My students and I need to meet each other halfway, as they learn the kind of talk that I speak and write and I learn theirs, for the combination of these registers is more powerful than either alone.
Gerald Graff, from Clueless in Academe:
How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (13)
Graff’s point in Clueless in Academe is, in part, the same one that David Bartholomae made in “Inventing the University” a decade and a half earlier: students are entering into a new discourse, one that they can only attempt to approximate if they do not understand the value of such discourse. In contrast to Bartholomae, however, who implies that it is the student who fails through the sheer impossibility that they might have access to (all of) what he or she needs to function within academic discourse, Graff asserts that it is academics who hide their labor behind an alchemic “cloud of smoke” (9). As I re-read the writing of these two men, I’m reminded of Jim Mitsui, who taught creative writing at Oliver M. Hazen Senior High: each week, Mr. Mitsui would ask us to ink one of our creations with one of an assortment of stamps. “I don’t believe in grading creative writing,” he would intone from the front of the class, tracing elliptical orbits around his oratory with the strangely “z”-shaped pinky finger on his right hand. “But I’ve got to grade something. So you’ve got to pick something.”
I remember my favorite stamp—the Dragon, the scaly, sinuous, mysterious custodian of emperors under whose astrological sign I was born more than three decades ago. Dragons—mercurial and ambitious, but also influential and well-liked—were special people, and I wanted to be special. But as I picture the stamp now, what stands out for me is its arbitrary nature. I chose it, but from a collection of choices determined for me, not selected by me. If I could have created my own avatar, who would I have made myself out to be? That memory haunts the decisions confronting me now. I can open up a world of choice for my students, but can I ever be free of the specter of the past? Can I offer my students a choice that no one has been offered before? The path I might blaze for the initiates in my charge might seem new to them, but it is far from free—forever Peter Pan’s shadow, striving hopelessly to cast itself in the absence of its master.
The way I remember that Dragon stamp, I imagine, to the way students feel about being graded. It’s not writing that scares them—they write e-mails and text messages, chatter on incessantly to each other between classes, during classes, after classes over chimichangas, cervezas, and cigarettes. They know how to use language. What they don’t know is what we—teachers, bosses, anyone in authority—want them to do with language. To paraphrase Peter Elbow, students are caught standing in front of an audience whose mere presence has silenced them, forced them to search for someone else’s words to pour into the void that so many textbooks assert stretches between their ears (cf. Elbow, 174).
But students are not silent, one part of me asserts. Website rating sites like http://www.ratemyprofessor.com show that students have plenty to say about the classes they take. What I hear from teachers on this subject usually involves the ideological blinders placed on students by the categories available to them—teachers are either easy or hard, helpful or not, attractive or not. Part of me is inclined to agree with the consensus of professorial condemnation. Students so often focus on the quantitative nature of their classroom experience: how much work do I have to do? How easy are the assignments? How likely is the professor to approve requests for extensions or to accept late work? The part of me that has dealt day-to-day with this phenomenon, in which students seem forever willing to delay, to rationalize, to misplace blame, agrees with one director of FYC under which I have worked who theorized that perhaps students simply need to experience the consequences of their own decisions (i.e., to fail) and learn to adjust.
But if Bob Broad is right, and we have not yet given serious consideration to our own complicity in students’ focus on the grade (307), then perhaps the nagging feeling on the edge of my awareness is also right: perhaps students have something to say to teachers about evaluation that teachers, so accustomed to dismissing student thought as shallow, uninformed, undeveloped, instrumentally-focused, have not yet heard. Perhaps, to paraphrase Julie Jung, what students have to say to us is something we need to hear more than we want to hear it. And if that’s true, then maybe we should go one step beyond Bartholomae: instead of involving students “in scholarly projects, projects that allow students to act as though they were colleagues in an academic enterprise” (12, my emphasis), perhaps we should welcome them in earnest as the “members of the academic community” they are so often labeled as in university policy documents. What that means is giving up the idea that the teacher’s job is to introduce students to the modes of thinking and inquiry that teachers already value, and opening ourselves to learning what’s valuable about ways of thinking teachers have traditionally dismissed. To paraphrase Gerald Graff, it means assuming that, in signing up for our classes, students have already met us halfway, and it’s time for us to do our part.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Reprinted in Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 2 – 31.
Broad, Robert L. “ ‘Portfolio Scoring’: A Contradiction in Terms.” Reprinted in Assessing Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Brian Huot and Peggy O’Neill. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 301 – 314.
Elbow, Peter. “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” Reprinted in Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 172 – 194.
Graff, Gerald. “Introduction: In the Dark, All Eggheads are Gray.” In Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003. 1 – 13.
Jung, Julie. Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2005.
