I Am Locutus of English Teachers?

I get that there are bad teachers out there.  I get that there are people teaching English classes who really shouldn’t be.  I get that some of these people hold advanced degrees and are currently in charge of undergraduate composition classes.  I get that plenty of people have been traumatized by bad teacher.

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].

I Have Questions

I hear that James Franco was attending his graduate seminar on Byron, Keats, and Shelley at Yale when it was announced that he is currently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.  Good for James Franco.  Perhaps he is going to make having a PhD in English seem sexy and relevant again.  Or something.

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