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When academic lingo trumped correct
English
By David McGrath. David McGrath is a writer and an
instructor at College of DuPage
Published
November 13, 2002
Twelve years ago, when I quit teaching
part-time to accept a full-time tenured position in the English
department at a community college, my job title changed from that of
instructor to professor.
I found it flattering and amusing,
because I was essentially doing the same thing: teaching young
people to write. Certainly college writing tasks were complex, and
sophisticated skills were required for success. But my students
still got writer's block. And they still had difficulty generating a
thesis, developing an idea, and expressing it clearly. So I was
still instructing.
My
only real surprise was that some of my new colleagues had assumed
different roles as "professors." They claimed that their job was to
engage students in critical thinking. To widen their students' focus
to a world view and make them part of the "community of discourse."
Or to emphasize process, not product, and to promote deep
thinking.
These functions were validated in the academic
journals that gleamed with words like "literacy" and "diversity" and
"hermeneutics." The ideas looked impressive, and I went back to work
with a lofty air of excitement and anticipation.
Until their
students came to me.
Like `Ahmad' (all the names in this
column have been changed). His first essay in English 102 consisted
of 400 words uninterrupted by periods. Uninterrupted by paragraph
indents. By transitions. It was entirely devoid of logical or linear
thought processes.
Besides learning that Ahmad received an A
in English 101, I was also able to glean from his answers to my
questions that Professor Benton a passionate advocate of diversity
in education, believed that to correct Ahmad's sentence structure or
grammar would offend his cultural sensibility and obstruct the
class's primary purpose to empower non-native students. Ahmad and
his fellow students learned quickly that in Benton's class, they
could produce papers which they had only to read out loud in
marathon "sharing sessions" to get college credit in
composition.
Or Malcolm. Asked to write an analytical
response to a New Yorker essay, he scrawled a crude, idea-free ode
to his love, or, perhaps, to his bloodlust--it was never quite
clear, as both phonetic and syntactical connections were blurred or
non-existent. Another A student in 101, Malcolm was one of the lucky
enrollees who filled Professor Hume's class on the first day of
registration. Hume's students' journeys to explore their inner
selves was never detoured with a red pencil or a prescription for
usage. A teacher marking up a paper would gag their personal voices,
Hume thought. Instead, their grades were determined by their
rhetorical courage, or the degree of emotional pain they dared to
reveal in their narratives.
Or Libby. A graduate of a
composition class based on the `story method,' Libby was required to
write and then read in her sub-group a total of 12 to 20 pages of
experiential writing, writing which her professor listened to but
never marked with either a question or a even a grade. He had
announced publicly more than once that it was hardly his role and
certainly not his intention to compensate for the shortcomings of
students' high school training.
Libby confessed blissful
ignorance concerning his rationale for the final B on her report
card, but was becoming increasingly angry over the D's and do-overs
in my 102.
Or Jenna. Jenna loved English 101. She and her
classmates read essays on gender and politics, and they discussed
the tyranny of the dead white males whose work was being read in my
class. But Jenna would need tutoring to pass English 102, because
Bill, she said, who was her fresh-from-grad-school professor, told
them that copy editing was not his job, and that the English
department was not intended to be a proofreading division for the
benefit of the other disciplines.
Which is what I was
starting to feel like: proofreader, copy editor, patsy. Whatever I
was, I felt more alone and more burdened, struggling to teach while
a few other professors indulged their higher calling to lead
students to question what . . . what, I guess, I was
doing.
There is nothing wrong with diversity, deep thinking,
or even with deconstruction of the traditional study of literature.
But the English professors of Ahmad, Libby, and the others used the
high falutin' notions and lexicon of academia in the service of
their own intellectual egotism and professional sloth. It's like the
case of the janitor who says, "Sorry, a sanitary engineer does not
do windows."
Far be it from me to criticize progress. Dozens
of my other colleagues employ the latest composition theory in
earnest hope of advancing English education, and to remedy the
failures of me and my predecessors. But they do so while continuing
to teach writing skills and conventions, because students still
enter their classrooms needing to learn.
And diplomas ought
still be guarantees.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
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