Seeing professors clearly

[Advice for students]

As a college freshman in 1975, I took up the now-vanished practice of turning in postcards with final exams so that my professors could send me my course grades before university grade-reports were compiled and mailed. One postcard came back with a semester grade (A) and the words “With a little help from my inability to do higher mathematics!”

That postcard confirmed my sense that my professor was a nasty, sarcastic man. He was after all the same professor who had criticized my writing all semester, pointing out my dangling participles, my pointless rhetorical questions, and my constant use of the word this to begin sentences. And now he was intent on somehow souring my A for the semester.

But I couldn’t have been more wrong in my thinking. As a junior, I took two more courses with Jim Doyle, James P. Doyle, and began to realize that he was the most generous, most inspiring teacher I would ever know. When I was a freshman though, hugely insecure about my ability to negotiate academic life — and hugely insecure about everything else — I couldn’t see what now seems plain: my professor was making a joke when he wrote that postcard. He was an English teacher, joking about his own inadequacies, and trusting that I was smart enough to get the joke. I wasn’t.

Now that I get to think about these matters from the front of the classroom, I count five misconceptions that often make it difficult, even impossible, for college students to see their professors clearly:

1. “Professors have you figured out from your first grade.”

Most professors are happy to recognize improvement in a student’s work. I sometimes see students go from Fs and Ds to Bs and As in the work of a semester. Seeing a student begin to take interest in a class and improve her or his work makes almost any professor feel a bit happier and a bit more successful. The student who feels categorized by a first grade might be the victim of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you feel that you’re never going to do better than, say, a C+, there might be little reason to try to do better.

2. “Professors give grades based on whether they agree with you.”

Most professors are more than willing to acknowledge that multiple interpretations or points of view are possible and plausible. Professors are much more interested in your ability to develop and support an argument than in agreeing with that argument. They are likely to admire an effort to develop a position that gives them something to think about and, perhaps, argue with. And by the way, professors don’t “give” grades. Your work is what earns them.

3. “Every professor wants something different.”

Most professors value clear, cogent, well-informed reasoning and writing. Different expectations are often a matter of different disciplines, not different professors. The wordplay that wins respect in Creative Non-Fiction might not go over well in Business Communication. The single-sentence paragraphs appropriate in Intro to Journalism won’t work in Intro to Literary Criticism. But that’s because different standards apply in each field, not because professors are insisting on their own idiosyncratic recipes for good writing. And while different professors might place more or less emphasis on various writing errors, that doesn’t mean that comma splices are sometimes okay and sometimes not, only that some professors might be paying more attention to your writing than others.

When professors do want things their way, it’s likely to be about relatively modest matters — paper clips rather than staples, serif rather than sans serif fonts. If you were reading hundreds of essays, you’d probably get a little particular too.

4. “Professors don’t care whether you come to class.”

Some don’t. Most do. But professors recognize that it’s a student’s choice to show up or not, to take notes or not, to follow a discussion or lecture or drift away in inner space. It’s unlikely that a professor will extend a favor to a student who has frequent unexplained absences or whose presence in class does nothing to help the cause of learning.

5. “Professors are obstacles on the way to a diploma.”

This misconception, unlike the first four, is rarely articulated. It’s pervasive nonetheless among students who practice various forms of educational gamesmanship — reading plot summaries instead of novels, plagiarizing essays, cheating on exams, concocting phony excuses for late work and absences. Students who see their professors as obstacles would do well to consider that their own attitudes are the real obstacles to graduation, impeding any possibility of genuine learning.

You may encounter a professor who will confirm every misconception I’ve described: someone who does decide semester grades early on, who allows no disagreement, who is arbitrary and idiosyncratic and oblivious, and who really does make life miserable. When you encounter such a professor, run — if that’s possible. Such professors betray not only their students but the very idea of learning. Most professors are better than that though — if your eyes are open enough to see them.

[I wrote “Seeing professors clearly” in January 2008 for Tim Milburn’s College Students Rule. The site appears to have folded, so I’ve made a home for this piece here.]

three.sentenc.es

A strategy for managing stacks and stacks of e-mail:

three.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all e-mail responses regardless of recipient or subject will be three sentences or less. It’s that simple.

The policy is also available in sizes two, four, and five.

(Via One Thing Well.)

Bravo, Dick Cavett

Dick Cavett on opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque”:

Our goal in at least one of our Middle East wars is to rebuild a government in our own image — with democracy for all. Instead, we are rebuilding ourselves in the image of those who detest us. I hate to see my country — and it’s a hell of a good one — endorse what we purport to hate, besmirching what distinguishes us from countries where persecution rules.

Real Americans, Please Stand Up (New York Times)

Off, or back, to school

[King Friday XIII and Queen Sarah Saturday watch anxiously as Ana Platypus and Prince Tuesday head off to Someplace Else for their first day of school. Lady Aberlin (Betty Aberlin) is carrying the children’s pencil boxes: Ana’s has a parrot; Tuesday’s, a pirate. Daniel Stripèd Tiger will follow, walking with Lady Aberlin. Daniel’s pencil box will have a tiger. From an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that first aired on August 23, 1979, thirty-one years ago today.]

YouTube has bits and pieces of four of the five August 1979 Mister Rogers’ episodes about going to school. These episodes are sentimental favorites in my neighborhood (by which I mean “family”). The fifth, missing episode is the one in which the children sit at desks in the newly-finished school as Lady Aberlin, François Clemmons, and Joe Negri sing:

Ana, Prince, and Daniel,
Ana, Prince, and Daniel,
Ana, Prince, and Daniel are near.

Daniel, Prince, and Ana,
Daniel, Prince, and Ana,
Daniel, Prince, and Ana are here.

Schooldays, schooldays, schooldays.

Happy schooldays, schooldays, schooldays to all.

Other Neighborhood posts
Blaming Mister Rogers
Fred Rogers and Pittsburgh
Joe Negri on All Things Considered
“Lady Aberlin’s Muumuu”
Lady Elaine’s can

Re: the Beloit Mindset List

Beloit College this week released the 2010 edition of its Mindset List, a project that attempts to map, year by year, the changing cultural landscape of incoming college freshmen. Several choice bits from this year’s list have turned up again and again in news reports: incoming freshmen have never written in cursive; Clint Eastwood is known as a director, not actor; Nirvana is heard on “the classic oldies station” (whatever that is), and so on. At least some of these bits are debatable: I meet students every semester who have beautiful handwriting, and I doubt that Nirvana can be found on very many “classic rock” or oldies stations. What bothers me about the Beloit list though is not the truthiness of individual items. Nor is it a feeling that the world as I know it is slipping away. Nor is it my persistent error in typing Beliot for Beloit. (Tricky keyboard!)

What bothers me about the Beloit list involves some unspoken assumptions about reality and young adults. The list reads like a nightmare-version of the proposition that begins Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” “The world is all that is the case” — all that is the case, that is, in the life-experience of a hypothetical eighteen-year-old American student. The list seems to accept as a given the kind of thinking that David Foster Wallace warns young adults against in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. . . . Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of you or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV or your monitor. And so on.

The Beloit list seems to suggest that if it hasn’t happened during your lifetime, well, it can’t really be real (witness the weirdly Orwellian statement that “Czechoslovakia has never existed”), or, at best, that you cannot be expected to know or care about it. Even the ugly word mindset reinforces that implication: “the established set of attitudes held by someone,” says the Oxford American Dictionary. The OAD illustrates that meaning with a sentence about being stuck.

The tendency to get stuck, to mistake one’s own reality for reality can be a stubborn thing: I’m still surprised when not a single student in a class has even heard of, say, Charlie Chaplin or Woody Guthrie, just as students are sometimes surprised by the bits of film and music I bring in for classroom use. (“Where do you find this stuff?” a student once asked. “Amazon,” said I.) The tendency to dismiss whatever is not of one’s own small moment can be powerfully saddening, even frightening: witness the destruction of Josh Edwards’s 78s by bop-hungry delinquents in The Blackboard Jungle (dir. Richard Brooks, 1955), or, more mildly, the snickers prompted by any display of high emotion in a black-and-white film. Or, again more mildly, the characterization of a two- or three-year-old film as “old.”

My own “mindset” in college probably has something to do with my antipathy toward the Beloit project. I listened almost exclusively to blues and jazz in college, some of it made by musicians who lived and died before I was born. I liked old black-and-white films. And studying literature and philosophy, I spent most of my time reading the work of people who were long, long gone. Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton were way before my time. Which was of course the point, “my” time being, like anyone’s, so limited.

An interviewer once asked the poet David Shapiro to name his favorite living poet. Wallace Stevens, he said. “But Stevens is dead,” the interviewer objected. “But not for me!” Shapiro replied. (Having talked with David Shapiro, I can imagine the insistent energy with which he must have made that declaration.) I suspect that among this year’s incoming freshmen are some for whom Wallace Stevens (or Emily Dickinson, or E.E. Cummings, or Langston Hughes) is still living, for whom a pocket notebook and pen or pencil are tools of thought and introspection, and for whom Czechoslovakia is as real as it gets.

Related posts
The Beloit Mindset List, 2011 edition
The Beloit Mindset List, again (2012 edition)

[Thanks to Matt Thomas for tweeting about this post.]

Well said, Daughter Number Three

Daughter Number Three says it perfectly: Eighteen Percent of Americans Make Me Tired.

Recreating Aeneas’s journey

From Turkey, news of an effort to recreate Aeneas’s “historic [sic] journey” from Troy to Italy.

Penguin Great Ideas, fifth series

An advance look at the covers for the twenty volumes in the final installment of Penguin’s Great ideas series. I especially like the Winston Churchill, George Eliot, and Epictetus covers.

Frank Kermode (1919–2010)

The literary critic Frank Kermode has died.

Men, like poets, rush “into the middest,” in medias res, where they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967).

[“Into the middest”: From Edmund Spenser’s 1589 letter to Sir Walter Ralegh regarding The Faerie Queene:

For an historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions; but a poet thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the things forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing analysis of all.

In medias res: into the midst of things. In mediis rebus: in the midst of things.]

Consider Frank Ryan

I’m out of step: unlike many people commenting on this story, I see nothing funny in it. It’s only grotesquely sad. Note to self and others: the next time you’re tempted to do anything on a phone while driving, consider Frank Ryan.

[Image from drfrankryan (Twitter).]