Professor X (21 page)

Other factors pushed me toward the D over the F grade. I looked at her work and detected faint, pinprick reflections of my own teaching. She repeatedly referred, for example, to the voice of the poem as “the speaker.” Bingo! I grabbed at it like the last bit of meat on a picked-over turkey carcass. She did that one thing correctly. She didn't refer to the poet, or the narrator, or the author, or to Ted Hughes, or, as some of my students are inclined, to Ted. (Langston, Tennessee, and Ernest have also turned up in papers.) She wrote about “the speaker.” Mentioned it repeatedly, in fact. I make a big deal of that in class: how we can't confuse the writer of the poem with the speaker of the poem, and how one way poets can be thought about is in the distance between their lives and verses. She had been listening. She had emerged from my class with an everso-slightly deeper understanding of poetic mechanics. Not much deeper, I admit; deeper by about the thickness of one coat of paint. We could say only, based on her paper, that she seemed to have understood one concept. I would never for a moment have considered giving her an A or a B or a C, but how proficient does one have to be to simply eke out a passing grade? If she was to come to understand more fully, over the duration of fifteen weeks, five concepts, would that be sufficient?

I receive worse work than that. I get papers that are out-and-out F's, things that are just as badly done but lack any value at all: poorly written summaries without even the smallest attempt to probe meaning. From this sort of work I get not even the briefest wink of reassurance that the students paid any attention in class.

Here's one student's anonymous evaluation of my college literature class, and I don't get the feeling he or she is pulling my leg:

My students almost think of my interest in reading and writing as eccentricities, as this evaluation makes clear:

Even for someone like me—someone whose pulse quickens a little at the thought of
Lolita
or
Catch-22,
someone who vows to read
Ulysses
all the way through in retirement and wonders (in passing, but certainly a few times a year) whether there can possibly be anything in all this adulation of Marilynne Robinson—writing about literature is not something I was born knowing how to do. It's a knack, and it takes lots of practice, like driving a stick shift; it seems impossible to master at first but can eventually be done without thinking. It took me years to be able to drift into the contradictory state of consciousness that combines close reading with a trancelike receptivity to themes and subtext and patterns of symbols. Now I can do it in my sleep. My student might be able to get good at this, or at least better than she was, but I doubted that she would ever have interest enough or time to, and I have started to wonder why she should bother trying.

Is it fair to penalize the students for being unable to grasp, in fifteen weeks, the passwords and coded language and shibboleths and secret handshakes of the world of Introduction to College Literature? The students I encounter in English 102 have spent a lifetime in English classes thoroughly in the dark; they stand outside the great Masonic hall of literature with their noses pressed up to the glass. I'm a good person to lead them inside, but it will take time.

I have always wondered about the ultimate disposition of my students. I have wondered, sometimes, at the conclusion of a course, when I have failed such a large percentage of my students, if the college will send me a note either (1) informing me of a serious bottleneck in the march toward commencement and demanding that I find a way to pass more students, or (2) commending me on my fiscal ingenuity, since my high failure rate forces students to pay for classes two and three times over.

What has happened is precisely nothing. I have never felt any pressure from the colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don't mention all those students who have failed my course and I don't bring them up.

Our American unwillingness to count even the most hopeless of us out in the educational marathon may be one of the most debilitating ideas in contemporary culture, a jagged gash through which vitality and truthfulness and quality slowly drain away.

I find the ultimate institutional indifference to marginal students something of a good sign. Yes, there are remedial classes, and writing labs, and interventions by the academic advising people, and meetings with at-risk students. But how much can or should the colleges do? In the end the students' fates are in their own hands, and if they aren't willing or able to put in what could be a tremendous amount of work, they will not pass. They must sink or swim.

Sink or swim. When was the last time you heard that in contemporary America? When was the last time we heard of a clearly defined, rigid, nonporous boundary?

My two colleges maintain their standards. Dean Truehaft said it long ago on the night of my initial orientation: give them what they deserve. I often joke that some of my students take English 101 and 102 twice or three times, and what a financial bonanza for the college this must be. But the truth is quite otherwise. My 101 and 102 classes are taken early in a student's time, and failure in those classes has a particularly discouraging effect. Students who fail repeatedly simply give up after a while, and do not graduate. In Boston, remember, 88 percent of local students did not finish community college. Eighty-eight percent! An occasional bonus of double-tuition notwithstanding, community and lower-echelon colleges would find themselves more solvent if more students graduated. A nod, a nudge, a wink, a whisper to the instructors, and everything would be hunky-dory.

But such is not the case. The colleges for which I work maintain their integrity. A passing grade is a passing grade, and a good grade means something; in my experience, grade inflation is not pronounced. When the
Boston Globe
opines that colleges “need to step up with some big ideas on how to turn entering students into graduates,” my blood runs cold. If the pressure mounts on colleges, and community colleges in particular, to get all their students through the program, grades will inflate tremendously and degrees and certificates will be worthless.

In educational circles, English 101, freshman English, is known as a gatekeeper course. Students who can't get through it can't move on. So I am a gatekeeper. I will teach my students. I will work with them as much as I can. (Remember, I don't get paid for office hours.) I will guide them to resources. But I will not pass them if they have not earned a passing grade.

We're not talking nuance here. My students who fail do so with an intensity that is operatic. They lack skills on a grand scale. To check if students are keeping up with the reading, I give unannounced quizzes. Sometimes I ask if characters are alive or dead at the end of the work. Hamlet—alive or dead? Polonius—alive or dead? Gabriel Conroy—alive or dead? Talk about not going into detail about a character's motivations or epiphanies. We're talking simple existence or lack of. And yet my students fail.

My colleagues are with me. A supervisor once asked for a bunch of midterm exams to see if she agreed with the grades I was giving. She said I was doing a good job, but she had one quibble. One of my D's should have been an F.

The students who attend class faithfully, who try, who actually go to the trouble of rewriting their papers, who put in the effort—they do improve as writers, but they just may not get far enough to pass.

When I assign compare-contrast essays, or cause-and-effect essays, or persuasion essays, I tell my students what every writer comes to understand: that for greatest effect and maximum clarity, they must write about what they know. And they do. They write freely and openly and without self-consciousness about their lives: about failed plans and disappointment, about dysfunctional homes and unwanted children (who always, at the end of the compositions, turn out to be the greatest gifts they have ever had), about addiction and poverty and just how wrenching and difficult life can be.

A harried-seeming young woman, Goth in the extreme, who always comes late and never says a word, writes that she has a couple of hundred bucks saved up from when she was in grammar school and she's probably going to be broke and exhausted for the rest of her life. A Chinese student writes of her childhood outside Beijing. She remembers delivering lunch to her father every day, and how his coworker always said, admiringly, that he had the smartest little girl in the world. Now, in America, she feels nothing but illiterate.

Another student, a child of divorce, buys a ticket for her father to take his girlfriend to see U2, but winds up going with him herself and mending some fences.

A woman in her late twenties named Kerri writes of her experiences as a mother. There are several young mothers in the class, and on the breaks Kerri and the others gravitate to one another. They talk shop: of nutrition and playdates and tantrums and sibling rivalry. Their conversation is lively. As the semester progresses, I note their growing addiction to one another's company; the breaks can't come fast enough for the group to assemble and compare notes. They seem pleased with life. They glow with satisfaction and take a vaguely superior stance toward the younger women in the class, who are not yet in the game of motherhood. Kerri makes the others laugh and has a large laugh herself.

From reading her writing, I know what her new friends probably don't, that stay-at-home motherhood has been something of a disappointment.

Now when I look at Kerri, I see not just a student struggling under the weight of school and family responsibilities. I see a woman gripped by a quiet, middle-class despair, the same despair that spawned the work of Betty Friedan and some of the dark domestic poetry of Anne Sexton, whose “Cinderella” we read in class.

Kerri smiles and jokes with the other mothers, but now I'm in on her secret. I see her struggling with guilt about what she feels, carefully watching the other mothers and searching for clues to answer the big question: Are they really as fulfilled as they seem?

Sometimes students have to tell me directly about their lives when life intrudes on their work. A student writes on the final test of the semester:

I sometimes feel, as I read my students' writing, that I know them better than anyone else. I sometimes feel as though I am the only one to whom they tell their deepest fears. This can't help but interfere with the process of grading.