Change in Perspective

I'm at the end of the school year, after teaching full-time since 1970. That's thirty-eight years, including most summers. College level.

At the beginning of each new semester, I used to think, ah-ha, a fresh start, new students--hope, light at the end of the tunnel, my intellectual and pedagogical missions are being advanced--a new group of students to introduce to the joys of reading, the value of improving their writing and thinking skills. A new group to send out well prepared into a world in need of them.

But I've had a change of attitude. Not long into the beginning of each semester now, I think to myself: I'm saying the same things I have been saying for 38 years. Some students might have improved because of me, but by and large, I keep having to say the same things, make the same corrections, offer the same advice, issue the same warnings.

Not only that: instead of thinking that each new semester brings a new crop of students, I've started to think, while grading papers: why are you still making this mistake? It's hard to see individual students. Instead, I see One Student, who has been bedeviling me and my colleagues for the past 38 years. In spite of all my efforts, all my preparation, all my attempts to interest him/her in his/her education, the excitement of the books, the stimulation of the ideas, of people who make their livings thinking and writing, the same mistakes persist, along with the same lackadaisical attitude--except that what was formerly lackadaisical has become aggressively, belligerently sometimes, indifferent. I have the feeling that the marks I put on papers go unregarded, or dismissed as the obsessive attention of a psychotic (things like correct spelling, competent punctuation, literate, expressive use of language.

I hasten to say, not all students are like this. But it's a minority who actually think about what they're writing and care enough to put forth high quality work.

Or, the others simply don't have the ability. Never mind a socio/economic/family background that prepares them poorly. Plenty of disadvantaged people catch on quickly enough to "smart-people things," as a colleague of mine puts it. Yet there are many more who don't look like they're going to catch on to anything at all. I showed a film in class the other day and suggested that students take notes on who the characters are and what issues the film raises. I took copious notes myself, but I looked around at one point and saw very people taking notes, some paying little or no attention at all. They're already targeted for failure, based on the rest of their work. Yet, they've attended class--they've put their bodies in their seats and stuck out what must have seemed like an excruciating fifteen weeks, in which their efforts have consistently received poor grades.

I used to think everyone should get to college. Now, the best I can say is that everyone deserves a chance, but not everyone is fitted for the kind of intellectual work college involves. I don't understand students who come up and admit that they've never liked reading: what do they think they're going to have to do in college, which is about getting new ideas, fresh perspectives, sifting arguments--much of which is going to come from the printed page. We have textbooks that are visually based as composition class "readers," but what difference do those pictures make? The students, after they've done the semiotic analyses, are still going to have to express ideas and put together a coherent argument in words.

These are signs that retirement is hastening toward me. One day, I imagine, I will have a revelation: the time has come. Perhaps the whole idea of an apocalypse, or end times, related to the sense of imminent change one feels at various points in life, the potential of that change to produce anxiety and disorientation, which feel like the coming of a new world and the devastation of the old. But I'm getting readier to embrace the new world, which for me means more time to practice music, more time to write it, and little or no time marking that single closing-in-on-forty student who never learns, no matter how many times I tell him.