Educating Gracefully: A Minor Rant on Obligation

As a professor, I have a lot of educator friends. And the vast majority of the time, they are teachers I deeply admire, thinkers and writers I respect, citizens of the world I would like to emulate.

But come the end of the semester, I start seeing all over my Facebook page, and on the blogs and pages of friends of friends, and in the comments sections of academic blogs written by people I don't even know, something that drives me crazy: "funny" quotations from student papers.

Someone will write something like this:

I learn something new every day. Today it was that "Shakespeare and his Mid Evil contemporaries had to be very careful about what kind of political references they put in their plays, because if the queen didn't like what they wrote about her government, it was 'Off with their heads!'"*

And the comments section will be full of people who find it hilarious that the student in question, after a full semester of a Shakespeare class, still confuses the Renaissance with the Medieval period. And apparently thinks that Medieval comes between the Early Evil and Late Evil periods. And is quite happy to create a mash up of Queen Elizabeth I and the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland.

And the commenters will quickly become jumpers on the band-wagon, who will share their best hilarious tales of student errors.

It's like the online version of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" or of a movie's blooper reel, with everybody laughing till their sides split as a welcome break from grading their own stacks of 85 papers and 120 exams.

Only it isn't. Because a blooper reel is outtakes from a movie for which movie stars got paid giant buckets of money, and in the blooper reel, they are laughing at their own mistakes, which means they know they made them, and even they think it's hilarious. "Jaywalking" is a little more mean-spirited--and frankly it always made me a little uncomfortable for that reason. But if you are going to let Jay Leno interview you on the street, and you genuinely don't know who was the first president, or what the current one looks like, I get that you are kind of asking to be made fun of.

On the other hand, student errors in papers are not part of a mutually-agreed-upon context for mockery. In fact, they are precisely the opposite. They are the efforts of less-experienced learners to synthesize information they have gleaned over some period of time into a coherent set of claims and discussions for our evaluation.

Are some of them better at this than others? Of course. As with all things in the world.

Are some of the things we encounter in papers truly laughable? Absolutely.

Are there always students in a class who are downright intellectually lazy, or procrastinators, or people who only attended half of the class sessions, or ones who skipped all the short writing assignments and then requested extra credit opportunities to make up for work they'd missed? Yes.

And without a doubt, these are all deeply irritating facts for someone who has been writing detailed comments on papers all term trying to help students become better writers, and offering extra office hours, and putting dates and historical information on the board because students reading literature often also need history lessons--only to find that all of this has been ignored in favor of the unsupportable hypothesis and the inane generalization. ("Women in the eighteenth century [by which the writer means the 1800s] were pretty much confined to their houses for their whole lives."*)

But that doesn't give us the right to mock these claims--completely inane though they may be--in specific detail in public forums. In legal terms, it is a a violation of federal laws that protect a student's right to academic privacy to have lines from his or her paper thus publicly quoted without permission. But in moral terms, it's far worse than that. It is a violation of the basic trust that students place in their teachers--trust to guide their ideas, impart information to them, steer them when they falter, help them learn to participate in the discourse community that is a particular discipline.

Of course, there are occasional moments in student papers that really tickle our funny bones. But, in general, I think it is less hilarious and more a sad commentary on the state of the U.S. educational system when I realize that I have many students who have spent the all the years of their young lives not reading, not learning history, not thinking deeply about how to question and challenge things they find in print. (I teach at a university that admits many at-risk and first-generation college students who are under-prepared for what college will require of them.)

When students write really absurd things about history or poetry or what long-dead people "really thought," it is my job to realize that this is the mark of the reams of things no one has ever taught them, not least of which is often how to "do" school. If I have done my job, they are a little better about all of these things by the end of the term than they are at the beginning.

Even so, I cannot undo a lifetime of educational lack in four months.

But I can keep myself from laughing at their ignorance. I can offer them some kind of firm-but-gracious feedback that provides them with a sense of how to do better next time. I can avoid making their efforts the butt of my jokes, as if my PhD entitles me ruthlessly to equate a lack of facility with specific information or specific writing conventions with a lack of personal worth. And I should.

At least, I should if I want to hold my head up and call myself a teacher.

_________
* These are made-up examples, not quotations, though all the errors are representative of the kind of historical anachronism, lackadaisical grammar and spelling, and casual attention to basic facts that I've seen educators mock.

Holding Back

In the longer-term aftermath of the accident, we suddenly find ourselves having to put on the brakes and consciously hold back on things that feel like recovery. It's more than a little disorienting to want my son to get better more slowly.

At this point, he is so emotionally done being broken that he just wants to act as if he is completely whole. The leg may not be perfectly healed, but he has had it with being slowed down by that fact. The weather is has been unseasonably lovely this spring, and sunny days beckon him outdoors. He wants to be running and kicking and throwing and batting and tumbling and tackling and volleying. And so, he tries.

The amazing thing about a surgical repair to a broken leg is that femur-length pins provide a tremendous amount of stability--so much so, in fact, that nine weeks after the accident, my son feels capable of trying to do all the things he used to be able to do. It is hard (and, if you have ever had a sports-addicted eight-year-old boy, you will easily be able to imagine how hard) to keep him down.

Of course, it was hard to keep him down as a toddler as well. At eleven months, he dragged a chair across the kitchen, climbed onto it to investigate what was on the counters, and proceeded to drop the coffee pot--SMASH!--onto the tile floor. At fourteen months, he began climbing out of his crib and making his way downstairs alone in the dark, so we had to move him to a bed. At four years old, he climbed a forty foot pine tree to the very tippy top and nearly gave half the neighborhood a heart attack at the Halloween cookout.

So it is perhaps not surprising that at eight, now that he can (mostly) walk again, he is ready not simply to be done with the crutches for good but to begin playing flag football. Immediately. His left leg is not nearly as strong as his right. The foot flops awkwardly as he reaches somewhat tentatively out to kick a soccer ball. He can hobble pretty fast, nearly jog, but no one would really call his gait a run just yet.

More importantly, his physical therapist has told him that he is to do nothing where he has to block, or plant his foot and twist, or dash after a ball to catch it. Nothing, in short, where he can really move. Nothing that opens up the possibility for him to be knocked over or fall down hard.

He can be outside, but he has to be safe. Not sedentary. But not really active, either.

This, as you might guess, is nearly impossible. Allow him to play catch, and pretty soon two or three other kids want into the tossing action. Get four or five kids tossing around a football, and you have a game. Seamlessly, the gimpy kid goes from playing catch to being in the midst of a full-on game.

He came home yesterday complaining that his friend was refusing to play carefully enough with him -- that said friend kept on blocking him and trying to steal the ball in their basketball game. Pressing him for more information, I asked precisely what he had told the friend about what he was and wasn't allowed to do. Well, he said, he kept trying to explain that he wasn't supposed to be blocked, but his friend just kept getting in his way, and ... "and, I suppose some of it was probably my fault too..." he trailed off.

Indeed.

Of course it was. It was his fault because he was trying to be eight years old and play basketball with his friends, but every time he got a little nervous that things might be getting too rough, he suddenly wanted them to back off. Of course they didn't know what the rules were.

And of course he was having a hard time following the rules himself.

The majority of his exercise comes in the form of dully repetitive exercises designed to rebuild the strength in his hip and, ultimately, restore his gait. These are so boring that he has taken to counting them in exponential units just to keep himself going. Today, he did 120 billion box step-ups, for example.

Quite honestly, I'm pretty sure it feels to him like he's actually done that many.

So it was hardly a surprise that this afternoon, he came home and proudly told me that he was able to do the drills in gym class that involved running half the length of the gym, picking up a bean bag, turning, and running back. "I did it in eighteen seconds!" he announced with glee.

"That's very fast," I said. "But didn't Mike [his physical therapist] tell you this morning that you aren't supposed to run yet?"

His face collapsed in sobs. I felt as if I'd punched him. All I could do was hold him tight and tell him I was not mad at him, and say that I know this is really hard, and promise to call the surgeon's office tomorrow and see if she had some other guidelines or more relaxed restrictions to offer. Realistically, she may not.

There is "nothing to do" at recess on a sunny day if you are eight years old, and have narrowly escaped devastating injury being hit by a car, and now can manage something approximating a run. You must, from sheer joy of motion, you must RUN.

Every time I see his tousled hair and gleeful face when he manages a physical feat that makes him feel normal again, I understand that joy. My heart leaps for him. I, too, feel a surge of happiness when I see him move in a way that nears effortlessness.

In fact, the greatest effort now lies in holding back. In being careful. In exercising caution and putting on the breaks and not pushing himself. These are less painful than February's excruciating stretches of his tightened-up knee. They are less physically difficult than re-learning to walk. But they are as emotionally painful.

All he wants, I can see in his face as he cries over the devastating success at gym class, all he wants is to race across that shiny wooden floor, pick up a bean bag, and race back, grinning, to his waiting friends.

All he wants is to be eight years old and whole again.

My heart breaks for lack of the ability to give that to him.

In which I find myself defending Samantha Brick...

Samantha Brick has caused a firestorm by announcing in a bold article that she is quite the prettiest thing in any house in the town in which she lives. Moreover, she gets all kinds of preferential treatment from men as a result. But the main point she would like to make is: women generally hate her because they feel so threatened by her astonishing good looks.

Let me just say up front that I don't know whether she is right or "deluded" about her own good looks, and I don't care. What I do care very deeply about, however, is the fact that she is under attack from all sides for having said her life is made more difficult by being so beautiful--and I think it's worth taking a deep breath and doing some good, hard self-examination before we hurl invectives her way.

If you haven't read the article, it is worth a gander so that you can get a sense of just how extensively she makes her argument. But if you pop over to the Daily Mail to read it, you really ought to browse some of the comments too. Their vitriol is breath-taking.

There is no doubt that Brick does a painfully thorough job elaborating just how many free gifts she's been given by doting men, just how many female bosses have apparently found her looks threatening, just how many friends have dropped her because, she laments, they were insanely jealous that their men might be flirting with her. One might have wished for a shorter catalogue of examples ostensibly supporting the idea "men love me, so women hate me." The article could have been far more powerful if she'd spent more time analyzing WHY all of these things really happen, instead of just assuming it is obviously because she is so beautiful.

But the comments she is getting do not take her to task for being a redundant writer or an over-simplifying thinker. Instead, they accuse her of being far uglier than she realizes, stuck up, full of herself, delusional.

Her syllogism is: "Women hate me. I am beautiful. Therefore, women must hate me because I am beautiful." 

The logic is unsound. But her enraged detractors cry out in personal, vile, angry attacks: "You are an arrogant bitch." "You are narcissistic." "You are ugly on the inside, and that is why women hate you." "You are attractive enough for men to want to do you, but not so attractive that you look out of their league. Men give you things because they think you will be easy." Most of all, they tell her, in so many words: "You are plain. You are ugly. You have bad teeth. You would not be considered beautiful in my town," where, implicitly, the standards are a whole lot higher than they apparently are where she lives.

Of course, comments aren't limited to the article. They are all over NPR and late-night TV and the blogosphere and Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else you can possibly imagine anyone speaking out against the horrifying egotism of a woman daring to purr, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." (Those of you over a certain age will remember those ads.)

But here's the thing: the amount of vitriol that her article has spawned suggests she's really hit a nerve. And, quite frankly, I think the nerve is: women aren't allowed to say that they are comfortable with--even more, HAPPY ABOUT--how they look. 

We are supposed to be modest, demure, and insecure. Aloud, we are supposed to insist that we believe all of our friends are prettier than we are. Silently, in our own minds, we are supposed to believe that all of our friends are prettier than we are. Insidiously, we have become acculturated so that we actually do believe that most women are thinner than we are, with better features, nicer hair, and bodies better suited to whatever style is currently the rage. 

Most importantly, we are never, ever supposed to say aloud that we are wholly comfortable with our own levels of attractiveness--because, implicitly, we are never supposed to be wholly comfortable with our own levels of attractiveness.

Sure, we are allowed to have good days. On our wedding days, we are allowed to feel beautiful. For the rest of the afternoon, after we walk out of the hair salon, we are allowed to have that spring in our steps that makes our hair swish pleasantly over our shoulders. 

But we have to credit the princess dress and the months of preparation and the being thoroughly in love for our beauty on our wedding days. And although we are allowed to agree with our friends who tell us our new haircuts look great, the acceptable way to do this is to say, "I know, right?! She [the stylist] is so good. Of course, it won't look like this again until the next time I get it cut." And then we laugh that particular laugh that is self-deprecating, and take a deep breath of satisfaction in knowing that we are not egotistical. That it is not that we have nice hair. It is just that we have paid a good stylist to make it seem so.

It is so deeply ingrained in us that we do not measure up that when someone says aloud that not only does she think she measures up, she thinks the female half of her world hates her for knowing it, our first response is to come up with a hundred other reasons to hate her even more.

And, to tell her she is ugly.

In short, I think it's probably true that women hate Samantha Brick for her beauty--but not precisely for the reasons she gives. I do not think women hate her because she represents some empirical standard of physical perfection (which, anyway, is somewhat subjective). I think women hate her because she dares to find herself beautiful. Because she thinks she is gorgeous and is not afraid to say so.

Now, you might argue that she could keep her mouth shut on that score a bit more. Perhaps she announces her own self-satisfaction with her looks too often for culturally accepted norms of modesty about any kind of accomplishment. I can't say what she does in the rest of her life, although this article certainly belabors her own assets in a way that might rankle whether the assets were beauty, brains, money, social connections, or any other litmus test of success. No one likes a braggart, whatever the category of bragging.

On the other hand, I think that people are reacting much more strongly to this article than they would to one by a man that said, "men hate me and are intimidated by me because I'm so smart and went to Yale."

And I think the reason people--not surprisingly, many many of these people are women--are commenting with such hatred, is that deep-down, we know that Samantha Brick does have something we don't. She is perfectly secure and comfortable in her own skin.