My wife and I were in Home Depot this evening, and a young female salesperson said a friendly
"Hi," as though she knew me.
My wife said, "Was that a student?"
I said, "I don't recognize her."
But when I asked the student if she had gone to PCC, she said yes, and that she had been in my Grammar and Composition Review course several semesters before. I had taught her to write a good essay, and she was preparing to transfer to Cal State Northridge.
"When I'm not in school, I'm here," she said. She was in her orange work apron.
The student was quite friendly and helpful, we joked a bit, and she got us the price on a folding chair for the porch. Unfortunately, the only boxed chairs were palleted out of reach on a high shelf. She told us to wait.
I went to check out the cacti, and when I returned, there was the student driving a forklift. "I just got my license for this," she beamed. With the help of a supervisor, she maneuvered the thing into position and got the pallet of chairs down. The supervisor proposed that we buy two now that 12 or 15 were available, so we did. I mean, what if both my wife and I wanted to sit on the porch, contemplating intellectual stuff, as we do so often?
I hyped my student lavishly to her supervisor. "She has extraordinary powers of persuasion. We were only going to buy one." Even though he had been the one to suggest it, I supposed he would credit her.
But more important was the forklift driving. I'm always looking for practical ways to motivate my students to take their essay-writing seriously. I had one here: "Learn the essay, drive a forklift." It made sense: identifying your territory (Home Depot required that they fence customers out of the work area for safety), the introductory maneuvering and jockeying for position, elevation of the forks as you build toward a climactic moment, the sense of timing, the satisfaction and relief when you bring your load to solid ground. And then the concluding pitch: this was good, buy two.
"I'm so proud of you," I told her. "You put my class to good use."
Friday, June 29, 2007
Playing Cards
I've been teaching full time at the college level since 1970, and I've been accused of discrimination twice. In both cases, the students were angry about receiving a D in the class.
The first time was at Wayne State University, in a community outreach course, taught at the Canfield Center, about three miles away from the main campus, in a very depressed neighborhood. This one African-American student wrote poorly, but when I tried, in individual conferences, to explain what his mistakes were and how to correct them, he explained why he was right. After 45 minutes of increasingly frustrating conference, in which he was right and I was wrong, I had to move on--and these were not judgment call mistakes. He was genuinely a person who thought the writing style he had cultivated (apart from grammar and sentence mistakes) was remarkable and compelling. It was over-inflated, misused words, and often obscure. He consistently got Ds, but consistently refused to hear anything I said. At one point I had to tell him that if he was as good a writer as he considered himself, he would be teaching the course, not me.
At the end of the semester, I gave him a D, and he filed a discrimination complaint with the university ombudsman: I had given him the D because he was black. When I went in to the ombudsman's office, two other professors, from Humanities and Art History, were there--the same student had filed grievances against them. When they heard I had given him a D, they applauded me, admitting they had not had the nerve. The ombudsman had my roll sheets in his hand. Students had gotten the usual array of grades--a couple of As, some Bs, some Cs. The only question the ombudsman asked was, how many African-American students were in the class. I replied that the whole class was African American students, except for one. End of grievance. [The unfortunate aspect of this situation was that the student seemed to have consciously tried to develop a style; he employed some sophisticated vocabulary and had a kind of oracular, proclamatory tone. But what he meant was too often unintentionally obscure and ambiguous, and he did not have mechanics under control. If he hadn't been so obstinate, I could have taken a more helpful tack with him.]
The other incident involved a Muslim student who took my Bible as Literature course at Pasadena City College. About five weeks into the semester, I noticed that his attendance was spotty. He came to the office to explain that his father from Iran was visiting, and he was responsible to show him about. The student also filled in a bit of family history: the mother had brought the kids to America and the father could not understand why neither his kids nor his wife obeyed him any more. The ongoing conflict made life difficult for the son.
The student asked for some leniency on my part, and I said we could work out something equitable, and then, thinking that his attendance would improve, I hardly saw him again until the final. He had missed a good 75% of the class meetings, and had not submitted a major assignment. There was no way to make up the missed classes, and the college catalog stipulates that a student who misses more than two weeks of class, can be failed. I told the student he was going to get a D.
Then the arguing began. He insisted that if he took the final, he would get an A. I told him there was no point taking the final: he had been absent too much, and an assignment was missing. We went back and forth for a good twenty minutes. His strategy was to wear me down. I finally told him that he could take the final, but he would have to get his A in order to earn a C in the class. He went away, satisfied. My office mate was there during the whole haggling conversation.
The student took the final, failed it, got the D in the class, and filed a grievance against me for discriminating against him because he was Muslim. He added that I had identified him in class as a member of a terrorist organization (this was a lie--I don't believe I even knew what his religion was, and I certainly did not automatically equate Islam and terrorism), and claimed that I had given all the Christians in the class As (this was a lie--he could not possibly have known--not to mention laughable; my grade sheets told a different story). Finally, he claimed that I had promised to give him a C if he took the final. I called on my office mate to verify what I had actually said, and the grievance was dismissed.
There was a third case, though it did not consist of playing the race card in the same way as the previous incidents. This occurred at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where I was teaching a freshman composition course. Art Center has many, many remarkable, intelligent students, but one Caucasian fellow took me to task for giving him a C on a paper. He was irked particularly because I had given As and Bs to several Asian students. "Are you telling me that those Asians write better than I do, when they can't even speak English?" I didn't know which papers by which students he was referring to, but there were certainly Asians who spoke and wrote fluently in the class. I just said, "It's the same eyes grading both, so I guess they must be better." I didn't get any more complaints. He had played a race card against his classmates, and it didn't work.
The first time was at Wayne State University, in a community outreach course, taught at the Canfield Center, about three miles away from the main campus, in a very depressed neighborhood. This one African-American student wrote poorly, but when I tried, in individual conferences, to explain what his mistakes were and how to correct them, he explained why he was right. After 45 minutes of increasingly frustrating conference, in which he was right and I was wrong, I had to move on--and these were not judgment call mistakes. He was genuinely a person who thought the writing style he had cultivated (apart from grammar and sentence mistakes) was remarkable and compelling. It was over-inflated, misused words, and often obscure. He consistently got Ds, but consistently refused to hear anything I said. At one point I had to tell him that if he was as good a writer as he considered himself, he would be teaching the course, not me.
At the end of the semester, I gave him a D, and he filed a discrimination complaint with the university ombudsman: I had given him the D because he was black. When I went in to the ombudsman's office, two other professors, from Humanities and Art History, were there--the same student had filed grievances against them. When they heard I had given him a D, they applauded me, admitting they had not had the nerve. The ombudsman had my roll sheets in his hand. Students had gotten the usual array of grades--a couple of As, some Bs, some Cs. The only question the ombudsman asked was, how many African-American students were in the class. I replied that the whole class was African American students, except for one. End of grievance. [The unfortunate aspect of this situation was that the student seemed to have consciously tried to develop a style; he employed some sophisticated vocabulary and had a kind of oracular, proclamatory tone. But what he meant was too often unintentionally obscure and ambiguous, and he did not have mechanics under control. If he hadn't been so obstinate, I could have taken a more helpful tack with him.]
The other incident involved a Muslim student who took my Bible as Literature course at Pasadena City College. About five weeks into the semester, I noticed that his attendance was spotty. He came to the office to explain that his father from Iran was visiting, and he was responsible to show him about. The student also filled in a bit of family history: the mother had brought the kids to America and the father could not understand why neither his kids nor his wife obeyed him any more. The ongoing conflict made life difficult for the son.
The student asked for some leniency on my part, and I said we could work out something equitable, and then, thinking that his attendance would improve, I hardly saw him again until the final. He had missed a good 75% of the class meetings, and had not submitted a major assignment. There was no way to make up the missed classes, and the college catalog stipulates that a student who misses more than two weeks of class, can be failed. I told the student he was going to get a D.
Then the arguing began. He insisted that if he took the final, he would get an A. I told him there was no point taking the final: he had been absent too much, and an assignment was missing. We went back and forth for a good twenty minutes. His strategy was to wear me down. I finally told him that he could take the final, but he would have to get his A in order to earn a C in the class. He went away, satisfied. My office mate was there during the whole haggling conversation.
The student took the final, failed it, got the D in the class, and filed a grievance against me for discriminating against him because he was Muslim. He added that I had identified him in class as a member of a terrorist organization (this was a lie--I don't believe I even knew what his religion was, and I certainly did not automatically equate Islam and terrorism), and claimed that I had given all the Christians in the class As (this was a lie--he could not possibly have known--not to mention laughable; my grade sheets told a different story). Finally, he claimed that I had promised to give him a C if he took the final. I called on my office mate to verify what I had actually said, and the grievance was dismissed.
There was a third case, though it did not consist of playing the race card in the same way as the previous incidents. This occurred at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where I was teaching a freshman composition course. Art Center has many, many remarkable, intelligent students, but one Caucasian fellow took me to task for giving him a C on a paper. He was irked particularly because I had given As and Bs to several Asian students. "Are you telling me that those Asians write better than I do, when they can't even speak English?" I didn't know which papers by which students he was referring to, but there were certainly Asians who spoke and wrote fluently in the class. I just said, "It's the same eyes grading both, so I guess they must be better." I didn't get any more complaints. He had played a race card against his classmates, and it didn't work.
Monday, June 25, 2007
The Labyrinth and the Garden and the Bible-o-phile
Check out these blogs too--there's a lot of overlap. All venues harbor labyrinths and gardens, the academic world among them.
Two lessons I learned on my first job:
a. if you take notes, you'll be assigned to take notes
b. the less there is at stake, the harder people fight over it
Argh, just a comment--this seemed particularly true at Wayne State, where I was a faculty member in the English Department for six years (I didn't get tenure). There was vicious and snide animosity among younger faculty. The older faculty seemed to ignore it or look on in amusement, except for one mid-level faculty member who accused the junior faculty of throwing tantrums (we had asked for representation on the hiring committee).
There was bitter hostility over the formulation of a "department charter," which had been requested by the dean. Older faculty vs. younger faculty again. The fight went on, and by the time I left, four years or so after the beginning of the charter effort, no charter had been written.
Several extraordinary experiences from my time at WSU:
1. one bitterly cold winter morning, I parked my car in the dirt parking lot (Wayne did not have a lot of amenities) and got my briefcase. I turned toward the building where I taught and caught a glance of snow crystals blowing off the roof of a nearby apartment. They sparkled in the morning sun. The bright blue sky was dazzling.
2. It was a late March day--the wind was blowing, maybe fifty miles an hour. I had never been in wind so strong--the Santa Anas of Southern California can't compare. I walked down Second Avenue, pulling myelf forward parking meter by parking meter.
3. my first real snowstorm: late afternoon, the snow was coming down in big flakes, the street turning silent white. I stopped for gas and asked the attendant if this was a blizzard. "If this isn't, I don't know what is," he said.
Two lessons I learned on my first job:
a. if you take notes, you'll be assigned to take notes
b. the less there is at stake, the harder people fight over it
Argh, just a comment--this seemed particularly true at Wayne State, where I was a faculty member in the English Department for six years (I didn't get tenure). There was vicious and snide animosity among younger faculty. The older faculty seemed to ignore it or look on in amusement, except for one mid-level faculty member who accused the junior faculty of throwing tantrums (we had asked for representation on the hiring committee).
There was bitter hostility over the formulation of a "department charter," which had been requested by the dean. Older faculty vs. younger faculty again. The fight went on, and by the time I left, four years or so after the beginning of the charter effort, no charter had been written.
Several extraordinary experiences from my time at WSU:
1. one bitterly cold winter morning, I parked my car in the dirt parking lot (Wayne did not have a lot of amenities) and got my briefcase. I turned toward the building where I taught and caught a glance of snow crystals blowing off the roof of a nearby apartment. They sparkled in the morning sun. The bright blue sky was dazzling.
2. It was a late March day--the wind was blowing, maybe fifty miles an hour. I had never been in wind so strong--the Santa Anas of Southern California can't compare. I walked down Second Avenue, pulling myelf forward parking meter by parking meter.
3. my first real snowstorm: late afternoon, the snow was coming down in big flakes, the street turning silent white. I stopped for gas and asked the attendant if this was a blizzard. "If this isn't, I don't know what is," he said.
Etymologically Speaking, That Is
Etymologically speaking, I know what happened to the lost tribes of the Israelites. The lost city of Atlantis? That's not a Hebrew word!
The Mormons are right--the lost tribes migrated to North America and become Native Americans!
How do I know this for such certain, you may wonder. Indeed, you may. But to someone linguistically intuitive, as you know I am, it's encoded in "Yosemite." You see, there are Anti-semites, and there are pro-semites (I count myself in the bunch)--the Native American tribe which gave its name to the tourist spot is obviously pro-semitic, as suggested by "Yo!" (a term of endearment, greeting, down-home camaraderie) attached to "Semite," an ethnic designation. There were the Paiute, the Shawnee, the Reubenites (famous for sandwiches), the Menassahites, the Shoshone, the Luddites, and the descendants of Jacob's lone daughter, Dinah--one branch is the Shorites, the other the Dianetics.
This is the thought for the day. The academic world harbors and nourishes freedom of thought.
The Mormons are right--the lost tribes migrated to North America and become Native Americans!
How do I know this for such certain, you may wonder. Indeed, you may. But to someone linguistically intuitive, as you know I am, it's encoded in "Yosemite." You see, there are Anti-semites, and there are pro-semites (I count myself in the bunch)--the Native American tribe which gave its name to the tourist spot is obviously pro-semitic, as suggested by "Yo!" (a term of endearment, greeting, down-home camaraderie) attached to "Semite," an ethnic designation. There were the Paiute, the Shawnee, the Reubenites (famous for sandwiches), the Menassahites, the Shoshone, the Luddites, and the descendants of Jacob's lone daughter, Dinah--one branch is the Shorites, the other the Dianetics.
This is the thought for the day. The academic world harbors and nourishes freedom of thought.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
You Can Never Tell
You try your best as a prof, and you come up with what you think is going to be an innovative, original way to dramatize a point. You think you've done a great job, but then it turns out that some student, somewhere, missed the point and considered you a dope.
When I taught at Center for Creative Studies in Detroit (a college of art and design), I had frequent conversations with Joseph Bernard, a painter who taught a course in twentieth century modernism required for all fine arts majors. We would talk about Joyce, Duchamp, Beckett and Cage. It is to Joseph that I owe the story (which I hope is not apocryphal) about Duchamp dropping a piece of rope from a ladder one day. When the rope touched the ground, Duchamp said, "That's enough art for today," and got down. Joseph is very intelligent, completely involved in 20th century art, and a wonderful, original artist himself who has swum with the whales off the north Atlantic coast.
Anyway, in one of my own classes, I had a student who mentioned that he was taking Joseph's modernism class. I asked how he liked it, expecting that he would brighten up. Instead, the student looked resentful. So far, he informed me, the class had been a waste. "He spent the whole first meeting playing a recording of some woman lying in bed talking about herself and her husband." Pointless.
It took a second, but I realized that Joseph must have played a recording of the last chapter of Ulysses, Molly Bloom's nearly non-stop interior monologue, a lively, funny, revealing stream-of-consciousness review of nearly everything that had transpired in the life of herself and her husband, including (graphically) her own affair with Blazes Boylan, men she had loved before meeting her husband, the death of her 12-year-old son years ago, etc., etc., all this while she and Bloom lie on the bed in opposite directions, his feet near her face and visa-versa. If there is a classic modernist literary passage, this is it. It must have been on the basis of this long, long chapter that Ulysses was banned from the United States for some quarter century after its publication.
I told the student he had experienced one of the great great works of twentieth-century literature. He just shrugged. For him, at that moment, it had been a waste of time. It was too vast, compelling, profound, and humane a piece of writing. Perhaps for me, at that age, the first time through, it would have been a waste of time, too. I can only hope that the student, frustrated as he was, grew to fit the revelation he had been given.
I remember the first time I played a composition of John Cage in a Humanities class. The angriest students were two music majors, who accused Cage of not making music at all, just noise.
Willing or not, receptive or not, students benefit by the enigmas their teachers lob into their midst. As a teacher, you have to move forward, not teach only what you think your students can relate to: that might not teach them anything at all. You have to go for it, jump over the edge and risk getting lost in wilderness.
When I told Joseph about his student's reaction, we both got a kick out of it, but we were both also somewhat sobered. For awhile, anyway. Then we were back to lobbing our enigmas.
When I taught at Center for Creative Studies in Detroit (a college of art and design), I had frequent conversations with Joseph Bernard, a painter who taught a course in twentieth century modernism required for all fine arts majors. We would talk about Joyce, Duchamp, Beckett and Cage. It is to Joseph that I owe the story (which I hope is not apocryphal) about Duchamp dropping a piece of rope from a ladder one day. When the rope touched the ground, Duchamp said, "That's enough art for today," and got down. Joseph is very intelligent, completely involved in 20th century art, and a wonderful, original artist himself who has swum with the whales off the north Atlantic coast.
Anyway, in one of my own classes, I had a student who mentioned that he was taking Joseph's modernism class. I asked how he liked it, expecting that he would brighten up. Instead, the student looked resentful. So far, he informed me, the class had been a waste. "He spent the whole first meeting playing a recording of some woman lying in bed talking about herself and her husband." Pointless.
It took a second, but I realized that Joseph must have played a recording of the last chapter of Ulysses, Molly Bloom's nearly non-stop interior monologue, a lively, funny, revealing stream-of-consciousness review of nearly everything that had transpired in the life of herself and her husband, including (graphically) her own affair with Blazes Boylan, men she had loved before meeting her husband, the death of her 12-year-old son years ago, etc., etc., all this while she and Bloom lie on the bed in opposite directions, his feet near her face and visa-versa. If there is a classic modernist literary passage, this is it. It must have been on the basis of this long, long chapter that Ulysses was banned from the United States for some quarter century after its publication.
I told the student he had experienced one of the great great works of twentieth-century literature. He just shrugged. For him, at that moment, it had been a waste of time. It was too vast, compelling, profound, and humane a piece of writing. Perhaps for me, at that age, the first time through, it would have been a waste of time, too. I can only hope that the student, frustrated as he was, grew to fit the revelation he had been given.
I remember the first time I played a composition of John Cage in a Humanities class. The angriest students were two music majors, who accused Cage of not making music at all, just noise.
Willing or not, receptive or not, students benefit by the enigmas their teachers lob into their midst. As a teacher, you have to move forward, not teach only what you think your students can relate to: that might not teach them anything at all. You have to go for it, jump over the edge and risk getting lost in wilderness.
When I told Joseph about his student's reaction, we both got a kick out of it, but we were both also somewhat sobered. For awhile, anyway. Then we were back to lobbing our enigmas.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Bozos in the Ignorance Business
This blog could also go in the "Labyrinth and the Garden,"
but I'll put it here, since it involves academic misadventures, fortunately not my own. The labyrinth of The Great Academic Cheating Machine, though, is a sewer where the scum hang out, justifying their rottenness with ignorant, exalted claims. I could also title this Blog, "Bozos in the Bullshit Business."
My wife recently referred me to a website called "Asian Grade" and printed out its manifesto, which harps self-defensively on the theme that term papers are a waste of time for the students, are never read anyway by professors, and are a sign that any professor who assigns one has "no fucking idea" what to teach. Their idea of a good "lesson" is a Power-Point presentation. For awhile, I avoided reading the manifesto because I knew it would just make me angry. But, I succumbed. And it did. And here's my response.
The creators of the site (I'll leave you to find it and read the manifesto for yourself) are self-righteous about their enterprise, but Asian Grade, for all its chummy, pretentious rhetoric, is just another arrogant, sleazy example of the Great Academic Cheating Machine.
In the interest of persuading desperate students to download the free papers, Asian Grade doesn't tell the real truth. Professors do generally read term papers, and they can detect the plagiarized, or canned/purchased paper pretty quickly. The student who ventures to submit such a paper risks getting no credit (he or she doesn't deserve any for their smart-aleck attempt to hoodwink the prof), but more than that, he or she risks being regarded as ignorant, incompetent, insecure, arrogant (they consider themselves above the law), or just plain lazy. Perhaps they risk academic probation (and a permanent notation on their academic record), or, if the student has tried this trick before and been caught, expulsion from the institution. Contrary to popular belief, schools do take cheating seriously.
The good students do not, generally (there are always exceptions, of course), purchase or plagiarize. They either don't need to, or they're willing to put in the effort to think, organize, work out ideas, discover new depths of creativity in themselves--these are, after all, the point of writing assignments--or just follow the path of intellectual integrity. They take pride in their achievement, not in simply being able to pull the wool over someone's eyes.
Asian Grade is the most egregious example I've seen of a Cheating Machine website taking the stance of a Robin Hood, fighting for the poor, oppressed student suffering from meaningless assignments by bored professors who are lousy teachers and would be out the door if they didn't have tenure. The manifesto writers (never mind that the blog piece is embarrassingly written for an act of public communication) are really self-serving charlatans, claiming to perform an exalted act of liberation--to bring down the tradition of the pointless, mindless term paper.
I'm trying to imagine what would happen in a music department if a student tried to avoid an end-of-semester recital (which is the equivalent of a term paper) by substituting a recording, or by being conned into believing that the music teachers won't be listening anyway, or getting someone else in to play the recital.
Perhaps, if there's a failure on the part of professors, it's not explaining why they give writing assignments. (After all, contrary to the canard insisted on by the Asian Grade team--that professors don't read the papers--professors spend good time going over the papers and consider them an important part of the learning process.) I mentioned above a couple of reasons why they might be valuable--the reasons will certainly vary from discipline to discipline. But they must include, at the very most basic level, the practice in finding and integrating information, perhaps critiquing it, putting ideas into a coherent form (the corporate world is on record that the quality of written communication among college graduates is consistently dismal). The writing practice, in and of itself, can be worth the effort of putting together a term paper. Good writing is one key to success; bad writing may not guarantee failure, but in today's competitive world, I would think a person would want to give him or herself every possible chance. Good writing also implies other qualities: a sloppy, lazy writer appears careless, indifferent, shallow, and generally willing to cut corners, or incapable of the kind of sustained attention to coherence and detail that are required for any kind of success.
It's wrong of the various members of the Great Academic Cheating Machine to pretend that they're doing students a favor. In fact, they're lying to students and exploiting them: professors aren't stupid or gullible, though they are often willing to give a student in a jam a little extra time and/or answer questions, or look over drafts. The students might get "that piece of paper" (i.e., their degree), but the inadequacies they've created for themselves by cheating will be exposed at some point. There's a better than excellent chance that a student who buys or plagiarizes a paper will get no credit or a failing grade. And professors don't necessarily have to "prove" that the student deliberately cheated. A canned paper sets off the professor's innate alarm. If Google doesn't yield results quickly, the professor can always figure out why the paper is a failure; students ignorant, desperate, or cynical enough (the Asian Grade gang is profoundly cynical) to cheat generally aren't competent enough to know whether what they're submitting is flawed, and a professor can shred it pretty much at will.
The Asian Grade Gang is offensively anti-intellectual. Their manifesto is too much like the bozos in grade school who considered the smart kids "nerds" and ridiculed them for getting good grades. Intelligence, hard work, honest effort are re-branded as stupidly falling prey to meaningless exercises. This is a form of intellectual thuggery.
The Asian Grade Cheating Machine Gang is offensive and cynical in yet another way: they're either Asians themselves, or they're trading on the hopes and ambitions of Asians, in which case they're racists. It's like saying, "We know you Asians need this lousy help, and you're dumb enough to fall for our lies." They're saying to all students, "Come on--you'll never make it without cheating." On the one hand, they're trading on people who come to America for a "Western" education, but then luring them into exactly the behavior that undermines what is best about American education: the development of a critical and analytical mindset. You get this from writing term papers, no matter what the Asian Gang tells you about the meaninglessness of such projects.
Get an honest job, Asian Grade. If professors get cynical, you're one of the reasons.
but I'll put it here, since it involves academic misadventures, fortunately not my own. The labyrinth of The Great Academic Cheating Machine, though, is a sewer where the scum hang out, justifying their rottenness with ignorant, exalted claims. I could also title this Blog, "Bozos in the Bullshit Business."
My wife recently referred me to a website called "Asian Grade" and printed out its manifesto, which harps self-defensively on the theme that term papers are a waste of time for the students, are never read anyway by professors, and are a sign that any professor who assigns one has "no fucking idea" what to teach. Their idea of a good "lesson" is a Power-Point presentation. For awhile, I avoided reading the manifesto because I knew it would just make me angry. But, I succumbed. And it did. And here's my response.
The creators of the site (I'll leave you to find it and read the manifesto for yourself) are self-righteous about their enterprise, but Asian Grade, for all its chummy, pretentious rhetoric, is just another arrogant, sleazy example of the Great Academic Cheating Machine.
In the interest of persuading desperate students to download the free papers, Asian Grade doesn't tell the real truth. Professors do generally read term papers, and they can detect the plagiarized, or canned/purchased paper pretty quickly. The student who ventures to submit such a paper risks getting no credit (he or she doesn't deserve any for their smart-aleck attempt to hoodwink the prof), but more than that, he or she risks being regarded as ignorant, incompetent, insecure, arrogant (they consider themselves above the law), or just plain lazy. Perhaps they risk academic probation (and a permanent notation on their academic record), or, if the student has tried this trick before and been caught, expulsion from the institution. Contrary to popular belief, schools do take cheating seriously.
The good students do not, generally (there are always exceptions, of course), purchase or plagiarize. They either don't need to, or they're willing to put in the effort to think, organize, work out ideas, discover new depths of creativity in themselves--these are, after all, the point of writing assignments--or just follow the path of intellectual integrity. They take pride in their achievement, not in simply being able to pull the wool over someone's eyes.
Asian Grade is the most egregious example I've seen of a Cheating Machine website taking the stance of a Robin Hood, fighting for the poor, oppressed student suffering from meaningless assignments by bored professors who are lousy teachers and would be out the door if they didn't have tenure. The manifesto writers (never mind that the blog piece is embarrassingly written for an act of public communication) are really self-serving charlatans, claiming to perform an exalted act of liberation--to bring down the tradition of the pointless, mindless term paper.
I'm trying to imagine what would happen in a music department if a student tried to avoid an end-of-semester recital (which is the equivalent of a term paper) by substituting a recording, or by being conned into believing that the music teachers won't be listening anyway, or getting someone else in to play the recital.
Perhaps, if there's a failure on the part of professors, it's not explaining why they give writing assignments. (After all, contrary to the canard insisted on by the Asian Grade team--that professors don't read the papers--professors spend good time going over the papers and consider them an important part of the learning process.) I mentioned above a couple of reasons why they might be valuable--the reasons will certainly vary from discipline to discipline. But they must include, at the very most basic level, the practice in finding and integrating information, perhaps critiquing it, putting ideas into a coherent form (the corporate world is on record that the quality of written communication among college graduates is consistently dismal). The writing practice, in and of itself, can be worth the effort of putting together a term paper. Good writing is one key to success; bad writing may not guarantee failure, but in today's competitive world, I would think a person would want to give him or herself every possible chance. Good writing also implies other qualities: a sloppy, lazy writer appears careless, indifferent, shallow, and generally willing to cut corners, or incapable of the kind of sustained attention to coherence and detail that are required for any kind of success.
It's wrong of the various members of the Great Academic Cheating Machine to pretend that they're doing students a favor. In fact, they're lying to students and exploiting them: professors aren't stupid or gullible, though they are often willing to give a student in a jam a little extra time and/or answer questions, or look over drafts. The students might get "that piece of paper" (i.e., their degree), but the inadequacies they've created for themselves by cheating will be exposed at some point. There's a better than excellent chance that a student who buys or plagiarizes a paper will get no credit or a failing grade. And professors don't necessarily have to "prove" that the student deliberately cheated. A canned paper sets off the professor's innate alarm. If Google doesn't yield results quickly, the professor can always figure out why the paper is a failure; students ignorant, desperate, or cynical enough (the Asian Grade gang is profoundly cynical) to cheat generally aren't competent enough to know whether what they're submitting is flawed, and a professor can shred it pretty much at will.
The Asian Grade Gang is offensively anti-intellectual. Their manifesto is too much like the bozos in grade school who considered the smart kids "nerds" and ridiculed them for getting good grades. Intelligence, hard work, honest effort are re-branded as stupidly falling prey to meaningless exercises. This is a form of intellectual thuggery.
The Asian Grade Cheating Machine Gang is offensive and cynical in yet another way: they're either Asians themselves, or they're trading on the hopes and ambitions of Asians, in which case they're racists. It's like saying, "We know you Asians need this lousy help, and you're dumb enough to fall for our lies." They're saying to all students, "Come on--you'll never make it without cheating." On the one hand, they're trading on people who come to America for a "Western" education, but then luring them into exactly the behavior that undermines what is best about American education: the development of a critical and analytical mindset. You get this from writing term papers, no matter what the Asian Gang tells you about the meaninglessness of such projects.
Get an honest job, Asian Grade. If professors get cynical, you're one of the reasons.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Angels and Demons
It's probably not good form to list people you liked and didn't like along the way, but that's no doubt what this will wind up being. I'll try to leaven the acerbity of some of my darts and jabs with
Let me preface my prejudices and quirks by admitting up front that when I started my first job, I was fired up to be a literary critic specializing in stylistic analysis. When I began to realize (rather quickly) how old that would get and how soon it would get old, I cast about for some more expanded context for my activities. A colleague suggested that, to assure myself of tenure, it would be a good idea to make myself indispensible to the department: I should become the resident specialist not just in stylistic analysis, but in the general theory and practice of stylistics. This was good advice. However, I read several essays in the field and knew immediately in my heart that I could not stomach a career reading and thinking about such things. This was unfortunate because literary theory was at or near the ground floor and would probably have paved my way toward a lasting university career. But for me, stylistics was too boring.
I had a second revelatory experience: I had submitted my doctoral dissertation for publication at the invitation of a publisher I can't remember; but the reader who evaluated it did not find it adequate for publication and it was returned to me with an embarassed letter of rejection. I did not have the intellectual savvy at the time to continue working and repair its deficiencies. I thought the rejection was final and the reader had spoken for all readers at every press and declared my work hopeless. My doom was spelled. I am older and wiser now, but I would not go back to do scholarly work for other reasons.
So, two avenues seemed closed: publishing my dissertation as a book, and becoming an expert in stylistics; the first was beyond control (or so I thought); the second was too--well, I might have enjoyed more sitting in a closed garage with the exhaust running.
Another avenue, if not actually closing, was darkening in its future: scholarship generally. I seemed to find more joy and exhilaration in photography and music; writing scholarly material at all was do-able, but I didn't enjoy it. It would have been the same as punching in and punching out at Penny's, where I had worked one tedious summer selling work clothes.
So, I may have had promise as a scholar, but I was not thrilled about the prospect of doing scholarship for the rest of my life. Whenever since then I have had ideas that might conceivably have been turned into scholarly books, I remind myself that to do so would require four or five years of concentrated effort and subordinating activities I really enjoy. I reconciled myself rather easily to the idea that the world would never see a book on any of the four or five topics I might have written on. And who would know? Who would care? There are plenty of ideas out there, and many of them already fall by the wayside. A friend at my current institution, Pasadena City College, once quite adamantly urged me to get back to work on the scholarship--he had the generosity to describe my essays on Milton's prose as "cutting-edge stuff." But I had to tell him "no" several times: I was too far away from any interest either in the specific topic or in the activity. He had helped me get access to the Huntington Library, but I never went back after the first visit, at least not to the scholarly collection.
An interesting fact that some colleague in a how-to-get-tenure meeting at this university raised: something like 90% of the valuable scholarship is done by some 15% of working scholars. The percentages may have changed, but the ratios are probably still valid. For an almost innumerable variety of reasons, it is hard to get published, it is hard to write important scholarship, etc etc. But this is not an apologia--I just lost interest and defaulted back to creative interests I had always had: performing and writing music, and doing photography.
My shortcomings admitted from the outside, I can go ahead to pinpoint some of the high and low points along the way related to teachers.
First, a couple of high points: I took multiple classes at UCSB from Alan Stephens, a poet primarily, but he had also written some critical essays. Another professor (Benjamin Sankey, who wrote on Thomas Hardy and William Carlos Williams) described Stephens as a very "shrewd" reader of poems and a very careful writing. With Stephans, I had to become the most rigorous critic of my own writing that I call on my own students to be. He set high standards.
Ben Sankey was very friendly and very helpful--above and beyond any call of duty, he offered to tutor me informally, gave me a reading list for the summer and read a paper I produced, all entirely outside of class. I don't believe I took the paper seriously enough, but he was still helpful and patient. I was a young and curious undergrad, innocent about style, but hankering: I once asked if we should regard Faulkner as a model for writing our papers. Sankey didn't say yes or no, but he turned to a nearby grad student, jerked his thumb at me and said, "He wants to know if Faulkner is a good prose model." I guess for papers in class--not. Ben Sankey died early of cancer. He believed in me enough to suggest that I try for Woodrow Wilson fellowship. I didn't get it, but I went through the interviews.
Philip Damon: a very friendly, engaging professor, who later transferred from UCSB to Berkeley, so I had the pleasure of being in his classes there as well. I had a Chaucer class from him, in which he made us recite from the Canterbury Tales. He announced in class one day that we were to do fifty lines or so. The next class meeting, he announced that he had realized how much time it would cost him for thirty or forty students to recite that many lines individually in his office. So he reduced it to fifteen or twenty. I listened to the recordings, put on my best Middle English accent, and went in to recite from the Wife of Bath's Prologue, where she argues that Jesus didn't mean everyone to live without sex, only those who wanted to live "parfitly." I twanged out "parfitly" as parfitly as I could, and Damon chuckled and complimented me on my choice of a typical Chaucerian passage.
At Berkeley, I had Damon for an intro to medieval lit course, in which we read the contemporaries of Chaucer. He said something that has always stuck with me: he was, himself, conducting his own education publicly. Meaning, I think, that he didn't come into the class with all the ideas worked out and all the information prepared ahead of time, but he was flying by the seat of his pants, trying ideas out in class discussion, coming up with them on the spot: the class was a form of brainstorming session for him. I noticed that about several professors at Berkeley: classes were a way to develop ideas, not places where you taught ideas that were already worked out. This may sound like lack of preparation, or inadequate preparation, but I think it's a different kind of preparation: where the professor fills himself with the primary material and then goes into class ready to ask questions and develop ideas. Too much preparation ahead of time (I mean, you have to have some ideas worked out in order to have a framework for discussion) can be detrimental. On the other hand, my office mate in Detroit, began his first classes (which was also when I began mine) by writing out his lectures in full. He didn't read them in class, but writing them out enabled him to think through issues in ways that the seat-of-the-pants method does not.
I must contrast this with a colleague at my first job in Detroit. Since I heard this second hand, I cannot absolutely attribute it to him, but he was reported to have cautioned that one should never present in class an idea that had not already undergone the trial by fire of the referee experts who approved an article for print: that is, never present an idea in class that hasn't already appeared in a book or journal.
Can anything stifle creativity and spontaneity more? If this was indeed his philosophy, it seems to me based on the false assumption that appearing in print makes an idea somehow more definitive, not as subject to wayward and unpredictable change. But, what else is class for? This professor published quite regularly: he was something of a scholarship mill. Certainly, though, ten years after one of his own books was published, his ideas must have continued to evolve. A classroom is an intellectual snapshot, as is a book. They are not portraits for the ages. Even portraits for the ages are not that: painters go on to do other things in other styles.
Let me preface my prejudices and quirks by admitting up front that when I started my first job, I was fired up to be a literary critic specializing in stylistic analysis. When I began to realize (rather quickly) how old that would get and how soon it would get old, I cast about for some more expanded context for my activities. A colleague suggested that, to assure myself of tenure, it would be a good idea to make myself indispensible to the department: I should become the resident specialist not just in stylistic analysis, but in the general theory and practice of stylistics. This was good advice. However, I read several essays in the field and knew immediately in my heart that I could not stomach a career reading and thinking about such things. This was unfortunate because literary theory was at or near the ground floor and would probably have paved my way toward a lasting university career. But for me, stylistics was too boring.
I had a second revelatory experience: I had submitted my doctoral dissertation for publication at the invitation of a publisher I can't remember; but the reader who evaluated it did not find it adequate for publication and it was returned to me with an embarassed letter of rejection. I did not have the intellectual savvy at the time to continue working and repair its deficiencies. I thought the rejection was final and the reader had spoken for all readers at every press and declared my work hopeless. My doom was spelled. I am older and wiser now, but I would not go back to do scholarly work for other reasons.
So, two avenues seemed closed: publishing my dissertation as a book, and becoming an expert in stylistics; the first was beyond control (or so I thought); the second was too--well, I might have enjoyed more sitting in a closed garage with the exhaust running.
Another avenue, if not actually closing, was darkening in its future: scholarship generally. I seemed to find more joy and exhilaration in photography and music; writing scholarly material at all was do-able, but I didn't enjoy it. It would have been the same as punching in and punching out at Penny's, where I had worked one tedious summer selling work clothes.
So, I may have had promise as a scholar, but I was not thrilled about the prospect of doing scholarship for the rest of my life. Whenever since then I have had ideas that might conceivably have been turned into scholarly books, I remind myself that to do so would require four or five years of concentrated effort and subordinating activities I really enjoy. I reconciled myself rather easily to the idea that the world would never see a book on any of the four or five topics I might have written on. And who would know? Who would care? There are plenty of ideas out there, and many of them already fall by the wayside. A friend at my current institution, Pasadena City College, once quite adamantly urged me to get back to work on the scholarship--he had the generosity to describe my essays on Milton's prose as "cutting-edge stuff." But I had to tell him "no" several times: I was too far away from any interest either in the specific topic or in the activity. He had helped me get access to the Huntington Library, but I never went back after the first visit, at least not to the scholarly collection.
An interesting fact that some colleague in a how-to-get-tenure meeting at this university raised: something like 90% of the valuable scholarship is done by some 15% of working scholars. The percentages may have changed, but the ratios are probably still valid. For an almost innumerable variety of reasons, it is hard to get published, it is hard to write important scholarship, etc etc. But this is not an apologia--I just lost interest and defaulted back to creative interests I had always had: performing and writing music, and doing photography.
My shortcomings admitted from the outside, I can go ahead to pinpoint some of the high and low points along the way related to teachers.
First, a couple of high points: I took multiple classes at UCSB from Alan Stephens, a poet primarily, but he had also written some critical essays. Another professor (Benjamin Sankey, who wrote on Thomas Hardy and William Carlos Williams) described Stephens as a very "shrewd" reader of poems and a very careful writing. With Stephans, I had to become the most rigorous critic of my own writing that I call on my own students to be. He set high standards.
Ben Sankey was very friendly and very helpful--above and beyond any call of duty, he offered to tutor me informally, gave me a reading list for the summer and read a paper I produced, all entirely outside of class. I don't believe I took the paper seriously enough, but he was still helpful and patient. I was a young and curious undergrad, innocent about style, but hankering: I once asked if we should regard Faulkner as a model for writing our papers. Sankey didn't say yes or no, but he turned to a nearby grad student, jerked his thumb at me and said, "He wants to know if Faulkner is a good prose model." I guess for papers in class--not. Ben Sankey died early of cancer. He believed in me enough to suggest that I try for Woodrow Wilson fellowship. I didn't get it, but I went through the interviews.
Philip Damon: a very friendly, engaging professor, who later transferred from UCSB to Berkeley, so I had the pleasure of being in his classes there as well. I had a Chaucer class from him, in which he made us recite from the Canterbury Tales. He announced in class one day that we were to do fifty lines or so. The next class meeting, he announced that he had realized how much time it would cost him for thirty or forty students to recite that many lines individually in his office. So he reduced it to fifteen or twenty. I listened to the recordings, put on my best Middle English accent, and went in to recite from the Wife of Bath's Prologue, where she argues that Jesus didn't mean everyone to live without sex, only those who wanted to live "parfitly." I twanged out "parfitly" as parfitly as I could, and Damon chuckled and complimented me on my choice of a typical Chaucerian passage.
At Berkeley, I had Damon for an intro to medieval lit course, in which we read the contemporaries of Chaucer. He said something that has always stuck with me: he was, himself, conducting his own education publicly. Meaning, I think, that he didn't come into the class with all the ideas worked out and all the information prepared ahead of time, but he was flying by the seat of his pants, trying ideas out in class discussion, coming up with them on the spot: the class was a form of brainstorming session for him. I noticed that about several professors at Berkeley: classes were a way to develop ideas, not places where you taught ideas that were already worked out. This may sound like lack of preparation, or inadequate preparation, but I think it's a different kind of preparation: where the professor fills himself with the primary material and then goes into class ready to ask questions and develop ideas. Too much preparation ahead of time (I mean, you have to have some ideas worked out in order to have a framework for discussion) can be detrimental. On the other hand, my office mate in Detroit, began his first classes (which was also when I began mine) by writing out his lectures in full. He didn't read them in class, but writing them out enabled him to think through issues in ways that the seat-of-the-pants method does not.
I must contrast this with a colleague at my first job in Detroit. Since I heard this second hand, I cannot absolutely attribute it to him, but he was reported to have cautioned that one should never present in class an idea that had not already undergone the trial by fire of the referee experts who approved an article for print: that is, never present an idea in class that hasn't already appeared in a book or journal.
Can anything stifle creativity and spontaneity more? If this was indeed his philosophy, it seems to me based on the false assumption that appearing in print makes an idea somehow more definitive, not as subject to wayward and unpredictable change. But, what else is class for? This professor published quite regularly: he was something of a scholarship mill. Certainly, though, ten years after one of his own books was published, his ideas must have continued to evolve. A classroom is an intellectual snapshot, as is a book. They are not portraits for the ages. Even portraits for the ages are not that: painters go on to do other things in other styles.
Setting Out
I was getting out of UC Santa Barbara as an English major with a pretty good grade average. What was the next step? (This was 1965, Viet Nam war time.) There was only one patriotic thing to do--serve my country. So, I applied to grad school. With Milton, I figured I'd serve best by standing (or sitting) and waiting. Actually, I managed to stay one step ahead of the draft. College undergrads had been exempt; I moved on to grad school just before undergrads became un-exempted. I had the same luck over the next couple of years. I got married just before unmarried college students got tagged; I had a kid just before married but childless men got tagged.
So, there I was, applying to three grad schools: UC Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale. My dad thought I should open up the field, but I said, naw, if I can't get into one of those three, I don't want to go. I might have changed my mind, but I got accepted at Berkeley and Harvard. Yale said no. Harvard said no to financial assistance, so I targeted Berkeley. One of my profs at UCSB assured me I'd find great people and dogs at any of the three, so I was satisfied. I didn't even know at the time what a splendid reputation Berkeley had.
All of the academic stuff aside, Berkeley had one other advantage: my wife's parents lived there, and they vowed (and carried through on their vow) that they would help with baby-sitting. So, up we went.
There are plenty of tales to tell, but I'll just mention that when I got to my first job, at a university in downtown Detroit, one of my colleagues (a PhD from University of Michigan) told me he expected that I'd be really arrogant because I had graduated from Berkeley. If I had known how others regarded me, I might have thought about being arrogant. But when I first went into the classroom on that job, I was more concerned that I couldn't think of anything I actually knew, though I had at that point been through ten years of college. A very kind colleague assured me that I knew far more than my students, which was true--but I felt that I truly started learning when I got out on my own and began to identify the areas where I felt inadequate. I had read lots of novels and poems and some criticism, but minimal history and history of ideas. That was where I had to turn my attention.
I was young (28) and enthusiastic. The first time I went in to teach an evening Shakespeare class, many of the students were older than me. One man, probably in his late fifties, seemed offended that I was teaching and wanted to know what my qualifications could possibly be. What can one say to a question like that without sounding arrogant? I identified my provenance as matter-of-factly as I could. He didn't return. Maybe he thought he'd been cheated with a new grad student. But we all made our way through, and I went on to teach many more Shakespeare classes, only giving Shakespeare up since I've been at institutions where Shakespeare is not such a staple of the curriculum, or I have to share literature classes with other colleagues also eager to remind themselves why they found literature an attractive specialization in the first place.
I was also young and bearded. After all, I came from Berkeley. In another class that first year, the discussion drifted into FBI and CIA spying on student protests. A student in the class jokingly pointed out that thmost hippie-looking person was the most likely to be the undercover agent. Everyone looked at me. I was suspicious-looking enough to be denied an apartment on the East Side in Detroit--the building owner was a liberal-loather: he knew I taught at the university, it came out in our rather antagonistic interview that I was from California (Berkeley, no less), and that clinched it. The university had a reputation for being a nasty communist breeding ground, and I just didn't have anything going for me in that interview, especially when the first rule I was given for being a resident in his precious building was that I could not operate a still. A still? A still? I had only heard about those in movies. How did he come up with that? Stills were off in the backwoods. He would have been closer to the mark if he'd threatened me about growing marijuana, which friends of mine did in their basements or attics. (That was then; this is now. All basements and attics I am currently familiar with have been purged of such antic husbandry and are the repositories of toy trains and household refuse not refusable enough yet to be junked.)
But there I was, new-minted scholar, taking up my first posting in a destination as far from life as I had known it as any given to a French Foreign Legionnaire.
I had an apartment a couple of blocks away from the sacred treasure of the conservative building-owner. Another block away, it was dangerous to walk at night. One night my car (a Volkswagen Van which had not been completely unloaded) was broken into. I came down to go to school in the morning and the windows were smashed. What was missing? Nothing. All I had in the car were boxes of books. The crooks must have taken one look at those and scratched their heads. The books were from grad school--unreadable to a normal person. They were unfenceable. They must have decided to cut their losses and go steal someone's car radio. By the way, this VW van--I had to buy it. I was from Berkeley, after all, and had a persona to forge and maintain. So there I was in Detroit, where any word about hippies must have come on newscasts, and I didn't make much impression with my nifty vehicle. The department chair--an otherwise not terribly distinguished person who played the horses--had a Mercedes and a mousey manner, but a funny sense of humor.
Another thing about the VW van: my wife, who was at that time in the process of becoming an ex-wife, hated it. To me, it stood for independence. I no longer had to borrow the family car from her. For her, it stood for my independence--she no longer had control over when and where I could drive. Belated ha-ha to her. Funny how you save these things up. What was I waiting for to do my crowing? The internet and blogging: in 1970, all I could do was keep stupid journals, which piled up here and there. You know what? Years later, I read them. I thought--ack! These are awful! Who is this depressed, miserable character? They were boring and trite. Mope mope mope. And what's worse, at the time, I didn't know how to spell "mope," so all they had was Mop Mop Mop, not even Raggedy Mop.
What did I pack? If'd known about Jack Kerouac at the time (I know, I know, how could I have lived in the Bay Area and not known about Jack Kerouac? Hey, cut me some slack, Mack. I was a Milton "scholar," and not only was I in a pretty esoteric area, I was in an esoteric area of Milton: his prose writings, doing highly detailed stylistic analysis. What did I know from Jack Kerouac? I had barely learned to eat Chinese food and drink the occasional Manhattan.) Anyway, if I'd known about Jack Kerouac, I wouldn't have packed anything: I'd have hitchhiked back to Detroit. Fortunately, my ignorance protected me, and I packed next to nothing, but everything that was important: drums, vibes, lps, books, clothes, trombone. Sadly, I left behind a daughter, with whom I am in close touch now, but I was off with the essentials to the desolations of the north. Like Gawain--off into the terrifying and unknown, hoping not to lose my head.
So, there I was, applying to three grad schools: UC Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale. My dad thought I should open up the field, but I said, naw, if I can't get into one of those three, I don't want to go. I might have changed my mind, but I got accepted at Berkeley and Harvard. Yale said no. Harvard said no to financial assistance, so I targeted Berkeley. One of my profs at UCSB assured me I'd find great people and dogs at any of the three, so I was satisfied. I didn't even know at the time what a splendid reputation Berkeley had.
All of the academic stuff aside, Berkeley had one other advantage: my wife's parents lived there, and they vowed (and carried through on their vow) that they would help with baby-sitting. So, up we went.
There are plenty of tales to tell, but I'll just mention that when I got to my first job, at a university in downtown Detroit, one of my colleagues (a PhD from University of Michigan) told me he expected that I'd be really arrogant because I had graduated from Berkeley. If I had known how others regarded me, I might have thought about being arrogant. But when I first went into the classroom on that job, I was more concerned that I couldn't think of anything I actually knew, though I had at that point been through ten years of college. A very kind colleague assured me that I knew far more than my students, which was true--but I felt that I truly started learning when I got out on my own and began to identify the areas where I felt inadequate. I had read lots of novels and poems and some criticism, but minimal history and history of ideas. That was where I had to turn my attention.
I was young (28) and enthusiastic. The first time I went in to teach an evening Shakespeare class, many of the students were older than me. One man, probably in his late fifties, seemed offended that I was teaching and wanted to know what my qualifications could possibly be. What can one say to a question like that without sounding arrogant? I identified my provenance as matter-of-factly as I could. He didn't return. Maybe he thought he'd been cheated with a new grad student. But we all made our way through, and I went on to teach many more Shakespeare classes, only giving Shakespeare up since I've been at institutions where Shakespeare is not such a staple of the curriculum, or I have to share literature classes with other colleagues also eager to remind themselves why they found literature an attractive specialization in the first place.
I was also young and bearded. After all, I came from Berkeley. In another class that first year, the discussion drifted into FBI and CIA spying on student protests. A student in the class jokingly pointed out that thmost hippie-looking person was the most likely to be the undercover agent. Everyone looked at me. I was suspicious-looking enough to be denied an apartment on the East Side in Detroit--the building owner was a liberal-loather: he knew I taught at the university, it came out in our rather antagonistic interview that I was from California (Berkeley, no less), and that clinched it. The university had a reputation for being a nasty communist breeding ground, and I just didn't have anything going for me in that interview, especially when the first rule I was given for being a resident in his precious building was that I could not operate a still. A still? A still? I had only heard about those in movies. How did he come up with that? Stills were off in the backwoods. He would have been closer to the mark if he'd threatened me about growing marijuana, which friends of mine did in their basements or attics. (That was then; this is now. All basements and attics I am currently familiar with have been purged of such antic husbandry and are the repositories of toy trains and household refuse not refusable enough yet to be junked.)
But there I was, new-minted scholar, taking up my first posting in a destination as far from life as I had known it as any given to a French Foreign Legionnaire.
I had an apartment a couple of blocks away from the sacred treasure of the conservative building-owner. Another block away, it was dangerous to walk at night. One night my car (a Volkswagen Van which had not been completely unloaded) was broken into. I came down to go to school in the morning and the windows were smashed. What was missing? Nothing. All I had in the car were boxes of books. The crooks must have taken one look at those and scratched their heads. The books were from grad school--unreadable to a normal person. They were unfenceable. They must have decided to cut their losses and go steal someone's car radio. By the way, this VW van--I had to buy it. I was from Berkeley, after all, and had a persona to forge and maintain. So there I was in Detroit, where any word about hippies must have come on newscasts, and I didn't make much impression with my nifty vehicle. The department chair--an otherwise not terribly distinguished person who played the horses--had a Mercedes and a mousey manner, but a funny sense of humor.
Another thing about the VW van: my wife, who was at that time in the process of becoming an ex-wife, hated it. To me, it stood for independence. I no longer had to borrow the family car from her. For her, it stood for my independence--she no longer had control over when and where I could drive. Belated ha-ha to her. Funny how you save these things up. What was I waiting for to do my crowing? The internet and blogging: in 1970, all I could do was keep stupid journals, which piled up here and there. You know what? Years later, I read them. I thought--ack! These are awful! Who is this depressed, miserable character? They were boring and trite. Mope mope mope. And what's worse, at the time, I didn't know how to spell "mope," so all they had was Mop Mop Mop, not even Raggedy Mop.
What did I pack? If'd known about Jack Kerouac at the time (I know, I know, how could I have lived in the Bay Area and not known about Jack Kerouac? Hey, cut me some slack, Mack. I was a Milton "scholar," and not only was I in a pretty esoteric area, I was in an esoteric area of Milton: his prose writings, doing highly detailed stylistic analysis. What did I know from Jack Kerouac? I had barely learned to eat Chinese food and drink the occasional Manhattan.) Anyway, if I'd known about Jack Kerouac, I wouldn't have packed anything: I'd have hitchhiked back to Detroit. Fortunately, my ignorance protected me, and I packed next to nothing, but everything that was important: drums, vibes, lps, books, clothes, trombone. Sadly, I left behind a daughter, with whom I am in close touch now, but I was off with the essentials to the desolations of the north. Like Gawain--off into the terrifying and unknown, hoping not to lose my head.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)