I feel like there’s been an odd intersection among my Gibson-Graham readings about feminism and capitalism and what I’ve been reading online about grading and about the intersection of feminism, family, and academia and about the gendered nature of agonistic discourse that’s lately become a little more clear. Via Cindy at Making Contact comes a link to conservative UPenn English professor Erin O’Connor’s multi–part tale of what happened to Brooklyn College professor Frederick Lang.
There’s so much going on in Lang’s story, so many things going so many different ways, it’s an academic minefield. My first reaction, on encountering the story at Cindy’s, was irritation at the familiar construction of teaching composition as “punishment” or, at the least, undesirable work. Things are more complex than that, though.
One thing that stood out immediately to me, as I mentioned at Cindy’s, was the way that Lang, a man, stood opposed in his narrative to Ellen Tremper, the department head, and Roberta Matthews, the provost(?), and the repeated use of the word “prick” to describe Lang. Couple this to Lang’s “demotion” to teaching composition, a historically feminized discipline and “other” to the privileged position of Literature in the English department (see Connors, Composition-Rhetoric, Jarratt & Worsham, Feminism and Composition Studies, Miller, “The Sad Women in the Basement”), and the gender politics become suddenly curious. Consider, also, the agonistic discourse that seems invoked by Lang’s students describing him via the word “prick”, and what one has to do to be called a “prick”. (O’Connor’s construction of the students calling him a “prick” just because they wanted high grades is disingenuous, to say the least, and bespeaks considerable contempt for students.)
Lang observes that Brooklyn College, a school in the CUNY system, has historically served a “working-class” student body. However, we discover that Brooklyn College has also recently discarded its “remedial” or basic writing courses, sending them off to the local community colleges. At the same time, both O’Connor and Lang decry the “unpreparedness” of the students in his courses, which — according to Lang — is entirely the reason for their poor grades. Lang paints himself as singlehandedly fighting the good fight against grade inflation so that the poor working-class students aren’t subjected to a second-rate education. One could turn the picture around, and see a professor-as-gatekeeper holding the dirty working-class hands of the hoi polloi away from higher education’s unsullied readings of James Joyce and the Western Canon.
I can’t (and won’t attempt) to answer the question of what grades Lang ought to have given his students. I will suggest, however, from his own and O’Connor’s descriptions, that the “care and dedication” he describes in his approach to teaching writing is entirely counterproductive. The last place Lang should be is in a composition classroom. O’Connor describes the “care” with which Lang “covered papers with comments” or “with red ink”, marking everything “from grammar to logic”. Let’s stop there, and think a little bit about composition instruction. You get a paper back, “covered” with Lang’s comments. Where do you start? Let me be a little more specific: Lang’s model is a deficit model, and is understood as such by students. All of these things he marks are errors, and they are to be fixed. (See Bartholomae, Shaughnessy, Rose.) This point is reinforced by the references to “marking down” for errors: so the student understands that the way to get an A, to write a perfect paper, is to fix all the errors. Once a paper is error-free, it will be perfect, or so the reasoning goes. Suppose, then that the student ‘fixes’ everything “from grammar to logic”. Does she start first with grammar, and once she’s got the sounds right, move on to the sense? What happens when she ‘fixes’ her grammar but then has to ‘fix’ the logic in such a way that changes the grammar? What happens when she ‘fixes’ her logic and then the grammar error that Lang ‘corrected’ no longer stands to be fixed? Her paper, of course, will never be perfect. And it can never be perfect with teaching practices as bad as Lang’s. Collapsing editing with proofreading is a recipe for bad papers no matter what.
Here’s a tip: if you’re helping a student revise her paper, talk to her about the ideas first. The logic, the structure. Once she’s got it the way she likes it, once she’s got it working, then — and only then — do you go back and work on correctness issues; on grammar and spelling and punctuation. And you teach her how to do it on her own, rather than covering each paper with a mass of red ink that makes the teacher’s expertise the only arbiter of error. You teach for understanding, for helping the student figure out how to make it right, not for some teacherly notion of a perfect paper.
And the “teacherly notion” leads me to a second point: the way Lang set up his composition course. He centered it around Joyce’s life and writing, he tells us. So we have a professor with a PhD from Columbia and a book on Joyce who gets moved from teaching literature to teaching composition — to teaching a course in essay writing, in other words — and he centers his essay-writing course for first-year students around the topic of his research. How appropriate is reading Joyce, and researching his life, a topic for first-year students in a required course? I would suggest that Joyce is fine for a literature course, but reading Ulysses or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or portions of Dubliners hardly contributes directly to the topic of instruction in an essay-writing course. Few of Lang’s students were prospective English majors; all of them could have used some help understanding the generic components of an essay and how those components work together.
Here’s another tip: the subject of a writing course is writing. As such, the direct instruction model would seem to be most reasonable, and the burden of proof would seem to rest upon those — like Lang, with his studies in Joyce — who would propose an indirect method of writing instruciton.
What’s interesting is that Lang was working for education services, helping students with “remedial” writing skills, before he came into the English Department when Brooklyn College decided it no longer wanted to be bothered with helping basic writers. And yet, from his own words, his methods of teaching writing seem to be the things that contributed significantly to the low grades in his courses.
All your objections to Lang’s methods are right on. My point over at my own blog was that he was–if I’m remembering correctly and I admittedly need to go back and read–being citing for “making students revise”. I did note that I did not agree with his method but that the notion of being disciplined for having students revise–in itself–was absurd. Obviously, he isn’t responding to student writing in a constructive or progressive way, and it may indeed be the case that he shouldn’t be teaching composition.
It still doesn’t mean he isn’t being handled in the wrong way by the department chair and the college. The department believes he is a bad teacher and therefore puts him in more contact with the students who most need a good teacher as “punishment” before removing him from the classroom?? And she apparently violates their contract or college policies by doing so? She’s lucky he hasn’t won a permanent place in the classroom on that one.
And even if he is a shitty comp teacher, has it been demonstrated that in an upper-level literature course he is anything other than a tough grader?
Part of the problem here is of course that we only get the “facts” filtered through Lang and O’Connor.
True Cindy re: the filtering of the facts. Not to sound indifferent to Lang’s plight, but you guys have catapulted off into a discussion of teaching style that is really independent of Lang’s situation and the subject of which probably has more impact and relevance than how/if Lang got screwed. I guess that does sound indifferent; I’m not indifferent, just more interested in your thoughts on teaching methods and the fact that comp teachers like Lang are still out there.
My only exposure thus far was when I participated in the editing of the rhetoric department’s annual publication and worked with the writers to edit and improve their already supposedly perfect work (i.e. the finished product, the A essay, the one their teacher suggested they submit for publication and which was chosen, so hey, why edit, right?) It was a really unique experience for me in terms of of helping other writers and a big eye-opener on technique in doing same but a very limited and small experience, to be sure.
I can see why you are both proud to be part of a worthwhile profession that makes a tangible difference for students. And Mike, I hear ya on your comments to Cindy’s post about you guys being more hireable. If I had the stomach for theory, I would have considered that route. 😉
Mike and Cindy–
I agree that Lang is the kind of figure one hates to have to defend against the “evil” administrators. He confuses rigid grading procedures with demanding the most of students’ writing. A real giveaway is his refusal to accept spelling errors on quizzes, in-class draft writing. I don’t know Lang, but I know his type. I helped ease one into retirement several years ago–he had simply lost any ability to teach the students in front of him. He wanted the students he’d had 25 years earlier.
As for the feminist construction, you might look at my review for NCTE of a bad novel: William Hart’s “Never Fade Away.” (On my web page, http://faculty.deanza.fhda.edu/lovasjohn) Here the noble male composition instructor does battle with the female writing program administrator who is portrayed as “humping” the poor,hapless, part-time, Vietnam veteran compositionist who truly cares about students while the administrator only cares about the departmental exam. The feminization of composition is a subject worth a lot more investigation and from more points of view than simply feminist critiques.
Mike’s post refers to Brooklyn College “sending away” it’s remedial students to local community colleges, which, of course, don’t have names. This construction is one of the worst that has come out of the New York City “open admissions” debates of the last 25 years or so. Ira Shor has promoted some very tired ideas about class and community colleges based on very limited experience in the New York City area. Shor knows virtually nothing of the California system or the Florida system or the Texas system, each of them quite distinct and each different than New York. Yet the basic access argument in New York has been that if the top schools don’t have “basic writing” then working class students have been disenfranchised. My view is that, on average, the composition teaching is much better in community colleges than in university composition programs–this is especially true for developmental comp or “basic writing” as the univesity folk insist on calling it. So “sending students off” does not do them a disservice in most cases. Instead of a Lang, they are much more likely to encounter a professor who genuinely likes to teach comp and has figured out ways to do it well.
Good points all, John. My reference to the “sending away” was taken from O’Connor’s narrative, so I’ll try to deflect a little of the guilt that way, but I’ll also admit to being entirely unfamiliar with community college writing instruction. At the same time, having been a graduate student at two different universities with nationally recognized basic writing programs and scholars, and with instructors and administrators who are highly dedicated, I think there’s very much a place for basic writers within four-year institutions — and I think that four-year and two-year institutions offer somewhat different things, and if a student with difficulties writing wants to be in a four-year institution, I’m really uneasy about telling that student no. At the same time, that may belie a certain elitism on my part, which is what I think you were calling me on, John, and quite rightly. You’ve given me some tough things to think about.
I currently teach what my institution likes to call “developmental” writing at my community college, in addition to freshman comp. I also taught what was called “basic writing” at a four-year research institution as a T.A. I prefer the “basic writing” term still, John, though none of my immediate peers use it; I find some of the thinking surrounding the notion of “developmental writing” to come from the education ranks and to suggest less theoretical sophistication (o.k., like Mike, I’m a snob ;-)).
I think there is a place for both and a need for both given the diversity in students’ financial, emotional, and educational needs. Further, given the vagaries of placement instruments, I’ve had students in my freshman comp classes at the four-year school who would have been better suited for my developmental courses at the community college and vice versa. Overall, in terms of pure numbers, the four-year students tend to be stronger readers and writers, but there isn’t any strong and fast rule there.
I think it is true, John, that the community colleges tend to draw many people who really like to teach writing and therefore tend to be very good at it, but I think we can extend that observation to composition in general. (And if university composition programs aren’t providing good teaching I’d say it is because of the exploitation of grad students, adjuncts and untenured faculty, but even then, I feel uncomfortable with that charge). I can’t think of anyone I know who has an interest in composition who doesn’t want to be in the classroom and who, if s/he isn’t good at it, isn’t working hard at getting there. Can’t say the same thing about people in the literature area, many of whom teach because they HAVE to.
God forbid that someone have to spell correctly on an English quiz.
If not there, where ARE they going to learn that spelling matters, the math dept.?
David, your comment might seem less uninformed if you displayed an understanding of the differentiation between literature courses and writing courses associated with what you generally refer to as “English”, and the place (or, more correctly, the lack thereof) for quizzes in a writing course. Your comment might also seem less uninformed if your comment offered any ideas about how spelling might fit into a literature or writing curriculum — which, in fact, the post and comments above discuss in the context of “correctness” issues. Unfortunately, your comment would seem to indicate a privileging of correctness over any sort of analytical rigor or critical thinking skills entirely in line with the lack of analytical rigor or critical thinking skills that a correctness-focused curriculum would foster. Congratulations; you’re a perfect example of the type of student that your ideal “English” course would produce: a dipshit.