college

Speechless

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Some years ago while working at a different college, I wrote this essay loosely ripping off an essay by Tim O’Brien. I’m not ashamed. I found it recently and thought about how I still neglect to complete the very assignment I encouraged my students to complete as often as possible. . Something needs to change.

What Have We Learned

Older students are better than those just out of high school. The big dude with the pierced face and tattooed eyelids is probably a great writer. Many students would rather pull a lower grade than have a professor look at a rough draft. Students who take copious notes don’t always fair as well as students who just listen intently. If it happened before they were born, it really doesn’t have any affect on them and therefore they shouldn’t be required to learn about it.

Hamlet is boring; Oedipus is stupid; statistics is tedious; bio lab is too long; developmental classes are a waste of money; introduction to literature is a waste of time; history is not relevant; philosophy has no practical application; psychology is disturbing and the instructors are disturbed; text messages are read more than text books; face to face communication is obsolete; and the only source of information is the internet.

Here’s the great irony of education: While we should become smarter as time goes by because we’ve been given the answers through the centuries, watched the lessons played out on the battlefields and in seminar rooms, we’re actually ignoring more, learning less, and not really keeping tabs of our decline.

Maybe if I text my lectures they’ll pay attention. Phones go off in class, in the hallways, in their backpacks. They reach in to quickly shut it off because they “forgot it was on,” and spilling out onto the floor are the books they need, a few small notebooks, and various articles of clothing. They carry more in their bags then in their minds. 

The science and math books are ten-pounders, and the anthologies aren’t lightweights either. For lab they need their lab equipment, gloves, goggles, special notebooks, dead animals. Rough drafts, final copies, required journals, various books read besides the textbook, art supplies, tape decks, language discs, keys, wallets, games and personal items. Some have staplers, toothbrushes, condoms, aspirin, medicine bottles, and hand soap. Some carry crayons and cookies because their kids come to class sometimes when elementary school is out or cancelled, or when the kid is sick but the Prof told the parent if she missed one more day she’d fail the course. They carry medicine for those kids, bi-polar, attention-deficit, hyperactive. They carry the same for themselves, medicine for their own ADD, ADHD, OCD, diabetes and manic-depression. They carry a lot. They need to remember when papers are due, when tests are scheduled, including their math tests, their physics test, algebra, pregnancy, special needs tests, mammograms, CT scans, and various other tests they’ve got on their mind and written down in their notebooks at the bottom of their parcel.

They carry cell phones with various rings, various friends calling during class, right before class. They have small machines attached to their ear so they can remotely answer the phone without having to move their arms or lift their hands. They have the numbers of everyone they know automatically programmed in. They no longer have to walk to see anyone, walk to find a phone, remember any numbers, lift their arms, or turn their heads.

Once someone’s phone vibrated during class. The vibration on the desk was as loud as a ring, but she politely excused herself. Some professors insist the phones be off during class, and they won’t even allow them to be turned to vibrate. But this student came back in and said she was sorry and that she had to go, that was her babysitter calling and someone from her husband’s command post was at her house waiting for her to come home. A week later I discovered her husband had been blown up at a roadside bombing on the airport road from Baghdad. Another student’s brother was on television. He worked for Blackwater in Baghdad and she watched her brother’s charred body swing from a bridge in Iraq.

One student shot himself in the head because he thought the paper was due and he thought his medicine wasn’t. True story. A colleague of mine listened quietly one day to a near-suicidal student explain why her paper was late and how her daughter was going through depression and they were bringing her to the doctor to see what was wrong, and it weighed so heavily on her mind that she couldn’t really concentrate on the paper and would the professor mind the paper turned in a few days late, and she agreed. Students knew this about her—she would work with anyone. A few days later my colleague hung herself in her kitchen because her medicine was fucked up.

This is the American Community College. These are the trenches, in the city; some of these students come to get ahead, knock off some basic education classes before transferring and paying more at the university. But some come here instead of jail, or to bide their time, or to hang with old friends and maybe hook up with new ones. Some come to keep off the streets; it can get dangerous these days. But some of these students come from real war-torn areas. My student Deng walked across Somalia to Ethiopia twice looking for safety. Before he found it at ten-years-old in a Red Cross camp, he was given an automatic rifle and taught to kill. Now he tries to write about gun control and crime in seven hundred words, making sure the grammar is right. His mother was raped and hacked to death in front of his eyes. His father “disappeared.” He was a Lost Boy. Sometimes he didn’t concentrate. Yeah, okay, sometimes he didn’t pay attention. But when he came to my office we talked about politics and survival. We talked about Africa and faith. We talked about ideas, and he told me Chinua Achebe knows Africa. He told me how Sartre would not be popular in Somalia but Descartes would. He knew the differences, understood the gentle nuances that separate philosophy and politics. I didn’t ask about his scars. He didn’t ask about mine. Deng came here with an education the likes of which we can’t possibly conceive. He told me he as soon as he found the camp he knew he needed to leave. I said I understood. He said it was too much, and he wanted to die so badly and that’s when he knew he just had to get out. I didn’t answer. I had nothing left to say to him.

What I know now is this: all the lectures in all the classrooms from all the professors in the world will not prepare us to be anything of value if we don’t find any value in what we do and how we live our lives.

Of course we would all do things differently; even just a few small moments. I’d never have left Massachusetts. I’d have gone to Monterrey anyway. I would have passed on the Trout in Prague, the oysters in Asheville. When I left Tucson that last time I’d have headed west instead of back east.

We are always in pursuit of ourselves, aren’t we? Even if we don’t consciously consider such notions day to day. In class one morning I asked my students if there was anything they would have done differently in their short but tech-dominated past. They all laughed and had answers that ranged from staying off-line to trying harder in high school to treating a loved one better while she had the chance. They talked for a bit; they got quiet. They thought a while. And I added this: What are you doing now that five years from now you will wish you had done differently?

They looked at me for a moment with just a little confusion and some wonder about their future, and they waited for me to talk.

But honestly, I have nothing left to say.

Copy That

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

This week the assignment in college comp is to write an essay about the positive and negative effects (or short term/long term; physical/emotional, whatever) of involvement in extracurricular activities. Research and valid support from experts are required. Today I read some rough drafts.

Out of twenty something papers, fourteen of them quoted as their source the same “study” done by two professors at the University of Pakistan. Their papers “reflect” the findings in a predictably vague and non-committal way, with language intended for fifth graders and excessive repetition for extreme ADHD readers. My students have not yet figured out that AI writing generally sucks anyway.

After some frustration, I took a moment to Google “Studies of the effects of extracurricular activities,” and the first six or so hits were UCLA, University of Wisconsin, Oklahoma State, Notre Dame, US Department of Education.

National Institute of Health, Texas A&M, Nature. The list of accepted expert sources is extensive.

So what gives?

Ah! I thought. I know exactly what gives.

I Googled “information about the effects of extracurricular activities,” and the first five hits? University of Pakistan. I googled “statistics and quotes about extracurricular activities” and the same Pakistani people popped up. Then I Googled “Essays about the effects of extracurricular activities” and the same people showed up. Go figure.

Quick recount: Test scores started to drop at high schools and universities about the time technology slipped into the curriculum, not unlike obesity showing up more often after the explosion of fast-food restaurants nationwide, or the numbers of hyperactive and anxiety-prone students skyrocketing with the introduction of specialty coffee shops and power drinks. After Texas instruments introduced the calculator to the classroom, the slide rule (kids, look it up) slid out of use. The conversation in the seventies was that students weren’t learning math, they were learning how to use a calculator.

This has been going on since some Bronze Age dad figured out a flint stone started fire faster than rubbing together two sticks. At the time, if he handed his preteen two sticks, the kid might have stared at them like they were relics from the Neanderthal Age.

In all math classes and for all homework, teachers used to exclaim, “Do your own work.” Not meaning don’t cheat, though I suppose that too, but meaning do NOT use electronics such as a Texas Instrument calculator to figure out the solution.

Writing terrifies students because they simply don’t do it. And if they can use AI programs to complete their work AND know the material, well, whatever. But writing is different; it is organic, but most importantly it has been proven to be the most effective tool in learning. It directly aids in retention, and we can actually teach ourselves material and figure out solutions to problems simply by writing about them, page after page. It is called Writing to Learn, and in Days of Yore, it was standard practice, wherein an eighth-grade class might be assigned Hamlet to read, and then their homework was to write two-thousand words about “Hamlet’s madness” or “Laertes revenge,” and so on. The process of writing exposed the characters to the writer with far more accuracy than “thinking” about it, or even talking about it, and the students became better writers, learned to do their own work, and gained valuable confidence in the process. That’s the key issue here—the absolute lack of confidence on the part of the student to write coherently.

But that individual, organically generated (OG?) writing ebbed during a time when individual assignments were sacrificed for “Group Work.”


But I digress. I got carried away as is apt to happen when writing. I do it a lot, though, so I don’t mind. But my students do not do it and they apparently do mind, even in a class they know was a writing class. They avoid it anyway and would rather spend time finding other people who already wrote what I’m looking for. The problem is this isn’t a history class where all I really want to know is if they understand the pressure felt by a group of soldiers on D-Day, which still should be met with original writing of course. No, this IS a writing class, where the lesson we learn is how to actually do it and the subject matter is secondary. We don’t learn how to steal it or copy it or get through by being so howl-at-the-moon lazy that I question how they got through high school to begin with.

(breathe in, breathe out)

Don’t be so quick to assume the student with the 4.0 GPA earned it. Don’t assume the new hire knows the material; they might have just learned how to present information as if they know what they’re doing. Do not automatically believe the students would make good graduate students because they seemed to excel during their undergraduate studies. They may have actually excelled at finding material, not figuring it out on their own.

So how can we tell if students are doing their own work?

Here’s what I do:

I get to know them. I pull a chair into the middle of the room, and we talk about their hobbies, their siblings, their experiences being away at college for the first time, and what they do for fun to relieve the stress of classes. I adopted Leo Buscaglia’s requirement of a “Voluntary-Mandatory” meeting at least once a semester, where every student was required to volunteer to go to his office at least once for five minutes, introduce themselves, and talk about what they want out of the class. So I do that, and I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my students better now than I did in the thirty years I was at a different college.

Does it work?

NO! Half my class thinks Hamza Abbasi of the University of Pakistan is the source for all things extracurricular in the American schools. And they all told me so using exactly the same words as each other.

Tomorrow I’m handing out slide rules and asking them for the square root of 3987.5. That will give me time to read more rough drafts.

3.5 Decades

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I completed my thirty-fifth year of teaching college this week, reaching into five decades, and I’ve collected some observations through six presidential administrations, hundreds of school shootings, several wars, and three blood pressure medications.

When I began, students did not have cell phones, laptops, pcs, Starbucks, energy drinks, vapes, internet or any of its time-sucking programs like Spotify, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and so on—there was no device with which to communicate with others other than the house phone or pay phone. We didn’t have GPS or Uber, relying upon paper maps and taxis, or hitchhiking. We learned through experience instead of Google; research was completed at the card catalogue and microfiche section of the library. Students were less distracted and profoundly less hyper.

At the beginning of it all, it took the first five minutes of class to get students to stop talking; friendships and even marriages were conceived in classrooms where everyone moved swiftly away from high school friends and old neighborhood habits into new relationships which would last a lifetime. They looked at each other, talked and laughed and worried with each other. They took notes in notebooks, asked questions, and they learned how to figure things out instead of find things out. I kept attendance in an attendance book, and everyone knew everyone else’s names. The need to reestablish oneself at eighteen without a net (and without the Net), forced first-timers away from home to grow up faster, mature without the crutch of pre-teen friends a tweet away.

The campus grassy areas, the student center, the dorm lounges were filled with students studying, throwing a frisbee or football, standing behind tables proselytizing about organizations or providing information about that month’s cause. Lounges were packed, the line to my office was long with students ready to ask questions, review a paper, attempt to con me into extended due dates. Some just came by to talk and they’d sit in the office for hours, sometimes on the floor and some in the door as my officemate Tom and I would share stories of our college days, which even then seemed archaic—so when compared to my students today, our own freshman ways are tales from neanderthals.

But they were there, the students, laughing and talking, enlivening the office and the next day the classroom, trying a bit harder, doing a bit more.

When cell phones first entered the classroom, they were quickly forbidden, and students’ common claim was they carried one just in case of an emergency. That evolved to constant texts and phone calls before and after class, which morphed to phones behind books and in laps during lectures. In recent years when I walk down the hallway to the classroom it is quiet, deafeningly so, as if no one is going to be in the room when I turn into the doorway. But of course they are there, staring at their phones, texting their friends from middle school, watching TikTok videos. One semester with fourteen weeks gone I asked them the names of those sitting next to them, and no one—not one—knew anybody else’s name. I told them they might have spent the semester next to someone who could have been a good friend, a confidant, a soulmate. I remind them someone else in the class might have an answer to some question, a thought that completes theirs. They shrug.

In the beginning, students plagiarized out of books; then they bought papers online; today they turn in AI generated work, which they don’t realize is more often vague and filled with generalities, and while well documented, lacks in any significant attribution that is necessary in excellent collegiate writing, so they do poorly and can’t figure out why.

But there’s something else which has changed and is difficult to define that has something to do with simplicity. In thirty-five years the world has grown more angry, more impatient, and aggressive. This isn’t an old prof ragging on their generation staring at me from the silence of the seats; I hear the same thing from twenty-something year old colleagues. Most of today’s students don’t think they can face the day without a few Red Bulls, coffee, or three Five Hour Energy Drinks. This isn’t an exaggeration. In the beginning it seems students had big hearts—helping others in class, stopping by (pre-email, remember) my office to ask for help or offer thanks, willingly teaming up with two or three others for projects and study groups. Today, students’ hearts are big—physically I mean, often fifty percent larger than they should be from the synthetic drinks, in turn causing anxiety, insomnia, intestinal issues, muscle spasms, and excessive restlessness, all from the B vitamins and caffeine coursing through their veins, causing classroom issues including tardiness, inattentiveness, impatience, irritability and a desperately clear lack of focus.

And me? Thirty-five years ago was I a better teacher? Ha. No. I feel so bad for those students those first few years, mostly because of my own arrogance borne of insecurity, my impatience resulting from fear of my own ignorance about a subject. I was almost the same age as them back then. The average age at that college was twenty-nine; exactly my age when I started teaching. So sure, I’ve changed too. But hopefully for the better.

Last week I pulled the chair in front of students, most of whom could be my grandkids, and I sat quietly for a bit. I told them

you just arrived at college this year and within a few weeks a half dozen adults my age want to know what major you wish to declare to invest your entire college education in for the next four years, what discipline you wish to focus on, what your plans are for the rest of your life, all while you’re attempting to navigate fifteen credit hours with professors who have no intention of holding your hands like high school teachers might have, while living with total strangers in tight quarters, sharing bathrooms. For the first time in your life, now, at eighteen, you’re thrust into this whirling processor trying to find your bearings, and you find safety and security in your phone which is your only remaining umbilical back to a more organized and predictable life. I get it.

In the beginning, when I first started teaching—I go on—students were forced into dealing with this new life with little ability to retreat, and it is how they found out what they’re capable of. And when they did, their energy didn’t come from a can; it came from knowing they could handle so much more than they thought they could.

Do you even know what you’re capable of? Because until you let go, you haven’t moved on.

I stood to leave. Abby, a fine student who takes notes and drinks water from a reusable vessel, asked, “What was college like when you were a freshman?”

I laughed because I have spent the better part of my writing life recently writing about just that. “Terrifying,” I said, and they laughed. “I was not only cut off from home because of the stone-age communication system we used in those pre-historic times, I also went to college ten hours away. I didn’t drink much and lived in a dorm with those who did drink, nonstop, at a time the drinking age was eighteen. I was never a great student so there’s that, and I tried to balance it all by getting involved in the radio station and newspaper and local coffeehouse scene, but that just made me neglect my work even more.” A “D” student in the back sat up and listened.

“You survived, I guess,” he said, reflectively.

“I did. Though it didn’t always seem that way. But I’d go back and do it again in a Monster Drink-infused heartbeat.” We all laughed, which is how I always preferred to leave them.

It’s been thirty-five years since I first walked into B-100, a small auditorium on the Beach campus of Tidewater Community College, to teach a college comp course. I sat in the seats like any other student while thinking of my lesson for my first ever class, as students walked in. Two behind me, of course not knowing who I was, said, “Geez I hope this one’s not an asshole.” I stood up and walked to the front and the faces on those two dropped.

“I hope not too,” I said. “But if I am, be sure to let me know,” and we all laughed.

Yeah, I’d do it again.