The Cost of Class

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College teachers, such as myself, are always telling our students that whatever else they get out of college, (and I hope they get a lot more) they can be confident that their investment of time and energy will underwrite a lifetime of relative economic prosperity. (Last night’s passage of the health reform bill may make an equally important contribution to the financial security of the middle class.) Doug Henwood’s recent costs and benefits analysis of education (“I’m borrowing my way through college…“) shows that this is still true.

Someone who doesn’t finish high school will on average earn only half as much as a high school graduate; if you earn a graduate degree, you can earn 2 to 3 times the income of a high school graduate. The caveat, and it’s a big caveat, is that students are leaving college with more and more debt. One reason is that college costs have risen dramatically, outpacing even medicine. And while there are grants available, the prohibitive costs have helped to ensure that class reproduction rather than class mobility is the new normal.

I see other limits to access in my classes, which are dominated by working class students; it’s particularly dramatic at the end of each session, when I’m thinking once more about the students who give up or, more mysteriously, sign up for the class but never show up, much less participate. There seems to be two main kinds of problems. One one side are students who don’t have the skills. Maybe they dropped out, or are non-native speakers, or just slipped through school without learning to write. They often mistrust teachers.

On the other side are students whose lives seem to be so chaotic and difficult that they can’t quite muster the discipline and focus. This is hard to judge accurately, of course; in any class there are always an alarming number of family deaths and catastrophes. (It’s more effective than “the dog ate my paper.”) But I know from my own family that too many of these stories are true and that if you don’t have much help (or money) to begin with, then every sort of problem is that much more draining and difficult and time consuming.

Posted in: Online Places, Professional, Writing

Teacher or Snowflake

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I am an A student and that is an A paper, and always will be to me. I read some of the other students papers, and to me they were nonsense written to fill pages. I will apologize for this email if you can produce one paper written for this assignment that can come close to competing with the ideas in my paper. I can only dream of having someone like Bill Gates give me advice for this situation. But I will still go on to follow the path that God has paved for me regardless of your opinion, because I already had the guideness I needed to help me visualize my purpose. I want my grade changed, and I am sorry if I offend you by this email, but I put my heart and sole into my education and I believe in myself even if you don’t.

The Status of Higher Education in 2010? An Empty Bottle of Jack Daniels and the Greatest Student Email Ever Written, Chauncey DeVega

It’s funny how these things go in cycles; perhaps mid-term (for traditional teachers) is the season for discontent. Or maybe it’s the last little taste of the foul moods of a long winter. But after I wrote my complaint about “snowflakes” I found this piece, which seems to express the same sentiments. I have mixed feelings about these sorts of critiques. On the one hand, I do think that the ideals of education has been denatured. Maybe it was never as real as I imagined, but I think that education used to represent a profound existential challenge, willingly taken on by students who by necessity had to trust their professors.

I didn’t like all of my professors, by any means, and one main reason is too often they were not particularly challenging, at least in the ways that I wanted to be challenged (in my admittedly naive way). However inchoate, I was looking for transformative experiences, and when I found professors that seemed to offer it, I knew instinctively that I had to believe that my guide had, in the end, my best interests in mind, even when they seemed to be saying things that I did not like, or asking me to do things that, at least in the short run, I did not want to do. I had a kind of faith in teachers. That’s rarer now.

On the other hand, I think the erosion of that faith is our own fault as educators. I think the problem is not so much in what happens in the classroom, or in the written conversations about writing that is at the heart of my own work, but in the broader context of education. It’s the giant athletic programs with their fetishistic obsessions with youth and physical strength; it’s the endless marketing of “school brands”; the cynical exploitation of the student loan system; the ongoing attacks on teaching and teachers; the manipulation of anti-intellectualism of both political parties, but especially the right. We don’t fight back effectively.

Posted in: Writing

Against the Student Grain

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As a part of my job as an online teacher I’m required to attend a yearly conference with my fellow full-time faculty and to participate in several online workshops each year. I enjoy it; it’s a chance to feel a bit more like a member of a department (not that I miss that too much!) and to think about what I love to do. Sometimes, though, it really makes me crabby and irritable, professionally and intellectually speaking. The problem has its roots in the rejection of the so-called sage on the stage.

Once upon a time, the legend goes, professors stood up at the front of the room, or lecture hall, and talked for the entire class. (I am sure that was, and is, still true, but I also think it’s partly a fairy tale.) Students had little say in their educations, much less a chance to tell the professor what they thought or how well they were learning. About four decades or so ago these students began to become teachers themselves and resolved to correct what they saw as an injustice rooted in bad teaching methods.

This student empowerment, as it came to be known, did a world of good insofar as it made professors pay more attention to their teaching. Of course, in the most elite institutions teaching is only rarely rewarded as well as research, if at all, but that’s a story for another day. On the other hand this empowerment helped to lay the basis for a consumerist model of education, particularly in the form of student evaluations, which too often become the main yardstick for teaching. It’s a boon for administrators but a disaster for teaching.

Too often, these evaluations were designed poorly and subject to all sorts of manipulation; they distort more than they reveal. Hopefully, their luster has begun to fade. More insidious and difficult to weed out is a kind of obsessison with positive feedback and affirmation. That’s what often drives me so batty about these conferences and workshops; it’s the Oprah school of pedagogy. “I tell students to visualize success,” one teacher said, “until they have their diplomas in hand.” It sounds harmless until you lokk closely.

I have a 40-something drill seargent in one of my classes for example; he’d probably (and rightly) take that as either nonsense or profoundly patronizing. This way of thinking turns students, even if they are young adults, into helpless, dysfunctional children, always in need of reassurance. Apparently, we can’t tell them that a successful education might be very difficult to achieve, that they might have to make sacrifices, or that there might be unexpected losses along with the gains. They’d melt like sugar in the rain.

Posted in: Composition, Professional, Writing