The Writing Prof

A Sound Thrashing is Good for the Soul

2005-07-22T17:25:25Z

Last semester brought me one of those curious, unpleasant-but-interesting teaching experiences that was outdone only by the curiousness of my reaction.

I had an on-line student, Tempest I'll call her, that I allowed into a full class late because she was a public school teacher who needed the course to round out a certificate of some sort. She lived on the other side of the state and hit the right (for me) tone of politeness-without-begging. And at this point, I am reminded of what a poor judge of a person's rationality I am.

Her first writing assignment was graded by the instructor I team-teach the course with, an adjunct who is talented at judging writing and giving helpful feedback, even though her field is Art. Tempest's paper was all wrong, though. It was hundreds of words over the max length, only tangentially on the assigned topic, rife with personal and unsupported opinion, and choked with downloaded images that often weren't relevant to the text. It was a mess, and my partner detailed the mess and -- sunny as ever -- urged a revision in the kindest of tones. (That tone, which falls just short of condescension, barely misses self-deprecating, and has just the faint aroma of authority to it is one I cannot manage, and I think I've avoided a lot of trouble by it.)

Since Tempest couldn't reach my partner by phone but she could reach me, she did. She was enraged, so much so she almost couldn't speak -- and yet there were other people in the background and since this was during regular school hours and the chatter had that familiar break-room sound, I had the peculiar feeling she was calling from a teacher's lounge. She berated me for her failing grade, "You never fail a student, never, never, never, never!" and the phone did that little electronic sizzle that indicates it's being overwhelmed by volume. "To get an F! An F! I am a teacher and I know what that does to a child. You never fail a student!"

I had fleeting moments of giving a rationale for a failing grade, particularly when the option for revision is there, but this was clearly not a time for reasonable remarks. This was a time to ride out the storm and see what happens. The telephone gave me a detachment I wouldn't normally have.

"An F - I know what that stands for! An F stands for Fuck, an F stands for Fuck!" I expected violence next, though I wasn't sure how she would assault me over a land line, but she had climaxed and began to spiral down toward sanity. "Of course I know I should be talking to R.... but I couldn't reach her, and you're my teacher too. And I don't even know if you read my paper, because it was R's assignment and I understand R gave me this grade..."

By this time, other than "hello" I had only responded with a few innocuous "yes" or "oh, I see" remarks, and I was preparing to formulate a sentence when the word "grade" set off a fresh rocket.

"But to turn in a paper and receive an F! An F! I know it wasn't perfect, but an F!" and the phone sizzled again. Suddenly her voice dropped to the level one would use to threaten cockroaches with - "You never give a student an F! Never, never give a student an F."

Well, the ride was about over and I don't exactly remember how it ended. She spiraled back down a bit and threatened to drop the course and I suggested that might be a good idea. So she did.

If I'd know what was going to happen ahead of time, I would have predicted that I would get angry, but that wasn't at all what I felt. Her words echoed around in me for the rest of the day and more than anything I wondered what kind of world she lived in, who she thought we were that would pass every student paper no matter what. Perhaps she teaches elementary school, where every Crayola alphabet drawing is the best she's ever seen.....yet she has her Bachelors and is working on a Masters. Has she never encountered..... But I gave up that line of thinking. Who is crazier, afterall: the person who raises high the flag of her madness, or the observer who tries to make sense of it?

Yet that's what I found interesting (as opposed to infuriating or astonishing or humorous) about this encounter. Every student lives in a different world from mine, and we need some bridge, some common ground, some (I'm lacking the right metaphor) shared language before I can teach. I had assumed some similarity with Tempest because we both taught, and yet that was exactly where we had our greatest disconnect.

And with my students, who more apparently are different from me in so many ways, how am I to know what common language we speak?

Turnitin.com vs the Shakespearean monkeys

2005-04-14T21:15:31Z

This is probably based on voodoo mathematics, but that's because most mathematics has elements of voodoo in my book....

However, if Turnitin.com receives something like 20,000 paper submissions a day during their peak periods, and they file all those in order to check future papers against them, then -- given the assumption that a million monkeys pounding away on a million typewriters for a million years would produce the collected works of Shakespeare -- doesn't Turnitin run the risk of eventually identifying almost all papers they receive as plagiarized?

Oh no, I'm the Plagiarism Professor

2005-04-12T14:37:37Z

Somehow I'm becoming the person people at my college turn to when they have a question about plagiarism, which proves that you can become a recognized expert simply by talking a lot about something you don't understand very well. At any rate, I've been asked to pen an open letter to students about plagiarizing. It may become part of an academic honesty booklet all students receive; the sort of thing no one reads, which I actually found comforting as I wrote this....

Dear Student,

We don’t talk often mention it, but you (my student) and I (your prof), have a relationship. It starts out with money -- your tuition and my paycheck -- and empty names on a class roster or course schedule, but those things drop away and something else soon takes over. That something else is a relationship unique to education, but like other relationships it is based on trust.

Also like other relationships we follow rules that are largely unspoken. They govern such things as who controls the class (that would be me, mostly) and who deserves respect (we share that one) and who can break off this relationship (this one is yours, mostly). These rules suggest that I will manage discussions, set deadlines, define tasks, determine topics, and because you accept these unspoken rules all this seems pretty much alright with you. We trust each other to abide by these rules. I won’t change deadlines at the last minute or embarrass you in front of class, and you won’t demand to change topics or shout to each other during lectures or insist that you grade yourselves.

We also agree to not lie to each other, since our entire relationship becomes useless when that happens, again as it does in life generally. For if I am not telling you the truth about my discipline, the facts and conclusions that make up the knowledge I’m responsible for, then why would you ever want to attend my class? On the other side, if I can’t be sure your tests and papers are truly yours, then why would I bother to care about your learning?

Caring about how much you learn in my class is important to me. When you bomb a test, I wonder what went wrong and how to fix it. When you look confused in class, I change my approach to the topic. When your paper doesn’t work, I take time to wonder why and write to you about how the next paper can be better. But if I find you have cheated, it’s as if you’ve committed an academic violence, like a slap in the face or a petty theft. This crime is as much against the other students in the class as against me, and I wind up offended on their behalf as much as mine. The cheater breaks the trust, divides the relationship, and declares himself an outcast, creating no small amount of distress for us all.

When the course ends, our relationship will likely begin to dwindle, though I will be there at your graduation and selfishly take some pride in seeing you accept your diploma from the president and walk the boards. Afterwards, even years later, I will probably remember things you have written or classes where you spoke. People lodge themselves in our memories for different reasons, not always predictably. Often I remember those who worked the hardest; always I remember the plagiarists.

I wish you the best here at ________. This is what I, as a professor, have built my professional life around.

Sincerely,

Your professor

Plagiarism Grant

2005-03-24T15:13:44Z

My college gives out small grants to encourage classroom research. They can be informal and can include anecdotal, non-quantifiable, impressionistic "data," as along as the end result brings the instructor toward a closer understanding of how students (especially the prof's) learn and how good instructors instruct. Generally these grants max at $500 and are usually payments just for the instructor's efforts, since equipment and supply costs are often nil. Sometime the $ covers a slice of a conference fee. And the instructor is to give a report to other faculty about what has been learned: written and posted, email, 5 minutes at a meeting, whatever.

These are great, but one of the discouraging things they reveal is that so many faculty are clueless about their students, don't have the slightest idea about what they might investigate, and are just plain stupid about classroom research. And these are good -- or at least earnest -- college faculty, people who would genuinely like to do the classroom dance better. I wonder sometimes if it isn't that the role they accept of college instructor isn't so blinding that they can't see beyond the suppositions of their superiority and the infallibility of their teaching style. I expect students to be blinded by their roles, but not faculty.

Well, that's a digression. What I wanted to do here is summarize the grant I'm just starting. I titled it Plagiarism Boot Camp and found out how far a good title can get one; it was being circulated around campus before the approving committee had met on it.

What I propose to do is take writing assignments in our freshman comp and freshman intro lit courses -- whatever faculty are willing to send me -- and to plagiarize papers on them. I'll take no more than 20 minutes, not pay for papers, include as little of my own wording as possible, and use no tricks that I don't think any college freshman wouldn't know. If I really can't plagiarize the assignment -- can't even come close -- I'll let the instructor know that, given my restrictions, I think the assignment is plagiarism-proof. If I come up with a paper, I'll send it to the prof and let him see if he thinks he'd have caught it.

I have two goals here, one overt and one subversive. Overt: I want my colleagues to realize how easy it is to plagiarize their assignments; they naively think they have one or two plagiarists a year, while I find about ten a year, and I'm sure the number is more than either of those. So I'll produce a list of qualities the plagiarism-proof assignments have (I think I already know what they are, but I'm curious what I'll find when I enter the dark side) and make suggestions on how to write the plagiarism-proof paper assignment. I'll also produce a list of assignment characteristics that make plagiarism easy. Subversive: My department turned down a request to give Turnitin.com a trial subscription ($600 or so for the department for a year seemed like a good deal to me), saying that it would be better if we could just assign papers that are impossible to plagiarize because of what we ask the writers to do. I agree in theory; better nobody plagiarizes than we catch people who do. But I think the department is a bit smug in their notion that their assignments are such that plagarized papers simply wouldn't be acceptable.

We'll see. My first discovery has been a surprise to me: this will be fun. I have this disturbing feeling that plagiarizing a paper can become a rather exciting game, far more exciting than actually writing the paper. I was not prepared for this. However, yesterday a friend of mine sent me a plagiarism site that Google headlines as a paid advertiser, and when I opened the site up ($10 per page custom written, delivered in about a week -- that's a bargain) and browsed around some I saw that all the pictures were of people just beaming with joy, almost uproarious. Just what, or who, were they laughing at, I wondered.

Joining a Movement

2005-02-16T20:30:10Z

It was called a movement when I first got involved: the community college movement. That appealed to me by its romance of revolution, but breaking to pieces the chains that kept the poor and powerless in their places. My circle of friends would talk about living lives that forced change. We wanted to break the self-charging cycle of privilege and open up doors for the kids shut out of the candy shop. We were going to be elementary school teachers, social workers, writers, reporters.

And so we graduated and scattered to jobs (them) or graduate school (me) and I first heard of community colleges. They had been around since 1950, but no one anywhere I'd been had ever spoken of them as if they were real. They were places I drove by, nothing more. But suddenly there was a surge of students wanting or needing college and not enough room in the 4 years; they became more selective; the community colleges enrollments grew and so did new faculty positions.

I jumped into a graduate school program designed around community college teaching and was in the movement. That movement opened the doors to give everyone a chance at a college education. It dropped the tuition cost. It planted community colleges within driving distance of nearly everyone in the state. It hired and promoted according to teaching ability, professional development, and contributions to community and profession. It drew people who dropped out or flunked out, who were too poor, who never finished high school. And it needed a teaching faculty who could take real academics, drain the pomposity and egoism out of themselves and their disciplines, and make it all meaningful.

I still like that challenge. I found, like my circle of friends did, that the problems of poverty and privilege are far more complex than we imagined, that enthusiasm and good intentions don't take one as far as we thought. But there is still the feel of a revolutionary movement in much of our thinking about this kind of education. Neil Postman wrote that teaching was a subversive activity, and it is.

Verts: intro and etra

2004-10-04T04:21:06Z

Last week I came across my notes from a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator training session I took some years ago. They take me back to some thoughts I had at the time about student-instructor differences, and the changes education brings.

The Myers-Briggs rough-casts personality types into four either-or categories: Introvert or Extrovert; Sensing or Intuitive, Thinking or Feeling, Judging or Perceiving, the names pretty well describing the categories.

Two-thirds of college faculty are Introvert-Intuitive.

Introverts are attracted to inner worlds of reflection, ideas, thoughts. They think to themselves and need to be asked to share what they’re thinking. They get exhausted by people & activities and retreat to quiet or privacy or intimacy to re-energize. They tend to delay action for more thinking, and they have a hard time remembering names.
Intuitives perceive the world through possibilities, with facts mainly useful as starting points for hypothesis, reflection, guesses, conclusions. They like abstract concepts, learning new skills, facing new problems. They work in bursts of energy and enthusiasm that may feel like inspiration, and this often results in an erratic work routine. They don’t like routine, miss lots of details, keep their attention on the future, and prefer intangible rewards.

Two-thirds of college students are Extrovert-Sensing.

Extroverts direct their energy toward the outside world of people, things, activities. They like action, talking, and often think with their mouths. They prefer to act as (or before) they think. People energize them; that’s how they relax.
Sensing people are all about the facts they get through their senses. They are realistic, down-to-earth, accurate, steady, precise, patient, effective in routines and handle details well. They generally like to keep things simple and to stick with what they know. They are oriented toward the present, the concrete, the conventional.

I am the classic Introvert-Intuitive type. It’s probably helped me read all that lit, write all those papers, plan all those classes, spend all that time shut up with a book and a laptop. And it’s also what I struggle against when I feel insecure about stepping into that packed classroom or when I resist hiding in my office and communicating by e-mail.

I wonder about all the ways my I-N must grate against my students’ E-S, all the ways in which I must be incomprehensible. The further a student goes in his academic trek, the greater the system rewards I-N behavior, which made my education increasingly comfortable and rewarding for me. I suppose for the strongly E-S student it all becomes increasingly awkward, the academic robes becoming increasingly ill-fitted. How flexible the E-S student becomes in adopting all those introverted, isolated, idea-ridden behaviors must have something to do with how easily they ride out the semesters.

Small talk

2004-09-07T12:08:08Z

Some years ago in a basic writing course I met DG. I was in my mid-thirties and she was a little older than I, and older than the rest of the class. Her first paper was rife with fragments, so I told her. Her response, with some indignation: "Well why didn't you tell me it was wrong to write with sentence fragments?" So we talked about how if I explained everything anyone could do wrong before she wrote her first paper, she'd never get to write that first paper.

But I liked her attitude and the way she gritted her teeth with determination to succeed. She had less innate ability than most of the class, but more strength of purpose. Others gave up and some just laid back in second gear, making it to class about two-thirds of the time, often late. DG was always there, and in my office, and in the tutorial center. Everyone knew her and how she was stroking away in the only course she was taking. And she succeeded. Her grade was not great, but she knew success was about more than grades.

At the end of the class she gave me a book she'd liked a lot, with a note on the flyleaf thanking me. Then she disappeared and it seemed no one knew why she quit school. About three years later she showed up again, but this time on the maintenance staff, moving tables, shampooing carpets, mowing lawn. She was the one who always showed up when she was supposed to, whose work never needed to be done twice, who didn't complain. A few times I had coffee with her on her break. Then again after about 18 months she was gone from campus. People said she had quit for health reasons.

More time passed and I got to know a man, EG, who turned out to be her husband. When I discovered the connection I asked about DG and found out she had been institutionalized. She had experienced depression and suspicions and wild imaginings and had separated from E. Then she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, treated with drugs, and placed in the psych ward. E said she didn't respond to his presence any more, and more recently that one surgeon wants to open her skull and cut the corpus callosum.

Somewhere in that brain, probably lost and certainly insignificant, are those classes and conferences she and I had, the small talk on her breaks. I wonder if DG visits these, when she retreats from all else. Someone with both eyes on pure results would have to wonder what the point of that class work was. What did all that effort on fragments lead to? But I need to think less of results and to remember that every exchange is a human thing, existing in the present only. The rest is uncertain. Maybe we carry it on into the future, if there is one.

Ben Jonson says...

2004-08-30T14:06:52Z

Ben Jonson wrote, "No more would I tell a green writer all his faults, lest I should make him grieve and faint, and at last despair. For nothing doth more hurt, than to make him so afraid of all things, as he can endeavor nothing.... Therefore a master should temper his own powers, and descend to the other's infirmity. If you pour a glut of water upon a bottle, it receives little of it; but with a funnel, and by degrees, you shall fill many of them."

Good advice, Ben. Finding that balance in providing feedback on student essays can be hard. Being overly helpful on my side of the comments seems like being beat up on the other side of them. And how much is too much is just one of several balances that need to be struck. How much commentary on mechanics vs comments on ideas? How much on weaknesses and how much praise? And the balance point changes from student to student.

I remember G., a student who thought my marginal commentary would point out every problem in the essay, and revision was just a matter of fixing the problems I pointed out. She became amazingly frustrated with me when I kept telling her that, instead of merely getting commas in the right places, she had to write fluidly, fluently, economically, with perfectly fitting words, with invisible language, with grace.

Thus Ben Jonson writes of filling bottles, the funnel being that teaching thing we do. The bottle analogy doesn’t work for me as well as others, but I like that image of the funnel.

Surprise Plagiarism

2004-08-06T08:49:13Z

Another case of plagiarism came my way, the last paper of the course two days before grades were due in a hurried summer session. It was a surprise. But it's always a surprise, so why haven't I gotten used to it by now?

Part of what lets it sneak up on me, over and over, is that most people don't cheat (even those that seem most likely to, such as the student already failing but with a hope of passing via an uncharacteristically great job on the last paper), and that anyone might plagiarize.

Past culprits:

a small town cop;
an outgoing, 18 year old honors student;
a quiet, studious, shy woman who never missed a class and did every bit of reading assigned;
a probably learning disabled, highly disorganized, strange young man who claimed to be in the military performing "classified" work;
a mid-twenties guy who participated loads in class and had previously aced one of my other classes;
an Army reservist called up for active duty service;
a Criminal Justice major who didn't believe he needed writing skills and missed about half the classes;
a mother of 3, working full-time and taking three summer classes at once (she's my latest);
and a blur of just average students.

The reasons are mostly predictable. No time, too much pressure from other courses or events, the assignment is too hard, procrastination, disorganization. One guy (the cop) just said he guessed he underestimated me.

A few deny the evidence. The shy, studious girl, when I showed her the ezpapers.com essay and her paper (they were identical) quietly mumbled that she could see how I would make the conclusion that she had plagiarized and she would accept the F in the course, but that she would never cheat in a course. The mom this summer said she had found the planetpapers.com essay on the web, saved it to a disk for inspiration, and then had done a copy&paste submission on-line off her disk by accident. "I don't understand how you could think I would plagiarize," she wrote. "I didn’t plagiarize any of the other papers." But her planetpaper.com essay had been edited down to meet length requirements and had a name/course/date heading. When I mentioned this, and the name of the dean she should complain to, I heard only silence.

Articles on why people plagiarize tend to take three views.

It's a mistake. Students think they know what qualifies as plagiarism but don't. They have plagiarized before and received no penalty so they think it's OK. In high school, some of the assignments even asked them to plagiarize. In this view, it's almost as if the plagiarist is the victim. (I do find a few of these, but just a few, and never among the group submitting downloaded papers.)
It's the only alternative, or at least that's what the plagiarizing student talks himself into believing: there's no time, the expectations are unrealistic, I'm too stupid, I can't let others down, it's too hard – and so the only alternative is to download a paper. (This may be the biggest group, and the only ones that I feel some empathy for.)
It's a crime, they know it, and if they get caught then that's a risk they knew they were taking. (I find a good number of these, too. They generally don't complain to a dean or invent bizarre explanations.)

Maybe I do know why each plagiarist still surprises me. It has to do with what attitude I want walking into class with me. Every student deserves an equal shake, a level playing field, an attitude from me equal parts supportive and suspicious. It's part of my job to expect each student to be honest, but to not be naïve, and to still be surprised when I find a cheat. I think that surprise turns out to be important. If I'm not surprised by cheating, then what? I expect it? I'd rather be a bit naïve and occasionally shocked than jaded and occasionally feel smugly justified when I catch the cheat.

to be young and stupid and choosing a career

2004-06-21T07:38:03Z

Interesting discussion in academics_anon about how much professors get paid, begun by someone thinking about entering the profession. That lit a couple of interesting links to web sites and reports and testimonials about professorial salaries, most of which seemed to be from the planet Xenon. Many people outside of academia hear "professor" and they think about the research university, high ceilinged and paneled offices, book deals, three course teaching loads, tweeds, six figure salaries...

Actually, I suppose that TV land professor exists somewhere, as do the salaries, but that's in a land I long ago decided would be my terra incognito. That was along with all those other career decisions that one makes from youth and insufficient knowledge. As I rolled through the senior year of my bachelors I had this clear set of convictions I had thought my way through, matched by an equal number of unexamined values I had absorbed blindly from the culture. And I think I was fortunate to have no idea of the lasting significance of my decisions.

I believed:
 the world of work was ruled mainly by greed.
 young people were more open minded, progressive, liberal, unorthodox and experimental (all things intrinsically good) than older (say, over 30) people.
 new and different meant better.
 you should choose a career according to how well it uses your talents to help others.
 one person can make the world a better place.
 you save people's lives by educating their minds.
 a major flaw in most people was their pride, which drove them to be phoney.
 thus, a constant goal should be to stay real and open and honest.
 no one was better than anyone else, so any system of grading or evaluating or discerning or judging was damaging.
 we couldn't really know what's right, so it was better to like others and be liked in return.
 an ersatz conspiracy by those in power worked to maintain the status quo; this was known as "the system" and was bad.

Such a disorderly pile of assumptions to build a future upon. I would throw maybe half of them out if I were picking my career now, and add a few more. I wouldn't sneer at wanting to make a good living wage, and I wouldn't discredit all the efforts of the previous generation or be quite so smug in my ridiculous belief that I knew what I was doing. Probably I would make a much worse, more practical decision.

The Dangers of Favors

2004-06-04T11:04:00Z

My colleague, Chas, says that the student who is malicious toward the prof is certain to be the student who the prof has given a break. She bases this on experience, and a healthy love of irony.

As for experience, there is her case of the student whose final grade tipped from a D into an F based on an uncharacteristically bad final exam. So Chas accepted one late revision that put the grade back on the borderline and gave the student a D. Ten days later Chas was in the Academic Dean's office, with her grade book open, defending her grading before the student, who thought she deserved a B. The student had lost several papers with exceptionally bad grades, but showed the Dean one of her B papers. The Dean looked at the grade book, read the paper and looked across the table at Chas.

"You gave this a B? What, did you feel sorry for her?"
"No. A little maybe. She was trying."
"Well not hard enough. Girl, is this the best you can do?"

The complaint session didn't last much longer. After the student had left, our dean turned to Chas. "That girl can't write." She sighed "I know." This is a story Chas likes to tell. (We loved this dean, by the way. She didn't stay long enough.)

I think I'm brewing my own case for complaint right now. It's in my freshman comp course and involves a student with a low placement test score. She somehow registered in my course without being tested (which college policy does not allow), having missed the first class (which college policy allows), tested, made my second class where she turned in her first paper, and then got the results of the placement test, placing her in a basic skills course. Then she started to make her case. It went like this:
 The first paper was not bad, about average with for this class.
 She got tutoring on her own for the first paper, her high school English teacher (which, by the way, is a maneuver fraught with dangers that I should write about some other time).
 She needs this course so she can transfer it back to her high school in order to graduate this summer. Without it, she doesn't graduate from high school.
 Her mother, by phone, plead much less effectively, saying explaining the high school thing, that her daughter was paying for the course entirely on her own, that she just wanted a chance, that she was a good English student. It didn't help that she kept interrupting me.
 Plus I liked the way she made her case: logically, aware of her own limitations, with a plan for how she would succeed in the course. She was organized and seemed mature. She didn't spoke of how much she needed the course, as her mother did; she spoke of how she would do the work. She sat in the front row.

So I looked at the placement test and saw its problems: one thesis in the intro and an entirely new one in the conclusion, with the body disconnected to either; some particularly silly subject-verb agreement errors; vague pronouns. Most of this wasn't present in the first paper, plus we were already about to start the third of the 12 course summer session. So I let her into the course.

When I told her she was in she said, "Really? Are you sure?"
Funny question, I thought.
"No, but we'll give it a try anyway."

On the fourth meeting I had a paper to return, one that made all the errors of the original paper, and she wasn't in class. Neither was her best friend, also a high school senior, who did place into the course. She has missed turning in two assignments and has no idea of what the next assignment will be. But the one I expect the trouble to come from will be the mother. And our current dean is much more interested in public relations than academics.

Giving a Book

2004-05-21T13:05:01Z

Something in a book tries to rise outside of time, to stand with something like permanence. We try to use that to recognize an English graduate every now and then. Here's how.

Take the best writer graduating and name her as the outstanding writer of the class of 200_. Go to the warehouse store or the discount book store and buy a good book, something hardback and beautiful, something you'd like to have but probably wouldn't buy for yourself. Write something on the inside cover about her, name the college, sign it, wrap it in foil paper. Buy a card and make a presentation at the graduation brunch.

We did that last week, but don't do it every year. We should.

I like to think of those books, packed off to universities, later to grad schools, later dressing up a bookshelf made of planks and bricks, finally finding a niche in a living room somewhere and eventually, some summer or some vacation, maybe even being read. Students forget me, forget the classes, forget the cardboard glory of being the best writer in a community college graduating class, but there's something about gift and a signature. Maybe it's the surprise of something never associated with grades and classes, but students respond even to a graduation card, a get well wish. And a book?

I like to think of those books, years later, opened and the inscriptions read. Someone remembers writing well once; someone remembers a place where his words were honored; someone remembers an English prof that was moved by what he wrote. Some books eventually are traded away, donated to a library rummage sale, boxed and forgotten in garages. But no matter where the books go, until the things are burned or fall apart, someone will open the cover and read the inscription and wonder who we were.

Last week I found a book, lying face open in the crosswalk on Main St. Cars had driven over it, road texture pressed into its cover. I snagged it on my way across. Published in 1912, and amazingly all there, it's called The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour, or The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain, and it sits on my desk now. Inside the cover it reads Leo E. Osborn, Box 263 and the name of a little town 45 minutes from here. I wonder who he was and how old he was, those 90-some years ago when he wrote his name and address in the book. I wonder if I'll know anything about him when I read his book.

I walk that crosswalk most days on the way to a coffee shop, feeling curiously grateful for its gift.

Mother's Day Story

2004-05-11T04:39:52Z

One of my students, McH, is a woman in her mid-to-late thirties who never smiles, her face a mask. She walks in evident pain with a body rocking sort of limp. She is in our Learning Center more than any other student, and the LC director told me her problems, including head trauma that continually rattles her ability to concentrate, stem from a car accident that almost killed her.

Friday she stopped by my office to make sure she had an assignment right. She's one of the best students in the class, yet she didn't have it quite right. I asked her what program she was in.

"I've just changed. The advisor in the Counseling Center gave me a test that said Business would be good for me, so I am in the Business program."

"Well what do you want to do with your education?"

"I don't know."

"OK. So why are you in school?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" she asked, as if I thought she shouldn't be in school.

"I mean, why do you want to take the courses you're taking?" I felt like the conversation had turned an unexpected corner into strange territory where we weren't really speaking the same language.

Then suddenly, for three or four minutes she spoke intensely of her son: from the age of 12 buying and restoring and reselling cars, doing algebra problems in his head but struggling to do the easiest writing assignment, traveling two hours each way for special tutoring McH paid for, taking class notes in his own coded language, attending summer school every year so that until this, his junior year, when he is deciding to give up. We talked a bit about learning disabilities; her son is just now getting tested.

Then I said, "You know, what I asked was why you were taking classes."

"Oh. Before my accident I always did many, many things at once. I was all about multitasking, working two jobs, at every school function. Now it hurts to move, every step, even sitting still. It hurts."

"And you take classes..."

"To show my kids that you don't stop living because it's hard. I live in a little box and that's all I can handle. That box is my son. I go to school for him. Once I know he's OK, then .... I don't know. Something else. I can't think about that now."

"I understand," I said, thinking about the poetry paper, for which had I required just one source, just 500 words, and for which she had written twice that, bringing in five sources, disassembling the poem nearly syllable by syllable and in the process completely overlooking the assigned topic. She'd put the poem in a box, put it under a microscope, climbed in after it and closed the lid, never stopping to look at the poem as a whole. The paper was fragmented, piecemeal, nearly incomprehensible in places. Then she had rewritten it to perfection. Every task became its own separate little box; she climbed into life, one box at a time.

This first Friday in May I had a Mother's Day story, one I couldn't do anything about but marvel. I couldn't make McH not hurt with every step, couldn't dissuade her son from dropping out of school, couldn't enable her to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, couldn't even give her a break (not that she would need it) on the paper she is working on now.

So what am I to do with this story, with all these stories of my students? Mainly my job, I suppose: teach and be truthful. But also to be a witness, to ask about their lives, to hear their stories.

Interview Season

2004-05-06T06:05:57Z

It's interview season, and has been since March. I have been sitting in on several search committee meetings with candidates; I find the whole process fascinating, even moreso when I'm not responsible for the paperwork and I can just show up and talk. Across the years I have gathered a list I should start including here: Things you should never say when interviewing for an English position at a community college (and yes, I've heard these).

Candidate 1
Q: What authors would you like to teach if you could teach anyone at all?
A: Oh, Hemingway I think.
Q: OK, anyone else?
A: Uhm. Not that I can think of right now. Certainly not Faulkner.
Q: No?
A: Definitely not, not for Freshmen. He's too difficult.
(And so I'm thinking, "In all of literature she likes only Hemingway? And oh yes, William Faulkner, whose "A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning" are probably in 90% of all Freshman Literature texts, is certainly too hard for people to read....")

Candidate 2
Q: So what do you like to read for pleasure? Summer reading?
A: Nothing.
Q: No?
A: No, this job has ruined me for reading. I mean, I keep up with the journals, but fiction? No. When summer comes I put on a backpack and I'm into the woods until August.
(Does she really think a college instructor of English should never crack anything but journals, so many of which are so deplorably written?)

Candidate 3
Q: Have you come across any research that suggests how we should approach developmental writing instruction at the college level?
A: No, it just doesn't exist as far as I know.
(And meanwhile I'm thinking that I've just read a cover letter from someone who spoke of Mike Rose and Mina Shaughnessy -- oh wait, that would be this guy.)

Candidates 4 through 7
Q: So do you have anything you'd like to ask us?
A: What is considered full-time at this college? Will I have to teach 12 hours each semester?
(Oh you poor puppy. Only in the 4 years and down south is a full load 12 hours. Community Colleges – in the northeast at least – have 15 hours as a standard teaching load, and most of us teach 18 at least once a year just to keep us in coffee and scones.)

OR

A: I have been active in my union in my present job and the administration has become pretty hostile. What kind of relationship does your union have with the administration?
(Why don't you ask that of the president and deans when you meet them. She did, and that was the last we ever saw of her.)

OR

A: Will I have to teach composition?
(Yes, with whips and chains we will force you into the Freshman Coliseum. I hate it when faculty speak of teaching writing with a look on their faces as if they hated getting their hands dirty.)

OR

A: How many freshmen will I have to teach?
(Is five enough? Are fifteen too many? Don't worry pal, we supply you with armor and an automatic weapon.)

Sometime I wonder why they don't just say, "Guys, I really don't want you to hire me, so let's just all go home early today."

writingprof @ 2004-05-05T11:31:00

2004-05-05T08:39:57Z

A discussion among some of us writing instructors landed on the topic of how hard we grade. It started out with a, "Students seem to think I'm a hard grader." These were mostly teachers with experience but new to Freshman Comp, and I enjoy just listening to them.
"Sure they think you're a hard grader. Students think everyone's a hard grader."
"Well what if they're right? I mean, shouldn't they know?
“Shouldn't you know if you're grading too hard?”

That, I thought, was a good question. I suppose I've taught somewhere between 100 and 150 sections of Freshman Comp, and from that experience I am sure I have a sense of how hard is too hard, but I am not sure I could justify my standards to some innocent academic bystander. I'm not even sure how to talk about it, but it seems that in thinking about setting standards I am obligated to four groups. Other groups might like me to be obliged to them (college administration, parents of my students, NCTE, my union) but I think of them more as advisory voices that come and go, rather like Job's three friends. Here are my obligations.

The students: comparatively, all the students I have had, and how hard a course needs to be to lift their efforts and expectations so they wind up write better than they thought they could, but not so hard that they just give up, smoke churning from their ears. I think, whether they do or not, they come to me in confusion and with a want that I have contracted to respond do. They are the occasion one rises to meet.
My own professors: particularly those that cared about my writing, that I do it well. I don't often think about the role-model function of professors and don't enjoy thinking of myself as such, but I can't deny that the few who really knew something about writing have set examples I try to live up to, including standards.
My profession: and here I am thinking about writers even more than teachers of writing. Novelists and poets, from as far back as I can remember, have done more to give my life meaning than any course, any lesson, any teacher, any experience. I feel a debt of gratitude, on those too rare moments when I reflect on it, to those who have used the language to make life mean more, out of that brief span between the first page and the last page, the opening and closing lines. I should be passing along that reliance on writing that both writer and reader have for pushing back the horizons, expanding the mind, multiplying the possibilities one has.
My colleagues: both those who work earnestly and hard as teachers, setting a standard of effort for me, and those who will have to read the muddled thinking of my students. And it is thinking that they count on us writing teachers to teach, even though they will talk more about spelling and fragments than cracked logic and unsupported conclusions. Though all faculty teach thinking, it seems to me that we teachers of writing do this for the academy at large more generally and broadly than any other discipline: we drive students to think more deeply and more thoroughly than they have before. Just as language is a primary teacher of thinking in a child's development, writing carries on that task in adults. Good writing is always good thinking and always engenders more thinking, just as bad writing always conveys collapsing thinking and yields nothing from the reader.

Comics and Professors

2004-04-28T04:29:31Z

This was probably one of those situations where the idea seemed great but the writer just couldn't get it to work. The article was titled "What I learned about teaching from stand up comics." It turns out he didn't learn very much: sometimes you have to improvise, not every joke works, save the best routines for when you need them.

But it is a good idea, and it feels like there should be something to learn. Like maybe...

Some percentage of teaching - some very high percentage, I suppose - is acting. It's a performance. For years one of my colleagues launched herself from her office, generally four minutes late, muttering "IIIIIIIIIt's show time!" It took me years to realize why she was always late for class; it was her way of making an entrance. Every routine requires an entrance.

Or maybe...

Whatever Jay Leno does to be funny when he doesn't feel funny is what we do to teach brilliantly when we feel stupid. Or at least to get through a class talking more sense than the people who are sitting down. Where it comes from we don't know exactly, but put the chalk in the hand, blank looks on a couple dozen faces, and a short story on the burner and some sort of autopilot professor take over.

Or maybe...

It's the way we -- teachers and comics -- live in between the things we planned to say and the things they expect us to say, a place that none of us knows but suddenly appears when we get there. The thing that gets the great laugh is like that, happens there. So is the repartee that suddenly stretches the horizon in a student's mind by a centimeter. You can almost hear it. It sounds like applause.

a reason to teach

2004-04-21T04:26:17Z

All through grad school, during job interviews, sitting across from my colleagues, sitting down to interview applicants, I've wondered why people want to teach. Sometimes it's a case of, "Hey you could do just about anything, so why did you settle on teaching?" Usually, though, it bounces the other way.

"Hey, you can't teach, don't like students, complain about the paperwork and haven't changed your lecture notes in eight years, so why did you ever settle into the professoriate?"

Of course I never say these things aloud, but I can't help wondering. Dr. MnG, for instance, from grad school, chain-smoking his way through incomprehensible lectures that crackled with disdain for the 37 smudge-eyed students cramped into ancient desk-chairs. In his office he spoke only questions, fired from the hip and thoroughly unanswerable. In the hallway he ignored us. Questions we asked in class he bounced back to us in mimicry. Questions he asked in class were designed to prove how little we comprehended. One evening he asked each of us in turn just how much of the assigned reading we had completed, one by one, pointing his cigarette to indicate who should speak. From a blue haze in front of an aged actual slate blackboard, he turned ruddy as the room grew hotter and every student but one confessed to reading none of the texts.

So now, years later, I still ask my garbled memory of Dr. MnG, "Why, oh why did you choose to stalk the classroom?" Half of us in that classroom that night were high school teachers, churning away our nights to earn a masters before our temporary teaching certificate and our livelihood expired. Half of us were full-time grad students and TAs. All of us had started out on this crooked path because we loved literature, but we saw no love of the works you autopsied for us, and no joy in seeing us handle the literary corpse. And if love didn't drive you then what: fear, hatred, obsession, greed? Was it just the power to wilt our pretentious optimism, to expose the tissue paper foundation supporting our conceits? You proved yourself so much smarter than we, but no one would ever expect anything else.

In the TAs' bull pen office we grumbled into our coffee over freshmen and MnG, defied by one and vilified by the other and in the end resolving mightily to never humiliate as you, to have a human reason for teaching, to let love drive us. There Dr. MnG, could that have been your purpose?

Quirks in the Job Search

2004-04-19T05:42:59Z

I've been sitting in on interviews for a few faculty positions my college is hiring. This searching for faculty is a funny process with unspoken rules and hidden agendas. Hiring committees I'm familiar with are usually made of two or three faculty from the department doing the hiring, a faculty from outside the department a department coordinator and maybe an Assistant Dean. Sometimes there's an alpha faculty who rules the committee. I have seen committees where the quirks of the members are part of that hidden agenda. Not quirks, you understand, I have seen recently, but you wouldn't look too long before finding a member who...

... only likes people from his alma mater, or conversely opposes any applicant from a particular background: private school, state school, university, ivy league, west coast.....la-de-dah.
... is looking for a particular trick: someone to liaison with high school English departments, someone to take on that obnoxious dean, some overeager greenhorn to pick up the slack from the senile Chaucer scholar, someone to take on the comp load.
... is against hiring anyone who knows more than he does in some particular field. Sometimes it's a broader field, like writing instruction or literature. Sometimes it's just some specific little fiefdom, as Jane Austin. The goal is to weed out applicants who might challenge his position as the big fish in his particular pond.
... has some personal characteristic needed in order to balance the department: race or gender, age or nationality.
... figures that anyone who knows what he knows doesn't know enough, and so waits for applicants to stump him.
... doesn't really know what he's looking for and so is attracted to whatever magnet pulls strongest on the iron filings of his soul: a 100 watt smile, a wit, a curvy calf, a firm handshake, charisma.

So how is our hero (the applicant for a faculty post) supposed to know any of this? You can't. What I would do is just swing for the fence. I'd assume that the person they are looking for is me, and let them know just who I am.

Critizism

2004-04-15T06:17:18Z

DW is one of my students. I don't know as much about her as I do many of my other students because she's an on-line student. I do know she's mad, though, when she sends me this message:

I think as a teacher you should give more positive feed back ..not as much rude critizism. It only makes the students feel like crap. It would help if you gave advice on how they could make a paper better rather than tear it apart. The kind of comments you gave made me feel like i cant do any better....now if you gave me advice on how to make it better...maybe my work could become better!
Just some food for thought!

DW is in the second in our required two-course sequence of writing courses. The English faculty coordinate the two pretty closely, so usually I can assume some solid basic skills by the time students reach this course. But DW is struggling with the basics: popping out little rambles with no thesis, fumbled tenses, mismatched pronouns, missing words. She invents her own source citation format and redesigns assignments. And all these errors are Teflon; regardless of my comments on returned papers, each one has the same problems.

My first response is to do a little rant. Doesn't DW realize those errors I mark are so she can fix them, so she can stop doing them next time? Or that no matter how much I could praise her paragraphing, that won't help her learn how to cite her source? How am I to state in positive feedback that she has not followed the directions of the assignment? Where is the positive spin I can put to "I don't know what this sentence means"? What does she think my closing remarks about revision are if not "advice on how to make it better"?

Just as I'm deciding how to reduce her to toast and ashes, reason kicks in. "Old fool," he says familiarly, "what she's really saying is underneath the words. Look there."

"Like a dung beetle under a rock" is my reply. But I look anyway. Suppose she's as lost as a puppy can get, I think. She really doesn't understand that my comments are not designed to hurt but to correct; she really does think that it's rude for a teacher to point out errors; she perhaps can't learn from comments that are not sugar-coated; and schooling for her is about how she feels, not what she thinks. Maybe her past has spoiled her for learning. Certainly her freshman composition course has conspired with her inability, passing her along without marring her expectation for feel-good education, and my college can bear some of that blame. (In cases such as this I almost always resist the temptation to dig out her registration records and find out what fool gave her a C- in comp when she can't perform at the level of an average high school junior. I have to work with these people, and knowing which ones are twits would not make that easier, or change their twittiness.)

The urge to scorch has passed and now I sit down to explain myself to her. Yet what good will that do, and do I want to initiate a debate about my "critizism"? Actions will have to speak for me, not words. Either DW will improve and pass or simmer in her present state and fail. It has much more to do with her than me, and for her it is going to be about much more than this one course.

"Just some food for thought!" she wrote. I see she was right about that.

A Story for a Teaching Philosophy

2004-04-13T05:10:58Z

Many MA/PhD programs with graduates heading for teaching dip their people into the waters of a Placement Center; they come out with a generic resume, cover letter, and teaching philosophy statement. The idea is that the happy applicant replaces "Jane Doe" with her name and she's ready to job hunt. It's not that these materials are bad; it's just that they aren't good: fill-in-the-blank resumes, no personality cover letters, bland statements about inspiring students to learn.

A summary of your teaching philosophy especially: instead of unscrewing the top of your skull so someone can look inside, you hand them an anonymously written, one-size-fits-all paragraph? This is how you take something intended to help us think about ourselves as teachers and turn it into a sales pitch.

Anyone who wants to teach should grind his way through a teaching philosophy. Put it down on paper and then decide whether or not to show it to anyone. But another way to get underneath your own skin is to find a story that catches your relationship to your teaching. It becomes something like your archetype, your fable, your parable: a plot-character-conflict-theme intersection that explains something about you and your teaching. For instance, here's mine. (Once upon a time a community college English professor wanted to work out a snapshot of his teaching....)

After ranging around a bit, I thought of the story of Jesus creating the miracle of loaves and fishes in order to feed a crowd of his followers, out in a wilderness area, faint with hunger. A boy volunteered his lunch, a couple fish and five small loaves of bread. Christ blessed the food, broke the bread and began handing it out. By the time he was done 5,000 people were fed and the leftover food was more than the boy had to start with. The master rabbi as a model for a fumbling, seat-of-his-pants teacher seemed like a great idea at first, but then not so much. I could teach for another twenty years, doubling what I know about the classroom every year, and never perform miracles. Then the light bulb: I wasn't the Christ figure; I was the boy.

That's me in the classroom. I bring what I have to class, and it may not be much, but I pass it around out and somehow it multiplies. People learn. Some start to write like they never have before, and I'm not entirely sure why. When they do learn, partly it's due to their effort and partly due to mine, but the really good results seem like the product of more than just those efforts. That's the miracle.

There are other intangibles that my story can point me toward. It keeps me from the smugness of thinking that I'm the source of my students' success. It keeps me looking for the miracles. It keeps me from giving up on students I think aren't going to make it.

And yesterday, while I was hauling brush to a bonfire on the last day of vacation, I was thinking about this journal entry and, on another line, wondering about a small flock of students who have disappeared from my freshman composition course. It doesn't bother me so much that they've disappeared; they leave for a world of reasons, some of them good. It's what they leave behind, unclaimed and enhanced with a filigree of my marginalia dancing across their papers.

Hours of my work, I think as the flames peak higher, stashed in a folder, eventually to be thrown out. Wasted effort. Yet, my story tells me, that's not my concern. My job is just to give what I've got, doing my best and waiting to see if miracles happen. Sometimes they don't.

The File that Feels like Guilt

2004-04-06T10:25:49Z

It only takes a few years of teaching before you start building a file in your memory labeled Moments that Haunt. Mostly the file holds blunders that somehow didn't quite get you disciplined, embarrassed, sued or fired. Those moments I sometimes can correct or confess or apologize for, but always I turn them over and over in my mind until they become like worn stones that the tide only rarely exposes.

Anyone who teaches but doesn't have these moments (or this file) should leave the profession. We can survive when our business people, politicians, lawyers and law enforcement have no conscience. We're doomed, on the other hand, if our artists, poets, parents and teachers are without conscience.

But I mention these star points of guilt to contrast with another kind of entry in that file of moments that haunt one. These moments escape labeling and it's a puzzle why they last. They avoid classification, don't bear that heavy gift of guilt or shame, lack drama, but still get hung up on some frayed neural traces. Here's one.

H. was a nineteen-year-old in my Freshman Comp course, three months out of high school on a full tuition scholarship. She had reached the top 10% of her graduating class without having to work much and had wanted to be off with her friends at college a half state away. However, tuition was as far beyond the reach of her parents as the college was, and when they offered her a car if she'd take the free ride at our local community college, she caved. And so she arrived in my class, well wheeled but dissatisfied.

I liked H. Well, I like most of my students, but I thought she had potential for excellence. Her in-class writing was almost exceptional; homework essays were ordinary with little flashes of light; attendance was spotty. Then on the major research paper she dropped it: clever idea but poorly researched, disorganized and documentation botched five different ways. It failed, she failed, and the last day of classes I got a call from her mother.

"I would like to talk about my daughter's grades in your class."
"Well, I'm sorry but I'm not free to do that. Grades are confidential, so I need her permission to tell you anything about what she earned in my course."
"I just don't understand why you would make such an important assignment without giving your students time to do it well."
"Oh, I..."
"Or without giving them a chance to revise their work"
"Mrs. H..."
"How do you expect people to get better if you don't give them a chance to learn from their mistakes?"

Since I make my research assignment two months before it's due, accept drafts for preview, and expect students to work through revisions with me, none of which H. did, I know H. has been trying to explain away her failing grade at my expense. That happens. And sometimes mom contacts me and asks if she and her daughter can come in to discuss her poor performance and my instructorly inadequacies. I always say yes.

OK. All that is prologue for this sticky memory that came next, one afternoon in my little office during finals week. H's mom is polite and reasonable and I ask H if it's ok for me to speak openly about her grades and she nods, but with a look on her face that I think I can read. It says, "This all started out as an excuse. I should have aced this course in my sleep but I let it slip through my fingers and Mom went ballistic so I blamed it on this Hitler comp teacher. Suddenly I was on a train, couldn't get off, and saw this moment in Hitler's office rushing irresistibly at me. Oh just shoot me."

So I show Mrs. H. the handouts, the schedule for revisions, the missed due dates. She asks about attendance and I look at H. and she explains she'd missed a lot of classes. I thought, at that moment, the mother and daughter looked a lot alike. I wondered how long it had been since they had been tuned in on the same wavelength like this.

"Oh dear," H.'s mother said to her. "You had two years of college coming for free. All you had to do was keep a 2.0 cum" and I saw that failing my class was losing H. her scholarship. It wouldn't have changed anything had I known. I was on that same train with H., headed irresistibly to this moment.

I never saw H. again and don't know what happened to either woman after they walked politely from my little office. I do wonder why they keep coming back to my memory, though, and why it feels just a bit like guilt when they do.

Stepping Out of Reality

2004-03-29T07:37:18Z

Every once in a while I slip into the surreal, usually pushed by my students. I enter their crazy world and when I come out I have to find someone to confirm that, yes, there's nothing wrong with me, that really was lunacy.

N. is an adult student who has been taking a few classes at a time, working days. She has come through our basic writing and math courses, passed freshman comp after a few tries and now is in an intro lit course my colleague (Chas.) teaches. N. is about half way through her degree and is beginning to run into walls. She works as hard as she possibly can, memorizes, re-reads and re-re-reads texts, but from what Chas says, it just isn't enough.

N. is never downbeat, but never quite knows which end is up, either. When she comes to me for advisement, she reports that everything is fine in her courses: nothing but passing grades. I'm her academic advisor, and somehow I can't see myself getting into a "No you're not/Yes I am" argument. Maybe that's shirking my duty, but I go along with her assessment of her academic progress. Her past grades, actually, are about average so maybe she is right. I didn't know it at the time, but by that point I had left reality.

So we talked about her degree requirements, how she'll need some sophomore literature courses in the fall, how great things are going. None of this is going to happen, of course. But if she does transfer, which also won't happen, she'll need a World History Course. So I say,

"You need another history course."
"I'm taking U. S. History 1 now."
"Right, you need that plus a World History course. And World History 1 is being offered next semester."
"But I'm taking a History 1 course now."
"OK, but which history is it?"
"It's a 1."
"And what does it cover? Is it U. S. or World History."
"Um, I'm not sure."

I should have stopped her there. How can she be 8 weeks into a course and not know it's about U. S. History? I know it's U. S. History from the transcript she has. Why doesn't she know it? So I say,
"It's U. S. History 1 that you're in now. You need a World History course and World History 1 is being offered. Why not take that?"
"Well I'm in a history course now."

I started out being aware that I was being very patient with N, but by now, somehow, I've lost that. It seems like I'm actually trying to explain something difficult. Except, in the back of my mind I'm thinking about Abbott and Costello. I say,
"OK, that's U. S. History 1. This course next semester is World History 1"
"So......what's the difference between U. S. history and World history?"

And at that point I understand I've left reality. I hear myself say, "Well U. S. History is about the history of the United States, but World History studies the history of the whole world," and I make an encompassing gesture with my hands to signal that the world is a big place. But I'm watching myself as I finish this advisement and complete the registration, the way people who die and come back to life say they've watched the efforts at resuscitation. It's sort of nice there, waiting for N. to leave so I can go back to reality.

N. leaves and I tell Chas. about the history question. "That didn't happen" she says. "It couldn't."
This does not help.

Truth, Trust and the Ways of a College Classroom

2004-03-23T09:55:04Z

This profession of teaching is in some ways a bizarre notion. Our wares are perfectly invisible. We peddle words, and people come to hear these words because they trust that the words are valuable. They trust that we have some sort of truth to open for them, and for this they will pay more than they pay to hear Jerry Seinfeld in person or the Rolling Stones in concert. I'm impressed by that (though I'm jealous of the applause); we all should be impressed by that.

Lately I've been thinking that we handle our truths too carelessly, and that we too often teach the facile lie. I've been thinking about how little we mind being lied to, and how this assaults the foundations of our profession.

It's five years ago in August on a Saturday morning. I'm in my dining room and on the phone with an enraged mother. Her daughter has failed my freshman composition class for plagiarizing most of her research paper. Magazines were named at the end of every paragraph, but no quotation marks were used, no specific material was matched to the magazine names, and nothing like proper research paper form was used. When I read the magazines, I found that most paragraphs came unchanged from the magazines, less than 200 words of the long paper were hers. As the mom tells me how much she paid for the course, how they needed a new washer but spent the money on tuition instead, how this community college isn't the university in town, and even there this sort of garbage isn't required, how people who left college because of me advised her not to take the course –- I wonder how we got here.

It's not that I'm stunned because the student didn't pick up proper citation process from lectures, class examples, textbook reading or the cautions in the assignment handout. It's the not uncommon sense students have that I couldn't really mean anything by all this; that in my teaching I'm "just saying" things are important, but really they are not; that asking students to give credit when they borrow someone else's words or ideas is an unrealistic standard to set. But this mom's furious and I'm embarrassed for the both of us. I want to go back to bed; for the moment, I want to give it all up, change my standard, and say "y'know isn't really that important. I want to teach lying.

And faculty do teach this, all of this. When crediting sources for a summarized article isn't important, when a quotation can appear in an essay without mention of where it came from, when sources must be used but no mention is made of their citation, when a block of professionally perfect prose can appear in the ramble of a student paper and no questions are asked: faculty teach that truth is what gets the assignment done. Truth is what fills in the blanks, what satisfies an assignment, what makes up the word count. Well who cares, anyway?

But when we cheapen the definition of truth, we cheapen the basis for our own credibility. The economy of our profession is built upon truth. When it is devalued to the point where any liar can download a paper and turn it in and we are just too tired to call him on it, then what is the value of our own words? If we aren't peddling truth, then we had better seek a new profession, because Jerry Seinfeld has a better gig, hands down.

The Mail Clerk's story

2004-03-22T07:09:15Z

Spooky T., the mail clerk, has written a story, which has moved through shadowy processes until it reached me. Those processes, in addition to whatever creative magic T. worked, included some amount of faculty shuffling and some hem-hawing and eventually T. landed in my office with an "I've written a story" confession.

My hem-hawing lasted about a week and then I found him on my way out one evening and asked about it. He pulled it out of his cart and I was committed. He handed two typed sheets to me as though it were a heavy package.

The story was more summary than story, a sketched series of actions with two-dimensional characters, one overly good and one overly bad, Americans in today's Iraq. It's the sort of story and situation where one says, "Interesting -- I like the way you've grabbed a timely topic. This has the ring of current events to it."

But I didn't. We crossed paths a few days later and took a few minutes in a hallway. I mentioned a few things he could do to make the story better and he looked a little confused and we went separate ways. I wonder if the words I gave him, my version of the truth, were really any better for him than that pat interesting response. Probably not, though they were better for me, and sometimes that's the only guide you have.

They used to call it cheating and it used to be bad

2004-03-15T07:11:00Z

A faculty forum last week on what is now called Academic Dishonesty revealed just one thing: we have more to say about it that can be said in an hour, probably in a week. We are, after all, college faculty.

I went to the forum mainly interested in sorting some things out about plagiarism, but that didn't happen, and even if we ignore all those sub-categories to cheating and their individual problems, I see some surprisingly complicated issues. For instance, our freshmen and sophomore students overall don't view some actions as dishonest, though most faculty would call those actions cheating.

A scrap of data: A student-to-student survey three years ago on my campus asked this question: Have you ever cheated at this college? Those who answered NO were asked, Have you participated in any of the following activities while at this college: copied someone else's answer during a test or quiz, let someone else copy your homework, turned in work that you had not done with your name on it......and 30% answered YES. So why did they say they hadn't cheated? It's a matter of perception, you might say.

One faculty at the forum said that she's discussed cheating with students before and heard "It isn't really cheating if you aren't caught." Interesting philosophical, if not ethical, stance. It isn't the action that makes something wrong, it's the sanction that results when and if it does.

But what sanction should befall a student, and when? Ask this and find out that faculty don't agree on what cheating is. Some instructors expect students to copy homework, so why waste the effort in trying to prove what we all know is happening? Or why bother collecting homework? Others will toss out the test or quiz that results from the cheating and have the student do it over again. That strikes me as an odd response, being in effect an encouragement to at least give cheating a try. I've been trying to think of a similar ploy I might use to get students to give studying for quizzes a try but haven't been able to find one.

One of the statistics about student cheating that interests me most is this: between 90 and 97% of all students who cheat are never caught. Those odds are another encouragement to at least give it a try. That 10% that do get caught must be the worst cheaters, so if you can be at least average at cheating, the argument must go, you're golden. The student survey I like the best giving that kind of info was conducted among students listed in Who's Who Among High School Students, where 80% said they'd cheated and of those, 95% said they'd never been caught.

Yet, you know, what I'd have most liked to talk about in that forum -- more than the amusing anecdotes, the sly anti-cheating strategies, the foolishly clumsy attempts at cheating (like writing crib notes all over the hand that the student used to give the exam to the instructor), the syllabus policies -- is the way dealing with cheating makes me feel. I suppose this doesn't happen to everyone, and it no doubt reveals some flaw in my professorial professionalism, but plagiarism is the only thing in my life that brings out the hunter in me. Mentally, when I see the prose that I know this student is incapable of writing, I pull on camouflage, shoe-black my face, strap on a double bandoleer of shells, tuck rifles under my arms, and stalk my prey. I feel a shameful thrill. Righteous indignation pumps through my veins. And the kill, the moment when I hit the print button and the paper that's been downloaded spins its electronic code to the printer, is delicious. Gotcha!

I hate that. All of it: the cheating, the hours out of my life I've spent tracking down sources, the thrill of the hunt and the kill, the suspicion it's given me whenever I read any student writing that's surprisingly good. How much I hate it comes sharply into focus every time I make my move to confront the cheater, evidence in hand. At that point, the student suddenly is not just a thief; he's someone who paid cash to be here, had real potential to be successful here, and has gotten his priorities twisted by some deforming pressures in his life. OK, maybe the pressures weren't that heavy and maybe he's been cheating his way through school all along and just finally slipped up. Maybe, but telling him he failed is just that, it's just failure, and I doubt anything is made better by it. Except keeping the game fair, that is.