One Man's Hacking, Slashing, and Earth-Salting Through the Thickets of Undergraduate Academia

-by Martini

"Look, I'm not joking! This is my job!" --Donald Sutherland, Animal House And, sadly, it is. To pay the bills while pursuing my Ph.D., I teach -- or more correctly, am employed as a "teaching assistant," the semantic nuances of which elude me to this day -- in the history department of a large university. And like most of my colleagues and friends who have joined me in the reality-postponing experience that is graduate school, I started on this journey with, I must admit, more than a little overestimation about the quality of my undergraduate charges. I am not the first, and doubtless will not be the last person to make that mistake. But I figured that a lot of the standard doom-and-gloom pronouncements about the dilapidated state of American education were a tad overblown. I remember watching Peter Jennings one evening saying -- in that huffy and somber tone he adopts while reporting on some social fiasco that always seems to imply that everything is totally and irrevocably your fault -- that the present class of high school graduates has approximately a 21% proficiency in writing skills. I'm willing to accept the fact that not every 17-year-old who gets shot out of the cannon of secondary education in this country will turn out to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I took a smidgen of offense at the implication that barely 1 in 5 students knew how to construct a simple sentence. My high school drilled composition into our heads with the fervency of a Maoist re-education camp, and even though my math skills aren't what they used to be I know that our student body simply wasn't large enough to constitute the 21% of students who were able to tell their colons1 from a hole in the ground. (I also took offense at Peter's tone. I mean, the statistics may be poor, but do we really need an anchor who's Canadian by birth rubbing it in?) Well, as I've since discovered, it's been a looooooong time since I went to high school. Things have changed. For the decidedly un-better. I know education's supposed to be a hot-button political topic these days, but if you're one of those types who thinks that giving more money for schools and a hundred grand worth of new teachers is a good idea, let me be the first to say that you're going to be throwing good money after bad. As I mentioned, I teach history. Whenever I make this fact public, I get a majority of responses from people who tell me: "Really? History was my favorite subject in school." Or, "Great! I love history. It's fascinating. It's all I read." This may be true, and maybe history was taught differently in their day, but my gut response to anyone who says they "love history" ought to go see how it's being understood by future generations. You will crawl on your hands and knees like a leprous penitent flinging yourself prostrate before the altar of computer science, begging for forgiveness from St. Microsoft and professing that you wholeheartedly embrace the One True Shining Path of MS-DOS forever and ever to the end of days.2 I mean, I don't go out of my way to be obtuse when I teach, and I understand that history can be rather indecipherable when it's taught badly... but on the other hand, this isn't rocket science. Of course, if it was, I wouldn't be surprised, considering NASA's recent sub-par track record in actually keeping things in orbit more often than not. (Whoops, there goes the latest Mars Orbiter in a vast explosion of space bits. Forgot to carry the 2 again.) But judging from the answers I get on tests, some facts have to be faced:

 

1. PETER JENNINGS IS RIGHT.

Students don't know how to write a sentence. Many of the essays I get contain prose -- and I use that term in its loosest possible definition -- that would make Strunk & White pack it in and go into copyediting for gangsta rappers. I mean, what's the phobia toward verbs? You know a sentence needs a verb. Something that actually happens to the subject. How hard can this be? Hell, I've got an eight-year-old cousin who knows enough to put verbs in her sentences. Maybe they don't make sense; maybe she's got them in the wrong tense (she's only 8, after all), but she puts 'em in there. And she's eight. A few examples from recent American History exams: "She was convented to Christianity." [Converted, I believe. See, Catholic school really does have an impact. ] "Creolization is changing a language and its culture by combining the two languages to get a unique combination of the two cultures combined." [Well, at least they can conjugate verbs.] "Women no longer wanted to be refereed to as housewives." [I'll leave it to you to conjure up the image of Martha Stewart in a hockey official's jersey.] And then there's circular reasoning, or at least what I like to call the Mobius Sentence. You know, the kind of sentence that wraps back around itself? The kind of grammatical knot that'd put the Gordians to shame? Like these: "Antinomianism is simply a reform against nomianism." [Simply, all right. Here's a simple D-minus for you.] "As Mike saw it, life seemed to be going in a cycle. Good things then bad things then some more good things would happen." [Lather, rinse, repeat until dead.] "French was mixed with English in Louisiana and a mixture resulted." [I'd've thought French and English mixed about as well as nitro and glycerine, but I guess I'm mistaken.] And another thing. Do any of these kids know what the proper use of a dictionary is? No, Sparky, it's not for propping your bedroom window open: "The Spanish-American War had some very ferrous fighting." [I believe he means "ferocious." An answer dripping in iron-y, if you will.] "Republicans still favored business economics in the 1920s." [As opposed to home economics, I guess. Now, I'm no accountant, but the image of the entire GNP of the Calvin Coolidge administration revolving around casseroles and potholders is something I don't want to contemplate.] "The Tampico incident involved a squirmish between US and Mexican troops." [I don't know exactly what that means, but it doesn't sound particularly pleasant.] "The US entered WWI because the Central Powers were trying to end the German blockage of the seas." [See previous response.] ...But none of this compares with the various ways my kids try to spell "corollary," as in the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904. I've gotten "corarlly," "coorilary," "collary," "coolary," "corrallery," and a few rather rude ones, too. None of them look quite right.

 

2. THEY REMEMBER VERY ODD THINGS AT THE WRONG MOMENTS.

Or, to be more precise, they only half-listen to things and then try to connect them together in essay exams. Most of these things you couldn't connect with a soldering iron and a barrel of epoxy cement, but they try. Lord Almighty, do they try: "She retained many of her own cultural beliefs, particularly the highly valued ability of enduring pain." [Yeah, I can see that... "Twenty bucks says I can't hold my hand over this lighter without flinching" is the sort of attitude that is a mainstay of most native American cultures.] "In 1607, the English landed at Plymouth Rock and formed a new colony called Jamestown." [Maybe I should give map quizzes after all.] "The economy of New England was based on fur trade and migrants." [Trading in migrants? How do they pack them? Do they spoil in transit?] "America went into World War I because of Germany's communist government." [OK, pal, I study German history. Been doing such for about 8 years or so. And I have never heard anyone argue that Kaiser Wilhelm was a communist. So, this leads me to one of two conclusions: Every history professor, book, article, or documentary has been keeping something pretty vital from me. You're wrong.]

 

3. THEY ENGAGE IN INNOVATIVE ARGUMENTS.

In other words, they state the very very very very very VERY obvious, which simply invites professorial abuse, as in: "She was into all the church things." [Like that whole believing in God, going to Mass, living your entire life according to a moral-ethical code --- you know, those church things.] "The Puritans called for the total omnipotence of God." [Evidently He didn't have it at that point.] "Mike had trouble getting to America. He basically had to sneak around Europe in order to escape." [I guess he just pointed in a random direction and said something like "Hey, look over there. Isn't that David Hasselhoff?" and ran like hell the other way while the entire population of the EEC's backs were turned.] Why does this happen? What did I do in a previous life to deserve this? Maybe nothing. Maybe it's not me. It's them. Yeah, it's definitely them. But how do we fix this? We could pump more dough into the sump that is the public school system in this country. We could hire more teachers and reduce classroom sizes. Of course, we could bring back corporal punishment in schools. Not on the kids, mind you. On the teachers. That's it. Convene a secret police force of composition. A Grammar Gestapo. A Spelling Star Chamber. A Phonics Fascist Flying Squad. Use every method at our disposal. Intensive re-education in the MLA Handbook of Style. Bring back sentence diagramming. Electrodes in sensitive places. Whatever it takes, folks. Who're you going to let teach your kids? The Department of Education? Or me? I think the answer's self-evident. Now, where'd I put those jumper cables? 1. The grammatical ones, you sicko. 2. Or at least until the Y2K bug renders everything with a microchip into one big worldwide collection of paperweights.