I was coming to the end of my 20th year on the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University and I had just about had it.
Twenty years of telling juniors and seniors that the comma goes inside the quotation marks, not outside.
Twenty years of explaining that nonfiction books are not novels.
Twenty years of furtive and not-so-furtive digital activity.
Twenty years of searching in vain for signs that undergraduates know – or even want to know — anything about anything beyond their own little social worlds.
Twenty years of students begging me to accept late work and overlook multiple absences.
And it all seemed to have gotten worse.
A story one of my fledgling reporters turned in about what her peers look for in an instructor nearly finished me. One of her sources valued “a teacher who is accessible at all times – whether that be in email, over the phone or in person.” Another said “organization is key.” The others just wanted their professors to be flexible: to accommodate their busy schedules and “different learning styles” and, in light of those two variables, to reward whatever effort they can spare. In other words, accept late work and overlook multiple absences.
The common denominator here is a preference for profs who don’t make their lives any more difficult than necessary. Which is understandable.
But notice what’s missing from my student’s story. No one said anything about wanting to be challenged or exposed to unfamiliar ideas or have their sense of the possibilities of life expanded. Not a word about learning.
Granted, as samplings of opinion go, this one was miniscule. But it feels representative. It explains why, in 20 years, I can count on the thumbs of one hand the number of times a student has initiated a discussion of something in the news or something I asked them to read. They just want me to tell them what I want them to know and do.
As the spring semester wound down, I made a note to self: Talk to a financial planner about retirement. Be ready if the university offers another buyout this fall, like it did in 2016.
Then came the final round of papers and, whaddaya know, my know-nothings rallied and redeemed themselves. Here are two passages that eased my worried mind.
-
From Kayla Neiland: “This semester I met Richard Nixon, Ernest Hemingway and Joe DiMaggio. I was taken to Tiananmen Square in 1989 and ended up getting a little too involved in the protests. I traveled all over the poorest parts of Haiti with a doctor so selfless that it’s selfish. I saw the nightmarish reality of atomic weapons, drank with Irish lesbians, and even engaged in snake-handling rituals. When signing up for a literary journalism class I was not aware that I was signing up for all of this but I soon became aware of how much life there is out there to live.”
-
From Kenny Mckernan: “I come from a very conservative town. We in Tyrone love our Fox News. It is also an extremely white town. When I graduated there was a total of five black people in my high school. Because of these factors, a lot of the things I saw on Facebook and heard from people were buying into the “Black Lives Matter is a hate group” idea…Reading ‘They Can’t Kill Us All’ [a book – not a novel! – about the Black Lives Matter movement] was an awakening for me though. The book showed me that the videos I had seen of ‘Black Lives Matter members burning buildings’ were actually outliers from the group. I learned what the group was really about. They are a peaceful group who demand that justice is served for the young men who were killed. I have a whole new understanding for the movement after reading this book. I wish I could make the people of my hometown read the book too.”
In addition to these thoughtful passages, I saw fewer errors of the kind that make me gnash my terrible teeth and roll my terrible eyes. It’s possible that some of my young scholars saw themselves headed for a final grade that wouldn’t have any straight lines in it and upped their game for the final round of assignments. It’s also possible that some of them had sized me up and figured out what I wanted to hear.
So be it. What matters to me is that my three modest messages had finally gotten through:
-
That it’s good to know things
-
That there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy
-
And that they should proofread like the fate of civilization depends on it.
Mission accomplished.
This happy ending does not mean I’ll stick around for another 20 years. It does mean that come August, I’ll be ready for another round of teeth-gnashing and eye-rolling.
