September 8, 2008Aletia;Your student is challenging you to justify having given him an "F" because he couldn't read well enough to pass the course? He wants you to explain to him why his having failed doesn't mean something is wrong with you, as a professor? Should you respond to his challenging your legitimacy?You know what? NO. You SHOULDN'T.If the student can't read, then that's part of the problem. He'll find a less demanding class and a less demanding professor. Many of our colleagues are far less demanding than we are being, so the range of choice makes it a buyer's market for the student. They shop professors all the time. That's another part of the problem.Now, I warn you that if you don't want to read a long, critical, and NON accommodating treatise, to stop here. If you read on, then don't fuss at me because you disagree with me. I don't want to hear it. Okay? Cool.WE TOO (all we professors) are part of the problem, because we have, without standing up to our respective universities and colleges to demand workable and FUNDED literacy remediation to back us up, we have allowed the situation to systematically water down the subjects we teach at the university while we limp along trying to remediate and also trying to teach, 'shortening' curricula to cater to unprepared students who suffer from extreme illiteracy. And yes, I mean it exactly that way. Bourgeois restraint says don't call this ugly dog a dog, call it something more polite, call it a cute little puppy, but then I was not raised a bourgeois, I was raised like you, Aletia--a lumpen-prole.Wayne State University's 'writing center', where students with reading and writing problems are supposed to go for help from tutors, SUCKS (some community colleges don't even have writing centers), and one reason the English department--the 'civilized' department of Billy Shakespeare and Billy Wordsworth--is cold toward me is that I have told them so in the past. Such snot arose in so many noses in response to me when I was 'KingParksChavez Visiting Scholar' there back in the day, that I felt like I was a tube of vicks inhaler. They offered the typical indignant self defense: 'we're doing our best'. Well, when I look at my students at Wayne State and see how so many of them cannot even read well enough to follow the directions on the exams, let along answer the questions, I have to say 'our best' is not good enough. Maybe we need to do better.(Why do we even have 'English' departments anyway?? This is The United States of America--shouldn't we have "American Studies" or "American Language" departments? If that sounds Nativist, so be it. Maybe I'm a native of something even after the middle passage and the lynchings, and the economic oppression. I know that my professors at Wayne State didn't shorten a damn thing for me when I was an undergradaute here. They kicked my butt, is what they did. HARD. Mike McKinsey and Steve Tudor, and Charles Baxter, and Professor Stine, and Professor Beres, and all the rest of them did not care that I was poor, had to catch the bus to school, had to work, had to catch up, and couldn't pronounce French phrases correctly. They expected and demanded things of me; they TAUGHT me things so that I could SURVIVE in a technologically advanced, patriarchal, White supremacist, corporate, hostile America where the industrial revolution was about to end, which meant, as my Marxist sociology professor used to warn us, that BRAIN was about to replace BRAWN. No more factory jobs. He was right, as it turns out: the only thing you can get a job 'mass producing' these days is French fries.)We've allowed ourselves to be conditioned to 'shorten' the curriculum. Hell, you can't 'shorten' Marxist dialectics, or semiotics, or the complexity of Jefferson's attitudes toward slavery while at the same time being a revolutionary (he was both--and we have the job of somehow explaining that to a room full of bored undergraduates), or shorten the meaning of the feminist movement, or shorten micro and macro economics, or shorten the distinctions between an ionic chemical bound and a covalent chemical bond. Our students in the inner cities, the urban centers and in the working class are headed toward running the French fry machine at McDonald’s because for fifteen years now we've been 'shortening it' so they can read it even though THEY CANNOT READ AS WELL AS THEY NEED TO to fathom and run an increasingly cognitively complex post modern democracy morphing now into an Empire thanks in part to FOX news', which our students think is 'fair and balanced' simply because the blurb on the screen SAYS it is (a generation of chumps who actually beleieve there is 'truth in advertising'!)Isn't this a good historical moment to be teaching the history of Caesar’s conflict with Pompeii and his attempt to make himself an emperor, paving the way for his nephew, Octavian to crush the senate, finish off the remains of Roman democracy and establish a malevolent triumvirate, turn on Antony, then establish a malevolent dictatorship long enough to murder a thousand of his enemies, then establish a benevolent dictatorship and rename himself 'Augustus’? Are we headed for a benevolent dictatorship right now in America under John McCain? Or a Disney Technicolor neo liberal Haight Ashbury democracy under Obama? Which would be worse? ("Oh, Behave!" I can hear Michelle Obama hissing at me)If our students cannot read, pick up on nuance, irony, implication, sensibility, and subtext, its our fault. Our bosses, the university administrators are, as Bill Bryce always says, soulless raccoons who only care about profit, not about preserving intellectualism. He's right. That means it's up to us.I simply do not believe what the current ideology says; that our students are:1. Children2. 'Customers'3. Buying a 'commodity' from us which makes our syllabi 'contracts'4. In need of job training from us5. So over burdened by working and going to school at the same time that the need us to help them get it all together (I tell them to quit their jobs and go to school instead. They can work later, and that's coming from a poor eastside Black guy who paid his way through undergrad as a truck driver--I used to do all my deliveries, lie to my dispatcher that I hadn't finished, then park the empty truck in back of the Manoogian Building and take classes in the afternoon until it was time to drive back to the warehouse)We are not competing with the 'University' of Phoenix, and we are not 'contractors' or entrepreneurs. We are teachers, who sign contracts because the raccoons extract that from us in return for allowing us to use their property to teach.I'm not trying to be hysterical or extremist. I think university presidents are. My students are being fleeced by the bookstores, lied to by the administrators, used by many of their teachers, patronized, told that they are ready to move on to the next course in a sequence when in reality they haven't even mastered the skills they should have from two courses BACK. When they make it to upper level courses where professors are less willing to inflate their grades and cater to their inability to demonstrate pre-requisite skills, many of those students end up lost, alienated, confused, and left behind. Too many of them end up at McDonalds running the French fry machine. No more, Aletia. We have to say we are not going to participate in that anymore.Every semester I fail every single student who should fail, and I make each student READ every page they need to read, and give them no 'extra credit' no 'bonus points' and I refuse to 'break down' the problems with supply side economics when students say they think the Laffer Curve makes sense. When I teach them to critique Laffer or to reject out-of-hand as pseudo science the ideas of 'intelligent design' (creationism from the "Scopes monkey trial" sneaking back in under a new guise!) and they say I'm only giving them my 'opinions', I'm going to make them do an ESSAY exam and make them write.We can turn it around, we can change it, but first we must change ourselves. I remember what you told me about your mother's explaining why she gave you guys the crappy Christmas presents that she did; that you had to accept what you got because that was all there was for the poor. I actually feel for her, and for my own family as well, because my parents and aunts and uncles too, had to give their children less. They were giving us what they HAD to give, given the education, skills, resources, and imagination they possessed. But they had a valid reason for their failings: they were living under segregation and economic famine, unlike us--you and I benefitted from the "Great Society" programs that fed and educated us and provided us with health care. If our parens fell short, they can at least claim that they did what they could with what they had been given.Can WE say the same?love and comradeship,Ray
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