The simple truth is that as I’ve become more productive in my academic life (dissertation defended, Ph.D. acquired, three peer-reviewed articles set to appear in the next year, invited talks lining up, postdoc starting soon), I just haven’t had the creative juice to expend on long-form blogging about super-serious topics.

I am, however, noodling around on Tumblr under my real name–not that it was really a secret (thanks, Google!)–and you are welcome to follow me there. I blog about whatever the hell I want. Right now, it’s mostly Infinite Jest and Breaking Bad. If you’re a Tumblr user and into that sort of thing, come hang out with me there.

In short, I am in a very good place right now, and that, frankly, is a little terrifying. I have always, frankly, had a modest estimation of my own abilities as a researcher, writer, and academic in general.  I realize now that, in a way, that modest estimation has been a form of psychological protection. It’s going to sound really obvious, but if I don’t expect much of myself, then I can’t be disappointed.  Success, therefore, is more than a little scary. Though I don’t think of myself as superstitious, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It hasn’t yet, but there’s a long, bleak job hunting season ahead of me and plenty of time for the universe to take its revenge.

Does this little bout of navel-gazing presage a return to blogging? I am not sure.  I am, however, impressed that this site continues to get a few hundred hits a day.  You people have patience.

A few of these students came after me after class to say that they recognized the mistakes that they had made, that they didn’t like the papers that they had written either (which is encouraging) and that they would spend more time on the assignment going forward.  But I do think that a number of my students are laboring under that common misconception that the study of literature is essentially a free for all, that the “subjectivity” of interpretation means that interpretation is essentially personal, that there are no wrong answers, that anything can mean anything.  So, I brought in Vladimir Nabokov’s essay “Good Readers and Good Writers” today in order to talk about what the first task of any reader or observer of a work of art is:  to fully understand what the creator of a work was trying to communicate.  This means setting preconceptions aside and allowing oneself to be transported into a particular world with particular protocols, particular rules and causes and effects that may or may not have direct correlaries in the real world:

If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.  Nothing is more boring or ore unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.  We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so the first thing we should do is study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know.  When this new world has been closely studied , then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.

For Nobokov and for philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, this is a moral and pedagogical imperative:  art and the effort to faithfully understand what the author is trying to communicate is how we learn to come into sympathy with other perspectives.  Upon re-reading this essay, I was surprised at how much I resist this way of reading, how suspicious I am, in fact, of looking at a work of art as a contained body of meaning, hermetically sealed off from its context.  The good postmodernist in me believes that meaning are unstable, that artists, in many ways, do not control what their works mean for each individual who encounters it.  The feminist in me is inherently suspicious of author’s motives and of the way in which the realities contained in texts are both socially constructed and participate in the construction of contingent knowledge as historically transcendent.  In other words, in my own work, I reflexively attend to everything that comes after “then and only then” in that paragraph and perhaps do a poor job of helping my students master everything that comes before it.  Because while I still hold that meaning is unstable and contingent and that artists are not infallible, I have to get my students to a place where they can see that while there are multiple available interpretations for any given work of art, the number of interpretations is, in fact, limited.  Otherwise, I get papers on why the Will Smith character in I Am Legend is a Christ figure based on a criteria so loose that it could apply to almost any protagonist in any narrative in Western literature.  I also wind up getting papers that tend to read, say, sections of Paradise Lost as an object lesson or a sermon–no matter which character is speaking at any given time–rather than a Milton’s particular entry point into theological and political debates about the nature of freedom and its relationship to both divine and civil law.

Thus, at the moment, I am trying to summon up the good little Formalist in me and disciplining myself to ensure that my students understand, first and foremost, what the author means before moving on to any historicist or postmodernist critique, though this is the first class in six years where I’ve really felt the necessity of doing so.  Either I’m becoming more aware, or I’ve just been dealt a class that is particularly in need of work at the level of reading comprehension.  It’s probably a little of both.

This teacher’s students didn’t choose. Kids are obligated by law to go to school up to a certain age (I don’t know what that age is in America). I don’t know if high school is included in that, but even if it’s not, it’s pretty much mandatory anyway since there are no real alternatives (it’s not like a sixteen-year-old can just get a job and support themselves). And you just don’t get to trap people in a building all day and force them to do stuff and then complain if they seem resentful. You just don’t.

Society’s excuse for this is of course that kids don’t know what’s best for them, and I agree that there is no good alternative to organized education, but that doesn’t mean that school is always good for people either. School is an institution. It’s more similar to prison or (mental) hospitals than to parenting. People naturally hate being forced.

I find certain parts of this argument compelling and certain parts of it self-evidently problematic (though others might not find the problems so self-evident), and it raised questions for me that perhaps go beyond what AK was arguing:  does the state have a right to enforce compulsory education “for the good” of minors?  Is being a student or a child inherently a form of oppression, regardless of any other signifiers of privilege?  If we can agree that aspects of the education system are broken and perhaps even harmful to students, in what ways do students have a right to express dissent or non-compliance?  And if education systems are inherently coercive, what are the moral and pragmatic imperatives for teachers in ensuring that classroom environments remain conducive environments for learning?

As a pragmatist of the William James/W.E.B. DuBois/Richard Rorty variety, I tend to look at effects rather than transcendental principles:  what social contacts can we enter into that best respect the rights and liberties of all human beings?  In order to better understand what compulsory education was designed to do, I took a brief look at its history (did you know, for example, that in ancient Judea, parents were required by law to provide education for their children?)  Throughout history, lack of compulsory education has almost always meant that access to education was limited, limited to those with means, of course.  Limiting education to the moneyed and connected classes tended to be a way of preserving the wealth and privileges of the few who had access.  It is no accident that Martin Luther advocated free, compulsory education in order to ensure that everyone in Europe was literate and therefore able to read the Bible:  the language of the Bible was the language of power.  To have access to the Bible was not only to be indoctrinated into its tenets but to have access to the ability to dispute the theological and legal suppositions based on it.  To be able to read the Bible was to be an agent in society.

Compulsory education, funded by taxes, spread throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but did not become standard practice in United States until the nineteenth (though Massachusetts required some grammar education for every child).  Massachusetts was the first to adopt compulsory, free education in the modern form in 1847, and Mississippi was the last in 1918.  This was not always a happy situation.  The laws were, of course, used to take Native American children away from their tribes in order to educate them in government schools and assimilate them into the society of their colonizers.  This was an unmitigated tragedy that students, frankly, should learn more about in school, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Lack of compulsory education has, however, as a rule, meant the disenfranchisement of the underprivileged.  It is absolutely no accident that Mississippi failed to get around to it until the early twentieth century:  Mississippi was home to a textile industry that relied heavily on child labor and a disenfranchised black population that had for more than a century been kept in ignorance because, as Frederick Douglass would argue, lack of education kept slaves unaware of their degraded and oppressed position and deprived them of the tools for self-actualization.

So why make it compulsory?  Because children have historically been uniquely vulnerable to exploitation, education had to be compulsory not because students had to be forced to go to school, but because adults might prevent them from doing so.  In the nineteenth century, a child might be denied the right to education by his parents or employers.  Compulsory education was central to the debates about school integration during the Civil Rights Era, when white parents sought to both prevent black students from attending white schools and attempted to pull their children out of schools that were integrating.  In short, I would argue that on the whole, compulsory education has been a core aspect of ensuring that all students have the inalienable right to education.  In fact, that relationship is encoded into the UN Convention on the Rights of Children:

Article 28

1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular:

(a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all;

(b) Encourage the development of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational education, make them available and accessible to every child, and take appropriate measures such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case of need;

(c) Make higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means;

(d) Make educational and vocational information and guidance available and accessible to all children;

(e) Take measures to encourage regular attendance at schools and the reduction of drop-out rates.

2. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity and in conformity with the present Convention.

3. States Parties shall promote and encourage international cooperation in matters relating to education, in particular with a view to contributing to the elimination of ignorance and illiteracy throughout the world and facilitating access to scientific and technical knowledge and modern teaching methods. In this regard, particular account shall be taken of the needs of developing countries.

Compulsory education is currently society’s way of ensuring that all adults attain a modicum of social, political, and economic enfranchisement based on literacy and access to employment.  It is a way of ensuring that minors are not kept out of school by parents who wish to psychologically and physically control them, that even parents who object to the public school system for religious or political reasons are required to provide basic forms of education to their children, that children cannot be taken out of school and forced to work, and that communities cannot deprive a minority group of access to education by depriving them of the funding required to maintain a school.  While the last point on this Quebecois website advocating the abolition of compulsory education is compelling, note that the first is “Reduction of the undesirable element in public and other formal schools”:

Abolish compulsory schooling laws, and this undesirable element will simply not attend schools—either out of apathy toward schooling or out of a desire to live a different kind of life. Schooling is wasted on these individuals; however, they might be drawn toward finding jobs and might thereby learn skills that might increase their productivity and respectability in work environments where bullying is simply not tolerated. The absence of such persons from the schools would make the lives of the better students immensely easier and would greatly increase the level of overt intellectualism in the entire society—as many intelligent people today actively repress their abilities from a young age in order to avoid bullying. This repression needs to end, and giving the bullies an option not to attend school is the best way to accomplish such an immensely important goal.

Hmmmm.

No student, however, is required to bow down and thank the state for providing this opportunity, and compulsory education always runs the risk of become coercive.  That is undeniable.    This is why some public school systems have a “Students Bill of Rights” embedded into their by-laws.  Students ought to be free from religious or political indoctrination.  They should be free from discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, class, or disability.  They should have access to education in their own language (though some states are trying to put an end to that…I’m looking at you, Arizona), and they have a right to expect professionalism from their teachers.  Students have a right to organize and petition school administrations or school boards to amend practices or rules they deem unfair (as some GLBTQ groups who were suppressed by administrators have successfully done).  In short, they have a right to participate as citizens in the microcosm of civil society represented by the school.  However, because schools have a special mandate–to ensure that quality education is provided to all students on an equal basis–students are required to abide by certain rules in order to ensure that happens.  Because the teacher has the mandate of ensuring that the students in her care have access to quality of education, this means that students and teachers are engaged in a social contract.

A quick word about social contracts.  This is a term that gets thrown out in education and is regarded by some as a distinct pedagogical model.  In fact, it’s what informs my policy on late papers.  Namely, rather than an authoritarian model of teacher/student relationships–”I am the teacher and you do what I say because I am the teacher”–the model is somewhat transactional:  the teacher promises to provide certain things (timely feedback on assignments, opportunities for unconventional learning, opportunities for group discussion, reprieves from homework) in exchange for student’s cooperation (turning in assignments, turning in assignments according to a schedule, adherence to certain behavioral guidelines regarding cell phone use, talking when the teacher or another student talks, etc.).  I am a fan of social contracts in the classroom and use it, for example, to allow students to create guideline for discussing controversial subjects in class so that no one is silenced or marginalized.

Regardless of the techniques one uses, however, the simple fact is that teachers are charged with creating environments conducive to learning, and that entails policing student behavior and cooperation in some form or another.  Because the simple fact is that when even one student is holding a conversation while the teacher is attempting to teach, or refuses to participate in a group activity, or texts or sleeps conspicuously during class, or persistently questions the teacher’s professionalism or authority, or monopolizes class discussion with irrelevant or offensive speech, the social contract is violated.  That student is 1) distracting other students from the business of the classroom, 2) potentially (if the problem is not addressed) giving the impression this is tolerated, thereby undermining the credibility of the teacher, 3) and potentially (if the problem is addressed) monopolizing the resources of the teacher, who has to take time and energy away from the hir primary duty in order to deal with the offending student.  That last item is not a joke.  Dealing with a persistently non-compliant student doesn’t just mean turning away from the board to make them stop but spending massive amounts of time consulting with other teachers and assistant principals, trying to get the parents involved, attending meetings with all parties just mentioned, all of which takes time away from marking student papers, holding office hours to meet with other students, or developing new assignments or activities (or, you know, eating or sleeping or attending to other fundamental requirements for physical and mental health.)

In short, one student’s lack of cooperation–however slight–can radically change the dynamics of the classroom and can seriously undermine the ability of other students to obtain an education.  As such, even students who do not wish to be there and resent the responsibilities required of students are expected to abide by the social contract, because not doing so actually has repercussions beyond that one student.  Thus, the relationship between teacher and uncooperative student becomes adversarial, not only because human beings often get personally offended at being called an “evil bitch” for asking for homework but because non-compliance in one student can severely undermine the ability of the teacher to provide a quality education for all students, and because (rightfully and in accordance with the rights of students), the teacher is not allowed to deprive the non-compliant student of hir education by throwing them out of class permanently, said teacher may find hirself at an impasse, a toxic, festering impasse.

Which is all to say that this is how teachers wind up in a place where they feel relentlessly antagonized by their students:  because the social contract has broken down and been replaced by a “squeakiest wheel gets the most resources” situation.  Clearly, some teachers violate their own end of the social contract by verbally abusing students or participating in overt or tacit forms of discrimination or behaving in an otherwise unprofessional manner, but as long as a teacher is doing hir job and doing it well, I would argue that students ought to contain their resentment over being forced to come to school not only because it’s “for their own good” and shows respect to the teacher but because it ensures that the student’s classmates receive the education to which they are entitled without encumberance, and teachers have the right to insist upon cooperation for that reason as well.

It did, however, occur to me that this whole kerfuffle is acting as a kind of Rorshack inkblot for many people, revealing some of our deepest points of sensitivity (many of which ought to provoke lively debate) about issues in education.  I, as you can probably tell, was most struck by the very nature of the public outcry, that so many people seemed to be shocked, shocked that a teacher, given the environment in which they work, might have these thoughts.  It hit that part of him that does resent the fact that teachers, particularly female teachers, are expected to be endlessly tolerant and forbearing.  I also find the resentment toward teachers who try to get their students to meet minimum standards for graduation perplexing, because that is, after all, their job.  They are evaluated based on how well their students are doing, though again, we can debate the wisdom of that another time.  Naturally, venting one’s frustrations in this manner was not wise, but the adversarial relationship that teachers sometimes feel toward their students is not altogether uncommon and not altogether a sign of a bad teacher.

Finally, it hit that part of me that is tired of seeing teachers being used as a very easy punching bag for frustrations with a broken education system, as if going after teachers unions and pensions and tenure and collective bargaining rights were going to solve anything.  The perception that government employees–particularly teachers–are incompetents simply living off the federal dole–is disturbingly alive right now.

So, just in closing, Natalie Munroe is not my test case for anything.  My initial assessment of her culpability was wrong, but the public reaction to her blog is, in my opinion, almost as troublesome as the blog itself.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one:

“Be careful what you post on the Internet,” Natalie Munroe told her students year after year.

Maybe if she had listened to her own advice, she wouldn’t be where she is right now: Suspended and at risk of losing her teaching job at Central Bucks East High School.

Munroe, who has taught English at CB East since 2006 and has a salary of $54,500 this year, wrote a blog called “Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?” for more than a year. In between blog posts about muffins, Food Network stars and her favorite movies, she posted long, profanity-peppered rants about Central Bucks administrators, her co-workers and her students.

“My students are out of control. They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners,” she wrote in one post dated Oct. 27, 2009. “They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire and are just generally annoying.”

Munroe wrote multiple posts in the year that followed in which she talked about her own boredom and used profanity to describe her students.

Ok, so let me get this straight:  over a year ago, a high school English teacher ranted about students in general (using no names or identifying information) on an anonymous personal blog, using such slanderous language as “rude, disengaged, and lazy” as well as unspecified swear words, and the internet has taken to its fainting couch, called for its smelling salts, and demanded that Munroe be taken to the village stocks and flogged for her misbehavior.

Oh yes, and evidently she has been suspended with pay, and her job is potentially in danger. If you go wade through the comments at some of those links (tread carefully) and hell, even some of the actual reporting, you’ll note that a number of depressing assumptions and stereotypes about educators:

That good teachers are long-suffering and eternally compassionate and never ever ever complain about their students and that teachers who complain are bad teachers who hate their jobs. I am here to tell you that I am married to an award-winning high school teacher.  We regularly hang out with other high school teachers, and they bitch about their jobs all of the time, including their students.  And most of them still qualify as excellent teachers with strong testing records and a legion of adoring students.  Because here is the thing:  teaching is not missionary work, even though state legislatures seem to want to make it so.  Teaching is a job, and sometimes people have bad days at work.  Teaching is also a job that involves a lot of interaction with people, and as a rule, people sort of suck.  Teaching is also a job that requires the job-holder to negotiate an often needlessly complex and even hostile bureaucracy.  And teaching, much like parenting, is a job that carries with it enormous unrealistic expectations that no human being could possibly fulfill.  So sometimes they need a safe space to tell it like it is.

That individuals who do not find the teenage propensity toward laziness and narcissism occasionally frustrating do not belong in teaching. If that were true, our list of eligible teachers would be desperately slim indeed.  Some commenters on this story have said something to the effect of:  “I hate teenagers, but I didn’t sign up to work with them everyday.  She shouldn’t be a teacher, because she clearly hates children.”  I would submit that there is a vast difference between having flashes of sublimated rage toward the teenager who tells you to “fuck off” under his breath after you’ve asked him for his homework and “hating children.”  It means that occasionally, some teenagers are disrespectful asshats, and like most emotionally healthy individuals, and most teachers have a appropriate emotional responses that may or may not get vented once said asshat has been sent to the Vice Principal’s office and said teacher has entered the sanctum of the Teacher’s Lounge.  Hell, if we applied this “you must find all minors uniformly adorably under all circumstances in order to interact with minors on a daily basis” rule fairly, we as a species would have to stop reproducing.

That teachers should never, ever communicate a general displeasure with students or her job in any form that could be detected by her students. Many have seen this incident as an object lesson in using discretion on the internet, and while I think the point is somewhat valid, I also think that insofar as Munroe’s blog was anonymous and never once named any students, administrators, or even the school, district, or state in which she was teaching, and given the sheer vastness of the internet, Munroe was reasonable to expect that no student would ever come across what she had written unless they were looking.  And I find compelling her claim that some student or parent may, in fact, have been cyberstalking her in order to find incriminating information.

That teachers whom students dislike are invariably bad teachers. There was a teacher at my high school who I hated but who I now recognize was an excellent teacher.  She was ballsy enough to teach evolution in a biology department at a Christian school in a state that barely teaches it in the public schools, and she expected the utmost from her students.  Considering that this was a college prep curriculum, I think she understood that she was not getting paid to coddle anyone, that she had a right–in her Honors class–to expect students to rise to the standard she had set based on two decades of prior experience.  She was also frequently accused of “hating kids,” despite the fact that she was raising a developmentally disabled child to whom she showed nothing but compassion.  She just did not have a warm, motherly, nurturing personality, and students who were used to making A’s made B’s in her class, and as a result, she was the target of numerous campaigns by students and parents to get her fired.  Luckily, her administration backed her up every time.  Anyone with a passing acquaintance with children can tell you that they resist and often resent being challenged.  And parents all too often over-identify with students who think they are being treated unfairly and are often unwilling to see their child as part of the problem.

Now, it would appear that not everyone is calling for Munroe to be drawn and quartered, and sympathy for Munroe has been rising ever since she began blogging again, revealing herself to be articulate and lucid when it comes to the issues facing public education today.  And one of those issues she has correctly identified is the fact that when we talk about improving education, we’re almost always talking about teachers:  teacher’s unions, teacher tenure, teacher qualifications, merit pay, how to deal with failing teachers, etc.  The conversation is always about holding teachers accountable.

And yet, with all of that specialized training, people second-guess and blame teachers for so many of the problems that exist in education today. Do we go to our doctors and lawyers and tell them how to do their jobs, and second-guess everything they do? Do we stand alongside chefs at restaurants and tell them we think the boulliabaisse looks like it needs some more saffron? No. We trust them to do what they’ve been trained to do. Of course it’s ok to ask questions along the way so we can know why something is happening or understand the process–but at the end of the day, some trust needs to come into play, too. Let’s let teachers do their jobs.

I doubt anyone could possibly disagree that accountability must be a part of teaching, but accountability in recent years has increasingly meant sucking all of the creativity, art, and dynamism out of teaching.  And it has increasingly been used as a way for politicians to look like they’re doing something without admitting that we as a society seem either unwilling or unable to hold students, parents, and communities accountable as well.  Any teacher will tell you that she can pour all the love and creativity she possesses into her teaching, but it doesn’t amount to squat if the student isn’t showing up regularly enough to receive it, and it doesn’t translate into better numbers if the student refuses to hand in an assignment despite being given every opportunity to do so.

The trend among administrations has been to avoid telling parents and students difficult truths.  One of the items that made Munroe’s detractors so irate was a list of fantasy responses she made up as replacements for the “canned comments” her administration insists teachers use on report cards:

At report card time, we are obliged to add a comment to supplement and/or expand on the letter grades. We are strongly encouraged to use the “canned comments” option, which have a limited number of comments from which teachers may choose to explain students. However, much like options on those magazine quizzes where you sit there scratching your head and mumbling, “Well, I’m a little bit A, but somewhat D, too… um, I wonder what I should pick,” some of the options don’t work for some of the kids. Some of the students don’t fit within the canned comments. And none of them allow teachers to truly reflect any sort of behavior or academic deficiency in any truly negative way. Examples of canned comments are: “cooperative in class,” “achieving at ability level,” “needs to complete homework,” “needs to increase study time,” “doesn’t take advantage of second chance learning.” So I took the opportunity for myself and the possible amusement of my friends–since I was content and expected for everything to stay low-key with only my 7 pals reading my ramblings–to list those real behaviors that exist but that you just aren’t allowed to write. (Parents don’t want to hear the truth; administrators don’t want us to share the truth.) But regardless, they weren’t comments meant to fit all students, and nor were they even for every student I wrote “cooperative in class” about–I was just being pithy when I made that joke.

In a very real way, Munroe’s “offensive” post on this matter vividly illuminates the utter disingenuousness with which teachers are asked to evaluate their students.  Spared difficult news about themselves, students (and their parents) can proceed blithely from high school to college without ever learning hard lessons about either the subject matter they are supposed to be learning or about the realities of entering the world as an adult.  And then they wind up in my classroom, incredulous that they are receiving mediocre marks for mediocre work.

Here is the thing though:  English teachers are not a hive mind.  We disagree with one another, sometimes quite vehemently, about what constitutes good teaching.  Both English and pedagogy are dynamic fields of theory and practice that are constantly adjusting and changing as new knowledge is produced and old assumptions are challenged.

This is why I get chapped when, if my job comes up in casual conversation, I am suddenly called upon to answer for the transgressions of everyone’s 9th grade English teacher or freshman comp instructor.  This happens with acquaintances, with total strangers, with my father-in-law, with my grandfather. These last two pass up no opportunity to tell me–again–about the English prof who failed to recognize their latent genius back in college.  That teacher had the idiocy to give them C’s and made them feel like crap by using red ink to mark their comma errors, and now they hate English forevers.  And my role in the conversation is, I suppose, to confirm that I and all members of my profession traffic in bullshit.  Keep in mind that I get this from people who last took English classes during the Eisenhower administration.

In addition to reflecting the speaker’s insecurity and butthurtitude, these demands that I speak for all literature scholars and English teachers since Matthew Arnold also often takes the form of regressive attitudes about academic labor and the nature of tenure, which many individuals in my immediate circle seem to think is just handed out like candy to Trick or Treaters to any idiot who puts letters next to their name.  Also:  resentment about ever being asked to consider the experiences of women or minorities.

Samples from the past month or two:

Passing Acquaintance 1:  “Is there something about getting a PhD that makes a person’s head immediately go up their own ass?”

Me:  “Well, that will be me in about a year, so I guess you can let me know then.”

—

Passing Acquaintance 2:  “Are you like that teacher who tried to make me like Jane Austen back in college?”

Me: :…..:

Passing Acquaintance 2: “I mean really, why is Jane Austen considered to be a good writer?  I only read half of Sense and Sensibility and didn’t think it was so special.”

Me: “……”

—

Passing Acquaintance 1 (in a tone conveying disgust):  “My English prof is worthless.  She talks about feminism and how women are stereotyped all the time.  Just saying”

—

Grandfather:  “Blah blah blah. Tenure is a betrayal of the free market…protects bad teachers. Blah blah blah.”

Me:  [Something about intellectual freedom, the difficulty of attaining tenure, and the problems with applying free market principles to education].

Family:  “BLAH BLAH BLAH UNIONS! BLAH BLAH BLAH.” [Pile on.]

—

Friend:  “You must cringe when you read my emails.  My grammar is so bad…”

Me:  “Actually, I don’t care.  I find you to be perfectly understandable, and I don’t expect texts or informal emails to be perfectly edited.”

Friend:  “…because I had this English teacher who used to jump all over me for not putting commas in the right place, and I’m a pretty bad speller, and…”

Me:  “Well, that was part of her job, and what I do in my job and in my personal life is different, and I make typos all the time because I’m human and and and…”  [Dying a little bit inside].

At a press conference yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters that if some federal jobs were lost as a result of his proposed spending cuts, “so be it.”

I suppose this is of a piece with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to roll back collective bargaining rights for state employees:  government jobs (except for those held by elected and/or appointed members of the GOP, perhaps) are really just an extension of welfare.  Or something.  At the very least, those jobs don’t really count.  They are doing all of those people a favor by forcing them to go get real jobs in the private sector rather than living off the federal dole.  I mean what else can you call teachers, policemen and women, firefighters, mail carriers, and criminal prosecutors but total mooches, amirite?

At least this is the only way I can understand the thinking behind my home state’s decision to fire a shit ton of people, including public school teachers at schools that are already stacking classes way over the state-mandated limit, rather than raise anyone’s taxes a couple hundred bucks.

I have freshman students who clearly are struggling with the difference between analyzing a text and using a text as a jumping off point for talking about whatever it is they want to talk about, and given that this is a course called Literature and Religion, the results are, well…  For example, I received three papers that interpret entirely different narratives as allegories for the Christian life as the student understands it based on a criteria so broad that just about anything could be read as an allegory for the Christian life (which is more or less what I said in comments).  Coming from a religious background, I understand where it’s coming from.  Kids who grow up in evangelical environments are pretty accustomed to hearing popular films, songs, and books interpreted in this fashion in sermon illustrations and books on spiritual life, and for many of them, reading a narrative in this way is an important strategy for justifying their own interest in it.  So, when I get a paper on how the film 300 is an allegory for the Gospel, I understand that at least in part, this kid is trying to rationalize the fact that he likes the movie 300 by projecting Christian themes onto it.  So getting that kid to see that what he’s doing is, in fact, projection rather than an accurate interpretation of the film is, in a way, taking something rather important away from him.

Conversely, I have at least two seniors in their final semester, both of them intellectually talented but lazy.  Unfortunately, one of these students was the one who told me he “has to get an A” in order to graduate. Nevertheless, it’s clear that while I have some students who need to be acquainted with the basics of textual analysis, who really need to be taught how to accurately summarize a text before they can even begin to analyze it, and I have a few others who are bored to tears.

So in addition to the dilemma of how to conduct class in a way that addresses the needs of the weakest students without alienating the stronger ones, I have the question of how to assign and present grades.  In previous semesters, I’ve simply refused to assign a grade to the first draft as a way of encouraging everyone to revise.  However, students were clearly expressing a desire to know where they stood.  Furthermore, a bad grade early on can act as a wake-up call for students who are simply lazy, though I run the risk of students in the first category becoming discouraged and simply shutting down.

It occurs to me now that I worry a bit too much about how students will respond to a grade, that how they choose to move forward is entirely on them, and it is simply up to me to provide thoughtful, honest feedback and allow them to take it from there.

I have questions, though.

Do the other graduate students in that seminar take pride in the fact that they have never seen a James Franco movie and try to work that fact into pre-seminar small talk whenever possible?

How will James Franco complete a dissertation what with all the acting and directing and appearing on talk shows and all that stuff seeing as it will probably wind up taking me a total of three years at this point with very little else to do?

Who is going to be James Franco’s dissertation director and will that disseration director take months to get chapter drafts back to him?

Is James Franco going to be showing up at Marriotts and Hyatt Regencies around the nation delivering fifteen minute papers on the British Romantics?  If so, will he stay at the conference hotel or commute from The Four Seasons?

Assuming, as this Daily Show clip tells me, that James Franco decides to pursue a tenure track career, is he going to quit all of that other stuff in order to work for $60,000 a year (at best) churning out articles and books that exactly six people will read?  Is he going to have to adjunct for a couple of years with the prospect of a full time position tantalizingly dangled in front of him until it becomes clear that no such position is ever going to be created?  If the latter, will James Franco return to acting?

Will James Franco put his Oscar nom on his curriculum vitae?  And if so, will the cynical sneers of hiring committees be visible from space?

Will James Franco be attending MLA in order to give interviews in a crappy hotel room with faculty from regional colleges in Pennsylvania?  If so, will his bodyguards be allowed in the interview room with him?  Will he be wearing a Prada suit?

Has Yale English been getting applications from people who say they want to study the British Romantics but really just want to study James Franco?

Until I get answers to these questions (and more), I won’t go see James Franco’s movie 127 Hours.

Ok.  I lied.  I won’t be seeing it anyway, because the whole cutting off one’s crushed and probably necrotic arm squicks me out so bad that I can’t even watch the previews.  Also, the more I think about James Franco’s possible academic career the more I suspect that the answers to the above questions might make me hate James Franco a little bit.

James Franco.

Image Credit:  c. sexowski, Flickr Creative Commons