waver each fall on how to go about doing the leaves. Do I rake them into piles and
then
onto the blanket, or do I skip the piles and rake them directly onto the blanket? Each method seems sometimes like less work, sometimes like more, depending on the time of day, my mood, whether I am feeling precise or slapdash, and the ache in my back. Do I grade on improvement and/or effort and/or sincerity? Raking is invigorating, but it gets tiresome, and I grow weary of theorizing about it. Have I mentioned that my property consists of a lot-and-a-half: not enough to subdivide or sell, just enough to rake. And mow. And weed. And rake again. As I rake and sweep up the leaves I come upon sheets like papier-mâché of leaves from last year, or several years ago, that I missed. I have the feeling that I'm just getting behind with everything in my life. I would flatter myself and say the metaphor is reminiscent of one by Robert Frost, but I know that he was much better in the yard than I am, always picking apples and patching his wall and such.

Rarely do I venture onto my college campuses during the day. One afternoon I come in to pick up a new teacher's edition of my writing textbook. I wander the corridors. Classes are in session; doors are shut. A few students meander through the halls. The place looks, in the bright light of day, like a real college. There are ads and notices on the bulletin boards lining the corridors: ads for screenings of
Halloween,
information about the tutoring program, stuff for sale: cut-rate textbooks, a DJ setup with a pair of turntables. One item catches my eye: an ad for a Web site, Simplified Nursing, “where you can learn about and purchase easy-to-read books written to help nurses and nursing students. . . .”:

The ad interests me. I read further. The books use illustrations to convey their points. The book
Drug Calculations for Nurses Who Hate Numbers,
for example, shows a drawing of a 150-milligram pill broken into thirds—each segment drawn as a little character, with a smiling face—to explain how much to give if the dose is 50 milligrams or 100 milligrams.

I don't immediately realize that classes have ended. Classroom doors open and students pour forth. I am in an awkward spot, blocking traffic. Professors pack their satchels and chat at their desks with stragglers. These professors don't look like the adjuncts I am used to seeing. These are regular-looking professors, prosperous-seeming chaps, tall and weedy fellows in long oxford shirts, women with hair cut in tidy wedges. One guy is fat, bearded, benign—the spirit of Robertson Davies himself! The place smells of tenure and, emanating from a faculty office near the stairs, freshly brewed Starbucks coffee. In the office, two professors in lab coats hold their mugs in anticipation as the brewing cycle finishes; one affectionately strokes the pate of a skeleton mounted on a stand.

These are the full-timers. They leave their classrooms, satchels in hand, and eye me with apparent suspicion. What am I doing there? They know all the daytime faculty, at least by sight. Who the hell am I? What's a fifty-year-old man in a necktie doing skulking about?

Daytime at the campus has a carefree quality I never see. The sun is shining. Moods seem brighter. The students, not having arrived from an eight-hour job, shuffle languidly in flip-flops and T-shirts. Department secretaries lace up their sneakers and pair off for midday walks and lunch. The professors are relaxed. They have paid sabbaticals and great parking spaces and guaranteed employment. For them, the recession is a rumor. Cheerfully haughty, they remind me of the professors I had so many years ago. Their students will head off in many different directions, toward many different types of employment, but each class day's unspoken lesson is that being a tenured college professor just may be the sweetest gig there is.

My students and I are of a piece. I could not be haughty, even if I wanted to be. Our presence in these evening classes is evidence that something in our lives has gone awry. In one way or another, we have all screwed up. I'm working a second job; they're trying desperately to get to a place where they don't have to work a second job. All any of us want is a free evening. We are all saddled with children or mortgages or sputtering careers, sometimes all three. I often think, at the beginning of the class, that a five-minute snooze, a sanctioned nap period, would do us all good. We carry knapsacks and briefcases spilling over with the contents of our hectic lives. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The daytime students are fed by the college food service, which understands its mandate to be at least marginally nutritious. My people eat cakes and chips out of machines—when there's anything left in the machines.

The poignancy of my students can be overwhelming. I see them trying to keep all the balls in the air: job, school, family, marriage. Of course it isn't easy. On our class breaks, they scatter like frightened mice to various corners and niches of the building, whip out their cell phones, andtry to maintain a home life at a distance. Burdened with their own homework assignments, they gamely try to stay on top of their children's.
(Which problems do you have to do? . . . All right, then, just the odd numbers. That's good, right? One, three, five, seven, nine and you're done. Don't think of it as five problems. Just do them one at a time. Finish that and then do the spelling. Now put Daddy on.)
I hear husbands and wives trying to conduct a whole domestic life within the boundaries of a tenminute phone call, talk of parent-teacher conferences and appointments with plumbers that often disintegrates into argument. “What do you want me to do?” I have heard it said many times by trapped people standing in empty classrooms. “What do you want me to do?” I think sometimes that we'd all be better off without cell phones. After the breaks, it's difficult to reconnect with some of the students. I can tell they are replaying the last phone call in their minds, frustrated and helpless as they sit trapped in the classroom while the world outside, they imagine, goes to hell.

As a writing instructor, I have a unique perspective. A botched calculus or biology exam reveals only the student's ignorance of the material being tested, but a piece of bad writing lays bare all intellectual deficits. And because essay topics are often rooted in the personal, as they have to be to get any decent writing out of the students, I am far more likely than a math or biology instructor to hear my students' tangled backstories.

Now, some of my students are merely young and silly and disinclined to do the required work for the class. They know they're goofing off, and they sort of care, but pretty early on they throw up their hands. All of life stretches out before them, all possibility, and it is impossible to take people like me seriously. Consider Jason. Jason is a cheery sort, with a fringe of dark curly hair visible under his omnipresent baseball cap. He has a pert sort of nose and little bow lips; I can see the cute child he once was. He comes to class faithfully, mostly I think to ogle the girls. Jason has thus far, this semester, handed nothing in, not a single assignment.

I meet with him after class to discuss the situation. “I love having you in the class,” I say, “and I wouldn't for the world suggest that you stop coming. But you've got to know that there are issues we need to talk about. Where are the assignments?”

This is the approach I have cultivated over the years. I chide him gently because the situation is so absurd: why would someone come so dutifully to class yet not hand in a single assignment? I am careful not to suggest, even faintly, that his time would be better spent elsewhere. I don't tell him that he's going to fail and there's really no point in his continuing. To suggest that he shouldn't come anymore, to be discouraging, or mean, or uncaring—it's simply not done, even though in college our goal is to get the students to evaluate data, to make good inferences, to think, above all else, critically. I cannot state, and I cannot elucidate from him, the obvious conclusion that the mathematics are working against him: he would have to do brilliant work at the Harold Bloom level to overcome all the lateness penalties.

“I've got a lot going on,” he says, vaguely abstracted, as though I was taking time from his other important work. He opens a binder full of fresh, blank paper. “Could you tell me which ones I've missed?”