Richard Jeffrey Newman

This is from the “Read­ings” sec­tion in the August 2010 issue of Harper’s, and I have been read­ing it over try­ing to decide what fright­ens me most about it.

The con­tent of edu­ca­tion is always, always, polit­i­cal and there will always be some­one some­where who thinks her or his per­spec­tive has been left out of what chil­dren are taught, to their detri­ment as indi­vid­u­als and to the detri­ment of soci­ety as a whole. Inde­pen­dently of that, thought, I am a big believer in try­ing to find as many ways as pos­si­ble to include as many per­spec­tives as pos­si­ble in the class­room, not to make the point that they are all equally valid, but to make the point that the more informed we are about those per­spec­tives, even the ones that have been shown to be invalid, the more respon­si­ble and account­able we are likely to be in our own per­spec­tives. The pro­posed changes to his­tory and social stud­ies cur­ricu­lum recorded here, made by Texas State Board of Edu­ca­tion mem­ber Don McEl­roy – and if you have not read about the Texas text book con­tro­versy ear­lier this year, here’s a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle that gives a taste of it – are prob­lem­atic on their face because they so clearly favor an overtly con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal agenda, but three things stuck out to me in particular:

• Remov­ing dis­cus­sion of pro­pa­ganda as one of the rea­sons that the United States entered World War I so fal­si­fies what goes on when any nation decides to go to war – and I am obvi­ously talk­ing here about the gov­ern­ment pro­pa­ganda directed at that nation’s pub­lic to gar­ner sup­port for the war – that it trans­forms what­ever lessons are taught in the con­text of this cur­ricu­lum change from edu­ca­tion into propaganda.
• The third para­graph down about “efforts by glob­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions to usurp the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion tran­si­tion­ing from U.S. sov­er­eignty to global gov­er­nance” is fright­en­ing not only because it sug­gests that the U.S. has, and should have, an agenda to become, essen­tially, the gov­er­nor of the world, but also because it is so badly writ­ten – unless I have read it wrong; and I have read it over more than a few times now – that it gram­mat­i­cally attrib­utes “threats to indi­vid­ual free­dom and lib­erty” not to the sup­posed “efforts by glob­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions,” but to the Con­sti­tu­tion itself.
• Cur­ricu­lum guide­lines that com­pare his­tor­i­cal fig­ures to fic­tional char­ac­ters as if those fic­tional char­ac­ters were real – and remem­ber these are his­tory and social stud­ies, not lit­er­a­ture guide­lines – sound like some­thing out of Orwell’s 1984 or some other dystopian novel. That Mr. McEl­roy and who­ever advised him could not find an exam­ple of real life opti­mistic immi­grants to com­pare with Upton Sin­clair, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois seems to me say more about the canyon-wide gaps in their edu­ca­tion than these pro­posed changes could ever say about the osten­si­ble lib­eral bias in edu­ca­tion that they are sup­posed to correct.

I don’t know if these pro­posed changes passed, but that they should have been put for­ward as seri­ous and sub­stan­tive, that they should have been taken seri­ously at all, really scares me.

I have three or four sets of tech­ni­cal writ­ing papers to grade this week­end – I am teach­ing two sec­tions this semes­ter – and I was think­ing to get started tonight, but I can’t bear the thought right now of hav­ing to deal with stu­dent writ­ing so I am going to pro­cras­ti­nate by telling you briefly about a dis­cus­sion I had Mon­day with the sec­tion that is all male (the other is mostly male) about the assign­ment they will be hand­ing in to me next week. I am using a text­book called Ele­ments of Tech­ni­cal Writ­ing, by Thomas Pearsall, the first seven chap­ters of which deal with the tech­ni­cal writ­ing process. Each chap­ter is given over to one step in that process, and Pearsall has built an incre­men­tal assign­ment into the sequence of chap­ters: Stu­dents are to imag­ine that they work for a start-up com­pany that is think­ing about invest­ing in group­ware so that employ­ees can work remotely. They have been asked by their super­vi­sor to do some research and write a report on group­ware that she can use to per­suade man­age­ment to spend the money. The first two steps in the writ­ing process that Pearsall lays out involve putting together a work plan, a descrip­tion of the project and a list of the tasks that need to be com­pleted. On Mon­day, we were talk­ing about the audi­ence analy­sis sec­tion of the work plan, and I was ask­ing my stu­dents to list what they knew about their super­vi­sor that might be rel­e­vant to how they would choose to write their report. They called out some obvi­ous things about being a man­ager, and then some­one said, “She’s a woman.”

“Is that rel­e­vant to the writ­ing of your report?” I asked.

“Of course,” some­one else answered.

“Why?” I asked, and the answers came very quickly.

“Because women are more skep­ti­cal than men.”

“Because women over ana­lyze everything”

“They pay too much atten­tion to details.”

“Women ask too many questions.”

“Because women never for­get when you make a mistake.”

“Because women in the work­place always feel they have some­thing to prove; she’s prob­a­bly going to be really pushy.”

There were a cou­ple of more that I don’t remem­ber clearly, but all of them – with the excep­tion per­haps of the last one – were such unam­bigu­ous instances of sex­ist stereo­typ­ing that I was, for a moment, shocked into silence. It had been a very long since I’d heard any­one any­where assert those stereo­types as if they were sim­ple fact. “Do you really think you want to write your report based on those assump­tions?” I asked. “Remem­ber, she’s your super­vi­sor.” A few of my stu­dents laughed; a cou­ple of them shook their heads; we had a brief and pre­dictable con­ver­sa­tion about sex­ist stereo­typ­ing; and while I doubt I changed anyone’s mind about women in gen­eral, they all seemed to get the point: don’t base work­place behav­ior on those kinds of assumptions.

Then, as the con­ver­sa­tion was wind­ing down, some­one said, “It’s good there are no girls in the class. If there were, they’d be fight­ing us all the way and we ‘d never have been able to talk like this.” Unfor­tu­nately, class was over and so I couldn’t pur­sue pre­cisely what he meant by that, but I walked to my car with mixed feel­ings. On the one hand, there is wis­dom in what that stu­dent said; on the other hand, there would have been value for those men in hav­ing to deal with women’s anger; and it made me start to won­der about how to struc­ture a les­son, or lessons, around the prob­lems of sex­ism in the work­place and eth­i­cal behav­ior in the work­place, that would remain true to the course descrip­tion but also go a lit­tle deeper than some ver­sion of When you go to work, check your sexism/racism/etc. at the door. It’s some­thing I will be think­ing about, since it looks like I will be teach­ing tech­ni­cal writ­ing for the fore­see­able future.

Like Kit­ten­loss said in her or his com­ment on Dead­Spin, where I found this story – thanks to my friend Amy King–I expected, based on the title, NYU Busi­ness School Pro­fes­sor Has Mas­tered the Art of Email Flam­ing, to side with the stu­dent, but the details con­vinced me oth­er­wise. The grad­u­ate stu­dent, and the grad­u­ate part is impor­tant, walked into Galloway’s lec­ture one hour late on the first day of class and Gal­loway asked him to leave and told him to come back the next day. This is from an email that the stu­dent sent to Gal­loway com­plain­ing about the late­ness pol­icy – you can’t enter class if you’re more than 15 min­utes late – and explain­ing his lateness:

As of yes­ter­day evening, I was inter­ested in three dif­fer­ent Mon­day night classes that all occurred simul­ta­ne­ously. In order to decide which class to select, my plan for the evening was to sam­ple all three and see which one I like most. Since I had never taken your class, I was unaware of your class pol­icy. I was dis­ap­pointed that you dis­missed me from class con­sid­er­ing (1) there is no way I could have been aware of your pol­icy and (2) con­sid­er­ing that it was the first day of evening classes and I arrived 1 hour late (not a few min­utes), it was more prob­a­ble that my tar­di­ness was due to my desire to sam­ple dif­fer­ent classes rather than sheer complacency.

Here are  the barely tongue-in-cheek first para­graphs of Galloway’s response:

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15 – 20 min­utes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 min­utes late), left that class (again, pre­sum­ably, in the mid­dle of the lec­ture), and then came to my class. At that point (walk­ing in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “both­ered” you.

Cor­rect?

You state that, hav­ing not taken my class, it would be impos­si­ble to know our pol­icy of not allow­ing peo­ple to walk in an hour late. Most risk analy­sis offers that in the face of sub­stan­tial uncer­tainty, you opt for the more con­ser­v­a­tive path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the pro­fes­sor has an explicit pol­icy for tol­er­at­ing dis­re­spect­ful behav­ior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lot­tery win­ner that is your recently crowned Mon­day evening Pro­fes­sor is teach­ing Judge­ment and Deci­sion Mak­ing or Crit­i­cal Thinking.

In addi­tion, your logic effec­tively means you can­not be held account­able for any code of con­duct before tak­ing a class. For the record, we also have no stated pol­icy against burst­ing into show tunes in the mid­dle of class, uri­nat­ing on desks or tak­ing that rev­o­lu­tion­ary hair removal sys­tem for a spin. How­ever, xxxx, there is a base­line level of deco­rum (i.e., man­ners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admis­sions depart­ment have deemed tomorrow’s busi­ness leaders.

The rest of the let­ter is worth read­ing as well.

For me, what jumps out here – aside from the obvi­ous ques­tion of whether Gal­loway is just being a dick, which I think he is not – is the degree to which this stu­dent seems to take for granted that, as a cus­tomer of the col­lege, he has the right, because the cus­tomer is always right, to do what he did. I have run up against the “I am a cus­tomer of this school and you have there­fore to give me what I want” think­ing a lot over the past cou­ple of years, and it trou­bles me. There are ways in which stu­dents are and should be treated as cus­tomers: they have a right to ade­quate park­ing, to clean and com­fort­able facil­i­ties, to access to tech­nol­ogy, to com­pe­tent teach­ers who come to class pre­pared, etc. But I a not a cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive and I resent the hell out of it when stu­dents treat me that way.

Three stu­dents from my tech­ni­cal writ­ing class came to see me dur­ing my office hours a cou­ple of weeks ago because they were unhappy with the grades they received on their first assign­ment of the semes­ter and they wanted my help in rewrit­ing it for a bet­ter grade. The assign­ment, which I give every time I teach tech­ni­cal writ­ing, is pretty straight­for­ward. Stu­dents are instructed to imag­ine that it is the end of the pre­vi­ous semes­ter – which in this case would be Spring 2009 – and they have gone to the Eng­lish Depart­ment office, where they are told that reg­is­tra­tion for Tech­ni­cal Writ­ing is by instructor’s per­mis­sion only, and so they need to sub­mit to me a let­ter of appli­ca­tion. In writ­ing this let­ter, they are allowed to use any source mate­r­ial they think is rel­e­vant: the syl­labus I have handed them, the col­lege cat­a­log, my fac­ulty and/or per­sonal web­site, my rat­ings on rate​mypro​fes​sors​.com – any­thing – as long as what they write con­tains the following:

1. An expla­na­tion of the course’s rel­e­vance to either their career goals or their aca­d­e­mic careers;
2. A dis­cus­sion of what they per­ceive to be their strengths and weak­nesses as writers;
3. A dis­cus­sion of what they believe they have to offer the class.

The assign­ment is dif­fi­cult, espe­cially given the fact that my stu­dents are, over­whelm­ingly, col­lege fresh­men or sopho­mores. Not only have most of them never had to write a real let­ter of appli­ca­tion before – and good let­ters of appli­ca­tion are damned hard to write – but even sea­soned writ­ers can find it dif­fi­cult to artic­u­late their writ­ing strengths and weak­nesses. More, it is rare that an 18-, 19– or 20-year-old has the matu­rity to write per­sua­sively about either her or his char­ac­ter traits or plans for the future. Indeed, one of my goals is that, by con­fronting stu­dents with just how dif­fi­cult it is to write about them­selves in a way that is both per­sua­sive and pro­fes­sional, the assign­ment will spur at least some of them to think a lit­tle more deeply about who they are, what they want to do with their lives, the place of writ­ing in their lives, and how and why they choose to present them­selves in writ­ing the way they do.

The first stu­dent who came to see me, a woman from Sene­gal for whom Eng­lish is a third lan­guage, received an F on her paper because it was filled with so many gram­mat­i­cal, edit­ing and proof­read­ing errors that, had it been an actual let­ter of appli­ca­tion, I would have stopped read­ing after the first half of the first sen­tence. Truly, it read like she’d spent, at most, fif­teen min­utes typ­ing, unfil­tered, what­ever was in her brain and then handed to me the piece of paper that emerged from her printer with­out giv­ing it even the most cur­sory of sec­ond glances. Almost the first thing she said to me when she sat down in my office was, with her eyes start­ing to tear up, that maybe the best thing for her to do was drop my course. Clearly she was a hor­ri­ble writer, she said, and she did not want to end up with an F on her tran­script. I asked her if she was a good writer in French, the lan­guage of instruc­tion in her coun­try, and she said yes. I asked her what grades she’d got­ten in high school on the essays she’d writ­ten in French, and she told me A’s and B’s. The prob­lem, then, I explained – and I am para­phras­ing a much longer con­ver­sa­tion – was not that she was a hor­ri­ble writer. Lit­er­acy skills trans­fer from a first to a sec­ond – and even a third and fourth – lan­guage. The prob­lem was that she hadn’t taken the time to do her best work, and when I sug­gested that maybe this was because she’d fig­ured writ­ing a let­ter would be easy, she smiled and nod­ded. Now that she knew bet­ter, she said, she would at least give rewrit­ing the assign­ment a chance before decid­ing to drop the course.

I’ve been teach­ing in the Eng­lish Depart­ment of the com­mu­nity col­lege that employs me for twenty years now, and I am still sur­prised – though per­haps I shouldn’t be – that it’s the stu­dents who are used to get­ting good grades with whom I have to have the above con­ver­sa­tion. Not that these stu­dents are the only ones who fail to take assign­ments seri­ously, but they tend to be the ones who come to my office either, like my stu­dent from Sene­gal, more or less destroyed by the poor grade I have given them or con­vinced that what they need is to get from me my per­sonal “Stu­dent Road Map to the A.” Stu­dent who are look­ing for the lat­ter tend to argue that my stan­dards are not just dif­fer­ent from those of all the other teach­ers who have graded their work in the past; my stan­dards are much, much tougher. This was what the sec­ond stu­dent who came to see me said. An African-American man who wants to be an inven­tor and a con­sul­tant, his first words after he sat down across from me were, “I don’t under­stand what you don’t under­stand about what I wrote.” It’s a fair ques­tion, and one I usu­ally look for­ward to answer­ing because it can lead to real dia­logue and real learn­ing on the part of the stu­dent, except that – at least at first – this stu­dent was more inter­ested in per­suad­ing me that the strat­egy he used in his let­ter should have got­ten him a bet­ter grade than the C I gave him than in hear­ing my expla­na­tion for why it didn’t. I explained, giv­ing sev­eral exam­ples to illus­trate my point, that his let­ter was nei­ther well-focused nor well-enough sub­stan­ti­ated and orga­nized to con­vince me, were he truly apply­ing, to admit him to my class. Each time I paused to see if he under­stood what I was say­ing, though, he responded by explain­ing in turn that his goal in the let­ter was for me to get to know him as the impres­sive per­son he is – that is my para­phrase of what he said; he was not, in fact, arro­gant enough to say it like that – because that knowl­edge, he felt, ought to have been suf­fi­cient for the let­ter to suc­ceed. When I sug­gested that ask­ing me to read five para­graphs of often irrel­e­vant detail about him­self before he even men­tioned the fact that he was apply­ing to my class might be ask­ing a bit too much, he explained, again, how impor­tant it was for me to get to know him. “I still don’t under­stand why you don’t get this,” he said.

So I went over one para­graph with him in extreme detail. I showed him how adding spe­cific exam­ples to sup­port the claims he was mak­ing about him­self, while at the same time tak­ing out the irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, would make his let­ter per­sua­sive. He under­stood, or at least seemed to under­stand, but instead of tak­ing this under­stand­ing and going back to rewrite his let­ter, he tried to push me into doing the same thing with every other para­graph. When I told him I would not do that, that he needed to take what he’d learned and try to apply it – to do, in other words, his own work – he said, “I’m begin­ning to under­stand what you want from me, and so what I need to know now is how to get you to give me an A, and the only way I am going to learn that is if you go over each para­graph with me.”

What I need to know is how to get you to give me an A. I rec­og­nize that stu­dents want good grades; I acknowl­edge the emo­tional valid­ity of feel­ing like, if you are pay­ing for an edu­ca­tion, part of what you should be receiv­ing is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I cer­tainly appre­ci­ate that there are stu­dents for whom the prac­ti­cal value of their grades out­weighs, legit­i­mately and rea­son­ably, what­ever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teach­ing and learn­ing ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show stu­dents how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help stu­dents learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really mat­ter to me if a stu­dent moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What mat­ters is that they have moved, that they are bet­ter writ­ers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indif­fer­ent to stu­dents’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learn­ing to write is not like fill­ing in a blank or col­or­ing in a cir­cle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each ques­tion and so the for­mula for get­ting an A is clear. Rather, learn­ing to write is a lot like grow­ing up. No mat­ter how much advice and guid­ance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never man­age it at all. » Read the rest of this entry «