Tag Archives: Teaching

Finding Myself in the Thick of It

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I have been away from seri­ous blog­ging for a while now, and I’ve been miss­ing it, but my life has been tur­bu­lent lately and there just hasn’t been the time to reflect that I need in order to write. I am sit­ting right now in the Star­bucks around the cor­ner from the gym where I work out, where I am very happy to be work­ing out this morn­ing for the first time in more than a week. I’ve been sick with a res­pi­ra­tory infec­tion that I started yes­ter­day to shake for real. Before that, I was con­sumed with mak­ing sure I got all my paper grad­ing and other end-of-semester work done on time, since I fell very far behind while my grand­mother was dying. Now I am in the thick of another cri­sis, this one at the col­lege where I teach, where it seems pretty clear that our new pres­i­dent and board of trustees are hell bent on dec­i­mat­ing the full-time fac­ulty and trans­form­ing us into some­thing more along the lines of Phoenix Uni­ver­sity than what it has been: one of the pre­mier, two-year lib­eral arts insti­tu­tions in the country. He has done this mostly under the guise of hav­ing to close the huge bud­get gap we are fac­ing – and we are fac­ing a huge bud­get gap; there are painful cuts that need to be made – but the dis­dain, and even con­tempt, he has expressed for the full-time fac­ulty in mak­ing the cuts he has made sug­gests that the bud­get is not his only agenda.

I am not going to go into too much detail about the specifics of the sit­u­a­tion, partly because it would take an awful lot of expla­na­tion for peo­ple who don’t know any­thing about the place where I work and partly because so many things are still in flux that I – some­one who is not autho­rized to speak offi­cially for the fac­ulty – don’t want to cause prob­lems for the peo­ple work­ing on those issues. One detail that I can talk about, how­ever, is the fact that, at the end of the spring semes­ter, the pres­i­dent fired all 66 full-time fac­ulty who were work­ing on tem­po­rary con­tracts, nearly 10% of our full-timers. A tem­po­rary con­tract is the one you get, at my col­lege any­way, before you are switched to a tenure track line and the pres­i­dent is within his rights to dis­miss any­one on a tem­po­rary con­tract with­out cause. Nonethe­less – and I am going to skip over a whole lot of local pol­i­tics involved with what this pres­i­dent did because it involves details of our con­tract, the nature of fac­ulty gov­er­nance at my insti­tu­tion and what the his­tory of faculty-administration rela­tions have been – nonethe­less, it is worth tak­ing a close look at the impli­ca­tions and con­se­quences of what he did, even if he was within his right to do it.

To start, con­sider that 66 fac­ulty rep­re­sent, at a min­i­mum, 6,000 class­room seats that will not have instruc­tors for the Fall. Those seats will need to be taught by some­one, which means that the col­lege will have to hire more adjuncts and/or – but it is most likely “and” – increase class size across the cam­pus, and even then I don’t know if the col­lege will be able to adjust in order to make sure those seats have instruc­tors. If we can’t, that means there will be a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of stu­dents that we will not be able to serve; if we end up with class-size increases – of which we have already had one in order to address bud­get issues – teach­ing and learn­ing will suf­fer, and they will suf­fer in ways that are per­haps par­tic­u­lar to com­mu­nity col­leges, where we do not have the huge lec­tures that exist at four year schools and where pro­fes­sors do not have grad­u­ate stu­dents to help with grad­ing and other class­room tasks, includ­ing, some­times, the teach­ing itself. There is, in other words, a lot to be con­cerned about in terms of the effect lay­ing all these peo­ple off will have on the college’s abil­ity to serve the com­mu­nity it is our mis­sion to serve.

As dis­turb­ing to me, though in a dif­fer­ent way and on a dif­fer­ent scale, is the way in which these lay­offs will require us to become more depen­dent on adjunct instruc­tors than we have been. This is dis­turb­ing to me not because I think adjuncts are not good teach­ers; they are as good or as bad as any other group of teach­ers. More, I have tremen­dous respect for their ded­i­ca­tion to both the pro­fes­sion of teach­ing and their field of study, because an adjunct’s life is much harder than mine. They are, as a whole, per­haps the most exploited work­ers in all of acad­e­mia, and the fact that they nonethe­less choose to cob­ble together a liv­ing from teach­ing part time at (usu­ally) two or three (or some­times more) dif­fer­ent col­leges and to keep up with their field of study is really quite amaz­ing. Yet the fact that they are so fully (and, frankly, eas­ily) exploited makes the ways in which col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties are, nation­wide, com­ing to rely on them more and more uncon­scionable, and it dis­turbs me to know that my col­lege might be headed in that direction.

I am aware that argu­ing for less reliance on adjuncts means, at least implic­itly, argu­ing for less work for adjuncts; and I am aware that this is prob­lem­atic for a whole host of rea­sons, some of them con­nected to the indi­vid­ual liveli­hoods of the peo­ple who are adjunct instruc­tors and some of them con­nected to the nature of the aca­d­e­mic job mar­ket, in which many peo­ple often get the expe­ri­ence they need to be hired full time by work­ing as an adjunct. To agree that the “adjunct prob­lem,” as it were, needs to be com­pre­hen­sively and sys­tem­at­i­cally addressed, how­ever, should not be to deny that there are seri­ous prob­lems when col­leges reduce the num­bers of full time fac­ulty and replace them with adjuncts, as if teach­ing is the only thing that full time fac­ulty do.

At my school, it is the full time fac­ulty who hire and fire; it is the full time fac­ulty who do the work of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment; of han­dling griev­ances; of stu­dent advise­ment; of advis­ing stu­dent clubs; of most of the men­tor­ing that gets done; of estab­lish­ing, in other words, main­tain­ing and grow­ing the edu­ca­tional and extra-curricular infra­struc­ture of the col­lege itself. And while I know that we have a degree of fac­ulty gov­er­nance that many other schools do not, the fact is that full time fac­ulty at other col­leges per­form a sim­i­lar func­tion. It is the full time fac­ulty who put the com­mu­nity in com­mu­nity col­lege, not because adjuncts are less able or less qual­i­fied or even less com­mit­ted, but because adjuncts – given the struc­ture of their lives – almost never have enough time. More, there is no rea­son for adjuncts to have the com­mit­ment that full-timers do to the insti­tu­tions where they teach. Adjunct posi­tions are enrollment-dependent; they get no tenure, no ben­e­fits; and they inevitably have to split their atten­tion (and their loy­alty) between and among the dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions where they teach. They may be moti­vated to sit on the com­mit­tees in which full timers get the work of run­ning the col­lege done, but adjuncts have no incen­tive to do so. Com­mit­tee work does not get them a raise, does not get them pro­moted. I would agree that a sys­tem should be worked out where adjuncts do have incen­tive to sit on com­mit­tees, but it doesn’t exist now, and I can guar­an­tee you that my col­lege pres­i­dent is not think­ing about insti­tut­ing one, not when he is hop­ing to use adjuncts to cut costs.

A col­lege – just like a high school, just like an ele­men­tary school – is, or at least I am con­vinced it ought to (con­tinue to) be, more than a col­lec­tion of class­rooms in which teach­ing is deliv­ered; it is, or should be, a com­mu­nity of peo­ple learn­ing to become, among other things, engaged and employ­able cit­i­zens, and that kind of learn­ing requires fac­ulty who can make com­mit­ments to stu­dents and to the insti­tu­tion where they work beyond the teach­ing they do in the class­room. There is, in other words, a good deal in my col­lege president’s deci­sion to fire nearly 10% of the full time fac­ulty, not least of which is the way in which his deci­sion essen­tially guts the next 20 – 30 years of the kind of work I have been describ­ing that would have been per­formed by those fired fac­ulty members.

As you can tell, I am angry about this, and I am aware that I have prob­a­bly reduced the com­plex­ity of the issue because I am angry; but I do think that peo­ple should be very con­cerned about a sys­tem of higher edu­ca­tion that is becom­ing increas­ingly reliant on con­tin­gent fac­ulty. It is not some­thing we ought to let hap­pen sim­ply because it costs less than what we have now. It’s impor­tant to remem­ber: You really do get what you pay for.

Disturbing Statistics about Remedial Students at Community Colleges

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Since I teach at one of the largest com­mu­nity col­leges in the nation, I was dis­turbed but not sur­prised by the fact that, accord­ing to an arti­cle in The New York Times, by Lisa W. Foder­aro, “CUNY Adjusts Amid Tide of Reme­dial Stu­dents,” nearly three quar­ters of the 17,500 fresh­men enrolled at CUNY’s six com­mu­nity col­leges required reme­di­a­tion in read­ing, writ­ing or math and almost 25% of those stu­dents required reme­di­a­tion in all three sub­jects. “The rea­sons,” Foder­ano writes, “are famil­iar…: fewer than half of all New York State stu­dents who grad­u­ated from high school in 2009 were pre­pared for col­lege or careers.” Pro­vid­ing these stu­dents with the nec­es­sary course­work to make them college-ready cost, last year, about $33 mil­lion, an increase of 100% over what reme­di­a­tion cost 10 years ago.

Nor is this only a prob­lem in New York State. Accord­ing to Thomas R. Bai­ley, who directs the Com­mu­nity Col­lege Research Cen­ter at Colum­bia University’s Teach­ers Col­lege, close to two thirds of com­mu­nity col­lege stu­dents nation­wide require some kind of reme­dial edu­ca­tion, with prob­lems in math out­num­ber­ing prob­lems in read­ing by a mar­gin of two-to-one. The suc­cess and reten­tion rates for the stu­dents who have to take reme­dial courses is also dis­turb­ing. Fewer than half of the stu­dents who take reme­dial courses com­plete them.

One prob­lem with Foderaro’s arti­cle is that she con­nects the prob­lem of stu­dents in reme­dial classes not fin­ish­ing with com­mu­nity col­lege grad­u­a­tion rates, which are not high, about 25% of full time stu­dents at CUNY and 35% nation­wide. One prob­lem with mak­ing this asso­ci­a­tion is that the stud­ies these num­bers come from do not track what hap­pens to stu­dents who trans­fer from a com­mu­nity col­lege to a four year school – and I know that at my school a sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of stu­dents do not plan to earn an AA; rather they plan to take courses they need to take at the sig­nif­i­cantly lower cost the com­mu­nity col­lege offers them and then transfer.

Foder­aro high­lights in her arti­cle some of the suc­cess­ful steps com­mu­nity col­leges are tak­ing to address this issue, and she also men­tions the fact that to the degree com­mu­nity col­leges become reme­di­a­tion cen­ters, they have less time and money to spend on the stu­dents who enroll who are pre­pared. Those stu­dents, after all, who often come to a com­mu­nity col­lege because they can’t afford to go to a four year school, are also deserv­ing of the college’s atten­tion and resources.

As I read the arti­cle, though, I couldn’t help but remem­ber a con­ver­sa­tion I had some years ago with some­one who teach­ers in my school’s phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion depart­ment. She’d been a high school teacher for many years, and we were on a com­mit­tee that was sup­posed to make some kind of rec­om­men­da­tion, or pre­pare a panel for a con­fer­ence, con­cern­ing stu­dent pre­pared­ness (I don’t remem­ber which). Any­way, she said that when she was work­ing in the high schools she’d been a big sup­porter of social pro­mo­tion, the idea that pass­ing stu­dents even when they were not aca­d­e­m­i­cally pro­fi­cient in a sub­ject would, by shield­ing them from the low­ered self-esteem that would result from fail­ing, ulti­mately help them suc­ceed. Now, how­ever, as a teacher in col­lege, that she had to deal with stu­dents who couldn’t read or write ade­quately, or think their way through a basic math prob­lem, she had to admit that social pro­mo­tion as a pol­icy was a mis­take from the start.

Yet it would be too easy to blame stu­dents’ lack of pre­pared­ness solely on the schools, or on the edu­ca­tional experts who con­cocted social pro­mo­tion and sold it to the school sys­tem. The qual­ity of stu­dents’ aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance is a result not only of the work they do in school; it is also a result of the qual­ity of the lives they lead out­side of school. If so many stu­dents are grad­u­at­ing from high school unpre­pared for col­lege or career, in other words, it’s not just our ped­a­gog­i­cal approach or the struc­ture of our edu­ca­tional sys­tem that needs to be fixed. We need to do some real soul search­ing about what it means to be a kid in this cul­ture, socio-economically, psy­cho­log­i­cally, emo­tion­ally and politically.

A woman in my evening class, which meets from 9:25 to 10:45 at night – and so you know the stu­dents who are tak­ing it are ded­i­cated to doing what they need to do – told me this week that the rea­son she hasn’t been com­ing to class is that her boyfriend, with whom she lives, is deeply and pro­foundly abu­sive. (This is the sec­ond time in as many semes­ters that a woman in my class has told me a story about this.) She’s been with him for seven years, since she was 13, and I am not going to go into any of the details she told me to explain her sit­u­a­tion, since the specifics of domes­tic vio­lence are not my con­cern here. As I read through Foderaro’s arti­cle, how­ever, I found myself think­ing about this stu­dent, who has already missed enough classes that I could fail her – but, of course, how can I fail her for that given what I now know about why she was absent; but then I won­der how is she ever going to be able to per­form in my class to the best of her abil­ity? And of course that doesn’t mean I will give her a grade she doesn’t deserve, but if I want to talk about the prob­lem of stu­dent per­for­mance in my classes, how can I not be aware that every stu­dent has a life out­side of class and that for far too many of those stu­dents, their lives impinge on their abil­ity to do school work, not per­haps as extremely as domes­tic vio­lence does, but it is an impinge­ment nonetheless.

Nei­ther schools nor school­ing is going to solve the social prob­lems that stu­dents bring with them into the class­room; nor should we expect them to. I guess, though, that I would like for a change – and this is not a crit­i­cism of Foder­aros’ arti­cle or of any­one who says that schools need to do a bet­ter job of edu­cat­ing stu­dents – to hear peo­ple address the fact that schools and teach­ers do not oper­ate in a vac­uum that is cre­ated when the school or class­room door shuts so that stu­dents are, for the time they are in class, com­pletely divorced from what­ever their real­ity is out­side the school building.

“Between the 1930s and the year 2000…only 32 novels were translated from Arabic into Hebrew.”

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From a post by Olivia Snaije, Ara­bic and Hebrew: The Pol­i­tics of Lit­er­ary Trans­la­tion, on the blog called Pub­lish­ing Per­spec­tives, and it is a shame­ful sta­tis­tic if I ever saw one, almost as bad as the fact that less than 3% of the lit­er­ary works pub­lished in the United States are trans­la­tions from other lan­guages. If ever two cul­tures needed the kind of cul­tural exchange and under­stand­ing that lit­er­ary trans­la­tion makes pos­si­ble, they are the cul­tures in which Hebrew (Israel) and Ara­bic (most of the rest of the so-called Mid­dle East) are the lan­guages of daily life, and yet, tellingly, most of the trans­la­tion that does take place hap­pens from Hebrew to Ara­bic, not the other way around.

Not that pub­lish­ing Ara­bic trans­la­tions of lit­er­a­ture writ­ten in Hebrew is with­out dif­fi­culty. Snaije refers to a Ha’aretz arti­cle about a Tunisian pub­lisher who is “in nego­ti­a­tions with Pales­tin­ian Israeli trans­la­tor Tayeb Ghanayem for his trans­la­tions of Israeli works into Ara­bic” and who refused to be named because of con­cerns about his per­sonal safety; and she also men­tions a Lebanese pub­lisher who will be bring­ing out in Ara­bic trans­la­tions the work of Pales­tin­ian Israeli Sayed Kashua (who writes in Hebrew) but who (the pub­lisher) declined to be quoted for the article.

Pol­i­tics gets in the way of trans­lat­ing from Ara­bic into Hebrew as well. When Yael Lerer, founder of Andalus, an Israeli pub­lish­ing house focus­ing on trans­la­tion and named for the often roman­ti­cized his­tor­i­cal period of the same name, went look­ing for titles to trans­late, most of the Egypt­ian authors she approached refused on prin­ci­ple to give her the rights to trans­late their work because it would rep­re­sent “nor­mal­iz­ing” rela­tions with “the enemy.” (Other Arab authors granted her trans­la­tion rights free of charge.) At the same time, the Egypt­ian writer Nael Eltoukhy (sorry, the site is in Ara­bic, but this is the one Snaije links to) trans­lates Israeli books from Hebrew into Ara­bic, often with­out permission.

“Trans­lat­ing Israeli lit­er­a­ture and writ­ings in itself is not a taboo. The taboo is any deal­ing with Israeli pub­lish­ing houses, since this is con­sid­ered “nor­mal­iza­tion with the enemy”. But you always have your options. One of them is ille­gal trans­la­tion, which is the best of a bad solu­tion. I am sorry for this but I (and oth­ers), don’t have any other options.” Said Eltoukhy.

Ille­gal trans­la­tion, too, hap­pens on both sides of the divide. The Israel-Palestine Cen­tre for Research and Infor­ma­tion, for example, published an online Hebrew trans­la­tion of Alaa al Aswany’s book The Yacoubian Build­ing; but the fact, dic­tated by regional pol­i­tics more than any­thing else, that peo­ple some­times have to resort to what is essen­tially intel­lec­tual piracy in order to get works from one lan­guage trans­lated into the other paled for me next to the fact that Andalus had to stop pubil­sh­ing because it was not sell­ing enough books to stay afloat. Lerner says there is sim­ply a “lack of inter­est” on the part of Israeli read­ers, which to me sounds more like the com­pla­cent arro­gance – or is it the arro­gant complacency? – of the powerful.

Israelis are not inter­ested, I would wager, because they don’t think they need to be inter­ested, because the lens through which they are given to view the Arab world around them – be it a lens of the right, left or cen­ter – is enough for them to feel engaged with that world. Of course I have no proof of this, but the phrase “lack of inter­est” recalls for me the reac­tions of many of the stu­dents from the intro­duc­tion to lit­er­a­ture classes I have taught over the years when they found out they would be read­ing works in trans­la­tion from the MId­dle East. “Why do I need to read this?” they would ask. “What does it have to with me?”

Inevitably, some of the stu­dents would come away from the semes­ter feel­ing they had learned some­thing worth­while, but get­ting stu­dents to look past their resis­tance to what they per­ceived as “too for­eign” was always a strug­gle. I’d try to make a game out of it, teach­ing them, for exam­ple, to pro­nounce the names of char­ac­ters that con­tained sounds we don’t have in Eng­lish. We’d all laugh at how hard it was, which would lead to a dis­cus­sion about lan­guage and the body and how we become so con­di­tioned, phys­i­cally, cul­tur­ally and psy­cho­log­i­cally, to mak­ing the sounds of our own lan­guage that mak­ing the sounds of another can feel like a kind of tres­pass. So, for exam­ple, peo­ple who speak Eng­lish who have never had to make the gut­tural kh sound (which in Eng­lish is usu­ally translit­er­ated as the Ch in Chanuka) will almost always talk about how it feels like they are hawk­ing up phlegm in order to spit it out; the sound, in US cul­ture, is just so damned impolite.

That dis­cus­sion would often lead to a con­sid­er­a­tion of how dif­fer­ent lan­guages deal with dif­fer­ent kinds of sub­jects – obscen­i­ties pro­vide a really fun and use­ful exam­ple here, but so do things like lev­els of for­mal­ity (tu vs. Usted in Span­ish, or pan­mal and chon­den­mal in Korean) – and that would often become a con­ver­sa­tion about how lit­er­a­ture can be a win­dow into another cul­ture. Almost always, how­ever, the major­ity of my stu­dents would react to these con­ver­sa­tions with some­thing that amounted to, “Gee, that’s nice and inter­est­ing and all, but what does it have to do with me?”

Now, my stu­dents are, most of them, not much older that 20 or 21 and so some of their self-centeredness may just be their youth speak­ing, but it’s hard not to see their lack of inter­est reflected in the fact, as I said above, that less than 3% of the books pub­lished in the United States are trans­la­tions from another cul­ture. By con­trast, in some South Amer­i­can coun­tries, by way of con­trast, and in some West­ern Euro­pean nations, the per­cent­age is closer to 30 – 40%. If enough peo­ple in the US felt it was impor­tant enough to read books trans­lated from other lan­guages, pub­lish­ers would respond by pro­duc­ing such books. If pub­lish­ers believed they could make money by cul­ti­vat­ing an inter­est in the lit­er­a­tures of other lan­guages, they would find a way to cre­ate the mar­ket for those books. No mat­ter which way you look at it, it’s hard not to see a seri­ous case of cul­tural myopia at work here.

Teaching Cornelius Eady’s “Brutal Imagination”

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One of the projects I have set myself for this tenth year after the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks on New York City and Wash­ing­ton DC is to read all the books of poems I own that were pub­lished in 2001. I think it will be inter­est­ing to see what some of the poets I care about were writ­ing in the years prior to 9/11. I was hop­ing to get started in Jan­u­ary, but a whole lot of things inter­vened, not least the fact that I was assigned at the last minute an intro­duc­tory lit­er­a­ture course that I was in no way pre­pared to teach. I have not taught this course in a cou­ple of years and the book I used to use, the Barnstone’s Lit­er­a­tures of the Mid­dle East has a sug­gested retail price of $100.60, way more than I am com­fort­able ask­ing my stu­dents to spend – and that’s for the paper­back edi­tion! It’s a won­der­ful book, and I loved using it, but that price is at least a 100% increase over what my stu­dents paid the last time I assigned it. I also hate using the lit­er­a­ture antholo­gies pub­lished by text­book com­pa­nies. Not only do they too cost more than I feel I can eth­i­cally ask my stu­dents, who are not lit­er­a­ture majors, to spend, but even if the prices of those texts were more rea­son­able, there is just no way in a sin­gle semes­ter to cover enough of the mate­r­ial they con­tain to jus­tify ask­ing stu­dents to lug one around for a whole semester.

So I decided I would do some­thing I have been think­ing about for a long time: build­ing an intro to lit­er­a­ture course around actual books, not just anthol­o­gized poems and short sto­ries. Given my time frame – I was assigned the course so close to the start of classes that I had to teach the first few meet­ings with­out a syl­labus, sched­ule of read­ings or writ­ing assign­ments – I decided to use books I’ve already read and so, to kill two birds with one stone, I chose two books of poetry from my 2001 col­lec­tion and two nov­els. The first of these books of poetry is Cor­nelius Eady’s Bru­tal Imag­i­na­tion, pub­lished by G. P. Put­nam. Bru­tal Imag­i­na­tion con­tains two sequences, “Bru­tal Imag­i­na­tion,” which is a series of poems spo­ken in the voice of the Black car­jacker invented by Susan Smith in 1994 to explain the dis­ap­pear­ance of her two chil­dren, whom she in fact had mur­dered by run­ning the car in which they were sleep­ing into a lake so they would drown, and “Run­ning Man,” which also deals with race in America.

I chose Bru­tal Imag­i­na­tion because I liked the idea of read­ing with my stu­dents poetry that was writ­ten explic­itly for the pur­pose of mak­ing sense of issues that they them­selves deal with – and, of course, that I deal with too – if not on a daily basis, then cer­tainly at var­i­ous times through­out our lives, and I have been pleas­antly sur­prised by how well my choice has worked out. The class I am talk­ing about meets from 9:25 – 10:45 PM, which means that most of the peo­ple tak­ing it are a lit­tle older and a lit­tle more mature than the stu­dents I have in my day classes. The group is racially mixed, though mostly white, and there are more men than women. The first thing I did was assign the Time mag­a­zine arti­cle I linked to above, so that we would all have the same set of facts in our heads as we dis­cussed what Susan Smith had done. Con­ver­sa­tion focused at first, of course, on how a mother could bring her­self to mur­der her own chil­dren, but I moved us very quickly to a dis­cus­sion of how she’d tried to cover up what she’d done – accus­ing an imag­i­nary Black man of car­jack­ing her and dri­ving off with her kids – and what it might say about the cul­tural imag­i­na­tion of the United States not just that peo­ple were will­ing to believe her so eas­ily, but that the entire nation, it seemed, mobi­lized in the effort to com­fort her and help her get her kids back.

I expected this dis­cus­sion to be full of ten­sion. Indeed, I am sure that if I’d tried to teach this book, say, seven years ago, there would have been a great deal of ten­sion: defen­sive­ness on the part of at least some white stu­dents who felt them­selves accused by the nature of the topic; anger on the part of those Black stu­dents who saw in the white stu­dents’ posi­tion a dis­missal or triv­i­al­iza­tion of what they, as Black men and women, had lived through. What took place instead, how­ever, was one of the most hon­est and respect­ful dis­cus­sions about race and racism in the United States that I have ever wit­nessed in a col­lege class­room. Granted, the stu­dents in this class may be an excep­tional bunch, but I couldn’t help think­ing as I went home that night that some­thing has changed.

In terms of teach­ing, I am going to start this unit the way I always start talk­ing about poetry, by get­ting stu­dents to grap­ple with the fact that poems have speak­ers and that these speak­ers, even when they speak in the first per­son, are fic­tional char­ac­ters. (My hope is that this will set us up to dis­cuss char­ac­ter­i­za­tion more fully when we start read­ing the nov­els I’ve cho­sen.) Eady’s speaker, to whom I will refer from now on as The Black Man, poses some inter­est­ing chal­lenges in this regard. Right in the very first poem, for exam­ple, he switches with­out com­ment but with a good deal of irony from the first to the third person:

How I Got Born

Though it’s com­mon belief
That Susan Smith willed me alive
At the moment
Her babies sank into the lake

When called, I come.
My job is to get things done.
I am piece­meal.
I make my liv­ing by tak­ing things.

So now a mother needs my clothed
In hand-me-downs
And a knit cap.

What­ever.
We arrive, bereaved
On a  stranger’s step.
Baby, they weep,
Poor child.

The first part of the poem is, if not famil­iar, at least straight­for­ward. The Black Man describes him­self as the man that white peo­ple sum­mon – even if, like Susan Smith, only in our imag­i­na­tions – to do cer­tain kinds of dirty work. Sud­denly, though, in the last stanza, a “we” enters the poem, in lines refer­ring to the moment when Susan Smith knocks on someone’s door to report the sup­posed car­jack­ing. Because he is a prod­uct of her imag­i­na­tion, there­fore, he is there with her; and so, in a deeply ironic twist, the sym­pa­thy the stranger expresses is sym­pa­thy for The Black Man as well. After all, the way in which Smith hijacked his image is anal­o­gous, at least in a metaphor­i­cal sense, to the car­jack­ing she has both used him to cre­ate and cre­ated him to com­mit. Indeed, not a few of the poems that fol­low take as their plot line this car­jack­ing that never hap­pened; and Eady weaves The Black Man’s con­scious­ness of his dual nature – he is who he is as the image of the Black man in Amer­ica, but he is also part of Susan Smith – throughout.

In “Who Am I?”, for exam­ple, he has the boys rec­og­nize “some­thing famil­iar” in him:

Though my skin and sex are dif­fer­ent, maybe
It’s the way I drive
Or occa­sion­ally glance back
With concern

In “The Lake,” Eady has The Black Man switch back and forth between first and third person:

When called,  I come.
My job
Is to get things
Done.

Our hands grip the wheel
As I steer toward
The lake.

The chil­dren and I
Have been dri­ving
For days.

There is a great deal more that can be said about Bru­tal Imag­i­na­tion, but for now I am focused on this ques­tion of the speaker’s voice and how it illu­mi­nates the ways in which the image of The Black Man that Susan Smith con­jured is an image we all have in us; and I am very curi­ous to find out what my stu­dents make of it. We begin deal­ing with it tonight.

Arizona Orders Tucson to End Mexican-American Studies Program — NYTimes​.com

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As often hap­pens, the Times used dif­fer­ent head­lines for the print and online ver­sions of this arti­cle. The online ver­sion reads, “Rift in Ari­zona as Latino Class Is Found Ille­gal.” The print ver­sion, on the other hand, reads, “Cit­ing ‘Brain­wash­ing,’ Ari­zona Declares a Latino Class Illegal” – and “brain­wash­ing” is a quote from Tom Horne, the man respon­si­ble for the law. You should absolutely go read the arti­cle for your­self because I think there are things in it that should frighten you regard­less of your polit­i­cal lean­ings, but here are some of the things that stuck out for me.

To start with, here’s how the Times describes the law the Mexican-American Stud­ies pro­gram has been cited as violating:

The Ari­zona law warns school dis­tricts that they stand to lose 10 per­cent of their state edu­ca­tion funds if their ethnic-studies pro­grams are found not to com­ply with new state stan­dards. Pro­grams that pro­mote the over­throw of the United States gov­ern­ment are explic­itly banned, and that includes the sug­ges­tion that por­tions of the South­west that were once part of Mex­ico should be returned to that country.

Also pro­hib­ited is any pro­mo­tion of resent­ment toward a race. Pro­grams that are pri­mar­ily for one race or that advo­cate eth­nic sol­i­dar­ity instead of indi­vid­u­al­ity are also outlawed.

I don’t think any­one would dis­agree that an edu­ca­tional pro­gram, espe­cially one funded by tax­pay­ers, which openly advo­cated for the over­throw of the United States would be prob­lem­atic at best, and, mostly because I am igno­rant of the his­tory of the south­west United States and Mex­ico, I am open to hear­ing argu­ments about why sug­gest­ing that those por­tions of the US that once belonged to Mex­ico ought to be returned threat­ens the United States in its entirety – though I also won­der if the Ari­zona leg­is­la­tors respon­si­ble for pass­ing this law have a sim­i­lar stance towards talk about land repa­ra­tions in other parts of the world, where ter­ri­tory has been acquired by one nation through mil­i­tary action and return­ing that land, or at least part of that land, is under­stood to be the just thing to do. More, I am specif­i­cally not using the exam­ple of how the US took land unjustly from the Native Amer­i­cans because I know that even the sug­ges­tion that true jus­tice would require return­ing that land, even while acknowl­edg­ing that such a thing is not really pos­si­ble, would be con­sid­ered by some tan­ta­mount to admit­ting that the US was founded largely by expro­pri­at­ing, often by force, the land of others.

What really dis­turbs me about this descrip­tion of the Ari­zona law, and what I think should frighten any­one, regard­less of their polit­i­cal stance, is con­tained in the sec­ond para­graph. A course which has as one of its learn­ing objec­tives the under­stand­ing that white peo­ple are evil would of course be objec­tion­able and should of course be taken off the books imme­di­ately, but how does one teach about racism in the United States with­out teach­ing that the lion’s share of racial hatred and dis­crim­i­na­tion has been in one direc­tion, from white peo­ple (and over­whelm­ingly white Chris­tians at that) towards peo­ple of color? And how does one teach that with­out engen­der­ing some anger and, yes, resent­ment on the part of peo­ple of color towards white peo­ple and the insti­tu­tions of white supremacy? But what really fright­ens me about this com­po­nent of the law is that it makes the educator/educational insti­tu­tion respon­si­ble for the emo­tional effect a class will have on the stu­dents who take it. If teach­ing stu­dents about the injus­tices of his­tory, espe­cially injus­tices per­pe­trated against them and their peo­ple, is not sup­posed to make them angry, what other emo­tions might the gov­ern­ment want to man­age in the class­room? What other top­ics might come under a sim­i­lar kind of scrutiny?

And what the hell does it mean that a pro­gram should not advo­cate for eth­nic sol­i­dar­ity? Or, rather, that it ought to advo­cate for indi­vid­u­al­ity as opposed to eth­nic sol­i­dar­ity – as if those two things were mutu­ally exclu­sive? When I taught a class in Asian Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, there was no way, of course, that I could stand in front of the class and include myself in the Asian Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence that lit­er­a­ture artic­u­lates, but was I teach­ing about an eth­nic Amer­i­can his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence that the Asian Amer­i­can stu­dents in my class had in com­mon? Yes. Does the fact of that expe­ri­ence sug­gest that those stu­dents are part of a par­tic­u­lar his­tory and that there might indeed be an eth­nic iden­tity – which implies sol­i­dar­i­ties of all kinds – that emerges from this his­tory to which these stu­dents can lay claim? Yes. Does that claim obvi­ate any sense that these stu­dents are still indi­vid­u­als within that iden­tity? No. Does that iden­tity some­how deprive stu­dents, by def­i­n­i­tion, of the indi­vid­u­al­ism that is such an impor­tant part of United States cul­ture? No.

Inter­est­ingly, of course, sim­i­lar pro­grams for Black, Asian and Native Amer­i­can stu­dents have not been found to vio­late this law, and I would be will­ing to bet that at least one of the texts found to be prob­lem­atic in the Mexican-American Stud­ies Pro­gram, The Ped­a­gogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, is taught in some of those other pro­grams as well. (The other book cited in the arti­cle as hav­ing been found prob­lem­atic is Occu­pied Amer­ica, by Rodolfo F. Acuna.) Indeed, read­ing the arti­cle, it’s hard not to con­clude that this law is more about the hurt feel­ings of Tom Horne, Arizona’s newly elected attor­ney gen­eral and for­merly that state’s super­in­ten­dent of pub­lic instruc­tion. As the Times puts it:

Mr. Horne’s bat­tle with Tuc­son over eth­nic stud­ies dates to 2007, when Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Work­ers, told high school stu­dents there in a speech that Repub­li­cans hated Lati­nos. Mr. Horne, a Repub­li­can, sent a top aide, Mar­garet Gar­cia Dugan, to the school to present a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. He was infu­ri­ated when some stu­dents turned their backs and raised their fists in the air.

At the same time, it’s also hard not to see Arizona’s law as part of a trend towards san­i­tiz­ing the racial his­tory of the United States and remov­ing from the class­room – and there­fore, poten­tially, from the pub­lic dis­course that emerges as the peo­ple taught in that class­room become the lead­ers of our soci­ety – any sense of con­tro­versy or con­flict over that his­tory. Regard­less of Alan Gribben’s inten­tions, for exam­ple, this will be one of the results of his Bowd­ler­ized ver­sion of Huck­le­berry Finn, and it’s hard not to see a san­i­tiz­ing motive in the Repub­li­cans’ deci­sion to leave out of their read­ing of the US Con­sti­tu­tion those pas­sages that refer to slaves as “three fifths of all other per­sons” or to things like pro­hi­bi­tion; just as its hard not to see this motive in at least some of the changes the Texas school board has de facto imposed on the edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions of our nation through the changes it adopted to its social stud­ies curriculum.

So much that is good about this coun­try has come about because peo­ple were will­ing to teach and to learn the dif­fi­cult parts of our his­tory and to strug­gle for rights and inclu­sion because they were angry and resent­ful over the injus­tices they and those like them suf­fered. We do our­selves a dis­ser­vice by try­ing to pre­tend those strug­gles never hap­pened or that they did not hap­pen they way they did or by water­ing down how we teach them so that the stakes do not appear to be as high as they were.

Eating Lunch While I Wait for Students and Think about the Connection Between Writing and Character

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So it’s a turkey and Muen­ster cheese sand­wich, a half pound of tomato-feta-and-cucumber salad, a brownie for dessert and peck­ing away a few sen­tences at a time here while I wait for stu­dents from my fresh­man com­po­si­tion class to come for doc­u­mented essay con­sul­ta­tions. I set this time aside to go over a draft with them in as much detail as I have time for and that their drafts deserve because they will not have the time to rewrite the essay after I have given it a grade. (My pol­icy is that stu­dents can rewrite almost any­thing for a bet­ter grade as long as they hand it in to me accord­ing to the time­line defined in my syl­labus; there’s just not time for that this close to the end of the semester.)

I had con­fer­ences sched­uled on Wednes­day and Thurs­day of last week too – today is Mon­day, and it’s about 1 PM where I am – and out of three fresh­man comp classes, of about 20 stu­dents each, exactly 6 showed up. I could, I real­ize, require stu­dents to sign up for these con­fer­ences, but at this point in the semes­ter, frankly, I am tired and I don’t have that much energy to invest in try­ing to get peo­ple who don’t care enough to come on their own to care about the paper they are try­ing to write. (I real­ize this is a lit­tle unfair; that there may be peo­ple who care but are sin­cerely busy enough that they won’t sched­ule the time unless they have an appoint­ment, but those are not the major­ity of my stu­dents.) In fact, here is a stu­dent come to talk to me right now. Back in a minute.

///

I’m back, and it makes me happy to be able to say that the stu­dent who left my office is a real suc­cess story this semes­ter. She is not likely to get bet­ter than a C+, but con­sid­er­ing that she started out fail­ing almost every assign­ment I gave, that she was con­vinced she just did not have it in her to write a com­pe­tent essay, that C+ will rep­re­sent more learn­ing than most stu­dents accom­plish. If I could give her a grade based purely on the amount of progress she has made and the effort she has clearly put into the draft we just reviewed, I would give her an A, or at least a B+.

Iron­i­cally, though, this student’s suc­cess illus­trates very nicely what I wanted to write about when I started this post, except that when I started I wanted to use the stu­dents who haven’t been show­ing up as my start­ing point.

When I applied for pro­mo­tion to full pro­fes­sor last year, one of the things I had to do was write a brief state­ment of my teach­ing phi­los­o­phy. This was my favorite part of putting my pro­mo­tion pro­posal together because, while I have been teach­ing for nearly 25 years and of course have had a phi­los­o­phy (or philoso­phies) dur­ing all that time, this was the first time I’d ever had to artic­u­late what mat­ters most to me about the teach­ing of writ­ing, under­stood both as the process and the prod­uct of what I do in the class­room. This, in part, is what I wrote:

To learn to write well is to pur­sue a con­nec­tion between your facil­ity with lan­guage and the con­tent, intel­lec­tual and oth­er­wise, of your char­ac­ter. I do not mean by this that peo­ple who can­not write well have no char­ac­ter or that writ­ing is the only way in which peo­ple can show their char­ac­ter. I mean, sim­ply, that you can­not write well if you do not make this con­nec­tion, because not to make it is to fail, as a writer, in hold­ing your­self account­able for the qual­ity of your own think­ing. Or, to put it another way, it is to fail to take your own intel­lect seri­ously. As a teacher, pri­mar­ily of writ­ing but also of lit­er­a­ture, I mea­sure my suc­cess not in how many A’s or B’s I give out — since grades reflect the sur­face of learn­ing, not nec­es­sar­ily its qual­ity — but in whether my stu­dents have begun to take on the respon­si­bil­ity not sim­ply of hav­ing ideas, but of hav­ing the audac­ity, because we lie to our stu­dents if we do not acknowl­edge that it takes courage, to attempt to com­mu­ni­cate those ideas in words com­pelling enough to com­mand a reader’s atten­tion above and beyond the fact that they were writ­ten in response to a class­room assignment.… As writ­ers, we exer­cise this respon­si­bil­ity — we hold our­selves account­able — most obvi­ously through the process of revi­sion. In order for revi­sion to be mean­ing­ful, how­ever, in order for revi­sion even to be pos­si­ble, a writer must have a suf­fi­cient stake in what she or he is attempt­ing to revise that the work of see­ing it anew feels both worth­while and necessary.

I orig­i­nally wanted to write about how frus­trat­ing and debil­i­tat­ing it is to have so many stu­dents who, no mat­ter how hard I try to craft their assign­ments so that they can pick top­ics in which they have a stake, appar­ently do not take this respon­si­bil­ity at all seri­ously; it is a plea­sure to have writ­ten instead about one who clearly does.

 

Cathleen P. Black Is New Schools Chancellor in New York

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From the arti­cle on NYTimes​.com: “Ms. Black, at the news con­fer­ence on Tues­day where she was intro­duced, made no pre­tense of hav­ing any expe­ri­ence in education.”

I really do under­stand the value of hav­ing a schools chan­cel­lor with a strong busi­ness man­age­ment back­ground. I do think, how­ever, that any­one cho­sen to be schools chan­cel­lor who has no expe­ri­ence in edu­ca­tion should be required, if he or she wants the job, to spend a year in the class­room first. The school sys­tem might be an orga­ni­za­tion that can be run like a busi­ness in many ways; the class­room, how­ever, is not – if only because learn­ing is not a busi­ness trans­ac­tion – and the out­go­ing chan­cel­lor, Joel Klein, it seems to me, very clearly did not under­stand that. My wife, who teaches in one of the tough­est school dis­tricts in New York City, tells me that she and her col­leagues are demor­al­ized by this appoint­ment because they feel like, yet again, they will be led by some­one who doesn’t really under­stand not sim­ply the nature of edu­ca­tion, but the actual work of being a teacher.

In higher edu­ca­tion, at least at the com­mu­nity col­lege level where I teach, this ten­dency to treat the process of edu­ca­tion as a busi­ness trans­ac­tion finds expres­sion in an increas­ingly com­mon metaphor that frames stu­dents in the class­room as cus­tomers and teach­ers as cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives. The wrong­head­ed­ness of this way of think­ing astounds me, not because I think I should not be account­able to both my stu­dents and the peo­ple who employ me for the qual­ity of the work I do as a teacher, and not because I think there is any­thing wrong with mea­sur­ing that account­abil­ity in ways that are as for­mal and rig­or­ous as those used to mea­sure a busi­ness’ suc­cess – though that does not mean I think the same meth­ods are appro­pri­ate to both sit­u­a­tions – but because if I have to think of my stu­dents as my cus­tomers, if I have to think of myself as a cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive, then, frankly, the incen­tive I have is to make sure they are happy and sat­is­fied with the results they receive, which is not the same thing as mak­ing sure they have learned something.

On Digital Technology and the Generation Gap

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So last week I started prepar­ing my fresh­man com­po­si­tion classes for the doc­u­mented essay they will have to write. Teach­ing research and doc­u­men­ta­tion has always been my least favorite part of teach­ing writ­ing, pri­mar­ily because I find so much resis­tance among my stu­dents. It’s hard enough to get them to see the value of doing the work that writ­ing requires when they are not research­ing, but to get them to value research, or even just to begin to value research (under the assump­tion that they will grow to appre­ci­ate its value as they progress through their aca­d­e­mic careers) is a chal­lenge that I have often found more debil­i­tat­ing than rewarding.

Sev­eral years ago, though, I started intro­duc­ing the research and doc­u­men­ta­tion by giv­ing stu­dents a sam­ple doc­u­mented essay, some­thing that I orig­i­nally wrote as part of the intro­duc­tion for an ency­clo­pe­dia on mar­riage I was devel­op­ing with a book pack­ager that, slightly edited, fit almost pre­cisely the model of the doc­u­mented essay fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents at my col­lege are required to write. The one sig­nif­i­cant way in which my essay, “A Short, Per­sonal His­tory of Courtship in the United States,” dif­fers from the doc­u­mented essay as my stu­dents were taught it in pre­vi­ous writ­ing classes they have taken is that I intro­duce the essay with a per­sonal story and use the first-person pro­noun through­out, two things that writ­ing teach­ers tra­di­tion­ally – or maybe I mean tra­di­tional writ­ing teach­ers – insist are com­pletely taboo. (The the­sis state­ment also doesn’t show up until the mid­dle of the con­clu­sion, but that is not a dif­fer­ence that is rel­e­vant to this post.)

The ped­a­gog­i­cal value in using some­thing I have writ­ten, some­thing per­sonal that was orig­i­nally intended for pub­li­ca­tion in a book and that breaks some of the rules, lies of course in mak­ing the notion of research “real” for stu­dents in a way that other kinds of sam­ple essays might not, pro­vid­ing them with an exam­ple of how research works in a real-world writ­ing sit­u­a­tion, as opposed to the inescapably arti­fi­cial sit­u­a­tion of the class­room. What I want to write about, though, has less to do with ped­a­gogy than with the reac­tion my stu­dents had to the story I use as an intro­duc­tion. Here it is:

Shortly before we broke up for good, Beth asked for her let­ters back. At first, I didn’t want to give them up. I knew if our rela­tion­ship ended while she still had them — and I knew our rela­tion­ship would be end­ing soon — I’d prob­a­bly never see them again. But when she told me that she needed them, that she wanted to read them next to my let­ters to try and under­stand how she had come to be as angry at me as she was, I found it impos­si­ble to refuse. Part of me hoped she was look­ing for a way to patch things up. Still, it took me a long time to seal the let­ters into the enve­lope that would carry them back to her. I picked out pages at ran­dom, read pas­sages aloud and was sur­prised over and over again by how imme­di­ately they con­jured for me the time and place where I first held them in my hands; and also how, even read­ing them nearly seven years after she’d first writ­ten them, I still imag­ined I could feel her breath on my cheek as she spoke her words into my ear.

When Beth and I met, we were work­ing at a sum­mer camp in Cold Spring, New York — she was nine­teen; I was twenty — and she was involved with two other men, the one she planned to marry and the one she was see­ing to make sure that the one she planned to marry really was the one. I had no inter­est in turn­ing that tri­an­gle into a square, but I liked Beth imme­di­ately, and she liked me, and we soon were spend­ing as much time together as our work sched­ules and her other rela­tion­ships allowed. We never thought of our­selves as a cou­ple, but our friend­ship soon eclipsed Beth’s con­nec­tion to the guy she was see­ing to con­firm her desire to marry the other man in her life. At the end of the sum­mer we exchanged addresses, promis­ing to write as soon as we were able.

I don’t remem­ber whose let­ter started our cor­re­spon­dence, but over time, the let­ters we exchanged grew more and more inti­mate, becom­ing a deeply per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion of the sort few peo­ple ever have face-to-face. Through the mail, we could talk openly about our friend­ship and our­selves, about who we wanted to be for each other and our hopes and fears for the lives we wanted to lead. We wrote about love and iden­tity (I was Jew­ish; she was Catholic), com­mit­ment and fidelity (she was still involved with the poten­tial hus­band; I didn’t have a girl­friend on cam­pus), and through what we wrote I felt with an inten­sity I had never felt before. The hon­esty we shared in our let­ters was as com­plete as I’d known, and it was both exhil­a­rat­ing and fright­en­ing. On the one hand, our rela­tion­ship felt more real to me than the ones I saw my friends on cam­pus slip­ping in and out of, almost like they were try­ing on and dis­card­ing new clothes. On the other hand, the peo­ple in those rela­tion­ships could see and touch each other when­ever they wanted, as Beth and I could not, and I was afraid that if she got mar­ried, our letter-writing would stop and I’d be left with nothing.

My friends thought I was crazy giv­ing up the chance to be with women on cam­pus to sit in my room and write let­ters to a woman I never saw, but I was hooked, and so was Beth, and even­tu­ally, as we told and retold on paper the story of what was hap­pen­ing between us, the story itself became more com­pelling to her than the life she saw her­self hav­ing with her near-fiancé, and she broke up with him to be with me. Our rela­tion­ship lasted nearly seven years.

We couldn’t have known it at the time, but our rela­tion­ship was the result of a per­fectly con­ven­tional nineteenth-century middle-class courtship, even the fact that Beth asked for her let­ters back when she was ready to break up with me. For the let­ters rep­re­sented a com­mit­ment she no longer felt and so she felt it was inap­pro­pri­ate for me to have them, just as Mary Pear­son in 1808 did not want Ephraim Abbott to keep her let­ters if he thought it was time for them to marry. “[F]orming a con­nex­ion [sic] for life,” she wrote when she asked for them back, required “great delib­er­a­tion,”1 and she was con­cerned he would find in her words unwar­ranted evi­dence that her reser­va­tions were not as great as they were.

In fact, nearly every­thing I expe­ri­enced in my cor­re­spon­dence with Beth is attested to in the let­ters writ­ten by the middle-class lovers of a hun­dred and two hun­dred years ago. For Eldred Simkins, to take one exam­ple, read­ing a let­ter from his beloved was an expe­ri­ence of her phys­i­cal pres­ence not so dif­fer­ent from mine when I read Beth’s. It was, he wrote, “as if we were talk­ing together and that you were…sitting by me….”2 Indeed, for the men and women of the 1800s, let­ters served not as sub­sti­tutes for, but rather as exten­sions of, their lovers’ phys­i­cal pres­ence. Courtship was a process of reveal­ing mind and body through words on the page, for while the lovers of the time cer­tainly expressed their feel­ings for each other phys­i­cally, it was in their let­ters that what they expressed became trans­formed into love and com­mit­ment. Or in which they dis­cov­ered that love and com­mit­ment suf­fi­cient for mar­riage did not exist between them.

“Wait. You wrote let­ters?” one of my stu­dents asked. “How could you wait that long for a response?”

“Damn!” another one chimed in. “You two must really have had focus.”

“No, seri­ously,” still another one couldn’t help but ask, “you spent all that time at your desk writ­ing her? Why couldn’t you just pick up a phone?”

I explained that all I had was a rotary phone on the wall in my dorm and so it was not like today when you can pick up your cell phone and walk out­side to get some pri­vacy. That expla­na­tion my stu­dents under­stood, but some of them – maybe more than some; it was hard to judge how many were agree­ing with those who spoke up – just could not imag­ine send­ing a mes­sage to some­one that you knew was not going to get there before a cou­ple of days had passed and to which you knew you would not get a response until maybe a week later at best.

“But so much will have hap­pened between the time the let­ter was sent and the time it was read. How did you remem­ber what you wrote about?” Dis­cus­sion ensued about the value of being able to send a quick text mes­sage and get a quick response. Some stu­dents pointed out that you really can’t com­mu­ni­cate in a text mes­sage with quite the same depth that you can in a let­ter, or even in a long email, but most said that was what phone calls and face-to-face con­ver­sa­tions were for.

I am not a Lud­dite; I value dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy as much as any­one, I sup­pose, but this dis­cus­sion made more aware than I have ever been not only of the age dif­fer­ence between myself and my stu­dents, but also of the cul­tural dif­fer­ences that have arisen as a result of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy.

  1. Quoted in Hands and Hearts: A His­tory of Courtship in Amer­ica, by Ellen K. Rothman, 18 [↩]
  2. Quoted in Search­ing the Heart: Women, Men and Roman­tic Love in Nineteenth-Century Amer­ica, by Karen Lystra, 21 [↩]

A Disturbing Memory

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I loved my sixth grade teacher. Since he’s dead now and can’t defend him­self, and since what I am about to write deals with events from more than thirty years ago, I don’t want to use his real name, so I’m going to call him Mr. Aber­nathy. One of the rea­sons I liked Mr. Aber­nathy so much was that he encour­aged my inter­est in sci­ence. I was fas­ci­nated by biol­ogy, espe­cially micro­scopic organ­isms. We didn’t have a micro­scope in the ele­men­tary school I attended, but Mr. Aber­nathy taught us about para­me­cium and euglena using pic­tures. Once, I remem­ber, he pulled me aside as the class was get­ting ready to line up for dis­missal to show me an arti­cle he was read­ing in a sci­ence mag­a­zine. I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of what he said except for the com­ment, “Look at its lit­tle penis” as he pointed to a dia­gram of one of the obviously-not-single-celled organ­isms the arti­cle was about. Maybe, in fact, the arti­cle was about sex­ual repro­duc­tion at the micro­scopic level.

I don’t remem­ber at all what I said or how I reacted in response, though I can still see his fin­ger point­ing to the pic­ture and I can hear the matter-of-fact tone of his voice, and I know I was stand­ing next to him at his desk and I have a vague sense of under­stand­ing that he was show­ing me some­thing he did not want the rest of the class to know he was show­ing me; but I did not feel threat­ened or fright­ened or in any way uneasy. Indeed, for decades after­wards, when­ever I remem­bered this inci­dent, I thought of it as an indi­ca­tion of how mature Mr. Aber­nathy thought I was – and I was mature for my age, maybe too mature; my mother tells the story of how I decided to leave the repro­duc­tive sys­tem out of a fifth grade oral pre­sen­ta­tion I did on the human body because I didn’t think my class­mates would be able to “han­dle it” – and I took plea­sure in the thought that Mr. Aber­nathy had made a point of giv­ing me a lit­tle bit of extra attention. Recently, how­ever, it occured to me to won­der why Mr. Abernathy’s shar­ing with me that image of a micro­scopic penis is the only moment of extra atten­tion I can remember.

I was lis­ten­ing to the radio, prob­a­bly NPR News, and some­thing some­one said – I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of what – brought back to me a moment from Mr. Abernathy’s class in which he was telling us a lit­tle bit about his fam­ily. As all stu­dents do, I think, when teach­ers talk about them­selves, espe­cially teach­ers that they like, I was lis­ten­ing very closely, enjoy­ing the chance he was giv­ing me to know a bit about who he was out­side of the class­room; but then he started talk­ing about his daugh­ter, and I believe he said she was around our age, maybe older or younger by a year, but cer­tainly around the age when she would soon be enter­ing puberty, if she had not entered it already. I wish I could remem­ber more of what he said or the order in which he said it, but I do remem­ber very clearly that he was telling us that he would walk into the bath­room when she was tak­ing a shower, or even when she was using the toi­let in order to do what­ever busi­ness he had to do there. He acknowl­edged that she was embar­rassed by this, but he said he was try­ing to teach her that, within fam­i­lies, there did not need to be the kinds of bound­aries that existed between strangers, that our bod­ies were noth­ing to be ashamed of and that she cer­tainly had no rea­son to hide her body from him, her father.

The inap­pro­pri­ate­ness of this kind of rev­e­la­tion by a teacher in a sixth grade class, I hope, is obvi­ous, as are the ques­tions about what was going on in his house­hold that the rev­e­la­tion raises, but since I have no facts on which to base any fur­ther dis­cus­sion of either of those issues, I am going to leave them there, as obvi­ous impli­ca­tions. I can, how­ever, dis­cuss the fact that these are the only two con­crete, con­scious mem­o­ries I have of the time I spent in Mr. Abernathy’s class. More­over, there is no way to escape the fur­ther fact that plac­ing the first mem­ory in the con­text of the sec­ond raises dis­turb­ing ques­tions about Mr. Aber­nathy him­self. I would, of course, pre­fer not to think about those ques­tions, not least because there is, now, no way to answer them; but I also can­not unask them. I just think it’s sad that it doesn’t mat­ter whether the ques­tions arise more because I am think­ing about these mem­o­ries in the con­text of our cur­rent hyper­aware­ness of child sex­ual abuse than because there was indeed some­thing dicey that my sixth grade gut picked up about Mr. Aber­nathy that I am only now allow­ing myself con­sciously to rec­og­nize. I will never be able to remem­ber sixth grade or the man who had been one of my favorite teach­ers with­out the taint those ques­tions leave.