Professor X

by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

  7

  Remediation

  IF I HAD BEEN VERSED in the world of community college before my first night teaching at Huron State, I might have been less surprised at the low level of work. Thomas Bailey, the George and Abby O’Neill Professor of Economics and Education at Columbia University, puts the matter bluntly when he writes that “a majority of community college students arrive with academic skills in at least one subject area that are judged to be too weak to allow them to engage successfully in college-level work. Thus, a majority of community college students arrive unprepared to engage effectively in the core function of the college.” The usual solution when confronted by students with such poor academic skills is to enroll them in “developmental” or “remedial” courses. The numbers of students enrolled in such courses is revealing. One study, using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study sponsored by the United States Department of Education’s National Center on Educational Statistics, says that 58 percent of students enrolled in two-year colleges had to enroll in at least one developmental course. A national database set up by Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, using information from 83 community colleges, sets the figure at 59 percent.1

  The numbers are daunting. The University of Colorado at Boulder mandates a writing exam, and 85 percent of students turn out to require developmental writing.2 Exacerbating the problem, and putting both community college administrators and instructors in a difficult if not untenable position, is the fact that both placement in and testing out of developmental programs is a quirky business. Rules and regulations vary by school and by state and with each individual remediation teacher. Dolores Perin, in “Can Community Colleges Protect Both Access and Standards? The Problem of Remediation,” studied 15 community colleges in six states and reports that a “wide variety of practices were used to determine student readiness to advance in or exit from remediation.” Students don’t want to enroll in remedial courses—it is embarrassing for them, and because no college credit is awarded for completion, students feel that they are wasting time and money. So what happens is what one would expect to happen: “assessment and placement mandates appeared to be softened either at the state or institutional level, with the effect of reducing the number of students who were required to enroll in remedial courses.”3

  When looking at regulations regarding remedial education, the term “crazy quilt” comes to mind. The Perin study reveals that the skills assessment is, in the overwhelming majority of schools, mandatory, but what exactly is done with those assessments varies wildly, the end result being that fewer students are placed in remediation than should be. A number of colleges studied did not test all skills areas. Others allowed instructors to sidestep the tests by signing students into their programs who hadn’t been tested. Still others did not test students enrolled in vocationally based programs. The selection of tests and assessment instruments varied from state to state and college to college; some states mandated which tests to use, others did not, leaving the colleges free to choose. Assessment strategies also vary from year to year for reasons that have more to do with politics than educational theory. Perin reports a conversation with an administrator from a suburban community college in the Southwest:

  English was using up until [a few years ago] a holistic writing sample, where the English faculty would grade this writing sample by students and make a holistic decision whether they could go into college English or needed to be remediated. That got very controversial with the high schools, and so [the college decided that] anybody who finishes high school English can go right into college English and that was fine, the high schools are happy but the students aren’t successful. They’re not passing. So we have had just a radical drop in the number of students in developmental English and a rise in the number of students in credit English and a huge drop in success rate in credit English.4

  Virtually all community colleges mandate placement in developmental courses for students who do poorly on the entrance examination, but very often feel great pressure to maintain the intellectual status of their institutions. As Perin puts it succinctly, given “the extent of the need for basic reading, writing and math skills, if all students who needed remediation were actually required to enroll in developmental education classes, the community college could acquire the reputation of a remedial institution.” At one school, students who tested poorly in math and reading were mandated to attend remedial classes in only one of those areas; testing poorly in three areas meant remediation in two. 5 It’s all like some vastly complex game show, where choosing Kathy Griffin in the corner square entitles the contestant to a free pass. The nadir of this sort of illogic is reached in New York, in a suburban community college which required students who scored poorly on the placement examination to attend remediation—no fooling around, now—but released them from the mandate if they signed a waiver.6 And as for those who actually enroll in developmental education, Bailey tells us that, overall, “fewer than half of students who are referred to developmental education complete the recommended sequence.”7

  When I encounter a student who seems hopelessly unprepared at Huron State, I check the transcript and, almost every time, they have been through the wringer of remedial classes: developmental English 1, sometimes taken twice, developmental English 2. But developmental classes are by no means a foolproof solution, and getting through them doesn’t necessarily mean that the students have mastered the material. The consensus seems to be that even the most hopeless student can eventually find an instructor willing to pass them along. Perin quotes a developmental faculty member: “I think if the student ended up taking a summer session with an easy teacher they’d pass them on with a C. And that’s usually how they end up … they know how to work the system.”

  I can picture the student on his second go-round, the student who is perhaps not quite fully ready to leave the remedial class but, through dint of hard work, may be one of the best in that class. Would the remedial teacher really have the stomach to fail him again? I’m not sure that I would.

  Some have ventured to say that there is no evidence at all that remediation at the college level works. Bettinger and Long, in their study of remediation, which tracked nearly 13,000 students in Ohio community colleges from 1998 to 2003, can come only to the rather disheartening conclusion that “students in remediation do not perform worse than similar individuals who do not enroll in remedial courses… . When we compare students with similar characteristics, we find that remediation does not appear to have a negative effect.” The most they will say is that “math remediation appears to improve some student outcomes.” They conclude with the rather weary observation about remedial programs in general that “one might have expected to find a greater number of positive effects.”8

  Hardly a ringing endorsement. Preparation for higher education takes twelve years, and it is all but impossible to make up for inadequate preparation in a semester or two of remedial work.

  Semester after semester, I deal so often with students who are not yet ready for college that my sense of things gets a bit skewed. The student who is still using invented spellings at age eighteen or nineteen starts to seem the norm. I start to wonder: perhaps I am too harsh, too demanding; perhaps the idea of what a college student should be that I hold in my mind is just my own warped idealization. But then a student will turn up in my class who sets me right again.

  I have had only a few of these students. Several semesters back, there was a girl at Huron State who read Catch-22 on the breaks. Was it for a class? I asked her. No, just for pleasure. She got an A in the class. She couldn’t have helped getting an A in the class; even in her more pedestrian moments of writing, her familiarity with the sheer existence of the printed word shone through. Her diction was appropriate, her sentences and her ideas complex enough. She was a perfectly serviceable college student. She was perfectly average, perfectly good, she should have been instantly forgettable. If I could have given her an A+ I would have.


  Sometimes when a good student appears in one of my classes, it turns out they have been blown in from God-knows-what sort of complicated circumstances from halfway across the globe. Recently, in my English 101 class, I taught a woman in her early thirties. She had bright eyes, rather startling in their attentive shine. She wore long dresses, and necklaces that seemed to be made out of seashells. She read her first assignment aloud and stunned the rest of the class into silence. The paper was gorgeous. It talked about society’s reluctance to allow teenagers, who have as children learned by emulating such adult behavior as speaking and writing, to safely imitate the more frightening adult behaviors, to explore sexuality and drink under safe, controlled circumstances. Nice job, good thesis. Her writing was sophisticated. Her language was awkward in places; I noted a just-discernible accent. Her first language turned out to be Tagalog, not English.

  I asked the class what their first reaction was. They froze with uncertainty. I wondered if they could even tell whether the writing was good or bad. Finally, one astute young man, bless his heart, ventured a response. He said, with some incredulity in his voice, “It sounded like an adult paper written for adults.”

  The class agreed with him. “Adult papers written for adults” became my new definition for what we aspire to in our writing classes.

  I am actually surprised that a larger sprinkling of good students doesn’t turn up in my Huron State classes. I have come to think of two-year colleges as a great bargain. If you are a particular type of good student—someone who is in it only for grades and low cost, someone who can sit through rudimentary lectures without falling asleep, who can listen to the rambling and disconnected answers of your fellow students without wanting to bludgeon them, who can listen to your teacher’s repeated attempts to pull answers out of a class without wanting to scream out the bleedingly obvious response—if you are someone who can avoid falling into despair when college classes have high-school-type discipline problems, and the library is so lightly used, and no one really ever reads a word of anything, then a place like Huron State is a great buy. An in-state full-time student pays less than $2,000 per semester. Students who are on the ball can sail through two years at low cost with minimal effort, earning a 4.0 GPA, spiritually regenerating their professors and earning their eternal gratitude in the process.

  The students at Pembrook and Huron State leave me with two choices: teach at a true college level and fail everybody, or dumb things down enough so that more students can pass. For a long time, I didn’t know what to do, and so I did both, or neither, depending on the class, depending on my philosophy, which was constantly in flux. I would teach at a college level, but then someone would ask me if the New York Times was a newspaper or a magazine. I was suspended in a great workplace inconsistency. I’d been there before, treading the air (like a cartoon character who has wandered off a cliff) between the steep walls of policy and reality. “Because of generally weak skills found among community college students,” says Thomas Bailey, “professors in many college-level classes must teach in such a way as to address the needs of students with weak skills.” He goes on to discuss the phenomenon of “hidden remediation,” the surreptitious introduction of basic skill instruction. Well, I was secretly remediating like crazy, speaking in the same class period of deconstructionism and subject-verb agreement. I could teach my students how to write a sentence, but I couldn’t really give them college credit for it. Or could I?

  My classes and I flailed in the drink, and kicked, and swallowed water, and came perilously close to drowning, and at the end of 15 weeks a decision had to be made: nudge the terrible grades upward, give them lots of credit for making progress and pass some people along, or adhere to a set of standards and fail most of them. Could a student not yet ready for college learn the skills in 15 weeks to become so? Could he, at the conclusion of my class, write a fully formed, fully realized college essay, even a D or a C one? We weren’t, after all, asking for miracles, but the answer was no. The students at Huron State were worse than those at Pembrook. I’d failed my share at Pembrook, but here I hit new heights, or new lows.

  My eventual single-semester record would be nine out of fifteen students failed.

  David Mazella, an associate professor of eighteenth-century British literature at the University of Houston, would have it that the fault lies completely with me. He writes that I am an “unhappy soul,” a modern version of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, and really, their poor work, or at least my reaction to it, is all my fault:

  In my mind, the notion of grading-as-ranking almost always flips over and becomes a way in which we as teachers are reminded of how we have been ranked and sorted ourselves, into institutions and departments with reputations good, bad, or indifferent.

  He believes that my apprehension of the students’ work as being alarmingly substandard really has nothing to do with them. It is a manifestation of my own sense of powerlessness, and my own need to bully:

  The temptation, at institutions like mine and Professor X’s, is to impersonate the kind of punitive, absolute authority that renders grades to its helpless students as if they really were blessings and curses. The temptation to act out in this way, I think, actually gets stronger the further one is from any real or effective authority in one’s institution or profession.9

  I went to the Huron State campus to turn in my grades after that first semester. This was before the days of online grade submission; the deadline was 9 A.M. In the registrar’s office, little knots of instructors, adjuncts and full-timers, drank coffee and did last-minute averaging. The air was thick with weary sighs, sarcastic commentary, and the click of calculator keys. Huron State required instructors to turn in an additional form when a student received an F. The office floor was littered with these things, discarded forms with mistaken entries and blank extra copies. The scene looked like the aftermath of a modest academic ticker-tape parade. The helpful secretary had a big stack of the things on either end of her counter. “Anybody need more?” she asked. “Anybody need more F forms?” Several instructors wondered aloud: when were they getting rid of these things? It really was too much of a burden to have to fill out so many.

  I braced myself for the howls of outrage. I thought surely I’d be fired; I waited for the torrent of irate e-mails from the students. But no such response came. The students were silent. They were used to failure. They’d been failing for years. This was just another bad report card, although now there was no requirement that they have a parent sign it. Not a single student complained. Some weeks later I got an official looking letter from the college. I worried until I tore it open to find my contract for the following semester. A helpful adhesive arrow at the bottom showed me where to sign.

  8

  The Good Stuff

  IT TURNS OUT THAT despite everything, I really enjoy spending my evenings with 15 or 20 pupils both apt and inapt, our eyes glued to the blackboard, as together we try to hammer into shape the most malformed and misshapen escarpments of prose imaginable. We take paragraphs straight from the nightmares of E. B. White and turn them, after much work, into beautiful things. This is a laborious business. Crafting good writing is dead slow even for the best writer working without encumbrance; for me and for my 20 apprentices, thinking and writing and editing together, time accelerates in rather an Einsteinian fashion: an hour disappears in a flash as we focus and tighten and buff the writing to a shine. With every improvement, every strengthening of diction, every mistake removed, I read or a student reads the paragraph aloud again, and in time we are all marveling at the sensual pleasure good prose can give. Good writing in the mouth is like sweet vanilla ice cream. But it takes forever to get anywhere, which is okay, because I want the students to appreciate what kind of effort it takes to unravel and improve what the writing pedagogues would call “inexplicit texts.” Good writing takes hours and hours, but is there any intellectual endeavor more satisfyingly enveloping? Even the students who profess to be uninterested in wr
iting fall under the spell of the transformative process. What we do is true classroom alchemy, starting with little lumps of lead and emerging with, if not gold, something a lot shinier.

  Few things I do are anywhere near as engaging. If I am ill with the flu or my lower back is bothering me, I have forgotten about it by the time I finish unpacking my little instructor’s satchel at the front of the room. Teaching is a restorative tonic. If some disaster is befalling the house, if a mysterious stain on the ceiling of a room beneath the bathroom is increasing in circumference, I forget about it while teaching. If my wife and I are fighting, teaching clears my head and soothes my soul. Thinking of her unhappy tears me to pieces; the teaching of writing can distract me.

  There are many things to love about teaching writing and literature. It happens that I enjoy nothing more than trying to convey to a class something of my passion for a great short story, or the satisfaction a writer can feel upon nailing a point with a phrase that tells.

  Through a most circuitous route, one lined with heartache, I am back in the game of literature, the game I had abandoned to chase my notion of a middle-class life. My day job is nothing to be ashamed of, but it is, in the immortal usage of the late graphic novelist Harvey Pekar, quotidian. My job does not transcend. It is cut from the very heart of job-ness. I make schedules and approve purchases and improvise madly when the staff calls in sick—really, exactly the same stuff I did in high school when I was the de facto manager of an ice cream stand. I haven’t come very far, have I? My English degrees haven’t been relevant to my work life for years. I had given up thinking about the power of writing and literature. Becoming an adjunct brought me back to a world I had nearly forgotten and, of necessity, submerged me completely in its vast waters.