A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. The bursting of our collective bubble comes quickly. Even the cops-to-be feel driven to succeed in the class, to read and love the great books, to explore potent themes, to write well. When I am at my best, and the students are in an attentive mood-generally, early in the semester-the room crackles with positive energy. I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point. In 102, we read short stories, poetry, and Hamlet, and we take several stabs at the only writing more dreaded than the research paper: the absolutely despised Writing About Literature.Ĭlass time passes in a flash-for me, anyway, if not always for my students. My students must venture the compare-and-contrast paper, the argument paper, the process-analysis paper (which explains how some action is performed-as a lab report might), and the dreaded research paper, complete with parenthetical citations and a listing of works cited, all in Modern Language Association format. The goal of English 101 is to instruct students in the sort of expository writing that theoretically will be required across the curriculum. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me? They fidget they prop their heads on their arms they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading “Araby” or “Barn Burning,” their boredom quickly becomes apparent. For many of my students, this is difficult. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings. Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home and family. Some of their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. They chose their college based not on the U.S. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Also see: An Anti-College Backlash? (March 31, 2011) Americans are finally starting to ask: "Is all this higher education really necessary?" By Professor X