Blogs on Writing II

Another blog on writing is that of the Phantom Prof, who enjoyed some notoriety when her cover was blown last year (I think). She had been writing anonymously about her experiences as an adjunct writing teacher at an unnamed university, and she had delicious fun at the expense of the wealthy students who were, it seemed, a bunch of fashionably turned out and spoiled airheads who didn't do the work and whined when they received poor grades. She referred to the stereotypical female as Ashley; I can't recall the name she assigned to the male counterpart. (I don't have her problems; there are no conspicuously rich students at the community college where I teach. They all seem to work, some at two jobs. Lots are immigrants, from places like Somalia, Nigeria, Mexico, Thailand, and Laos.)

Someone figured out that she was teaching at SMU, her identity was discovered, and her contract not renewed. I enjoyed her dishing the dirt on her students. It's typical of college writing teachers in my experience that we are supposed to be nurturing and supportive (and help the college retain students), and at the same time we want to maintain our standards, and we do not like to be patronized or conned or taken advantage of or dismissed as fogeys. A dashed-off essay that obviously took someone as long to write as it took to type is simply an act of disrespect. As a result, we take pleasure in seeing such undeserving students get their comeuppance as at the hands of The Phantom Prof. We also are on guard against students who plagiarize or otherwise cut corners. I get the sense that the English teachers at my school are quite conscientious; we want to help, but we are not pushovers. To protect ourselves, we spell out the requirements and rules for courses in detailed syllabi, someting that was not much in evidence at the community college where I taught in the 70s, or at the university where I was a TA. With this detailed contract, we can pounce when work is late or sloppy or cribbed.


My train of thought is chugging into another station, as I recall an episode that soured me on the great U where I labored decades ago. I had been teaching Advanced Composition, which was required of Journalism and Accounting majors. The course was offered through the Extension Division, in the evening, so I also got many adult students who were working. I discovered the joys of teaching motivated adults rather than bored adolescents: they came to learn, they had pasts and interesting points of view, they were mostly a joy to teach.

But one class also had a student from Egypt, who had, I discovered when I graded his first paper, a limited command of English. He should not have been allowed in the class to begin with. But I did not pull the right levers to get him transferred quickly, the way my colleagues today would. Instead I gave him low grades and made lots of comments on his papers, trying to help him improve. THe next thing I knew, I was summoned to some sort of tribunal: the student had accused me of giving him lousy grades because of his pro-Palestinian political views. He said he was a victim, and I soon discovered that the U loved coming to the defense of a self-professed victim. The case wound up going to a higher tribunal (the details are fuzzy after all these years), but I vividly recall passing around pages from his papers and asking the professors who were sitting in judgment of me simply to read and judge the quality of the writing for themselves. To my astonishment, they refused to make any judgment, saying it was beyond their expertise. Also working against me was the absence of a detailed syllabus that spelled out the requirements and ground rules for the course. Anyway, I don't remember any punishment or censure, so I must have won my case somehow, but it left me thinking the adminstration and professoriat were spineless, PC wimps. I lit out for the territory of corporate America the next year.

Posted by Finn MacCool