Category Archives: Teaching

Sardines

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I know that I am in the general area of my classrooms.  They are right there in front of me.  I say “they” because I have one for my 1-250 class and another for my 3-450 class.  As you can see homer'sbrainthese classes are back to back with a ten minute break between them.  One might think that it would make sense to assign me the same room for the whole period and not give me two different rooms.  But the university does not know how to make sense of anything.

Instead of one room, I have 2 rooms and they are RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO EACH OTHER.  For God’s sake.  And neither of these rooms has a data projector.  So in the ten minutes between the classes, I must urinate, smoke a cigarette, unplug all the stuff I have had to plug in for my data projector to work.  Put all the stuff on the damn cart, and PUSH IT RIGHT NEXT DOOR (for god’s sake) where I have then to plug all that crap back in again to various sockets and outlets.

Just standing there looking at the two rooms—and I am pretty sure I am looking at the two rooms; I just don’t know which one I has my first class—I get pissed off all over again.  A person, clearly a student, comes and stands next to me.  I assume he is in my class since he seems to be standing there aimlessly.  I say, “I don’t know which room it is.”  “Oh,” he says.  Then he spies a woman going in one of the doors and says he thinks she is in the class.  So we go in that door.

Sure enough it appears to be my class.  A room full of annoying sophomores.  Moreover, not a seat is empty.  They are all mashed in there like sardines.  About 10 years ago I walked into one of the classrooms in this building on the very first day it was opened for use.  I almost exploded.  This is supposed to be a university and part of the purpose although apparently a very insignificant part is to educate.

I walk into a place where such education is supposed to occur and find myself in a tiny box.  I have 25 students but there are 35 seats in the room.  The teacher’s table at the front of the room actually touches the desks in the front row.  Between the desk and the blackboard, I find about 2 feet of space into which I squeeze myself.  If I speak too vigorously, I am likely to spit on students who sit in the front row.  

I have to restrain my fury.  Brand spanking new classrooms with no data projectors built into them and so crammed with seats that I can scarcely move.  The students can’t move either.  And this is very troubling since I frequently break them into groups to discuss readings with each other.  Such groups will be impossible in this room because THERE IS NO ROOM TO MOVE.

I am about to have a hernia.  Millions of dollars have been spent building this building mostly for offices for professors and nobody bothered to speak to a teacher about how the classrooms should be set up.  I am freaking dumbfounded.  Not just by the stupidity of it, but by the clear and present indifference of the powers that be—whoever they might be—to the so-called educational mission of the university.

Then I think.  What the FUCK if we have an EARTHQUAKE?

Data Projector

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Having managed a successful visit to that hellhole of a restroom and having gathered up my stuff, I head out to the classroom at a comfortable amble, only to remember when I am half way there that I have forgotten to pick up my digital data projector.  Now I have to go back nearly to where I started, and I must hurry.

I am very unhappy about that.  I have for perhaps 8 years now been attempting to integrate intodataprojector
the classroom the use of digital equipment, a laptop in particular and a data projector.With these two devices I am able to access my on line syllabus, my blog where students make entries about what they have read, special readings I may have assigned, and the web which I use both as a source of information and a subject of analysis. Consequently, I have repeatedly asked the front office to insure that I have a room with a data projector built into it.

In spite of my best efforts however every other quarter it seems I must return to the office and tell them the rooms assigned me do not have a data projector.  I don’t like doing this since doing it might imply that the staff is incompetent or that perhaps I am senile and forgot somehow to tell them once again that I wanted a data projector for my rooms.  This problem is exacerbated by the ungodly turnover in the front office.  So that just when I have managed fully to indoctrinate the responsible party into my peculiar needs they leave for a better job.

 This time, I must say, perhaps I did not get on the problem early enough.  But I didn’t think there would be a problem soon enough.  In any case, the responsible party tried repeatedly but could not get me a room with a data projector.  No sooner had she told me that, than she moved on to a better job.  Now I have to train a new person about my particular needs.  But perhaps since I was one of the persons who interviewed her for her job, she will think I am important and pay attention to my requests.

So I rush back to the AV place to get the data projector I have reserved for my class.  When I get there, the door is closed because it’s the lunch hour, and for a second I think, oh god Jesus no, but then remember if I knock they will let me in.  So I knock and then knock again and finally somebody opens up and I tell them I am there for the data projector I have reserved for my class.  I expect they will lead me to the data projectors and say, here take this one.

But, no.  Everything is written down and you can only take the one assigned to you as if there was some huge difference between the damn things.  I find myself standing there as a rather oafish looking student worker begins to thumb through some pages to find my particular data projector.  I can’t believe it.  You would think the thing would be in alphabetical order and the guy would just go to the page with the first letter of my name on it.  But, no.  Maybe it’s not in alphabetical order or maybe the guy doesn’t know the alphabet.  Because he starts with the first page, looks at it, turns to the next for ten damn pages before he glumly says, “D-15.”  The code apparently for the projector they have assigned to me.

It’s pretty clear I am going to be late to my second day of class.

Sophomores As Pre-Mature Cynics

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When a person teaches writing, as I have, for 26 years to students who don’t want to take a writing class and resent being in the same room with people who teach it, I feel you have a right to be crabby.  Or at least to pretend to be.  Actually, I don’t mind the word ubiquitous.  I like the sound of it though I have small occasion to use it.  I just throw that in as an example of a big word.  I really don’t like the word “plethora.”    A person who uses “plethora” is a social climber, the kind of person who might be drawn to word power books as a way of cultivating an enormously inflated vocabulary as a means to intimidate others.

I don’t believe in using big words to intimidate others.  People who do that are vulgar and lacking class. If you want to use language to intimidate others, small words will do.

Of course, though, most students who try to use big works are not using them to intimidate but to imitate the big word users known as professors or teaching assistants.  They are humbly trying to conform but screw up a great deal while trying to do so.

But the deeper problem with my sophomores is not that they are probably average to poor writers rather that average to good.  No.  The problem is the sophomore attitude.  In less than a quarter, many conclude that college is a “game.”  Frequently this is a defensive strategy.  They came into the university thinking they would get A’s with little effort.  I do believe that about a quarter of the students I teach have a straight A average upon entering the university.  But then they don’t get A’s; they get B’s.  And sometimes if they are in the sciences they get Cs.

These students, rather than decide they are perhaps stupid or that their education was perhaps inadequate or that they did not study enough but partyed way too much, decide that school is a game, and if they screwed up, that’s because they have not learned the game.  Learning the game is not the same thing as learning at all.  Instead learning the game is best called working the system.  You simply have failed to make the right connections so you can find out who the easy teachers are or you have failed fully to grasp the technique of saying exactly what the professor wants you to say and no more or no less.  And because you have not figured that out, you study the wrong thing or too much and end up feeling like a social outcast among all those people who don’t seem to study at all but still get As.

Because the idea that college is a game serves as a defense for these people, as a cover up for some vulnerability, they can be quite obnoxiously assertive in their claim that college is nothing but a game with nothing of justice to it.  Such students will sometimes say, “I did not get my money’s worth from your class.”  Or: “Your class was a waste of my valuable time.”

I call these sophomores “pre-mature cynics.”

Annoying Sophomores

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But over the weekend, the sophomore problem started bugging me again in multiple ways.  I had all those sophomores partly because the Writing Program didn’t have enough money to teach all the Freshpersons who were supposed to take the course.  Or to put it another way, even if every class had been completely filled with nothing but Freshpersons we did not offer enough classes to take all of the Freshpersons who were supposed to take the course in the year—the Freshperson year—that they were supposed to take it.  Some of the sophomores in my class might have actually tried to get in the course but couldn’t find an empty spot.  So here they were slopped over into my class. plethora

Also quite logically and correctly, no doubt, I assume that most of these sophomores had not tried very hard.  The people who wanted really to get into Writing 2 were people who requested the course on what is called the first pass through the computer system.  But most of these people had probably requested the course on their third pass and of course—what do you know?—but no spots were available. They didn’t want a spot most likely because they had failed the writing placement exam.

That meant as entering Freshpersons, the year before they got into my class, they had not been eligible to take Writing 2 but had to take Writing 1 that is the course a person has to take if they fail the writing placement exam.  Most students do not like failing a writing test and then have to take and also to pay for (and at one time get no graduation credit for) a course to make up for failing the test.  The test is a really stupid test, but the people who flunk it, at least half of them, do not write as well as the people who pass it.  They probably did not pass it because they lacked confidence as writers or were hung over.  So they fail the test and their confidence is further reduced, and then they take Writing 1 which makes them feel stupid or like they have the small pox and their confidence is further reduced.

Consequently by the time they get to my class the very idea of a writing class—and the potentials for humiliation and embarrassment implicit in it (not to mention the horror of a bad grade)—has put them in a pretty rancid mood.  Also the sophomores know as well as I do that the course is for Freshpersons.  Right there in the catalogue it says, “Writing 2 Introduction to Academic Writing.”  And during that Freshperson year when they should have been taking Writing 2 they were “introduced” or perhaps “smacked over the head” with Academic Writing in one of those General Education Courses they didn’t want to take either, but had to because they are required.  Some feel resentment at having to receive a brush up course on an introduction they have already experienced in the concrete form of a low grade.

Already, I suspect they are seeking compensatory structures, as I call them, to hide or muffle their inadequacies as writers. So off I go, “And don’t ever use that thing…What’s it call the thsaraous (I pretend I can’t pronounce Thesaurus).  Yea…that thing.  I know, even though I am old, that they have that thing on computers now.  But never use it. Never, ever use a big word when a simple one will do.  Why use ubiquitous when you can use every where.  Tell me, why the hell would you do that except to impress somebody with your knowledge of big words? What are you trying to do?  Make somebody else feel stupid?  Are you an elitist or something? Well, I am not stupid, I am not an elitist, and I am not impressed.  Also, I want you to know I just hate the word, ‘plethora.’”

Sophomores

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Almost all incoming students are required to take Writing 2.  I don’t mind teaching it because it’s part of the Freshman sequence, and the fall quarter is particularly nice because the class is usually full of students who may have never seen a college teacher up close and personal before.  Perhaps they are not overcome with joy at the prospect of learning, but they are at least excited to be in college.  Also they don’t quite know how college works yet, so I have the opportunity to act in my person as an introduction to the university, most especially to its intellectual standards and challenges.

But when I walked into my first Writing 2 course of the new school year (I am teaching two this quarter), I felt something was off.  The room was dead silent.  In the first quarter at college some students don’t know appropriate student teacher decorum and one of them might do something odd like ask you how you are doing or are you the professor. And usually too they are at least whispering to each other trying to make sure they are in the right class and the right room and at the right time.

But not with this class.  As soon as I sat down to take roll, I saw why.  The class had only a sprinkling of Freshpersons.  The rest were sophomores.  In the Vietnam War, people wrote about soldiers with the thousand mile stare.  These people had been through hell and back and seen it all.  Sophomores have the two inch stare.  They have seen just enough not to want to see anymore.  They slouch, they fidget, they yawn, they stretch, they put their heads on their desks for a few winks, and they don’t want to meet your eye. Sometimes, they lapse unconsciously into grooming behavior and sit there breaking off their split ends.

 Sometimes, I think I could drop dead on the floor, and they would just ignore me.  And then somebody would ask, “How long do we have to wait for the Professor till we can leave.”  Then they would wait the requisite 15 minutes and step over my dead body as they went out.

You might think it takes a year for a Freshperson to become a sophomore.  Actually it takes just two quarter or about one semester.  Teaching Assistants who start teaching Writing 2 in the fall come up to me in the spring quarter and say that they don’t know what they are doing wrong.  Things went well the first two quarters, but now…  I say, hell, you are doing fine.  It’s those sophomores.

So felt a bit disappointed sitting there in front of all those sophomores.  “Damn, I said, you are nearly all sophomores.  I am sorry Freshpersons but you are at a disadvantage.  What happened?  This class is supposed to be for Freshpersons.  Did you put it off?  Couldn’t you get in?”

I might as well have been talking into thin air.  But I got into taking roll and trying to pronounce these amazing names that I can’t pronounce at all and pretty quickly forgot, for the moment, the sophomore problem.

Diddly

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Damn!  I am aggravated.  I don’t need aggravation.  It wears me out.  And I am aggravated by one of those things—I should  by now have developed a tougher hide—that makes me aggravated to be aggravated about.

But I am walking from the parking lot to the the computer room to run some stuff off for my classes that start in a couple of days, and I bump into this guy I have known for years.  Most all of our socializing has been of the parking lot walk and talk variety with few varaitions.  But he’s ok and I like him to the extent that I know him.  So I ask him how many years has he been coming out to the university to get ready for the first day of classes—because clearly that’s what he is doing too—and he says 36.  And you, he asks.  26, I say.

And then he goes on to talk about how much better he has had it than me, what with his being a tenured faculty person who gets to teach literature and pretty much whatever literature he wants, and he wonders how I have stood teaching one thing—writing and being told on top of that what kind of writing to teach—for 26 years.

And the guy does have it better.  He’s about five years older than I  and wasn’t apparently bothered by the draft and finished his PhD in 1968.  Those were the glory days.  Even thought he graduated from nowhere U, his advisor wrote letters for him to three places.  And all three wanted him.  Back then you were a shoe in.  And he got tenure and teaches four classes a year while I teach 8, and gets sabbaticals which I don’t and never will get, and makes at least twice as much as I do, probably 20 thousand more than that.

So I go run off the stuff I was going to run off, and driving home realize that I am aggravated by my talk with this guy.  And it’s hard too because I know he was trying in his own way to show some sympathy for my “plight.”  So why am I aggravated?  It’s the tenure thing I guess.  He got it and I didn’t and as far as I can see he is and was no more qualified to get it than I was or am.

He got it and I didn’t because of timing.  That’s all and the fact that it is makes the whole thing seem accidental and contingent.  What’s that old song, “Born to late for you to notice me…”  .  And then there’s the fact of tenure itself—that it exists and functions as a sort of invisible wall or divide between those of us who have it those who don’t.  He can just sort of assume that I have had it hard because I have been a teacher of writing and he gets to teach literature and he loves doing that, of course.

And assumes I would love it too and must feel terrible that I don’t.  When if the facts be known, I don’t know how people who teach literature these days can justify their existences.  They really aren’t doing diddly—though I am honest enough to admit that I might have preferred the diddly that they are doing to  the diddly I am doing. It’s a more prestigious form of diddly.

So I am aggravated and as usual not about one simple thing but about a whole complex of aggravation.

Doing the Job

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Like the old man said life is making the best of a bad job.  Except for one semester when I was getting my Masters, I had never taught more than one writing class a semester or a quarter.  But when I was working for my PhD theEnglish Department got word that I had pretty well finished my dissertation, so they gave me three classes to teach in my last quarter as Teaching Assistant.  Technically, this wasn’t supposed to be legal, but they figured I would be done with the teaching by the time the paper work caught up to me.

Teaching three classes of writing per quarter is a lot different than teaching one.  By the numbers one is teaching 66% more than one did before.  But that’s not how it works really.  The first class is 33%, the second is 33%, and the third is 50%.  That third one is the back breaker.  I had those classes all on the same day, and by the time I was done, I had nothing left.  I was drained.  Then you had to mark up and respond to 75 papers four times a quarter rather than 25 papers four times a quarter.

I felt pretty bad.  I just couldn’t do all the things I had done when I had taught one class.  I couldn’t see the students as frequently in my office, I couldn’t remember their names, I couldn’t spend the same amount of time responding to their papers.  I told the same jokes over and over in class repeating myself and not even knowing it.  I honestly did not think I was doing my job properly and was letting my students and myself down.

But I had to make a living; I had to make the best of a bad job.  That’s how and what it is.  Rarely does one do anything under the ideal conditions for doing it.  There’s always some major fly in the ointment, like some Moby Dick of a fly.  Some people lay brick on foundations that are crooked while their hands are freezing from the cold.  Some doctors are so emotionally overload with what they have to do they become pill popping addicts and operate on people while completely loaded.  You do what you have to do, I guess, is the motto to make the best of a bad job.

I have heard of places—though they are few and far between—where people teach two writing classes a quarter and have less than 20 people in a class.  That approaches ideal conditions (although I have no idea what other rotten conditions might be interfering with these ideal conditions).  I am a good teacher but I will never know just how good I might be or might have meatcuttingbeen had I been able to teach under ideal conditions.  Instead, what once felt like a short cut is now just the way I do things, what once felt like not being responsible is being responsible.

So you adjust to the bad job.  Screw it!  What’s the use?  You can’t go around flagellating yourself because the conditions of the job make it impossible for you to do the job right.  That means going around being constantly irritated, upset, and chafing at the limitations of what you do.  Instead, you forget that you are making the best of a bad job.  You are just doing the job.