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Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Apparently the “white people pride” discussion did NOT go well, because now I have a student who wants to write about National Socialism and how racism “isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” that the preservation of the white race is “just like” the preservation of a rare species of songbird. Oh, and the swastika? Sure, there was that Hitler problem, but it’s really just an old symbol of power.
I honestly, truthfully have no idea how to handle this — partly because, I mean, holy shit, you really want to defend racism and white pride in my class? I’m also kind of pissed because he clearly didn’t listen or think about anything anyone but he said in the previous class conversation about “white people pride.” But mostly, I want to figure out how to actually teach him to open his mind to ways of thinking he’s currently closed to. And I don’t have any fucking clue how to do that on a topic like this.
Here’s the thing: I could shut him down and say, “No, that’s not an appropriate topic.” And what exactly is that going to do? Is that going to open his eyes to the fact that, oh yeah, racism is bad? No. Shutting down a conversation just allows racism to fester, hidden away.
Yet if I allow him to research this, how can I do it in a way that opens his eyes to truly understand the issue — in a way that doesn’t just allow him to reinforce what he already believes?
– That would be easy, you’d think, after I tell you that when I teach “research” writing at the Pen, I do all the research for my students because, by the by, they have no access to a library or inter-library loans. So I control what information they get. Voila!, right? Just give him the stuff I want him to read?
Yeah, no. That will be totally transparent to him. These guys aren’t dumb. He knows there’s plenty of information out there that he wants to read, and I know that it isn’t what I want him to read. So I imagine it’ll go something like this: I’ll talk to him about doing honest research and keeping an open mind, learning to recognize biased sources and twisted logic and all that. He’ll realize he has two choices: to write a paper I want to read, or write a paper I’ll give him an F on, and then he gets to take this class again next quarter. (Remind me who teaches this class? Oh, right. Me.) If he’s lucky, he might open his mind and write an honest, thoughtful paper reexamining and reassessing his beliefs. I just need to figure out how to tweak the circumstances in order to have the best chance at arriving at that “lucky” result. But how?
And now, with due respect to O. Henry, I offer my twist:
This is precisely what sucks about being an adjunct. If I were teaching on a campus and had connections and colleagues to consult about this kind of thing, or if I’d heard about how others deal with it in staff meetings with other instructors in the same boat or at professional conferences or in the literature available to me as a result of my being a real member of the faculty, I would be far better prepared to deal with it. But I’m an adjunct. I have no office (for my job teaching at the Pen, anyway), no colleagues (other than the people I walk into and out of the building with), no funding for attending conferences or subscribing to journals about this. I should research it on my own time, but I teach fucking writing classes and there is no such thing as “my own time.”
America, this is our education system. And providing an education to incarcerated students is one of the few things actually likely to reduce their chances of recidivism (thus saving taxpayer dollars by preventing them from going back to prison…you’re welcome). Our education system and our capitalist system mean that adjuncts like me are hired because we are cheap labor: crap wages, no benefits. And we are insufficiently equipped and supported for situations like this. If I don’t do well in the case of this student, I suspect I could end up having a huge negative effect on this guy’s life — not to mention his recidivism chances.
I bet there are adjuncts out there who would actually know what to do in this situation, either because they’ve handled it or because they’ve studied it. I haven’t handled a situation as bold as this, and I certainly didn’t do my M.A. on “How to Teach Racists They’re Wrong.” I did study enough about race relations to know that this is an insidious, illogical brain problem, and as we see daily in American politics, rational thought, facts, and information rarely touch people whose minds are so closed. So I know the basics. But this is by far the most challenging situation I’ve found myself in: because it’s racism, it’s the penitentiary, it’s something that I know to my very core is wrong and he believes, probably to his very core, is right.
Yet that’s my job. I’m going to do it. I just wish I knew how to do it best.
Tonight in my penitentiary class we were talking about audience. I stumbled verbally trying to decide whether to call readers of the magazine Ebony “black” or “African-American.”
“It’s okay, you can say it,” one of the white students said. There’s no hiding in this class.
“Well, what do you prefer?” I asked the black student whose audience was in question. “Black or African-American?”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Only old people care about that stuff.”
This led us into the rabbithole of rhetoric and political correctness, and eventually one white student wondered why there is a black caucus and a Hispanic caucus (there is?) but no white caucus in Congress. “Like, why can’t we have white people pride?” he asked.
I’m sure I have complained in the past about students wondering why there’s no “white people history month,” etc., but at times like this class discussion tonight, I remember that this question presents itself anew to each student, each person, each generation. And as the Trayvon Martin case has shown, Americans are very bad at talking about race. Just, awful. Horrible. So it is, but shouldn’t be, a surprise to those of us who have these difficult conversations that they arise with each new batch of students. (You’d think that would keep me from fumbling and bumbling my way through it by this point; alas.)
Student: Well, I like rap, but I don’t know how to write a research paper about rap.
Me: You know, I once had a student write a really good paper about Tupac and…
Student: It’s “too-pock.”
Me: Not “two-pack”? Like…six-pack?
Student: No.
Me: Oh. Sorry, I’m just really white.
Student: That’s okay.
Me: …Anyway, you said you’re also interested in Seattle, and music, so why not write about the grunge movement? It started in Seattle.
Student: What’s grunge?
A student wrote the following in his writing portfolio cover letter:
Dear Ms. Waters,
To be perfectly honest, when this quarter first started, I thought that English Composition 101 was going to be a breeze. I expected ABC-style, elementary writing where I would be able to knock papers out in twenty minutes or less, like a pizza joint. This class was supposed to be my easy “A.” Boy was I wrong.
The first paper I turned in was the 5-paragraph essay on the novella, “A River Runs Through It.” Assuming I was a great writer, I had a smug attitude and was looking forward to my first “A” of the quarter. When the paper was returned, however, I was greeted by a smack in the face: a “C”! Surely this must be some kind of mistake, I thought. Upon reviewing the notes and comments, I was dismayed to discover that I was not as great of a writer as I initially believed, and was, in fact, heavily flawed. I didn’t know how to properly cite sources, I was unclear in my arguments, and I was not summarizing in my own words. Worst of all, I was the next worse [sic] thing to being a plagiarizer.
[...talks about assignments he worked on and how his grade improved]
Writing is something that many people don’t understand how to do well. While the concept of explaining something in the written word seems so simple, to actually do it is something else entirely. The lessons that I have been taught in English Composition 101 are ones I will always remember. They have given me the confidence to write thoughtfully and intellectually on just about any subject. Grist for my mill, I suppose you could say [reference to G. Graff article "Hidden Intellectualism"]. In the future, I plan to use this knowledge to produce academically sound papers for my other classes and hopefully pursue a post-graduate degree once I get out of Washington State Penitentiary.
I would like to thank you, Ms. Waters, for taking the time to come to this environment and bringing higher learning into our lives. The lessons that you have taught me have inspired in me a confidence in my academic ability that I didn’t have before I took this class. I hope that you take at least a little satisfaction in knowing that you have helped a student begin his journey towards something better in his life. Wherever you end up going with your teaching career, you will always have students out there that will remain forever grateful for having been better educated by your lessons.
Sincerely yours,
[...]
I don’t post this to pat myself on the back; instead, I post it to remind myself, and I hope others, of the very high highs that come with this career.
And I’ll just add a sentence from another of his papers, which was pretty much the best line in a student paper, ever. The context is, again, Gerald Graff’s article “Hidden Intellectualism,” wherein Graff argues that students should tackle texts that are interesting to them, and that they can exercise the same rhetorical muscle with contemporary, popular texts as they can with traditional, canonical texts. This student’s response:
Sorry Shakespeare, but thou doth not standeth a chance against cars, music, friends, or girls, in any particular order, on any given day.
I’d be done with these papers if it weren’t for constantly needing to get up and (1) pee and (2) BANG MY HEAD AGAINST THE WALL, OH MY GOD.
Seriously: how can you be so articulate about what we talk about in class and then NOT APPLY IT TO YOUR PAPER?
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I have just given a paper 27%, an all-time low not counting plagiarism. The paper before that got a 90%. WTF, people.
I seriously don’t understand how we can go over summary, quotation, and paraphrase for HOURS and students still don’t use quotation marks for words taken from another source “because it’s paraphrase.”
NO IT’S NOT. The SOURCE may have paraphrased, but YOU did NOT.
*tearing out my hair*
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Update: Have fixed typo in title. Now am considering live-blogging Meltdown to Baldness 2010. Ugh.
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Those faint screams are the sounds of me checking my students’ sourcework.
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I must speak a different language when I teach. It’s the only explanation for a couple of these research papers.
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It’s really only three out of twelve papers (and two of those weren’t my students in ENGL 101) that are so awful, but they’re THAT AWFUL. (And this is one benefit of teaching at the pen: my students will never know I liveblogged my hairloss.)
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I think the key here is to not read all the good papers first. Stupid, stupid planning.
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Remember copyediting? That was a nice, stress-free career with regular hours….
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The delusions are getting stronger.
Every day I come home from my rockin’ ENGL 101 class totally exhausted (haven’t even gone to 102 yet…that’s in the evening) and yet totally exhilarated. I want to write about it, but don’t know what to say that would be interesting to others. So I thought I’d toss this to my readers (all two of you, of which only one is probably interested in education): What do you want to know about teaching English comp in a prison now that I’ve got about a year of it under my belt? I won’t disclose my students’ identities (obv.), but if you’re curious about anything, let me know.
Whenever I talk to my students about college, I say “when you get out of here and go to a four-year college.” Not if. To me, it’s important that they see this associate of arts program as a step towards something bigger and better. There’s at least one ex-Pen student who is a department chair at University of Chicago. Even if he’s an exception, he can be an inspiration.
Yet…last night I was talking to one of my students about what he’ll do when he gets out. He wants to go on for his bachelor’s degree, and he’ll have an HVAC certificate as well, so he’s hoping to work his way through college.
But, he said, I’m competing against people who haven’t been in jail. You’ve got me and a guy without a record, who are you going to hire?
Who, indeed. It’s such a struggle just to avoid getting into a defeatist mentality about life after prison, life as an ex-con. But my students know this, because I tell them all the time: even if life after prison is tough, education is one of (or, as I believe) the only proven ways to reduce recidivism. Line cooking out there, or struggling to start your own business, beats the hell out of coming back here, doesn’t it?
From what I’ve seen and heard, there are some tremendously good guys in my class. I know they could be playing me, so I keep my distance, but these are guys who were doing okay in life until they got sidetracked by drugs and/or drinking, guys who say that they weren’t criminals before they came to prison, but prison made them into the criminals that they now see themselves as. And Internets, I know there has to be a price for crime, but I can’t help but think here in America we’re doing it wrong when we lock them up without treatment. Because when they get out, and they’ve got a record in addition to an untreated disease or addiction, what kind of success can we really expect? I don’t know if that’s something education can fix.
Today ends the three-week “vacation” that people think teachers get during holidays. While a considerable amount of time was spent with family and their screaming progeny as well as preparing for and partying in the new year, a significant amount was spent getting ready for this new term. And Internets, I am frightened: I have never taught full-time before, never three different classes with three different preps and sets of students and assignments and work and OH MY GOD I’M NOT GOING TO MAKE IT.
Well, I probably will make it: I’ll probably meet the challenge, if barely, because that’s what I do: when I was taking three graduate school classes and teaching two and commuting from here to there, I managed. But last quarter, teaching only one class — it almost kicked my butt. Not because it was hard, but because it was so different, and I had to start anew on so much pedagogy. This quarter is the first time in my entire three-year teaching career where I’m finally teaching the same class twice in a row, and I hope to reach the point where my class prep is at an absolute minimum — reusable assignments made ahead of time — and I can instead focus on my students and their writing.
Here are my goals for the quarter:
- Minimal daily assignments — less busywork and less for me to grade
- Return to rubrics so students have clear goals and I have a clear framework for assessment
- Delve more deeply into readings
- Focus on pragmatic writing skills, including grammar (oh, I can imagine the gnashing of teeth from some comp people!)
- Convey the idea of research to a population unable to actually conduct research
I say the following honestly: I am often a mediocre teacher, and I want to be a good teacher. I will never be inspirational, I’m sure, because that gene doesn’t grow on my family tree, but if I can provide clear, straightforward instruction and advice that my students use, and if they go on to write well and think clearly, then I will have done my job.
10. If I can’t read their writing, I don’t have to read their papers.
9. Relatedly, I get a refresher on what cursive looks like. Some of my students quit school in fifth grade and think that cursive is how everyone writes. (Seriously, cursive still exists?)
8. I don’t have the problem of Blogger marking my students’ blogs as spam. Yay?
7. When my students lose interest, it’s because I’ve genuinely bored them — not because they got distracted by texting under the desk. (BTW, traditional students: it is so totally obvious when you’re doing this. That’s why I call on you when I do.)
6. I save my back the pressure of trudging around with a laptop.
5. My students can’t instantly fact-check me with their BlackBerrys and iPhones.
4. There aren’t any hard-drive-ate-my-homework stories.
3. I don’t catch them turning Safe Search off and “accidentally” “running across” porn while doing “Internet research.”
2. Three words: No fucking ringtones.
1. I don’t have to worry about what they say on RateMyProfessor.com.
I’ll say this right off the bat: it’s not nearly the same thing, but four years of boarding high school isn’t bad training for working at a prison.
I don’t particularly want to blog about work in any way that might jeopardize my job, but I’ll say a bit about the sensory experience of working at the pen.
Before that, however, I want to tell you something a student told me last night. We had five minutes left in the period, so I asked my students about what life at the pen was like. They told me what their cells were like, how they might spend a day. As the gate call sounded, they got up and left. One student lingered and said, “It’s better being ignorant.” I asked what he meant. “You really don’t want to know,” he said. “I’ll write it all down and you can read it, but you really don’t want to know.”
I’ve been pondering that. Thanks to my abundant curiosity, and excluding lurid details of others’ sexual lives and escapades, there’s rarely anything I don’t want to know. I find it hard to believe anything here, and I wonder if that’s true for my students as well.
However, I imagine there are things some of you might want to know — not about their lives, because I wouldn’t divulge that — but about my working environment, so here are a few details.
After parking my car, I walk up to the main complex, lock my keys and wallet in a lockbox, and continue through a maze of hallways and into the education wing. In total I go through ten doors, none of which I have the key to. Not all of them are locked: some are normal doors, and others are guarded and I have to show ID to get through. Sometimes I have to go through a metal detector, and my bag — which has to be of a cloth material — is always scanned. I’ve already been fingerprinted and background-checked in order to work here, so I guess Big Brother is getting to know me pretty well.
Everything is beige: the walls, the ceiling, the painted iron doors, the newly waxed floor in the education wing. I imagine but do not know this to be done with purpose: white would be jarring, might even drive you crazy with its starkness; black, I suppose, could connote dark thoughts and ideas; but beige lulls you into a state of somnolence, of mindlessness. I really don’t recommend it for educational settings. I think I’d prefer a nice green — neither hospital green or Forest-Service green, but maybe a thoughtful deep avacado color.
My students wear khaki pants and white t-shirts; I wear business attire, including my nemesis, closed-toed shoes; all of us wear badges on the left side of the front of our shirts.
Truthfully, the prison doesn’t smell a particular way. However, I was up once when they were cleaning and I could smell bleach, and now I always think I smell it, even when I don’t. I also sometimes think I can smell the beige walls, which is a muddy mix of concrete and paint, and somehow the smells seem to offset in my mind: bleach vs. paint and concrete. Maybe that’s why I smell nothing, because amidst the hallways of brick and beige, there isn’t a lot of anything.
The floor security guard is there before I arrive and after I leave. She seems to jangle when she walks, but I don’t know if she actually does or if I just imagine that with all the keys she has, she must. She’s a very nice woman who could no doubt beat the shit out of me with her earlobe. I bet her earlobe was always picked first for team sports in grade school.
Class lasts between two and two-and-a-half hours, depending on when the gates open and close. It’s a long time, and last night I found myself thirsty, but I’m pretty sure I’ll need to blink first in a staring contest with Death before I’ll drink from the lonely fountain outside the students’ bathroom.
The air temperature was warm last night, and I was tempted to remove my blazer since I was wearing a pretty conservative blouse under it, but trust me — there is not enough antiperspirant in the world for this job.
Our classroom is a fairly long room with about 15 desks and 10 computer terminals. It is divided lengthwise by an iron mesh see-through wall that locks us out of the library, if you can call it that, seeing as how it only holds about a hundred books, most of which appear to have been written mid-20th century. It’s a library that would make a librarian sob over its orphaned books and empty shelves; as a writing teacher, I’m not quite that hardcore and I merely feel revulsion.
The teacher’s desk is one of those heavy metal kinds. I think it’s olive in color, and I’d like to find and hang out the window by his toenails the guy who made this ubiquitous institutional style. Then I’d like to make him be solely responsible for moving the behemoths every time a department relocates or is remodeled.
My students’ desks are individual small tables, and we all have comfortable swivel chairs on rollers. It’s very obvious where budget allowances have been made, and I’m thankful for good chairs, even though I spend a lot of the time on my feet.
So, that’s a little what my job looks and feels like. If you have questions, feel free to ask.