Children Left Behind, part 1

It is late. Tonight's assignment, looking up pertinent articles on the school's database, is taking much longer than I expected. These are, after all, the computer savvy generation that makes me, though I am only 12 years older, look like neanderthal man by comparison. It's their attention span...it's for shit.

I was hoping that this class, on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, would take a total of thirty minutes. Maybe an hour. We have now rounded the second hour.

I tell them to plug keywords into the database search just like google. They know Google. They worship Google. If they had their druthers they worship the search engine like a god. When the calculator came out, it posed certain problems to the math community: how to teach math to people who could just as easily use a machine. It required a total realignment of intelligence. Suddenly it was necessary to teach the use of the calculator to perform the basic tasks--it was no longer necessary to teach the basic tasks. Now, no one knows the basic tasks. If the calculators break tomorrow, they'll have to reinvent calculus after second semester, because past that point, nothing can be done without a calculator. Forget statistics. No one has figured out twenty factorial in years.

That was just the calculator and math. Google is like a calculator for all human knowledge. Everything that there is to be known is on Google--including nonsense, sure, but the many handed god has more good hands than bad. We tell our students otherwise, but I'm pretty sure they know we're full of shit. Without Google, my students know nothing.

But they do know how to use Google, that's for damn sure. I find myself using the metaphor of the search engine in discussing indexes in books. That's pitiful.

Anyway, they're at the database which accepts keywords, ala EbscoHost, and all they have to do is find and correctly put into MLA format six peer reviewed journal articles.

"How do we get peer reviewed?"

There's a little box under the place you type the keywords that reads "peer reviewed," but Google doesn't have that little box, so it might as well be written in Farsi for all they understand.

"You...click the box that reads peer reviewed."

This will give them sixty articles; they only need six. This should take all of five minutes, but it ends up taking two hours. Why? Because they are used to getting one website per search on Google and then moving on. Why Google has more than three results is beyond me. The new generation of computer user looks at three results and if their answer isn't in those three, they start over.

Thus, when my students get one result, they start over. It would be humerous if it didn't seem like the kind of mistake a robot would make in trying to analyze Shakespeare. It is a babblefish translation error of some sort. I walk over to them, point out that they have summoned up sixty articles, look at them for some spark of recognition, think I see something, and walk away. Half an hour later, I will return and they will have plumbed into another eight searches.

"This article says its about anorexia and teenage girls."

"Yes."

"And I'm doing my paper on anorexia and teenage girls."

"Yes."

"Is this a good article?"

Good God!

"Do you have any keywords to look for inside the document?"

There's that Google metaphor again.

"Yeah, I've got anorexia, anorexic, girls, women, woman, female, females, and fat."

She's really covered the whole gambit on this. Even a Microsoft thesaurus would have come up with more. I bite my tongue before suggesting that she add "Daddy Issues" to her list. Too obvious?

Children Left Behind, part 2

The room is nearly empty tonight. Out of 18 students, I have 9. One of my students only shows up when she feels like it, or to argue about her grade. She’s a double major, so she’s very busy. She once said of a brainstorming exercise, “This is Bullshit!” loud enough that I could hear her from the back of the room over the sound of the class clattering at the keyboards. Who am I kidding? I asked them to brainstorm, to have an idea. I heard her say, “This is Bullshit!” over the sound of 18 women not typing, staring at me in utter confusion, total despair. Maybe someone types “new idea” into Google but they get 418,000,000 results—the top of which is a cookbook. No good there.

I am not surprised that the room is empty. After all, it is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, but the week before, they all had a paper due, and well, none of them knew what they were doing, so I gave them an extra week. I know that it sounds harsh that I have a paper due the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, but in reality this is a postponement. Doesn’t matter though, even some of the women who show up don’t have the paper ready.

The actual assignment they are supposed to be turning in, tonight, is a paper on power relations between groups of people. I’ve gone over some of the basic theoretical structures based off of ethnicity, which is where most of the best work like that has been done, and I’ve provided an overview. I convert post colonialism into charts, I break Diaspora down into four basic ideas. The paper they then are to write is to use some story from the four we read in class and to use some “moral”, “message”, or “theme” to elucidate some situation related to power relationships that they’ve seen in their own life, or which they’ve heard about, or which they’ve seen in the news. It really doesn’t matter. I say things to them like, “Have you ever had a fight with your boss?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you couldn’t outright tell him or her off, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So what did you do?”

Questions like that hang in the air. They have no idea how to answer.

In any case, the paper goes down a full grade for every day it is late. Some of these people who are missing tonight, I will not hear from them until next Tuesday. I cross my fingers that I will not hear from others ever again. The double major I could do without.

Those who remain, those who show up, are not, as I think seems most likely, my star pupils. Not at all. I would applaud their loyalty, but I really think that the main thing that happened is that they didn’t think to not show up, and so here they are, and now that they notice that people are missing, it’s too late to leave. It doesn’t really matter that tonight’s assignment is worth 10% of their grade—it isn’t due tonight. It doesn’t matter that if they don’t do the assignment now, they’ll pretty much have a whole bunch of internet related homework to do over Thanksgiving break—they aren’t going to do it anyway. It doesn’t matter that their isn’t time left in the semester to slack—they don’t really care if they flunk, though most are on scholarship, though most are from the inner city, though most will end up losing their scholarship if they get an F and will be forced to leave school. I would call this apathy if I thought for a second that they looked past the fact that I have class on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and that that’s “unfair.”

This does not put me in the mood to extend mercy, but moreover, I’m not tenured, I don’t make this class’s curriculum, and I can’t change it unless I want to lose my job and the associated paycheck that puts food in my baby’s mouth. If the entire class doesn’t want to do the annotated bibliography because it’s unfair that they should have to do research at all, then the whole class can flunk: Walmart is hiring.

Children Left Behind, part 3

We have settled now. Two of the women who understood the assignment even before I gave it have finished, handed it in, and walked out. I am left now, with four women and they have taken to discussing their feelings about English classes as next year, only one section of their remaining required English courses is being offered—a class in literature. One wonders, briefly, how the school could have any difficulty staffing that course, but then, can you imagine these people trying to tell you what’s going on in a Wallace Stevens poem? Would you want to hear their interpretation of The Great Gatsby? Me neither.

A woman who I caught plagiarizing (one full page of a three page paper) says, “I don’t think it’s fair that an English teacher can just grade you based off of what they think about what you’re saying?”

Ahhhh….

“That’s not precisely what I do? I grade on whether you can stay on topic.”

They look at me, here in the final 1/3 of the semester in the last English course they’ll ever take as if I have said something so simple and yet so profound that it explains everything, but then skepticism sets in: no answer could really be that simple.

But it is that simple. The rhetorical flourishes of anticipating counter arguments, of propping up your own ideas with experts who agree, of finding theoretical frameworks in which to place your argument for added validity, of having an argument at all, of presenting your ideas so that they seem fresh and/or original—all of this is a pipe dream: Stay on topic, you get a B.

I continue, “if you, say for instance, are talking about school reform, and then on the middle of page two begin a discussion of the Flintstones, I mark you down for that.”

A women who is trying to turn in her paper on power relations, pauses to think about the possibility that she should take it home, re-work it a bit, hand it in late.

I say, “I really don’t care if you all agree with me or not. That’s sort of uninteresting to me. As a matter of fact, I’d rather hear something that is different than my thoughts on the subject. It’s more interesting to me, at any rate.”

It sits inside her head that maybe this isn’t a popularity contest after all. But it doesn’t sit there for long. The idea of not grading with a scantron is so absolutely alien that their can be no conversion. I don’t have the heart to tell her that if I really was grading on whether or not people agreed with me, I could easily devise some scantron oriented test and have it grade them. As it stands now, I take fifteen minutes a paper to grade—sometimes longer. That’s a long time with very bad papers.

Something sets off the women in the back who normally wears a kerchief on her head. “Are you bi-polar? Because I’m bi-polar.”

“No,” I answer. In my mind, I think of those old 1970’s sit-coms, afterschool specials, etc... Remember Blare’s cousin on “The Facts of Life” and how important it was for us to all know that people who had muscular dystrophy could be smart even though they talked a bit slow. All those various one time shows about people who overcame great odds to get an education and become a success story.

Those shows would never fly now. Every person is catered to such a degree that whoever you are, whatever your problem, you can get a bachelor’s degree.

One of the other women says, “I’m just glad that this is my last English class. They did tests on me and found out that I have a sixth grade reading comprehension.”

Kerchief retorts, “I’ve got an eighth grade. Like…when I read something, ten minutes later, I forget it.”

“I can’t remember anything I read; someone has to tell me.”

I suppose that somewhere in here, there needs to be some kind of message about education, but what in the world do you say? Should I comment that these women were failed along the way by some teacher who had no time for them and so they never learned some basic skill? I don’t know that to be true. If their behavior now is any sort of indication, why shouldn’t I just think that they have no desire to improve themselves? That they simply could not be bothered? If this is a failure on someone’s part, some missing push towards the desire to self improve, so what? These people are adults. Adults have to take some kind of responsibility for themselves, don’t they? They can’t honestly just remain dipshits because their second grade teacher never called on them to sing the alphabet song. They’re twenty years old. Some of them are older than that. What am I supposed to say when I know for a fact that people who cannot remember anything they read ten minutes after they read it will be awarded degrees in subjects like Criminal Justice and Forensic Pathology? Should diligence and the desire to not quit really count for that much, especially when just showing up will earn you a C?

I have nightmares now that I will have some physical ailment and go under the knife. My surgeon will be a retarded gentlemen who didn’t “test well” and who’s mental condition granted him extra time and extra help on every assignment and who is the pride of his department who now pat themselves on the back for “helping this one through.” Anyway, he cuts me open, pausing now and again to listen for the buzz like the “operation simulator” he’s been playing with in the back room.