by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
When I initially suggest topics, and I talk about one that has even the faintest odor of the historical, some of my students complain that they are not into history. When I suggest a topic from current events, they sometimes ask, “What if you’re really not on top of the news?” Fair enough; when I was in college I was too busy to be on top of the news. So I prod and poke around with them, hoping to find something suitable.
One education major who was planning to be a high school teacher (but wasn’t into history) realized, after some leading questions from me, that she actually did know something about the history of federal education legislation, and ultimately that was what her paper was about. She said to me, with relief, “When you said history, I thought you meant just presidents.” Other students have a harder time of it; they can’t seem to place their chosen field of study in any intellectual context. We return to the old problem that my students do not read very much. They do not understand that most educated people read a fair amount. For my students, reading is just another thing that they happen not to be into, the way some people aren’t into scrapbooking or Pilates or watching Lost.
The research paper is a mix of high- and low-level skills. The more complex skills, the synthesis of arguments and the development of a thesis, are simply beyond some of my students at this stage of their academic development. Some are poor readers. Some cannot read a journal article—or even a People article—and summarize the author’s stance. An alarming number of my students have trouble Finding the Main Idea.
Authoring a paper is one thing. Making sure it adheres to the Modern Language Association rules is quite another. That’s a low-level skill, and they don’t do so hot at that either. My students seem to have a lot of trouble formatting the works-cited page at the end of the paper, giving information about the books and periodicals used in the paper. Each entry follows a slightly different format, depending on what it is: a book, a journal from a research database, an online journal, a newspaper, a selection from an anthology. It can be very annoying work, as I am reminded as I type the notes to this book. But it is doable. My students’ research materials fall into no more than five categories. They’re not citing anything tricky, like e-mails or unpublished dissertations or transcripts of interviews they have personally conducted. They’re citing books and Web sites and articles from the databases and that’s about it. I give the students a sample “works cited” page. I tell them: make sure yours looks exactly like this one. We spend one, sometimes two classes writing works-cited entries and putting them on the board.
After much drilling, they seem to get it, but when the papers are turned in, the works-cited pages are a disaster—even after I’ve looked at their first drafts and told them their format is incorrect. They don’t make changes. They don’t fix it. They do not make any goddamned changes. Why not, I ask you? Why not? I understand why my students don’t do what they can’t do. But why don’t they do what they can do?
I am frankly puzzled. Deciding what model to use for a particular entry is no harder than deciding whether a can of coffee on the supermarket shelf is regular or decaffeinated.
This is the conclusion I have come to: my students are suffering from some manner of despair. Unsuccessful students grow up thinking not just that their work has no value, but that it never can have any value, and thus they cannot put in the wholehearted effort that college demands. They cannot surrender to the demands of the work because they think it’s probably shitty anyway.
The library is an exotic place. Once, as we started to do research, one of my students found the name and the call number of a book she wanted to use. She dutifully wrote it all down on a slip. “So what do I do now?” she wondered. “Give it to a librarian?” She and I were standing in the library stacks. “Some things haven’t changed,” I told her. “It’s still self-service. You can pull it off the shelf yourself.”
Maybe she missed the orientation. Some colleges have multiple orientations to lure students into the library:
What other actions can colleges and universities take to get first-year students into the library? …
Include the library as a stop on the campus tour that prospective students take with admissions representatives. Along with the newest residence hall and the state-of-the-art recreation facility, students and their families should see the library. They should be welcomed by a librarian who delivers the message that the library is critically important to each student’s academic experience. That message bears repeating at every opportunity, especially during freshman orientation… .
Try the Barnes & Noble approach. A comfortable ambience, Wi-Fi, and coffee may bring into the library students who are seeking a cozy alternative to studying in a residencehall room… . [T]he University of Texas at Austin has revamped its undergraduate library to include “computers, a coffee shop, comfortable chairs, and 24-hour technical help.”1
Often I receive papers without a thesis, papers that lapse into incoherence, papers that have not been proofread, papers that simply beggar all description. Sometimes I think—they’ve got to be kidding! A woman once turned in a frightful paper, one of the worst I’ve ever seen, but she was older, she could have been someone’s grandmother, and I felt sorry for her. I thought for a moment about slipping her a C-minus or a D, but then I had a sobering thought: what if she were a plant from the New York Times doing a story on the declining standards of the nation’s colleges? In my mind’s eye, the front page of a newspaper spun madly, like in the old movies, coming to rest to reveal a damning headline:
THIS IS A C? Illiterate Mess Garners “Average” Grade Adjunct Says Student “Needed” to Pass, “Tried Hard”
Gotta be strong. Gotta give the F.
Every time I teach the research paper I drive the class a little harder. Each group does a bit better with it than the last. We labor mightily, week after week: thesis statements, parenthetical citations, proper works-cited format for a preface, introduction, or foreword. We’re all sweating. One night, I was going on about the ellipsis mark in a way that I thought was compelling when I looked down to the back row of seats and noted a startling V of student arms: across an aisle, a young boy and girl held hands. She took down what I was saying in her notebook. He couldn’t, his writing hand being committed. Instead, he looked on admiringly as she worked. At break time, I had a little meeting with the couple. “You just can’t do that,” I said, and they seemed sincerely abashed. They promised they wouldn’t do it again. “When you’re holding hands back there, no one else can concentrate,” I said. They walked away, hand in hand. They looked barely twenty. She was squat, splayfooted, wide of pelvis. Her shoulder-length hair bounced as she walked. He, a skinny boy, swam in his T-shirt, which hung long on him, nearly to his knees. A casual interlacing of fingers, and I no longer felt quite able to assure the class that all of this research paper stuff was so terribly important. Life had intruded on our classroom. Maybe they had the toughest part of life solved. Privately, I celebrated their union, and I wondered at their prospects, their children and careers and hopes for marital happiness. I hoped they would have enough resources; I hoped their lives would never be cramped; I hoped they would suffer no want. They returned to the classroom sharing a carton of orange juice. He was so in awe of her.
She got a B on the paper. The one he turned in was quite a bit worse. I don’t think he did much work on it. She must have been clasping his hand really tightly.
14
Life Editing
I BELIEVE IN THE EDITING PROCESS. I try to convey to my classes that the hardest part of writing is battling the blank page and emerging with some sort of draft, no matter how lumpy, which can then almost always be whipped into acceptable shape. How much simpler it is, how much more directed the work, to repair something rather than build from scratch.
Once we have our draft, no matter how lopsided or jerry-built, then we can spit on our hands and get down to the business of making it better. Once I have the raw material I have no fear. In my c
lasses, we’ve put junky, half-thought-out paragraphs onto the blackboard and—by dint of great sweat, by rewriting every sentence multiple times, by devoting as much as two and a half hours to a single paragraph—come up with something that is, if not brilliant, then decidedly okay.
I believe in the power of editing in life, as well, which isn’t always well advised. My faith in life editing renders me unafraid of taking the craziest course of action. It can always be fixed later, I think. I always want to do something rather than nothing, no matter how ill advised or boneheaded the action seems. I leap into life without fear.
Some of the decisions I have leapt into have worked out wonderfully.
The children, of course. What’s to say? What would life be without them? No life editing necessary.
Getting a master’s degree—that was a good decision. So was moving to the exurbs. So, in these uncertain economic times, when the unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent, was working for the government. It hasn’t ever been particularly glamorous, and I may have looked a bit foolish in the gogo stretches of the 1990s, but I do appreciate the steady work.
Marrying my wife—that was a good one too.
I was lucky to find her. Even today, after things have been so hard between us, after the sound of her approaching footsteps in the house can sometimes send my heart racing with anxiety and anger, after her voice sounds to me harsh and drained of all love (and she, no doubt, feels a whole set of corresponding things about me), so many times we still have the capacity to ring out together like notes of a pleasing piano chord. We are the same people, the same consciousness, in a thousand small ways.
We are Miracle on 34th Street people, not It’s a Wonderful Life people. Jimmy Stewart is too corny. Give us both the pleasures of John Payne.
We rush to tell each other about the same stories in the newspaper.
We are both almost comically indifferent to the weather. We never carry umbrellas.
We think alike. We see a lottery winner on TV and my wife wonders: if someone buys a friend a lottery ticket for Christmas, and the friend wins $250,000, what would be an appropriate amount to bestow on the gift giver? We both have an answer, without hesitation, and it is the same answer: $50,000.
We stand together outside the house and watch one of the holiday parades our little village is so fond of mounting. Our eyes alight on the same things; our heads snap in the same direction. Look at how tall that kid has gotten, we think at the same time. We watch with great fascination the manager of the local deli, who speaks with an eastern European accent. He is thin and angular, and he’s got an equally angular eastern European wife. They sip tea and watch the parade. My wife and I can’t stop imagining them as sculptors, and the same sort of sculptors at that: we imagine them mounting large installations made from found objects, old junk cars and the like. For whatever reason, even our craziest fancies are the same. The high school band passes: we like that. The Veterans of Foreign Wars pass: we well up at that. Here comes the 4-H club, and the local chapter of the Odd Fellows, and the Catholic church, and the volunteer firemen. The year could be 1956; my wife and I are swimming deep in the syrup and grain of Americana. And then come the Civil War reenactors, their shoes authentically tattered, the brims of their hats broken. They walk in a shuffle, half in a daze. These are men who have clearly seen too much on the battlefield. Except they haven’t, really; one is an insurance adjuster, one works in a toy store. The spectators fall silent as they pass. It’s an uncomfortable silence. No one quite knows how to react.
I make a snide remark about their fraudulence.
“It seems a harmless enough hobby,” says my wife.
The idea of fraudulence hangs in the air. The house we bought seems to have poisoned talk. There are fewer and fewer subjects on which we can alight comfortably. If there is to be peace, I dare not mention Civil War reenactors again. I’d better not mention the Civil War. There are scores of subjects off limits in this way. The vacation we took to Florida. Ivy League colleges. Even our shared indifference to the weather. If we cared about ourselves more, if we weren’t so blockheadedly oblivious to such things as rain, we would have taken care to feather our nest more, and not bought the house.
A sense of estrangement descends on us, raining on our parade, but mercifully it soon lifts. She, too, wants us to be normal. The Knights of Columbus march by in their tricorner hats beplumed with white feathers, their dark jackets trimmed with braids of white. She takes my hand.
All of our troubles may ultimately have made me a better, less rancorous person. I have always been a wiseacre, ready to make fun of anything or anyone. My wife, who laughs easily, was a good audience. Neighbors, relatives, local merchants, children’s teachers—all were fair game. Once I became less happy, the jokes turned caustic, and she stopped laughing. My weaknesses were showing; my desire to drag down everyone else, like the poor reenactors, was now evident. And so I developed a policy of measured silence. I assumed a virtue that I did not possess, but eventually, liberated from the obsessive search for a punch line, I started to see the world more clearly, and more charitably.
After the parade is over and the crowd has dispersed, it is time to mow the lawn, a task I do not relish. My lawn is large and my mower small. It has a 14-inch deck. It takes a long while. Somehow, my grass is always too long and too wet when I get around to mowing. I have to stop frequently and tilt the machine on its rear wheels in a sort of landscaping Heimlich maneuver so that it can disgorge, like knots of chewed gristle, plugs of grass. I must be rather a forlorn figure, tracing square paths, marching back and forth, back and forth, losing the battle with nature. I vow, tomorrow, to pull weeds. I look more and more like my father, the renter of an apartment in a quasisuburban setting. I never saw him in anything but a suit and fedora; he stood out from the other fathers, who sometimes turned up in sport shirts and sneakers. Why didn’t he have the right accoutrements? Why did he insist on the suit? Well, now I know: he was a bit of a dandy, true, but more than that, he didn’t want to spend the money on leisurewear. Neither do I. I wear discards from my work wardrobe: shorts cut from old work trousers, a frayed pinpoint oxford, wingtips without socks. I feel like the neighborhood tatterdemalion.
The task takes about an hour.
“How was mowing?” asks my wife as I sit in the hot kitchen drinking seltzer. Sweat pours off me. My head swims with fatigue. I feel as though I might collapse.
“It’s good exercise,” I say.
“That’s probably the best way to think of it,” she says, perhaps darkly.
I try to catch my breath. I am an old, poor, bare, forked animal. The chemicals in my body are out of balance; my toenails now routinely split and fall off. I suffer dyspepsia. For my health, I try without much success to eat oatmeal with the consistency of library paste. Outside the kitchen window, a crow caws in an ugly fashion.
Our household is wildly fraught. Everything drips with meaning. I know she’s thinking: It’s okay to think of it as exercise. But you’re at the age where you should really be able to choose your own exercise. How sad. Or something like that. Or maybe she’s not. I don’t know anymore. Even in the smallest, everyday actions, I am no longer on sure footing.
Before anyone else has gotten up in the morning, I struggle to read a book that won’t stay open and eat breakfast at the same time. This is difficult because my genteel, poverty-stricken mother taught me to butter toast one bite at a time. At her knee I learned to appreciate a world that lay beyond my means. The struggle with breakfast wears me out. I feel all my motor skills diminishing terribly with age. The pages of the book get greasy. I don’t even taste the toast. All my upbringing, everything silly I have brought to bear on life seems, at that capstone moment, to conspire against me, and I want to cry out: I seem trapped in the wrong universe, neither exactly left- nor righthanded, not able to maneuver.
I hear the creak of my wife’s step upstairs. I don’t go immediately up there, and she doesn’t come down. Our life has a
ltered what it was. I hope we can go back to how we were.
I am addicted to her presence, as sad as it makes me at times. I have never loved another adult the way I love her, and so—it has to be—I’ve threatened to leave, barked the word “divorce” at her (Did I really mean it? Or was I just angry, the way everybody in a couple gets angry sometimes?), shouted and screamed, hammered dresser tops with my fists, thrown things, jumped up and down in frustration like a little kid, as though I could break the bonds of Earth’s gravity, and that would make me feel better.
It’s not easy to argue with the children in the house. One tries very hard to be undetected. We argue in whispers. We argue in bursts no more than ten seconds long. We have gone out to the driveway and argued in the car, as though we were listening to the last minutes of a compelling report on the radio. But often, we can find a vacant room in which to fight. The house is big enough for that. How’s that for an irony? In the Cape Cod, there was no room to fight—there was no room to swing a cat—but we had thankfully little to fight about. This house, vast and dark, can seem to possess a malevolent spirit. I think of The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Hill House— thank you, Shirley Jackson.
“Why are we arguing?” I say. “It’s not like we’re fighting about doing anything. We’re not going to sell the house. We won’t uproot the kids. We’re just fighting about how we got here. It’s all just—literary analysis. I don’t care how we got here.”
“I want to make a better decision next time,” she says.
With one wrong move, one misstep, life can change forever. I tend toward the obsessive-compulsive. I’m always checking running toilets to make sure they don’t overflow. I try not to do it around the children. My anxiety might be contagious. I don’t want them to be nervous. I don’t want them to live in constant fear. But maybe my approach is wrong. Maybe they should know what I didn’t in my bones: that with one misstep, life can change forever.