Teaching Helicoptered College Students

I've been noticing it more and more the last several years. In some places, I hear, it is rampant. When I teach students who don't have it, it's such a relief, because they enjoy learning. The students who don't have it get so much out of school. It's so lovely. All the students that do have it, more and more each year, break my heart. Because I don't know of a cure that won't hurt. I fear it might be too late for many of them.

They have been helicoptered into helplessness.

• I'm having panic attacks about the test. Please, Dr. B, help me because I'm terrified of tomorrow's test. Well, I tell them, it's a pretty small test, and you've been in class and I know you have a pretty good grip on much of the material. I know I know it, they say, but tests just really scare me. You have to take the test, I tell them. What if I don't do well on it? they ask. Then you don't do well on it, I tell them, but you have to take the test. They take the test, and get a 70. See? they say, I told you I couldn't do it. I don't know anything. I talked to my mom and she thinks I should drop the class and take it later at the community college near home. 
• I can't go on the trip, Dr. B. I've been excited about it for ages, but I might not be able to handle it. Handle what? I ask. The trip. It's just too much. But the trip will be fun, I say, and there's work involved, but it's work you already know how to do. I can't handle it, Dr. B, it's just too much. You've already paid for it, I say. You can't get the money back now. I know it may seem overwhelming at first, but it'll be fun and you'll be with your friends and once you get going you'll realize that you can handle travelling. No, they say. I can't. It's too big. I feel like I might have a panic attack. I talked to my mom and she thinks this is too much for me and I should just stay home. 
• I'm struggling on my paper and I might need an extension. I can't decide what to write about, and my dad isn't answering his phone. Well, talk to me about your paper, I say. Yeah, I'll talk to you and then maybe I can talk to my dad. Well, I say, the paper is for me, so while I'm glad your dad helps you think through things, maybe you and I can figure out what you can write about. No, they say, my dad always helps me with my papers. 
• I just don't feel like I'm part of the campus, they say. Well, I say, at our advising meeting during orientation a few weeks ago, you were already starting to make friends on your hall. Oh, I moved out of the residence hall, they tell me. My mom didn't feel like it was safe enough so I'm living at home and commuting to campus. I never see anyone but the people in class, so I don't have any friends. I don't feel like I belong here. How long is your drive? I ask. An hour and a half each way, they tell me. And I get done so late at night, I get home around 10. I'm always tired, they tell me, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm just not cut out for college. 

These are my students. They've been saddled with the worst combination of high expectations (anything less than an A or the top spot or a flawless experience is a waste of your time and means you're worth less) and low expectations (you can't be expected to try again because that would be too hard for you). It used to be one or two per year. Now the extreme cases are one or two per year. The ones who can't handle basic assignments because they might have a panic attack are up in my gen eds to three or four per class section, sometimes more. I can't. It's too much. I can't read a book and then answer questions about it, I feel like I'm dying. I can't get in a motor vehicle and ride to a place I want to see, it's too much. I might have a panic attack - I have panic attacks sometimes. I can't do this assignment. My mom agrees with me, she says it's too much for me. These well-intentioned parents have wonderful relationships with their kids. I've never seen kids so connected to family. They are crazy about their parents. They talk to their parents every day, in some cases many times each day. But they are not talking to their parents just to chat. They are asking advice on how do do basic things in life. And these kids are 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 years old. (1)  

This  rescue helicopter will save you from everything hard.

There is a lot of talk in academia now about this helicopter generation. The trophies-for-everyone-in-the-league generation. The talent-show-with-no-contest-because-everyone's-a-winner generation. Those of us teaching them at the college level, where independence is key, have no idea what to do with them, except hold our ground on our standards and silently suffer with them while they struggle with ideas like risk and reward, or the possibility of disappointment, or figuring out what they do well and what they do poorly. They are having to learn, at age 18, that self esteem is built from accomplishing things rather than from just existing. They know, and some of them know it quite well, that they've been sold a bill of goods. But they don't know what to do about it. Having had their self-esteem shoved down their throats all their lives has resulted in young adults with low-self-esteem. Many of them have the same level of self-esteem they had at age 5 because their self-esteem has had no opportunity to grow with them, based on what they've accomplished. What they've taken away from all of it is that self-esteem is about feeling loved and appreciated, not looking at something they've achieved, however small, and saying "I did that." Reward is not associated with doing things, so they struggle to incentivize doing things, or to reward themselves when they do accomplish something. And their fear. Oh, their fear. Their fear is what undoes me, every time. I can't. I can't do it. It's too much. This thing I want so badly is too hard. It's heartbreaking. I don't need students with self-esteem that's been handed to them. I need students with the courage to do basic things like go to class and take a test on material they've studied for four weeks.

And I understand that the test-based, bottom-line curricula though which these students have come has been so monotonized, so robotized, so dumbed-down in some cases, that the fault lies in part with the schools. Here, everybody reach for this lowest possible benchmark and then we'll call you all winners because everybody's a winner. But these kids are not calling their old schoolteachers for advice on which test to study for first, or for moral support before going in to see their advisor for a conversation about which classes to take next semester. Some of them have had obstacles so completely removed from their childhoods that they now don't know how to overcome the dilemma of deciding which campus dining facility to go to for dinner without calling mom to ask her opinion (No, that is not made up. I have that direct from one of my students).

And so to the parents of my hyper-helicoptered students: SHAME ON YOU. Shame on you for letting your kids feel like things people have done for centuries and which you did when you were in college are too much for them. Shame on you for saying "Yes, baby, that is too much, come on home and I will hug you, and if it scares you then you don't have to do it." Shame on you because these kids are not being asked to handle snakes or ride motorcycles on twisty mountain roads with no guard rails. They are not being asked to discover a cure for cancer in a single semester. They are not being asked to write a scholarly book on Chaucer. They are being offered a good education. And it is NOT too much for them. It is hard. It requires effort. And there will be disappointments. There will be risks. They might even discover that they are really bad at something, and then they'll have to figure out how that works in their sense of who they are. They can do it. It's called growing.

I'm not talking about checking on your kids, or commiserating with your kids, or trying to be very positive with your kids so they feel loved and appreciated and hopefully recognize their great value in your family so they'll have a good self-esteem about the fact that they matter to you just by existing. That is not helicoptering. I hear friends worry that they're helicoptering their kids just by being concerned about them. Helicoptering is discouraging them from doing things that are hard, and encouraging them to find an easier alternative, especially if it means they'll stay closer to you. Helicoptering is removing from your kids' lives the risk of losing points or losing a contest or losing face with their friends even if winning would be awesome, simply because you can't handle their disappointment when they lose. You fear that they really can't handle their disappointment. You fear the world outside of your immediate sphere and so you discourage them from going out into it. What if they fall down? you ask. What happened when you were their age and you fell down? I ask you back.

And I know that I'm not a parent and babysitting and camp-counseling don't count. It's different when it's yours. It's so hard when it's yours. And I see the looks on my friends' faces when their kids are struggling and suffering. The pain my friends feel for their children is so excruciating that it shows in their eyes, even over little things like a really hard day at school (so a really hard year at school becomes a trauma my friends can't seem to shake, and I do understand). I see that they want to take their kids' suffering away, make it stop. And I remember, oh, so well, the awfulness of losing a game or not getting something I worked incredibly hard for - I remember that look on my mother's face. I know, at those moments, she would probably have rather it been games with no points or talent shows with no contests, because seeing me lose was completely awful.(2) My parents didn't remove obstacles from my life, though. And they are the reason I have the courage I have. And I've had panic attacks. Full blown, world-coming-to-an-end panic attacks. They suck. But you know what happens when you have a panic attack? You have a panic attack. And then the panic attack runs its course, eventually, painfully, and you might need help or medication, but then the panic attack is over and nothing has exploded or burned down. You had a panic attack. People have them. Everyone around you will understand. Oh, and by the way, you also might NOT have a panic attack. Lots of times when you think you are going to have one you don't. The idea of missing an opportunity you've looked forward to for months and paid a non-refundable fee for on the off chance that you might have a panic attack is total insanity.

This is everywhere, and I hear it from friends at every kind of school (including, btw, the community colleges to which some of our students resort as a refuge from the scarier schools, finding only that their fear has followed them to the place where they thought they'd find no challenges). I tend to see more of it because a school like mine, smaller and more focused on campus community and a nurturing environment, tends to attract students who are looking for safety in that environment, And I think we do pretty well at helping many of our helicoptered students find their way to living their own lives. There are the ones we can't help, in the end. Who go home because even though they've done all but 15% of the work for a class they just can't handle turning in that last assignment, and they think they'll just work or something and live at home or whatever. Helicoptered into helplessness.

Do not do yourself or your kids the disservice of thinking that they can't handle normal life and a great deal more. I'll tell you which students as a general rule are the most confident of all the kids I teach: the athletes and the theatre kids. Because at some point along their path, the games were for points and trophies weren't for everyone and not everybody got picked for the all-stars team, and not everybody got a part in the play and some people got parts they didn't want but they made the most of the parts they got and not every play won at competition. The students I see who are most successful are the students who have lost. Lost points, lost contests, lost games. They tried out for teams they didn't make and they've sung their hearts out for solos that went to someone else. And even the ones who hardly lost anything saw their friends try and try and not get what they wanted, and they had to learn to negotiate with themselves and their friends over that inequality. They had to learn to be okay with winning things their friends lost and losing things their friends won. (3)

And let's just get it into our heads, once and for all, that failure can be good. Failure can be GREAT. You know what happens when you fail at something? You try again until you figure out how to do it, so now you know how to do it not just instinctively but in a meaningful way. OR you realize you're not good at it and you stop wasting your time on it and go find something you do well that makes you happy. Obstacles are good. Courage isn't something that happens in the absence of fear. According to Dorothy Bernard, "Courage is fear that has said its prayers." If you want kids that need you to accompany them on their post-college job interviews, then please helicopter your kids. Yes, this is happening. (4) If you want kids who are confident, have self-esteem, and have a chance at not just making it through college but really getting the best education and the best possible experience at it, then teach them to say their prayers in whatever form that takes in your family, and then get out of the way so that they can fall down until they learn how to get up on their own, and until they learn that falling down is okay.

And, please, stop helping them with their homework once they're in college. For real.
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(1) There are, of course, students with genuine emotional problems and disabilities and there always have been, and I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a normalization of helplessness in 18-22 year olds, in which the kids never stop asking their parents for guidance about even the smallest things, and who turn to their parents as arbiters of  life who will remove risk for them so that they need never face potential disappointment.

(2) I wanted to be a cheerleader. So much it was hard to breathe. I tried so hard, I took gymnastics, I went to a cheerleading camp before trying out just to try to be good enough. I wasn't. I was devastated. I think my parents may not have totally recovered from how devastated I was. BUT because I wasn't a cheerleader I was free to be on the forensics team and compete (sometimes even successfully) at speaking events, which had everything to do with how the rest of my life has gone. And my life is pretty awesome. Suck it, cheerleading. My parents stood by, clearly suffering with me, while I didn't get to have you. And it turned out I didn't need you after all. I'll bet every reader of this blog good money that if my parents could go back and fix things so that I could be a cheerleader, they wouldn't do it for anything.

(3) There are also the soldiers returned from war, who have no patience whatsoever with their helicoptered classmates. One of my National Guard students told me the biggest problem he sees with him and his fellow soldiers reintegrating into civilian/college life is not PTSD, it's dealing with the "whiny-ass kids who think an essay is the end of the world." Once, when a few students in one of my classes were in fits asking repeated questions over how to format an essay, and were working themselves into a good lather over how they couldn't be expected to put all the punctuation in the right place, and one of the girls was near tears, a 22 year old who had come back from Iraq with a burn on his hand that he couldn't talk about looked at me from his desk in the back row and silently mouthed "What. The. Fuck."

(4) "'Helicopter Parents' Crash Kids' Job Interviews: What's An Employer To Do?" Forbes Strategies 9/20/2013  http://www.forbes.com/sites/theemploymentbeat/2013/09/20/helicopter-parents-crash-kids-job-interviews-whats-an-employer-to-do/

College ≠ Business

or,
Teaching Only What You Can Measure Is Not The Same Thing As Offering An Education

I hope that the last time I ever hear "A school should be run like a business," I'll be aware it's the last time so I can throw a martini party to celebrate the end of this stupid statement's presence in my life. The number of things wrong with the idea knock me back, but I'll start with the absurdity of the idea that "run like a business" means only one thing, as though all businesses are run the same way. Presumably, it's shorthand for "run like a successful business" but even then, there's a lot of variety. Should a school be run like JPMorgan or like Google? (and is JPMorgan even considered a "successful business" if despite making lots of money for themselves, they devastate others and end up in big trouble and paying massive fines?) Once when I questioned, "Why like a business?" I had it explained to me, painstakingly, by someone who used small words and talked slowly in order to communicate with the fluffy-headed humanities person, that it meant "efficiently." Except that again, not all businesses are run efficiently, and there is no reason to believe that a school isn't already being run efficiently as a school just because it isn't being run like whatever business you have in mind when you say "business." If you think businesses are all run efficiently, look around you.

nicked from collegeview.com

So now that we're past the phrase, let's consider the sentiment.

I would like to point out that when you start running a school like a business it becomes a business and stops being a school. And if you want to run a business, that's awesome, but if you want to run a school then you should run a school and stop worrying about whether you're doing things the same way you would if you were a manager of a Burger King. Because a school is not, absolutely not, a business. It is a school. It is a different animal.

What is our product? Is it our students? Are they what we manufacture so that the hiring world can purchase the product from us? This turns us into a factory in which the parents of the raw material or the raw material itself pays to be manufactured into something some as-yet-undetermined corporate entity might want. Not only is that a really bad business model, it's creepy as shit. Are our students our customers, then? Do they go shopping for what they want, pick and choose the knowledge they, at age 18, think they'll need for the rest of their lives, and then pay us to transmit it to them? How can the customer be right when the customer doesn't yet know that some fields of knowledge even exist, or what they'll want to do a year later when they've discovered that they can't pass those nursing classes or that English is actually hard or that athletic training isn't what they thought it would be? Do we let the customers pick and choose the classes they think they'll need or enjoy and forgo the rest, on the principle that the customer is always right? No. Because 1) no one would ever sign up for macroeconomics, and because 2) they can't possibly make smart decisions about what they need to know when they don't know any of it yet. And that is why it is still more useful to think of them as students instead of customers.

I suggest we skip over the "run it like a business" and get to what we really want to say, that a school should be run efficiently. But we also need to think about what that means, because what's efficient in a place of learning and discovery is probably not going to resemble what is efficient in a bank or a bistro or a yarn factory. Spend a few minutes studying human cognition and you'll find out that we learn through trial and error. From birth this is how we learn. Teach a baby to touch her nose and you'll see that she'll miss a few times first before she gets that little pointer finger in the right place. In the business world, 5 failures before one success would be grounds for bringing in regional managers to audit the place and decide which heads are going to roll. In a place of learning and discovery, 5 failures before one success means you are on a path to greatness. We have different standards of efficiency in academia, because learning is supposed to be messy and chaotic, but that doesn't mean there is no efficiency at all.

So in the absence of thinking of college as a business, I suggest we return to thinking of college as COLLEGE. According to the OED, a college has been, since about 1380: "An organized society of persons performing certain common functions and possessing special rights and privileges; a body of colleagues, a guild, fellowship, association." This group of people can be religious or secular (think college of cardinals, or college of physicians). Those are the first definition. A group of people with a common purpose. A college is, in definition 4: "A society of scholars incorporated within, or in connection with, a University, or otherwise formed for purposes of study or instruction."  There are multiple definitions, and in every case, a college is a group of scholars or people collected together with a mission or common goal or the location on which they gather. Nowhere does the OED define a college as a place where people pay money in exchange for information. Nowhere does it define a college as a place that is only succeeding if it is increasing its profit margin. In fact, it does not define college as a group of students. It defines it as a group of scholars. It's the people gathered there for knowledge who make it a college.

Hogarth's "Scholars at a Lecture," nicked from maximiliangeneology.co.uk

A college is a collection of scholars to which students go so that they may study with those scholars and learn from them. I realize that in contemporary society's it's-all-about-empowering-the-children mentality that what I am writing here is heresy. What - you're saying we're not here for the children??????? Of course our instruction is geared towards our students' needs and goals. Of course it is. And I'm not saying the students are here for us. I'm saying we're all here for knowledge. And some of us are farther along in the life-journey of pursuing it, and so people who want to get a serious start on that path come to where we are to learn what we already know, as well as what we don't know so that maybe they can try to solve those problems down the line. In order to have a real college you need scholars, senior and junior. Now since we have to eat we charge for the mentoring, but the point isn't to make a profit, it's to make a living. Administrators and staff come into the picture because we can't possibly manage all the logistics of this enterprise by ourselves.* And it is good to do assessment because it's good to have goals and it's good to know if we're meeting them.

The problem is when profit margins start to matter. When money is tied to objectives that we assess because we're told what matters and that we have to reach those things no matter what. When things that can't be assessed (like passion) fall by the wayside because we can't assess them, and if it can't be in the chart then you don't have time for it. Can you imagine college theatres if they were dependent on ticket sales and investors to decide which shows to do? Audiences are awesome, but college theatre is there for college theatre students to learn amazing plays and how to do them, and the whole point is to hire amateurs who are learning their craft, and you can't do that if you're risk averse. It would be Macbeth, Our Town, and The Sound of Music over and over again. Great shows, but not much of a theatre education.

When administrator salaries are 20 times that of the senior scholars with whom the students have come to study, because (and I am not kidding you, this is the thinking in some places and I have heard this with my own ears) the school has to pay administrators so much so the school can attract the best talent. When administrative salaries are designed to attract the best talent but faculty salaries are decided based on the absolute least for which you can get someone decent. When the activities that make it possible for senior scholars to stay on top of their game -- time to stay current in their research, salaries enough to pay off student loans and settle down on a property a reasonable distance from the school, opportunities to gather and learn from other scholars -- are not considered "cost effective" and are dropped so that the strangely-still-increasing tuition can be spent elsewhere. At such a time, it risks no longer being a college, and becomes something else. It may be "efficient," but at what? It certainly stops being an efficient college.

This is why corporatization of academia is responsible for the current adjunct crisis. Only a for-profit mentality could come up with the scheme of deliberately hiring more adjuncts to teach fewer classes, rather than having a few full-time people teach more sections each. This is a way to pay them less and deprive them of benefits in order to get more for less out of employees. This is not a collection of colleagues. This is grunt labor. This shit is not the department chair's idea, I promise you. The department chair doesn't like seeing people, people he or she thinks of not as just employees but as colleagues, coming and going looking hungrier and sicker every day. You know who doesn't mind? The people who don't see it - administrators and board members who spend their time looking at balance sheets and make sweeping decisions that affect the quality of teaching but who have zero teaching experience themselves and can't even be bothered to stop and shake hands with the teachers they pass on campus on the way to trustee meetings and dinners. These are board members recruited for their "business experience." Not every college is like that. Some colleges work very hard to treat their faculty, all of them, like the professionals and scholars they are. But nearly all colleges are facing the business mentality and being asked to look at bottom lines, and then making cuts, often to faculty. Because faculty are the largest expense when you put all the expenses of a college into a pie chart. My question: shouldn't they be the largest expense? The faculty are, in fact, what make it a college.

I will not dehumanize my students by thinking of them as customers, or as products. I know stuff they need/want to know, even if they don't realize it when they sign up for the class they don't think they need until years from now when it turns out that having internalized parts of Paradise Lost actually make you a more substantial person, and being a more substantial person suddenly means something they couldn't have possibly understood at age 18. I will not dehumanize myself or my fellow scholars by thinking of us as delivering assessible material to future employees of the world.

No student is going to choose a college, no matter how flashy the campus, if the faculty suck. And it can happen, if you treat faculty like cogs in a wheel. Education is not retail. We are not selling anything over here. We are studying, and we are learning. We would love for you to join us.

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*At least, not efficiently. Or in some cases, at all. I couldn't survive without Julie and Carol, who keep me going on my craziest days. At Auburn, I would not have finished my degree, or had a book to teach from, without Frances and Jean. And our whole schools would collapse without the fundraisers who make sure we have buildings and stuff because tuition doesn't cover those things. These people, when they are treated as professionals themselves offer immensely important opportunities for our students to learn, as apprentices in those offices. To me, they, too, are scholars, bringing not only the work they do but the mentoring for students learning those work skills.

Too Busy to Breathe - aka October

I don't think April should get all the blame. April is a notorious month in academia, a month when faculty, students, administrators, and staff are all at a full run from April Fool's Day until that day you realize it isn't even April anymore and you're heading into finals (for staff it usually ends there, for students it ends with the completion of finals, and for faculty grading finals and administrators handling grade challenges it goes for at least another week). We avoid making plans for April, knowing we'll be already too busy running from awards banquet to student research conference to committee meeting, and hold it up as that month - ugh, April, ...you know.

To take some of the shame away from April, I'm going to put my hand in October's back and push it forward from the line, so it can stumble out where we can all see it for the sneaky bastard it is. How about you, October?!

Midterms, when studying and grading are compounded with midterm grades being entered, meaning twice the frantic work from faculty but also for students and advisors a serious rethinking of the schedule, right in the middle of the term. For freshmen, this can be terrifying - it's when they have to face their first big seeming-failure. (Despite advisors' firm statements that this is normal, it's what you do in college, freshmen struggle to see dropping a class as anything but a white flag). This is when classes start to ramp up, too; when the intro stuff starts to accumulate into an expectation that you're really getting it, which will rapidly turn into projects and big papers, not that you would know it on October 1 that any of this is on the horizon. Oh, dastardly October, you start off as the beginning of the term, just a few weeks in, all innocent with your unassuming readings and low-stakes assignments, and before you're over, students are freaking out about what the final project is going to be because now there are only a few weeks in November to get it researched and drafted or they'll be working straight through Thanksgiving again. But this is also the time for fall carnivals, homecoming, greek life and honor society philanthropy projects. There is something every weekend. It's a riot of campus life. It's exhausting.

This is adorable.

I will not be making it.

Because time.

OMG, October: you are

killing me with your cuteness

that there is no time for.

This is often when conference abstracts are due for faculty attending spring conferences, when grant proposals are due, when committee work gets crazy (so many forms!). At most schools, where students register semester by semester for classes, this is the time for spring registration, so students and advisors meet in person and over email figuring out the logistics of scheduling: 360 section D on MWF at 2 or 420 section B at that time and 360 D on TR at 9 right before a long lab on the other side of campus? At my school, where we plan in the fall for a spring registration that covers the whole next year, chairs and anyone helping them are figuring out two semesters worth of faculty schedules, trying to please everyone and probably pleasing no one, with this person insisting on a split schedule (classes every day) and that one asking for all TR classes but none of them back-to-back (this is logistically impossible on a day with 90-minute classes). Because just being in October isn't enough, is it? With all the weekend craziness and all the weekday work. We need to spend it with an eye on what we'll be doing the rest of the year as well? Oh, and yes, I'm totally fine having to have my spring book order sent in right now, too.

October tries to offer, in its defense, fall break. Yes, there is, for some schools, fall break. But don't let the word "break" throw you off. We know what you're up to with your fall break, October. It's, like, 2 class days off, so students leave a day early, making the day before break starts pretty much useless for accomplishing anything in class because even the ones who are present are only so in body - their minds are already packed up and out the door. Too many faculty assign work due the next Monday that will take all of break to accomplish, so some students get squat for rest, and too many faculty have a ton of grading to catch up on (midterm grades are due on the day we're back from break, or maybe the next). We also try to take advantage of a day or two at home to catch up on laundry and/or house projects and/or cleaning, because if you don't get that closet cleaned out now it won't get another chance until January.

I don't even know what people with kids do in October, when you have to add to this all the Halloween stuff. I made a fall wreath last week. Because I was going to get that fall wreath made if it killed me. If I had to figure out Halloween costumes on top of that I would probably go off the deep end. We'll probably put a few Halloween decorations out and bulk-buy some candy the day of Halloween, because we do really enjoy the kids coming around to trick-or-treat. But it will be a resin jack-o-lantern with a plug-in light bulb, because while we'd love to carve a pumpkin, we did that last year and I have yet to do anything with all the pumpkin we froze afterwards. So, October, what do you have to say for yourself?

I'm writing this in the morning while doing laundry and packing for a conference. I will now go gulp down some breakfast and race to school. I don't have time to chastise you further. Get back in line, October. And try to keep your shenanigans to a minimum in the future.

Favorites

There is an accusation many of us face at least once in our teaching careers, and only the most hardened among us can totally shrug it off. It stings.

"Teacher plays favorites."

Some students throw the accusation around rather lightly, but it is a serious charge because it goes to the heart of the teacher's job, which is to evaluate work based on previously established criteria and to do so equally with each student. We are more than mere purveyors of content, we help our students along the path of understanding that content, encouraging them along the way. But, we are also the judges of who has demonstrated knowledge of that content. Peter Elbow famously considers the conflicts for each teacher between these two roles we must play, calling them "coach" and "gatekeeper" (1). According to Elbow, "Our loyalty to students," when we are acting as coaches, "asks us to be their allies and hosts as we instruct and share." Yet "our commitment to knowledge and society asks us to be guardians or bouncers: we must discriminate, evaluate, test, grade, certify" (2). Teachers struggle to shift from one to the other and back. 

As students, we prefer the coach, and fear the gatekeeper. And if we don't like it when the coach seems to prefer one player over another, how much more infuriating must it be when the gatekeeper seems to let a few people through, based on criteria that have nothing to do with what we were told would matter? It's unfair. And, yes, Life is Unfair, as we are told by many sources including The Princess Bride (3). But teachers are held to a higher standard, and so we must work extra hours to put in place measures that will prevent our own flawed human natures from grading the thousands of students we teach in our lifetimes any differently from each other. The same things we do to keep ourselves from grading one paper more harshly than others simply because we're tired that day, or because we're sick of the assignment or content, are the things that keep us from going easy or hard on a student's work because of our feelings towards the student. Because no matter what we might say for the cameras, do not doubt it that some of our students are an absolute delight to teach, and others cause us to hold our breaths and count to ten before walking into a classroom we know they'll be in. Sorry. That's just reality.

We are not robots. We are humans, and that is a good thing. There's a reason classrooms are places where people teach, and aren't just places for students to pick up books and then drop them off after reading. Not only has human knowledge been passed from human to human since, well, ever, but a human can discern that a student is struggling and adjust to help that student catch back up. A human can discern talent for a subject beyond just turning in an excellent assignment (or a far-from-excellent one that nevertheless shows promise). A human can discern meaning. Not just meaning of words, like in terms of definitions. I mean "meaning" like "truth." A robot can only problem-solve as well as the human who programmed it. Who wants to be taught by that?

This is a robot teacher. A real one. In Tokyo. Touted as a major achievement, the teacher, named Saya, is credited with the following 
worthy skills: "she can speak different languages, carry out roll calls, set tasks and make facial expressions." 
Wow. Just what we all want in a teacher. Read the story here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/4942136/Robot-teacher-that-can-take-the-register-and-get-angry.html

But that does mean there is room for human error, and I totally concede that. We teachers are very, very aware of our own potential for human error, and we work hard to safeguard against it.

I have seen the accusation again recently, leveled at teachers in general, saying that teachers who play favorites should be fired. It was said in great anger, but with a scornful wave of the hand. This "off with their heads" statement left me wondering, of course, what that particular former student had experienced to cause such a righteous and such a generalized dismissal. Particularly since that student had been a student that I liked tremendously and looked forward to having in class  - I suppose a favorite, although I graded that person's work according to the same rubric I did everyone else's and so there was no actual privilege.

As I considered this person's anger, I remembered what it was like to be a student, to feel helpless sometimes about how to do well. I remembered how it felt to try my hardest to succeed in a class and to feel great resentment towards those who later bragged about their great grades, or feel a flash of anger against students who name-dropped professors subtly and cleverly to indicate that they had the inside track, who seemed to be those professors' favorites, who seemed to be able to get grades unrelated to the quality of their work. It didn't happen often, in fact it was extremely rare, but it leaves a permanent mark. Or rather, some of those cases leave a permanent mark.

Others dissipated once I became a teacher and I came to understand things that students can struggle to grasp. Sometimes (every once in a while, but extremely seldom) a teacher will fail to put in place measures that keep grading consistent, things like grading rubrics that recalibrate the grader with each essay and prevent the teacher's feelings towards a student or just the exhaustion of grading from affecting the grade. With nothing to prevent it will be easier on some students and tougher on others. But most of the time, the problem isn't an unfair teacher, it is that the students don't actually know everything that's going on with all the other students.

I know. So simple as to sound snarky, like the problem is the students themselves and they should just stop being so freaking self-centered. I do not mean it that way. But they're young, and some think they know everything that happens in a class because a  lot of the other students talk about their own experiences and share their grades, and so students assume they have the whole picture. They don't have anything close to the whole picture, and they have no idea how much the other students aren't telling them or, in some cases, even distorting the truth. Students can, after all, see clearly only their own relationships in class. Teachers, I remind you, are legally prohibited from revealing anything about a student's progress to anyone but other educators who are specifically invested in that student's progress. In other words, I can discuss Jane's classwork or behavior with her advisor, even with another of her professors who may also be able to shed some light on her difficulties or with whom I could troubleshoot how to help Jane, but I cannot even discuss her grades or attendance or behavior with her own parents who are paying her tuition. You think I'm going to give away her grades to a fellow student? Even if she is openly defiant in class and everyone knows she isn't doing the work, but she's telling people that she's making good grades for me? I can't. Even if I want to, I am forbidden from doing so.

So to all of us, past students and present students, who fear that teachers are treating students differently based on like and dislike, I give you this perspective from the front of the room.

1. Don't assume that the student that everyone knows isn't doing the work is making good grades, even if s/he tells you that s/he is. We hear students lie about their grades all the time. You should not be talking with other students about your grades at all. It's no one's business. But you often do. And students who aren't making good grades, when you ask them outright "Hey, I got an A-, what did you get?" will often lie because: a) his/her grade is none of your business and you had no right to ask but s/he doesn't want to start something by saying "It's none of your business," b) s/he would be glad to share his/her grade if it were a good one but is ashamed of it and so has to make something up, or c) s/he habitually lies about his/her grades because s/he isn't doing well in school at all and isn't even ready to deal with that fact or do something constructive about it and so is just skating along hoping it all works out later.

2. Don't assume that you understood the assignment better than someone else did. If they got an A on it and you got a B, perhaps instead of favoritism on my part it is a misunderstanding of the assignment on yours. If they've taken my classes before and make better grades than you, don't assume it's because I like them better, assume it's because they've grown accustomed to my assignments and are less likely to miss some required detail. Rather than calling it "playing favorites" and resenting it, ask them what they did to make a better grade and see if they'll help you on the next one. With all due respect, you may not be as great a writer as you think you are, and that is one of many good reasons why students do not determine their own grades.

3. You have no idea what personal and private circumstances a student may be experiencing that are legitimate cause for an extension or an Incomplete. I once had a student who had been punched by her boyfriend at a party. She missed a couple days of class, including the day on which the paper was due, and then came to my office to ask me what to do, and when I saw the bruise I begged her to talk to her advisor and the Dean of Students so she could handle the safety and legal angles, and then I gave her a two-day extension on her paper because she was too distraught at that moment to concentrate on finishing the paper she had started the week before. The other students in the class, who may or may not have heard what happened at the party, merely saw that a girl was absent on the day the paper was due in class and then saw me hand back her graded paper along with the others. What conclusions did they draw? I don't know. But I do know that the girl told me later a boy in the class had asked her how to get me to cut some slack on due dates.

4. Other people's disabilities are not your business, so if you ask why another student gets extra time on tests and papers I am legally barred from answering. You don't know which students have learning disabilities that they don't want to discuss with you, so you don't know why someone might be absent during a test but still get to take the test (because it's being proctored by the office that handles cases for students with disabilities). You don't know what private medical information I may have that led me to grant an extension or Incomplete when I denied one to others, perhaps even to you. You just have to trust that I know something you don't and that even though a student may be your friend, he or she may not wish to disclose to you that he or she has a disability, even if you've proven yourself to be a non-judgmental person or even if you've disclosed to your friends a disability of your own.

5. If students show up early and stay late, come by our offices and discuss their work, demonstrate themselves to be so hardworking and trustworthy that we hire them as babysitters or housesitters, shine so brightly  in group work or class discussion that we offer to write recommendations for internships or graduate school, we are not "playing favorites." They are practicing the behaviors that lead to success. We are doing what teachers do when students prove themselves to be exceptional. They are leaders. They are working their butts off. They are probably making very good grades for us, but that doesn't mean they can't make mistakes and get penalized for doing so. I have put dreadful grades on the work of ordinarily successful students because they made mistakes in the assignment. It broke my heart to do it, but I took a deep breath and consulted the grading criteria next to me and graded the work according to what was there, rather than what I wished was there. In several of those cases, the students' other work was so exceptional that the one bad grade didn't hurt them much in the end.

6. I give bonus opportunities to students who are giving it everything they have and coming up short, not to students who screw around until the last second and then realize they need a few extra points to keep the grades required for whatever. Some of the students in the latter group will, astonishingly, even say that's what they're doing (actual quote from a student years ago: "I didn't really put much into your class because I figured I already knew what I needed of English and writing and stuff, but now I'm failing and I'm in trouble with my grades and I could lose my scholarship. Can I do a bonus to bring my grade up to a B? I have to have at least a B"). Compare with the student who came to me with every essay to go over it, who went to the Writing Center at every stage of writing, who was just shy of the B she wanted to get into the honor society she aspired to, who offered to go see a local play and write an extra paper on it to bring her grade up the point and a half to where it needed to be. I said yes to that student, yes I will grade some extra work for you because you're offering to do a lot for a little, after doing a lot all semester. Did that make her a favorite? Because, I have to tell you honestly, she was one of my all time favorite students, in that I respected her and how hard she worked and if I walked into my classroom again and saw her sitting there I'd be thrilled.

And on that subject, I will elaborate: Oh yes, we have favorites. We don't have to "play favorites" to have favorites. Playing favorites is giving better grades to the students you like than to the students you don't like, regardless of the work they do. I honestly don't know anyone who does that. But every teacher I know has favorite students. Don't assume, however, that those students are doing well for us or that the students we aren't looking forward to teaching again have anything to fear when the grades come in. I've had repeat students who made Cs and Ds in my classes, but whom I'd describe as favorite students because they were smart and interesting, and I just wished they'd put more effort into their work because putting the grades they were actually earning on their work was depressing for me.

Mr. Keating lent this book to Neil. Playing favorites, or recognizing a student with potential? I'd add that Todd
and Knox and others were also seeming favorites of Mr. Keating, despite the factthat Todd was almost certainly
not the star of the class (coming in all defiant without hispoetry assignment done).  I pose this to you, if you had
to choose for your teacher eitherMr. Keating or Saya the robot, which would you choose?
photo from http://bookriot.com/2013/06/12/17-movies-starring-books/

Because 6. Don't assume if you made good grades in my class that I liked you. Don't assume if you made poor grades that I didn't like you. Maybe I found you terribly annoying, and disrespectful, and swaggering, but you wrote some great papers that were cleverly thought-out and well-developed, and so even though I was glad to see the back of you at the end of the semester you earned a good grade through your own merit. Maybe you were a jokester who made us all laugh and who had great intellect and charm but didn't get your work in on time or blew it on the Works Cited page and so I couldn't give you the grade I knew you were capable of earning because you hadn't actually earned it. I can't count the students whom I've liked personally who made abysmal grades in my classes, or the students who did extremely well on their assignments but whom I was not thrilled to see sign up for a second course.

So back to the former student whose anger prompted my musings. I hope this person never felt disfavor in my class, never felt that others were preferred or given privileges. I think not, largely because the person speaking had been one of my favorite students. But it's possible this student was someone I was delighted to teach and looked forward to having in class, but who never realized it. Because the favorites thing is totally about perception, and a students' perception of class is necessarily limited to what he or she experiences and what he or she hears from others. If you think we should experience every student identically I ask you if you could do that with thousands of students over your lifetime. Pleasant people are more pleasant to be around than unpleasant people, and that is just life and we're human and the only way to render pleasant and unpleasant people the same in our experience is to stop being ourselves.

Of course I do my best to avoid treating any students unfairly. Of course I do. Of course I do. I love when my students pleasantly surprise me, as they so often do. And what greater reward is there for teachers than for students who haven't been getting it to suddenly start getting it??? That simply cannot happen if we favor some students over others. What is more awesome for us than for students who have been immature and difficult to start acting maturely and pleasantly? That won't happen if we are unfair to those students. To former students, if we're still in touch, bets are you were one of my favorites. I'm glad to keep up with you and what you're achieving in your life. For current students: work hard, have a sense of humor, be nice to your fellow students and to me, assume that you have room for improvement, and share your ideas during class - and there is a distinct possibility that when you come back to visit years after graduation, you'll be introduced as one of my favorite students.



(1) Peter Elbow, "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process," College English 45.4 (April 1983), 327-339.
(2) Elbow 328.
(3) Readers familiar with only the film will remember Wesley's line to Buttercup "Life is pain, highness; anyone who tells you differently is selling something." But we might ascribe his bitterness to the moment's conflict of his finding Buttercup engaged to another man. In the novel, however, the "Life in Unfair" mantra is repeated at several levels of both frame narrative and fairy tale, including with the fairy tale ending as Prince Humperdink's men are closing in on the escaping Wesley and Buttercup. Why? The narrator tells us it's because life is unfair. The film is great, of course, and I love it. But in this case as in so many, the book is a hundred thousand times even better.

The Breakdown, or, There Is Crying In Graduate School

Here we are after a few weeks of classes, starting to settle in and get used to the new wake-up time, the new study schedule, the new workload. Every semester is a bit different, and requires some adjustment. I usually spend the first two weeks of fall semester feeling like I’ve been hit by a bus. But by this point, a few weeks in, the interminable meetings are starting to spread out a little, I’m starting to know my students’ names, and they’re starting to figure out what’s expected of them. This time is good, for professors and for undergrads.

This time, for many new graduate students, is when they have their first breakdown. This is when they realize what’s expected of them, and their study schedule is getting really tight, and they’re getting to know their fellow graduate students who seem really smart and prepared. This is when they start writing their first short papers and doing their first discussion-leading, and they know they have to do more than they did as undergrads but they’re not sure what that looks like yet. This is when many of them cry. The goal, as I remember from Auburn, was just to make it to the end of class and all the way out of the room before the first tear slid off your chin.

picture from penusa.org

That’s okay. I want you to know this, that it’s okay, you who are feeling tears at the backs of your eyes in class because you don’t have a clue what anyone is talking about, you who sort of have something to contribute to discussion but can’t find an opening between the students who are writing their theses on the topic, you who suffer that awful stab of panic when a few fellow students and the professor go off for 20 minutes on some part of the book you don’t even remember (“OhMyGod, did I read the wrong book??? No – whew! - my cover looks the same as that guy’s over there, and he’s talking, and the professor is nodding, so it’s the right book, but how do I not remember the part they’re talking about? Did I miss the whole point of it? Am I stupid? Do I even belong here??")

This breakdown, the one hovering in your vicinity just waiting for you to stop breathing deeply so it can wash you away, is all a part of your new life. Welcome to Academia! It’s your first grad school breakdown, and not only is it normal, it’s good. It’s healthy. If you’re on the verge, go ahead. I think every grad student is entitled to about three breakdowns over the course of the program, so you might as well get this one over with.

The first breakdown is usually the adjustment to new expectations, to realizing that you’re in a new league. No longer will you be the most prepared student in the class just for having read everything. No longer will the professor patiently explain anything in the text that you didn’t understand, and no longer will the test or the paper at the end of the course be a place to demonstrate command of the material the class covered. Now, as you have probably noticed, you’re reading things way beyond your skill level, things that look like they’re in English but a lot of the words are new and weird and don’t make sense in that order (That’s right, I’m talking about you, Heidegger and Foucault). Here’s the catch: you’re not supposed to feel like you’re mastering it. You’re supposed to feel disrupted by it. You’re supposed to consider possibilities, not show that you’ve nailed it. Stop trying to have good answers, and instead focus on asking good questions. This is a huge adjustment, from an expectation of mastery to an expectation of exploration, and you should be patient with yourself while you make it. And keep a tissue in the outside pocket of your school bag, because you do not know when the breakdown will strike.

picture from piccollage.com

 I had mine in the Auburn library. There’s this big spiral staircase in the  middle of the library – there are elevators of course, but the staircase is cool, and open, and gives a wonderful view of the levels full of shelves of books. I love libraries – my mother was a reference librarian and I’ve spent wonderfully happy hours of my life wandering libraries – but I have an unfortunate tendency to be really intimidated by them, I guess since they represent KNOWLEDGE for me, and so when I started to come to grips with exactly what I’d gotten myself into in a PhD program at Auburn, I had a full-scale freak out on the central, spiral staircase at Ralph Brown Droughon Library. I had been doing fine, and I was thrilled to be in a great program and was happy with my classes and my professors. I was pretty scared of the reading load, but I figured I could pull it off. I had gone to the library to reserve a study carrel, and while I was there I visited the PRs and PNs, the shelves I know I’ll be using most, and when I walked down the stairs from the 3^rd floor all those shelves of books started swirling around me, at walking pace at first and then faster and faster, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe and couldn’t figure out which way was out, and I sat down on the steps and cried until a library worker came and helped me to the door. (She was concerned, but she didn’t turn a hair. I got the idea I wasn’t the first overwhelmed grad student she’d ever seen).

But not all your meltdowns will happen in academic settings. My bestie from grad school told me she had her first big grad school meltdown in the Kroger parking lot as she was loading her groceries into the car. (I had a doctoral-qualifying-exams-meltdown in the cereal aisle. Perhaps the grocery store surroundings drive home for us the extent to which our schoolwork is forcing a detachment from quotidian things. Or perhaps it’s just that suddenly you cannot make one more decision without exploding.) I had another friend who had her first breakdown when she woke up at 4 in the morning on top of the covers of her bed, surrounded by half-graded freshman essays, two open theory books, and the saltines and Easy Cheese that had been her dinner. A few years ago, one of my grad students came in to talk to me about class a few weeks in and just lost it right there in front of me. She felt helpless and scared. She felt like she was the only one not getting it. But she took some deep breaths and pulled herself together and gave it absolutely everything she had. She went on, by the way, to become a leader in class and write a smashing thesis and is now a poised and professional program director. She did what you’re supposed to do: have the breakdown, and then use it to move on.

picture from moderncountrystyle.com

And so, to new grad students out there: You do belong in that class, in that program, in that discipline. You chose it, and chances are, at some point in your life, perhaps even recently, it chose you. You didn’t apply to grad school because spending 80 hours a week on something felt like a great way to pass the time. You applied to grad school because you want to know this stuff. And you don’t know it yet, which is why you feel lost right now. Be patient with yourself. Be patient with the material. If you continue to seek it, it will start to open itself up for you. And before you know it, you’ll feel like you’re asking good questions.

There is good news and bad news here. The Good News is that what you’re feeling is perfectly normal, and every scholar feels that way. The Bad News is that it never really truly goes away. You are in a new league now; one that is about always reaching for more. That can leave you feeling like you’ve failed to grasp. Not true. Take time, every once in a while, to look back at what you’ve read so far. Look back at what you knew a few weeks ago and what you know now. You’re getting there. Where “there” is will keep moving, it’s true, but you are getting closer all the time.

The Breakdown is good, because it means that you respect the magnitude of the task you have set for yourself. The Breakdown is healthy, because it means you are passionate about succeeding. The Breakdown means you are in very good company, because we all have The Breakdown from time to time, as we struggle and strive to reach for more than we know. The Breakdown doesn’t mean that you aren’t cut out to be a scholar. It means you already are one. 

Back to School

I'm playing on facebook the day before classes start and two days before my first classes when it hits me, the little flutter of joy somewhere in my chest. I catch my breath. It's time. BACK TO SCHOOL.

I have no idea how spastic I was for the very first first day of school, but I know that I was crazy looking forward to it. I still think that the first day of school is just about the coolest day of the year. I've been watching my friends posting First Day pictures of their kids, and eagerly awaiting my own first day - one of the most glorious perks of life in academia is that you get a first day of school every year until you retire.

Buying school supplies is so fun that those of us without kids
 buy them for other people.  This photo from Back to School
shopping with my bestie for my church's school supply mission.

There are calendar years and fiscal years, and different new years in lots of cultures. The Jewish new year is Rosh Hashanah. The Chinese new year tends to be around the beginning of February. And for lots and lots of people, a year begins in January. I can adapt. If someone says ‘that was a tough year,’ I know she’s probably talking about a year that began in January, or perhaps a year bracketed by birthdays – the year she was 22, perhaps. If a friend says ‘Next year we’re going to keep the house cleaner,’ he probably means that as a resolution beginning 01-01. But for me, the year begins in August and ends in May. A year is catalogued not as 2002, but as 02-03. Summer is an extra time, a yearly bonus, a time to catch up with family and housework that the year didn't allow time for, time to research and read, time to sleep 9 glorious hours every night. But no matter how great the summer, no matter how bad the phase of my life, ever since I started first grade at age 5, August has always promised a renewal, a new year, new chances, new ideas, new people. The 3 years after college that I was out of school were good for their own reasons, but when August rolled around and I went to yet another day of work instead of to school, it was not only disappointing, it was disorienting.

I am about to have my 34th first day of school. It will be my 6th first day of school where I teach now. My 2nd first day as a tenured professor. I have had 8 first days since I finished graduate school. My first day of school as a teacher was 13 years ago. This is an auspicious year for me - 13 has always been my lucky number. I am, I have to say, incredibly and unspeakably grateful for every single one of those first days, for the fortune to have an excellent education, to have been able to spend year after year in a classroom, to have spent the better part of my life - and I do mean the better part of my life - learning.

 But I can't find words to express my gratitude for the 13 of those years that have been as a teacher, because I've learned the most in that time. I remember a professor in my Masters degree who just seemed to know everything, and I asked him "How, HOW, do you know all this? I will never know all this!" and he said "Oh, wait until you're a teacher. You don't really know something until you teach it." He was right. He was so, so very right. I really thought I knew Hamlet after I'd, you know, written about it in my dissertation. I freaking knew that play. Backwards and forwards. And then I was assigned my first Shakespeare classes, in my first tenure-track job. Re-reading the play to teach it taught me Hamlet. Preparing my discussion notes taught me Hamlet. My students' responses taught me Hamlet. It felt miraculous, recognizing that I'd be learning for the rest of my life, just by doing my job. 

Most of us start out each fall giddy with anticipation, ready to MOLD YOUNG MINDS and INSPIRE FUTURE LEADERS, hopped up from full nights of sleep all summer and perhaps in some cases a possible marathon of Dead Poets Society and Mona Lisa Smile. The weeks will pass. The joy will not last. The grumpiness will set in. A student will miss a required conference and have to be penalized. Cell phones will be confiscated in class. Unprepared students will be sent out, and they will complain that it's so very unfair and will possibly even go gripe about me on Ratemyprofessors.com, writing comments so foul as to deserve deletion by site administrators. (Should anyone choose to visit the site, observe the blank comments section on a few of the posts. There were once comments there. I have on this site a fairly good record of the dates I passed out graded papers in years gone by - it is the day before the date of the post, in many cases). Even in Dead Poets Society, there's the red-headed kid not standing on his desk at the end, bitter and angry and untouched by Mr. Keating's magic. There's always the one, at the very least.

See all the kids not standing? They don't care about Mr. Keating
and they didn't appreciate his life lessons. Not yet.
photo from http://www.whatascript.com/dead-poets-society.html

Ideals collapse, and yet they endure.

The summer of 1985, when I was about to start high school, I fell in love with an ideal of Back to School from which I may never fully recover, thanks to one of my teenage girl magazines, probably Young Miss or Seventeen. Whichever one it was ran an August issue photo spread that was all about Back to School, showing red-cheeked girls in sweaters and plaid skirts, in misty fall afternoon scenes of football games or chummily piled into someone's Jeep or Range Rover or something, all friends and laughing with their books tucked under their arms. I was completely in love with it. I paged through it breathlessly, soaking in that this was what school would feel like - it would feel like this felt - forgetting entirely that I was in south Georgia and it would be fully January before we had anything that could be considered sweater weather (I usually got a single sweater at Christmas, since it wasn't like you'd get much wear out of more than that). When those realities began to sink in, as the fall wore on and it was hot and I didn't have very many friends and certainly no Jeeps to hang around on, I had to come to terms with the fact that my Back to School ideal would not come true any time soon. But I had a wonderful year, nonetheless. I confess, though, that if you look at my senior portrait four years later, you'll see me in a sweater and plaid skirt, hanging on to that ideal in a faded form, insisting on carrying it with me into my academic future. 

The joy and the promise of Back to School is an ideal, and ideals fall apart when we get close to them, like meeting your favorite movie star and realizing he's not as brilliant or funny as the characters he plays, but is still a nice guy. The ideal of Back to School is a heady one for academics. And we do carry it with us, because for all that my first fall of high school did not turn out to be a teen magazine spread, I made some new friends and football games were fun, and over the years there were cars to pile into and girls to laugh with as we walked from class to class with our books tucked under our arms. Ideals are useful. They teach us what we want. They are an anchor for us when we're spinning, a home to which we can return when reality devolves into brown Christmases and grade complaints. 

With my two best friends from high school, goofing around as we got ready for
our next big Back to School - in college. Both of these friends just posted on fb
the Back to School photos of their daughters. Some realities are better than the ideal.

The first day of Back to School is so full of promise, and it won't live up to all the promises we force it to make to us. But it's a beginning, a return to an ideal. And in seeking our ideals, we grow and learn, a little more every year.

So when I see students posting pictures of the books they bought for my classes on facebook and twitter, when I see my friends post pictures of their kids in their First Day outfits posing on the front steps with their shiny new backpacks, when my dearest bestie from grad school melts my heart with her annual ode to sharpened pencils, and when my other friends are texting me that they're almost done with their syllabi and without a moment to lose, I get breathless with anticipation. The School Year is Here! 13-14, Babyyyyy!

Happy New Year, my friends.

Syllabus Agony

Syl.la.bus. Sillybus. Syllabus.

Forms:  Pl. syllabi /ˈsɪləbaɪ/ or syllabuses /ˈsɪləbəsɪz/ .
Etymology:  < modern Latin syllabus, usually referred to an alleged Greek σύλλαβος .
(Oxford English Dictionary)

The first recorded English usage, according to the OED, was in 1656, to mean a sort of summary of contents for non-printed dissemination of knowledge, sort-of like a table of contents for a series of lectures, as well as a brief statement of the contents of a treatise.

It's been in use since 1889 in its most common usage, to mean "a statement of the subjects covered by a course of instruction."

It is the bones of the course. The policies, the assignments, the reading schedule. It constitutes an agreement of responsibilities, proposed by the professor and implicitly agreed upon by students by their continuation in the course after having that agreement offered to them. It is a contract between professor and student, which even further underscores the deep and terrible shame that many students don't bother to do much more than glance at it once before it disappears, crumpled, into the vast recesses of a bookbag. Yes, there are students who on the first day, as I'm going over the syllabus and books and such, carefully get their portable hole-punch out of their backpacks and punch the holes so they can file it neatly into their already-labeled course ring-binder. They will then go back to their dorms and meticulously highlight the assignment descriptions and record the due dates in their daybooks. But those students are not the majority. Five weeks in to the semester, after something like 25 reading assignments and probably at least one writing assignment, a student will ask "Professor, when is the next writing assignment due?" Response: "It's on the syllabus." Student: "...um, syllabus," (said while absently unzipping the bookbag and idly ruffling through things) "...yeah, can I get another one of those?"

The bottom is where the syllabus goes.

Also: When are your office hours? What is your email address? Where is your office? How many absences do I get? What happens if I skip a test? Are we going to read just out of this one book or will there be other books I need to get? When is the last day of class?

It's on the syllabus. It's all on the syllabus.

Because before we can even get to the subjects covered by a course of instruction, we must include every policy of the school regarding student expectations and behavior in class, we must include the course objectives determined by our department, and we must include every detail that we ourselves want to have laid out and clear before that grade challenge at the end of the term. The syllabus is where we cover the bases, and where we cover our asses. It gets longer every semester because we have to go back in and clarify everything that students found loopholes in so as to (we hope, we hope each time) avoid any further awkward scenarios. Some things you don't put on there, because they would seem petty or you just hope they never happen again.*

Outcomes and Objectives - here is the information and here are the skills you are to have learned by the end of the term and I'm stating it clearly here so you don't imagine we're just sort of reading generally around in some literature and stuff with the purpose of making you well-rounded or whatever. Course Policies - you get 3 unexcused absences and here is what constitutes an excused absence and I really, really, really mean it when I say I'll penalize you for excessive absences so please don't push me on absences because holy crap I hate the arguments over this more than just about anything. Food and drink in the classroom - I swear to almighty God I actually have to specify which beverages are permitted ("food is not permitted but water, juice, and soda are fine") because I don't want to have to specify "non-alcoholic" on the syllabus after the time years ago that a student took "beverages are permitted but food is not" to include a Coors Lite. Cell phones - strictly prohibited because no you don't need it to know what time it is since you don't wear a watch, and I will count you absent if I see you texting, and no you don't need to answer the call from your mother while sitting in the middle of the third row of class just as we're covering the rhetorical triangle because she's your mother and we can only hope that she'll understand that you were in class and couldn't answer. Assignments - due at the beginning of class and not 25 minutes into class after you finally got the printer to work in the lab full of students that you got to six minutes before class started, and yes 4-5 pages means a minimum of 4 full pages and a maximum of 5, and you have to address the specific assignment and not just write whatever you felt like because you thought my expository essay assignment was boring and you wanted to do something you found more challenging so you wrote a short story about yourself.

Then we put in the disabilities statement, and the teacher licensure objectives, and whatever else comes down from administrative sources as things that must go on every syllabus. And then, only then, do we get to the subjects covered by the course of instruction. The policies take time, but after the first creation of a first syllabus, they are mostly tweaking to adjust and adapt. It's pretty rare to totally rewrite from scratch. If a course is one you've taught a few times and you like it pretty much the way it is, if you're just changing out a few readings, there's not a whole lot to it beyond updating due dates based on that semester's calendar and adding any new personal policies you've picked up from conversations with teacher friends, like counting students absent for texting, or requiring the Turnitin.com receipt as the cover page for an essay.

The real work on a syllabus, the one that we dread sitting down to do but can kind of enjoy while in the middle of it, is the new or totally-revamped syllabus. I can update a syllabus I like in about a day, which includes due-date-changing, updated policies, even changing some readings or an assignment or two and posting on the online course management system (Moodle, Blackboard, whatever).  But a new or revamped course can take over 200 hours of work. This is almost impossible to do while teaching, so most of us do this over summer, when there might be time to read dozens of books before choosing which ones go on the reading assignments, pairing and repairing and re-repairing readings to see what goes well together and what themes emerge or what possibilities emerge for students to find cool open doors for their own work. Then there is the agony over the workload we're assigning. Is it too much? Is it challenging enough? Am I assigning tons of reading for periods in the semester when they'll be getting burned out or frustrated? Am I covering enough territory to give them a real sense of what else is out there? Am I going to kill them with all this reading?

I always say that the real divide between students and teacher when it comes to coursework is that they see 15 long weeks that need filling with stuff, and we see the entire world of literature that somehow has to get edited down and crammed into the miniscule 15 weeks we're given to cover everything. Why do we overdo it sometimes? Because we might be painfully aware that this general education literature course will be the last time some of our students read, so that last book for the last week of class may well be the last book that student ever reads in his life. No pressure. Or we might find it depressing that there are more major works of literary theory than there are class days in the graduate theory course, so we have to choose which ones to cover and which ones to leave off, hoping to God that we're not leaving off the one that would have made more sense to the students struggling to grasp the concepts.

Me, building a new syllabus from scratch.
Photo from: http://librarianinreallife.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/gandalf_201.jpg

Then we run around to our colleagues showing them the new syllabus reading schedule and asking if we're overdoing it. Then we re-do it a few times. Then we find the typos we didn't find in the last six revisions. Then we read it out loud to our pets to see if we missed any incomplete sentences or other casualties of cutting-and-pasting.

And at some point it is just done. We post it online. We print it and staple it and pass it out on the first day of class. If you're me, you read portions of it out loud to them so that later they can't say they didn't know that the professor doesn't answer work email over the weekend.

And the conscientious ones punch their holes and place it in the ring-binder, and the ones we'll sigh over later absent-mindedly stuff it into their bookbags where it will go to meet last year's syllabi and some food wrappers and someone's phone number, and we go over which editions of the books to get and what the first reading assignment will be for the next class period. And then we're done.

And three of them will drop the class for a variety of reasons. And the rest will come back.

Contract signed.

* Things that I have considered adding to my syllabus:

• No sunglasses to hid the shiner you got in a fight over the weekend.
• No asking athletes for autographs while in the middle of peer review.
• No dipping (when this kid pulled his spit bottle out out of his backpack and spit into it, the Kappa Delta across from him visibly threw up in her mouth).
• No transparent clothing in class.
• No changing shoes and socks in the middle of class.
• Backpacks must be stored safely under or up against desks and not sprawled out in the aisles where I will trip over them.
• A Facebook Policies section: You may friend me on facebook but I will put you in a restricted list so you can't see anything but a handful of pictures of me with my family and a few updates about school events, so please do the same since I do not need to see tagged photos of you doing kegstands. Also, I can put 2 and 2 together so if you post about your epic roadtrip over the weekend please do not then tell me you couldn't finish the reading because you had the flu. Also, it shows up in my newsfeed if you and another student who has friended me have a conversation about how much you hate my class and what a bitch I am.
• Grade-grubbing makes me crazy, so don't even think about it. Demanding that I explain to you how the grade was reached is only going to make me cut and paste into my response email the portions of this syllabus where I explain in detail how that assignment is evaluated, and to remind you to read my comments and the long paragraph at the end of the essay where I advise you on what you could have done better along with what you did well. 
• Recovery from tattoos is not an excused absence.
• Please consult the academic calendar before planning your wedding so that you do not book the venue for your ceremony for the exact time for which the university has scheduled your final exam.
• You may not substitute your own choices for class readings, even if you think that other book by the same author is better.

Must Be Nice To Have Summers Off

Even with a view like this, it's hard to stop thinking about work.

I just went on vacation. A real vacation, for a whole week, during which I checked my school email only three times and answered only one of those messages (from a student who took an Incomplete in an early summer class for medical reasons, who was distressed and needed reassurance). I did not read for work, although I had work stuff that needed reading and had even slipped one of those books into the bag we packed with tablet and chargers and novels. Instead I read, in heavenly bliss, a modernist novel that my husband had read earlier in the summer and really enjoyed and which is way out of my area, and it was amazing. I hung out with family and ate and even made a side jaunt over to my alma mater for one day for a reunion of faculty and students from my old department.

On our way back from vacation, my husband and I stopped by to visit his brother for a few minutes. My brother-in-law likes to tease me about work, and he wryly reminded me that "summers are for fun." Summers are time off, he says. No working in the summers. I laughed.

I wish. Sort of.

I had a summer off, when I moved to where I live now. I finished my spring term at the school I was leaving and moved here at the end of May and then had no class to teach in the summer for the first time in 8 years. I had no workplace to go to for the first summer since starting college at 17. I felt strangely untethered. I was weirdly between research projects. I unpacked boxes, and walked the dog 5 times a day (old dog, short walks), and drove around town learning my way around, and painted things, and planted things. When pre-semester meetings began in mid-August I was so relieved to have an anchor again that I could hardly contain myself. I was rested and restored, but I couldn't have gone on like that much longer without losing all sense of connection to the world around me. I am an academic - it's how I enter the world. Too much time away (like, a whole summer) and I feel like gravity isn't holding me down adequately anymore.

Moving into my house in VA in 2008.

That summer, I heard maybe 4 times more often than usual the hated accusation hurled at academics nationwide: Must Be Nice.

Must Be Nice To Have Summers Off. Even when said with something resembling humor, it drips with scorn and resentment. Must Be Nice.

This is only one version. There are variations. Must Be Nice To Be Out In Your Garden On A Tuesday Morning When The Rest Of Us Are Working. Must Be Nice To Have Breaks All The Time. Must Be Nice To Have Tenure (1).

I've heard my other garden variety academic friends stumble through awkward, shamed answers, trying to explain how hard we work, how these mythical "breaks" are just chances to live the lives other people live when they clock out at the end of the day, saved up for whole semesters so we can enjoy all those evenings and weekends all at once over Christmas or over the part of summer that we're not teaching a summer class. (I will not discuss Spring Break or fall break, for those of us who get a fall break, as these are merely days to work at the office on a relatively quiet campus, almost always frantically spent catching up on grading. If you've ever graded papers for 7 hour stretches several days in a row, you'll know how absurd it is to think of that as a break). And I will concede that it's not like I'm working my usual grinding hours during a break. I figure I work more like a 30-hour week during breaks. But since during the semester I'm usually working as long as I'm awake -- not kidding, I have stopped at the office on my way home from church and not finished until dinnertime, at which point I came home and read for Monday's class until bedtime -- I feel really okay with working a lighter schedule some of the time. I do enjoy planting my garden and fixing up the house a bit over the summer.

Growing tomatoes is soothing.

I usually just say Yes. It Is Nice. It's very nice to have summers off. Thank You. I don't have a problem with this being sufficient because it is so often followed, necessarily, with: Oh, why no, I'm afraid I can't help you with your volunteer project in June, as I will be working. Oh, no, well not July, either, as I will be working. Oh, no, I'm taking a short vacation the first week of August so I won't be available. Oh, darnit, after vacation I'll be in pre-semester planning, meetings and course prep, so I won't be able to help you with your project then, either.

As for the Must Be Nice To Have Thursdays Off, or whatever variation it takes in that particular instance, I can honestly reply that I'm working from home, in my pyjamas, and you only see me because on days I work at home I often take the dog out for a nice little walk  (and because my car is out front and you care so much about who gets what that you keep track of these things, but of course I don't say that part). I say: Yes, It Is Nice To Work From Home One Day A Week Because I Can Wear My Pyjamas All Day While I Grade And Catch Up On Emails And Collect Sources For My Next Project. I say this with no snark whatsoever. It really is awesome to wear pyjamas all day. In the semester of grad school that I was reading for my doctoral qualifying exams I would spend my non-teaching days entirely in pyjamas, reading theory from 7 am until 10 pm, book open even while I prepared and ate my meals, and when I was done I would take a shower and put on fresh pyjamas (2). This was one of my favorite periods in my life and I remember it with almost weepy nostalgia.

Sometimes, though, it really does get to me and I wish I could reply to these people what I'm thinking: Yeah? Go back to school for 7 more years and work 80 hour weeks and you, too, can walk your dog on a Thursday at 2 in the afternoon. 

But while I find the acid tone behind the Must Be Nice unsettling - and it is, after all, intended to be unsettling, designed to shake me out of my decadent lifestyle as an elitist mooch on society and bring me to the realization that everyone else is out there working very, very hard whilst I traipse around the ivory tower in my silk smoking jacket calling for the butler to pour me another martini (3) - the truth is that even if I did have summers off, I wouldn't want them. I had that one once, and it was confusing to me. Oh, for the first week or so it was lovely to wake up whenever I liked and not have anywhere to be at all. But that was partly because I didn't know anyone here, which isn't a really lovely reason to have nowhere to go. And I had plenty to do around the house, so I'd have a cup of coffee and walk my little, old doggy, Felix, around the block once and then pour myself some more coffee and open up a few boxes to unpack. So it wasn't like I was totally unoccupied. But it wore on me. Before long the lack of a schedule was disorienting. I had tasks, but they had no real deadlines (who cares when the bathroom gets painted?) and they weren't exactly intellectually challenging. I even inadvertently made a few of them more challenging than they needed to be, turning the arrangement of furniture into a major problem-solving exercise. But it wasn't enough.

Petting a six-toed Hemingway cat on vacation in Key West in 2011. 

Every summer since, I have taught at least an independent study, to have something to ground me. I know without teaching of some kind during those months, which seem long in May and excruciatingly brief by August, I will lose my mind a bit. and I have massively overlapping research projects now, always more work to do than time to do it. There is a list out there in internetland, called You Might Be An Academic If... (variants include You Might Be A Graduate Student, You Might Be A College Professor, etc.) which I've posted elsewhere on this blog. My favorite is the one about accepting guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation. It's true. Even finally relaxing on a deck chair at a cabin in the mountains, with a novel in my hand and a drink in front of me, it takes effort to fight back the rising feeling of "But the article I promised to work on. I have to get back to that article."

Must Be Nice. Ah, well. To each his own, I suppose. I do wish there were less resentment towards the collegiate folk. We're really working our butts off, and for not nearly as much money or job security as you think. But maybe we're just really lucky to be doing what we love so we seem less angry about our jobs, so that makes it look as though we're not working as hard? I don't know. Many aspects of my job can be a real drag, a REAL drag, but I didn't work that hard for that many years to qualify for a job I didn't want, so maybe it isn't that it that the job is easy, just that I make it look easy.

And seriously, if you do want to be free to work in your garden on a Thursday morning, or have summers "off," consider going back to school for 7 more years and working 80 hour weeks. Works for me.

At Kew Gardens, on a study abroad, in summer 2013.

(1) I am working on a separate entry for this one, for Tenure, that most contentious issue, and won't address it further here.

(2) Each week I took a 2 hour break on Tuesdays to have dinner with my best friend and a 1 hour break on Wednesdays to watch The West Wing. I did not then, nor do I now, consider the intense restrictions of that life at terribly limiting. I couldn't do it forever, but I have enough of the ascetic in me to treasure the time I spent totally immersed like that in my discipline.

(3) I really do like a good martini, though. A good, dirty martini is just about as good as it gets, but I have to go easy on those things because they'll knock me right out when I'm not looking.