Blowup Vulva

I woke up at 6AM today, only to stay in bed for 45 minutes before finally getting up to turn off the alarm clock I (cleverly?) left on the other side of my apartment in order to force myself to get out of bed. Fuck.

I'm tired. I've had three cups of coffee and still feel tired. And I have to get ready soon and go to campus to grade papers. 

I'm miserable because I would have liked to sleep for another four hours, but I can't because being late for grading today would look bad and possibly get me yelled at (and even fired from my job). 

How will this effect my grading process? Who knows, but my guess is that I will somehow inadvertantly take it out on the students. Or I'll go easy on them. 

This raises questions about notions of objectivity, which everyone who knows anything about a fella' named Heisenberg, is impossible to ever achieve. Pure objectivity is a myth. We cannot escape the force of subjectivity even on the quantum level. We just tell ourselves that we can be objective in order to fool ourselves into thinking that we can somehow think about the world without bias, when all we can ever strive for is to think about the world without bias that will negatively skew our perceptions.

The above statement also speaks to how much of a nerd I am, because even in my exhausted misery I'm still able to reference quantum theory and relate it back to the events that will transpire today.

First!

Oh wait... that only works when other people are reading this... and usually in a forum or comments section. DAMN! I'm off to a bad start "blogging" on this interweb thing.

This blog is where I will rant about anything that comes to mind. I have another blog... if you've read that, then you'll get the Blowup Vulva thing and know exactly who this is. Like Subcommandante Marcos... except without the AK-47... or the mask.

Now that I've got all that ridiculous crap out of the way...

ONTO THE RANT!

I'm a graduate student at a... west coast university. I teach an introductory composition course to freshman. This introductory course is designed to teach the young people how to write college-level essays and expects students to have a fairly strong command of the English language.

It's a course that's considered to be difficult by a majority of the students who take it. I should probably mention that this is a fairly respectable private university, where the average SAT scores are something like 1400, and the average GPA for incoming freshman is a 4.0.

It's even more difficult for my ESL (English as a Second Language) students.

The problem is that the course isn't designed to help these students with specific language issues. Another problem is that because it isn't a course geared specifically toward ESL students, and because the enrollment in the class includes people who have been speaking and writing in English for the majority of their lives, there's no way I can shift my course to even make an attempt at making it more accomodating for these ESL students.

Sometimes it works out. Last semester I had one ESL student who really put a great deal of effort into seeing me during my office hours, which I held three days a week (this is typically considered overkill). This student worked with me at least once a week to improve his writing and he made a great deal of progress by the end of the semester. It could be stressful. It took a great deal of patience.

I have several ESL students this semester.

This stress has increased significantly.

One of the reasons for this is that I invest a great deal of my emotional energy in the hope that my students will succeed. I can be very insecure about the teaching I do in a classroom setting. I've always done better one-on-one, because I've always been better at editing a text. I'm also insecure because I've always believed that you can't really teach someone how to write well. You can teach the basics: organization, how to write intros (what types of information to include), how to cite texts, how to integrate quotes into a sentence. Things like that.

But I've always believed that good writing, the kind of writing that's expected of you to make an A on a college level essay that is graded not only on content but on the writing itself, comes with more writing. With more reading.

This is a belief that to a certain extent stems from my own personal "education" in writing.

I love to read, I love the way that language works, and I love the way that certain writers use language in order to convey an idea, a moment, an emotion, or any other element of the greater human experience.

And I love to write. I love to see how I fashion words into sentences into paragraphs into stories, because I like to see how I'm coming along. How I'm coming along in that process that takes someone like James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway or Proust or Milton or Shakespeare or Eco or Borges from obscurity into something greater. Because language is learned. And the ways in which we fashion that language is a process of that greater learning experience.

Some people don't share my romantic idealization of writing. And this is okay.

But it also makes it hard when you're trying to teach people how to write.

Because they have other obligations. Because I don't expect everyone to share this love of language. Because many of the students I've had and many of the students I will have are only in the class to get the grade they need to move on. Because sometimes that's just how college is. I've done it. I know.

But to become a writer that will make the A on the paper-

To become the writer that makes a professor smile as they read your words-

To become this writer you have to think beyond this particular moment, this particular class in this particular semester. You have to know that writing is indeed a process. When inspiration hits you, it's not a muse, but that sudden realization that comes to any writer when they've become excited by an idea. When an idea seemingly comes out of nowhere but is actually the result of your own thought. When you have to take that idea and get it onto the page as quickly as possible lest you forget rather than turning it away and saying "I'll remember that tomorrow."

Because to do well, you have to love what you do.

It's difficult to teach students how to love writing. Especially when you have rules you have to adhere to in teaching writing. Because sometimes, the slightest step away from tradition can open up new ways of looking at how we read and how we write and make it exciting for people who have grown up in an increasingly interactive and interconnected world. That interconnectivity is, in some ways, what the process of reading is all about. The repetition of symbols, words, images becomes significant with every repetition. We assign meaning to such symbols in reading. We also do this in every day life. When we watch the news we hear about events that have taken place in the world around us. If that news story is repeated in the same day, the same week, the same month, we attach a significance to it that a story that has been reported on only once would not have. This is one way that Conspiracy Theories develop.

The popularity of conspiracy theories in recent fiction tells us something. We're becoming more and more interested in alternative historical possibilities. We're more aware that there are forces working against us. We are more aware that things are not always what they seem or what we are told they are.

To teach a class about writing framed around conspiracy theories would probably yield interesting results. Students might actually be interested. They would use writing experiences where they construct their own conspiracy theories using evidence to support their arguments in order to better understand how academic writing, in a sense, follows the very same logic (without the conspiratorial paranoia and the illogics that might result from said paranoia). And from this they might enjoy learning about writing, rather than barely staying awake after a night of studying (or partying) at 9AM in the morning.

Wait... I've been led astray by a tangential thought!

Back to the ESL issue.

I'm going to admit right now that my ESL students this semester have shown little motivation. They rarely come to office hours and when they do show up, they sit in their chair, hunched over the table, their legs pumping rapidly up and down, glancing at their watches because they need to be somewhere else. They show up to class late. Occasionally miss class.

And the tardiness and absences are okay. I try to be nice. But I also know that sometimes, not showing up is going to fuck up their grades in the long run anyway. Because sometimes, and I agree with this, my lesson plans seem to accomplish nothing. But it always turns out (and this is an irony that I'm all too familiar with) that the classes you miss are the ones that are the most important. Where things are accomplished and people leave with a sense that they've actually learned something.

But there's a deeper problem than the performance of these students in terms of extra work, being on time, or being there at all.

It's a problem with the system. A problem that might explain the general apathy I sometimes see in my students. An apathy that stems from their belief that there is nothing that they can do because the system is working against them from the beginning.

To my knowledge, most universities have programs in place where ESL students take a class that teaches them the fundamentals of the English language. Things like grammar and vocabulary, passive versus active voice, basic sentence and paragraph construction. My university also has such a program set up. Students must take a test that determines their writing placement, and depending on their writing level they either take a class like mine or a class such as the one I described. They also have a center on campus where students can attend short seminars that teach them fundamentals of writing as well as more complex aspects of the writing process.

The problem is that though this structure is in place, it also moves the students along without ever determining if they're ready for the next step. That next step has rules, it has certain rubrics it must follow. Because these students are ushered along, they can rarely expect to get a grade higher than a C because the course does not simply grade on content. It grades on writing. To be more specific, it grades on writing in English. At a college level. And the center has a time limit for individual writing consultations (15 minutes). I realize that at a large university, 15 minutes is all the time that one can spend with a student in order to make time for others, but there have also been complaints made by my fellow instructors that students are coming back to them feeling as though they have accomplished nothing in those 15 minutes. Because there are rules they have to follow for those consultations too. Rules that limit what the reader will help work on and rules that say no.

What happens as a result of this is that I suddenly feel helpless. My desire for my students to do well, my desire to see my students succeed comes into conflict with this helplessness. Because these students are struggling to reach "average" and success is almost completely out of their grasp. Because sometimes it takes them longer to get through a difficult reading and that cuts into the time they have to write. Because the difficulty they have with particular readings doesn't allow them to see just how that language works, it becomes an ordeal for them to overcome. I've faced this same challenge before on two fronts. Once when I was a child who was considered an ESL student, and again when I lost much of my first language due to a lack of use.

This might also all just be a big misunderstanding. Maybe these students just didn't care in the first class. The university can't keep them stuck in one class forever until they get it right. But I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that there is a decent program in place that would appropriately prepare them for the expectations of a course like mine.

People have told me that I need to be more detached. But detachment is difficult in a small classroom environment. An environment in which every face has a name, a distinct personality, and an innate intelligence that I am very much aware of.

And that intelligence shines through in every essay I read. It just shines through a little less in some, the light obstructed by an awkward combination of words where the idea is visible but unclear.

This is perhaps the most difficult part of it all.

That the capability (not potential... potential is just what people say to be nice to you when you just don't cut it) is there, that the ideas are there but cannot be fully and clearly communicated is what contributes both to my anxiety and my anger and is the reason for this insane rant.

Something about the new $124 billion war-spending bill and the August 2008 troop withdrawal tomorrow.