College?

When one of the clerks at my local small-town store returned from college last spring, I asked her how her first year of college went.

“OK,” she answered cheerfully, and then added emphatically, “Only thing is, college professors just don’t care about you. High school teachers care; professors just want to collect that check, and that’s all they care about.”

I kept my groans and sighs internal. “What do you mean, exactly?” I asked. She just repeated the above. “Well, like what, for example?” I prompted. She didn’t know. Said she’d think about it.

I saw her again this week, back from school again. I didn’t recognize her until I heard her voice—she was at best “stocky” before, and in the past few months, she’s changed her hair style and color and gained at least 25 lbs.—now seriously obese. I was shaking my head about a few of my own students, students who had emailed me course work eight days after the last day of classes—no explanation, no excuse, no plea for clemency, just the blithe expectation that of course I could just accept it whenever they got around to submitting it.

“A problem with math skills, perhaps!” I joked with the clerk.

“Oh, I’m terrible at math—but I got an A, because my math teacher likes me.”

Still joking, I abruptly shifted my weight, placed my fist on my hip, demanding “And English?!”

“Oh—that was horrible!” she replied. “We had an adjunct.”

OK—not quite enough information (especially since she attends a community college—60%+ of the faculty are adjuncts)…

“What was the problem?” I asked.

“He hardly ever came to class,” she said calmly, and then with much more animation, “And he was the kind of professor who would assign a ten page paper on introducing wolves into the Adirondacks…”

I cut her off. “Wait a minute. He hardly ever came to class?”

“Yup,” she answered, “And he assigned this ridiculous ten page paper on introducing wolves into the Adirondacks…”

I sensed a pattern here, and sure enough, we repeated it a few more times.

“Never mind the paper,” I finally insisted. “Let’s stick with your first point—if he hardly ever came to class, why didn’t you talk to the department Chair? Or the Dean?”

She looked at me and shrugged, a bit confused. “Well, this paper was just ridiculous…”

A ten page paper. O the horrors. Probably involved research too.

“But why would you all sit there repeatedly when he didn’t come to class and not report it?”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know. We didn’t think of it, I guess.”

Critical thinking. Education in action.

Writer

The Best and Worst of Words

Someone recently started a discussion thread on a message board, asking for each user’s favorite word, remarking that as writers, we should have some insight. People posted many interesting choices, but my initial thought is also my final response: the.

What word could prove more useful? Want to mark any word of your choice as a noun? The. Sure, other words can do this, but most are limited in their capabilities. Demonstrative adjectives (that, this, those, these, and other such words) can do this, as can count words (numbers and relative quantity indicators), but these are subject to external circumstances. A and an can mark nouns too, of course, but they’re constantly jockeying for position, always looking over their shoulders for what vowels or consonants might be following—let alone possible exceptions. Even then, their indications are indefinite. Adjectives, with or without additional modification from adverbs, just steer information obliquely. The, however, knows its own mind. This is definitely that. It’s THE noun, not a suggestion or a possibility. The is the anchor in an uncertain world.

That uncertainty is the root of my least favorite word, usually applied in the phrase “in conclusion.” I forbid using this marker in my classes, arguing that such a flagged conclusion can’t be leading up to much. Mindful of this rule, one of my poetry students. a college senior, submitted his final paper with his final paragraph beginning “to conclude.”

Yeah, that’s better. Why not just write, “So where’s my paper leading? To what final point? Final argument? Well, no point, really, so let me just repeat the stuff I already said.” Twenty-five words instead of two! That’s gotta help meet the minimum length. It would at least be more honest and more entertaining, if still pathetically weak in content.

So “conclude” becomes a sorry attempt to “occlude,” merely to include what the student should preclude, clearly choosing to exclude more effective approaches, preferring to seclude any real thinking process, clearly not at all clude in.

This decision mirrors the one to baulk against concision, circumventing precision by changing expletive openers like “it is” and “there are” to “it’s” and “there’re” rather than exercising incision in favor of much more definite subjects and verbs. Such an inclination to decline more effective approaches in order to recline will ultimately leave the student facing quite an incline, but this seems systemic in his native Incline Nation.

I do try to intercede, as I want students to succeed, but when they proceed to embrace approaches that precede college level writing, they prevent any hope to exceed grade school competence, and I can only concede.

The student’s stated goal, incidentally, was “to just earn a C.” Mission accomplished.

Writer