I love how this “teacher” comes to this conclusion about students who struggle in his/her community college classroom:

She simply was not qualified for college. What exactly, I wondered, was I grading? I thought briefly of passing Ms. L., of slipping her the old gentlewoman’s C-minus. But I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair to the other students. By passing Ms. L., I would be eroding the standards of the school for which I worked.

Yet, reading over this narrative of students who “don’t get it” my question is: how is this teacher qualified for the classroom? Inappropriate instruction, sending returning students, state troopers and so called “needy” students to Jstor for a first year writing course, asking them to write about issues that are as boring and cliche as the responses Ms. L delivered, falling back on the “find a thesis” generic assignment…..the teacher is there in his/her part time gig because he/she is not really qualified to teach in general. And while the instructor professes to not being a snob or “aloof,” she/he clearly is bound to highbrow values regarding education:

Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy�?

Will it have benefited anyone to read these texts? Maybe. Maybe not. The value of Joyce over Lost is one of aesthetics or taste, not of inherent quality. The instructor’s narrative is a cliched one. “Why don’t these students (regardless of age) understand how wonderful these classic novels or poems are?” I am an English professor. I don’t understand the value either. I read these books once, I don’t read fiction anymore (or much). Fiction, story telling, is not the key to being able to think anymore than washing your car is.

That’s not to say there is no value to literature. There is as much as any kind of expression may have value.  I just don’t get the highbrow value of Sinclair Lewis over James Bond, Sylvia Plath over Stan Lee. Even more, I don’t get folks like this teacher who cling to such beliefs as “natural” while working hard to dispel students’ beliefs (what the student thinks is “natural”) in the name of critical thinking.

And while this instructor feels the responsibility of lowering the “hammer” on those who do not belong in college, he/she also has this tidbit of insight: “Everyone wants to triumph. But not everyone can—in fact, most can’t.” Neither, it appears, can this instructor triumph. For that she/he is not just stuck in a part time job, but stuck in a bad pedagogy, unable to see that her/his methods are the main problem here, not the students. Someone ought to bring the hammer down on him/her so that this instructor can find employment outside of teaching.

Anyway. We get upset with these narratives because they are stupid, but also because they speak to some of the real problems in writing instruction, problems tied to the ways people teach. We get upset because this bad pedagogy is the result of an interpellative process that can be impossible to redirect. This instructor will continue to be a bad teacher. And she/he will continue to blame the students. And this narrative will be repeated in classroom after classroom, in university after university. Quite depressing when you think about it.