Extra Credit

We’re coming up on the last two weeks of class and as usual several students have emailed to ask me if there is extra credit they can do to improve their grade. Sometimes it’s just a matter of someone sitting on the cusp, a 70% or 80%, wanting to secure the higher grade. Occasionally it’s someone in the 60s% hoping to do whatever to get into the 80s%, a delusion that probably helps explain their being in the 60s% in the first place. Despite years of these requests, the same questions always follow:

1. Why do they wait until the end of the semester? If they wanted to make a better grade than they’re making, and they’ve been making that lower grade most of the semester (which is always the case), why aren’t they concerned earlier when there might be more that they can do to improve their performance (not just their grade)?

2. Do they not read the syllabus? If there would be extra credit, it would be in the syllabus.

3. How many other instructors offer extra credit? Because I receive these requests every semester, I suspect there are a number who do, though I don’t have any idea how many or what kind of assignments it might be. In my classes (literature), extra credit would require additional reading and writing. And that would in turn require additional work (reading and responding) on my part. Unpaid additional work, I might add.

Most of my students are in the first two years of college, and they probably aren’t as versed in the ways of higher education as they might be. I suspect many of them see learning as a quantitative venture, not qualitative, that the more you do the better. So I see these requests for extra credit as teaching moments. I suggest that in the future, if they’re concerned about their grade in any class, that they contact the instructor early on to see what they might do to improve it. As for my class, I recommend they spend whatever extra time and effort they might spend on extra credit on the remaining assignments (read the readings more than once, get help in the reading or writing center), and the effect should be the same.

Spring Break

Today’s the first day of Spring Break. I was reminded of this this morning when I went to post next week’s schedules in my two online classes and found there were no schedules to post because we have next week off. Spring Break has no meaning for me anymore. When I was teaching full-time and on campus I would always use the week to get away, for a fishing trip in Arkansas, a visit to Berlin and Prague, or just a long weekend in Chicago or New York or San Francisco. “Break” meant a physical break, an escape, getting away. But now that I’m retired (or semi-retired to the internet) there’s nothing to get away from. Or rather, I can now get away whenever I want. We went to Chicago last month. Next month we’re going to Italy. We are going to Chicago next weekend, though not because it’s Spring Break for me but because it’s Spring Break for my sister, who still teaches full-time and is coming to Chicago for her get-away this year.

Odd perhaps, but for me Spring Break wasn’t much of a vacation for me as a student. I never went to – or particularly wanted to go to (or for that matter could ever afford to go to) –Padre Island, South Beach, or Cancun. As an undergraduate, I would usually just drive home for the week, perhaps catching up on some backed-up schoolwork, more likely just lounging around watching TV or going to movie matinees. As a graduate student, the week was a hard study week, spent mostly in the library (this was before computers and the internet), catching up on reading, preparing for papers and tests that were to come.

It was only when I became faculty that I could afford – both financially and demands of work – to get away for Spring Break. And for all of the 22 years that I taught full-time, I can’t recall one when I didn’t use the time to travel, even if only for a long weekend a day’s drive away. But that was then. I don’t need the break now. Indeed, it comes – as it did today – as something of a surprise. And I plan to spend the week just going about my days as I’ve been going about my days the past two years – reading, walking, writing. Maybe I can get into the garden. Or out on a trout stream. Or maybe take a bike ride. But I don’t need an official break to do any of those things most any week. In that sense, every week is Spring Break for me now.

Willy Loman and Me

I may have to drop Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman from my Drama class. I’ve included it every semester for the past 15 years, and it generally works well in helping students learn about character, motivation, empathy, and plot, not to mention tragedy. But three years ago, a problem emerged that I hadn’t anticipated: I turned 60. Which, as one of my students pointed out in discussion (not in connection to me), is the age of Willy “I’m tired to the death” Loman in the play. (Coincidentally, the original Broadway production opened on February 10, 1949, three days before I was born.) Making it worse, each semester, as Willy stays forever 60, I grow older year by year. And my students continue to describe Willy in their discussions and papers (with no conscious reminder to me) that he’s “an old man,” or “a very old man,” or “a very old, sad, demented man.” I have to check myself from correcting their misperceptions (“He’s only been horribly overworked, burnt out” or “60 is the new 50”). And I hesitate anymore to read my students’ evaluations of the class (“I liked the readings, but the teacher is a very old, sad, demented man”). I have, though, made sure to emphasize in our discussion of the play the one positive thing that Charley finds to say about Willy in the Requiem: “He was a happy man with a batch of cement.”

Bias

My students are invariably proud to announce at the beginning of the semester that they are themselves devoid of bias. Bias, they have learned, often from faulty instruction in high school, is bad if not evil and must be denied at all costs. Good people hold no biases. I sigh and tell them that one of the things that I want them to learn is that every one of them – and everyone who has ever or will ever live – carries a host of biases. It’s in the nature of thought – of reaction, response, and opinion. Bias is at root an inclination or disposition based on culture, upbringing, experience, and expectation. “I like movies with lots of explosions and people getting killed in violent ways” is a common bias of my students that they have no problem holding though they don’t see it as a bias because having a bias is by definition a bad thing and liking movies with lots of explosions and people getting killed in violent ways is not a bad thing. I tell them, confirming their opinion of me as living on another planet (which is the point), that I prefer quiet, slow, character-driven films – and that is one of my biases. Of course, biases can be vile, hateful, dangerous, as in racial, religious, or gender biases. And that’s how the otherwise connotatively neutral term “bias” gained its now common condemnation; the media have for decades reported on the evil of “racial bias” and “religious bias” and “gender bias,” and in time the generic noun has assumed the negative connotation of the adjective-noun phrase. So it’s become a task to teach that bias underlies all opinion and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that we have to understand if we’re to comprehend the opinions of others – or our own.

The Downside of Downfall

For at least the past half dozen years or so, I’ve noticed in my students’ writing a prevalent confusion between the terms downfall and downside, as in “The downfall of this game is the cost,” when it should be “The downside of this game is the cost.” Downfall means a cause of decline or ruin. Downside means a negative quality or aspect. I’ve even found this misuse at an online paper mill that boasts it “offer[s] reasonable prices and deliver[s] top quality papers,” and then posts an example of one of these “top quality papers” that includes the sentences “One downfall of gambling, for instance, the sale of lottery games to minors is illegal in every state; yet, by all measures, there sales are commonplace” (could we also clean up the syntax and spelling in this “top quality paper”?) and “Also growing evidence reveals another downfall.” But this error is growing beyond student papers. In an article in the online journal Cash, Money, Life!, you can find the sentence “There are several downfalls to escrow accounts.” There are obviously more common confusions I see (“everyday” and “every day” come to mind, or “its” and “it’s”), but I’m curious about the source of the confusion of “downfall” and “downside” (I understand the confusion of “everyday” and “every day” or “its” and “it’s”). I don’t recall ever seeing the confusing going the other way: “Hamlet’s indecisiveness was the cause of his downside.” No, it always seems to go downfall instead of downside. Perhaps it’s just that the term “downfall” appears more often in our culture, being the name or title of a ska and punk band, a metal band, a funk metal band, a cover band, a board game, an online game, a game show, and one recent (very good) film, and thus is just more familiar. (There are no “Downside” bands, games, or films.) Or it might just be another inexplicable tic in current usage.

Lets Go

Old Navy, seeking to cash in on the start of another school year (meaning the start of another college football season), has created a new product line of licensed college and professional sportswear, “Superfan Nation.” One of the products in the line is a T-shirt with the logo and team name of one of dozens of schools and the words “Lets go!!” above. But as my grammar check suggests, there should be an apostrophe to indicate the contraction for the imperative “Let us go” as opposed to the verb indicating release, as in “The quarterback lets go of ball.” There’ve been rumblings in some quarters about how this is just one more indication of how no one knows anything anymore about grammar or punctuation or generally how to write good. Or even more generally about how our education system has let us down (let’s down?) and everything would be right in the world again if we just went back to phonics and cursive and dipping Susie’s pigtails in the inkwell. As a retired professor of college composition, I can’t get worked up about this corporate violation of our language. I see worse dozens of times every day just reading the newspapers (how many know the difference between “every day” and “everyday”?). Actually, I have less of a problem with the missing apostrophe than I have with the double exclamation points (they should only be used sparingly, only in dialogue, and only one at a time, please!!), though considering the sporting context, I could accept one. But then the exclamation point is an end point, indicating the end of a sentence, thereby making the capital “G” in “Go” a spelling error. Old Navy is offering to replace the faulty T-shirts and are reprinting them with an apostrophe. But I would suggest they go the next step (let’s go the next step) and fully correct the locution: “Let’s go!” (With the quote marks.)

Mindset List

Each fall, as college freshmen crawl onto college campuses with their microwaves, micro-fridges, HD TVs, iPads, and parents’ credit cards, Beloit College releases the “Mindset List,” a reminder of just how out of touch their teachers are and how unaware the incoming students are. Some representative examples from this year’s list (students born in 1993):

What Berlin wall?

They have grown up with bottled water.

Pete Rose has never played baseball.

Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.

Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.

Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.

They grew up in Wayne’s World.

Fox has always been a major network.

Burma has always been Myanmar.

I’ve always found this list amusing, even slightly interesting, though it’s always greeted by the news media as some sort of revelation, a bonk on the cultural head walking through the door of the new school year. But of course it’s the kind of thing that could have been compiled for every year for the past several thousand years. Consider what the list might look like from the year I entered college (students born in 1949):

Who was Hitler?

They have grown up with running water (and indoor toilets).

Babe Ruth has never played baseball.

Women have always gone to college (and voted).

Being “a retard” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not mentally disabled.

Walter Cronkite has always been reading news on TV (and always will).

They grew up in The Twilight Zone.

ABC, NBC, and CBS have always been (the only) TV networks.

Israel has always existed.

There are inevitably several responses to this list. The most ignorant is to denigrate or mock the incoming students for somehow being naïve or lacking in historical and cultural knowledge when all they’ve done is grown up in a different time with a different history and culture. As noted above, we all have had our “mindset list.” This year’s students are no different than last year’s or ten years ago or fifty years ago.

Another response – and probably the most prevalent, particularly by the network and cable newsreaders (and their writers) – is a sort of oh-my-god-can-you-believe-how-old-we’re-getting? This is a wholly self-centered response – what does this say about me? Well, if you’re really this old, don’t you know by now that time moves on, things change, progress happens? Why are you surprised by history?

Of course, the most valid response is that for which the list was originally intended, “as a witty way of saying to faculty colleagues ‘watch your references.’” We teachers grew up in a much different history and culture than our students, and there is often a disconnect between our experiences and allusions and references and theirs. And we have to be aware of that. We’re moving out of a world they’ve never known, and they’re moving into a world we’ll never know. We have just this brief overlay or worlds where we might make some contact and understanding. If we work on the continuity, not the distance.

Dreams of Teaching

They aren’t nightmares exactly, but after a year of retirement from classroom teaching I’m still having dreams of work, some involve teaching (not being prepared for a class or forgetting until the last week of the semester that I’m even teaching a class (this may not be so much a dream as a memory)) but most tend to involve committee work or department meetings (usually with a component of “What the fuck am I doing here? I’m retired.”). I’ve never been a believer of dreams being some sort of portal to the soul or psyche or subliminal desires or whatever. But I have to admit that these series of dreams – with no apparent connection to my waking dreams – do have me somewhat concerned, if only because I’d rather be dreaming about fishing for bonefish in the Caribbean, driving a Maserati through the Pyrenees, or having sex with . . . well, we’ll just have to wait to see about that one. The point is I’m not able to control my dreams. If life were fair, after retirement, we’d be able to control our dreams, much as we’re able to control our TVs remotely – click, click, click. That seems a reasonable, not to mention affordable, reward for having survived 60-plus years of dreams and aspirations, false promises and dashed hopes. It’s a cruel irony that in our dotage we have to relive our classroom traumas and administrative miseries in our nightly slumber. Anne Sexton wrote that “In a dream you are never eighty.” But Anne Sexton committed suicide when she was 45. What does she know about 80? Or even 60? She didn’t wait around for the dreams.

I'm Still An English Teacher

At some point during my 35+ year evolution as a college writing instructor, it gradually became clear to me that the teaching of what we call surface problems – grammar, usage, punctuation, spelling, and the like – was a generally useless enterprise. For one thing, by the time that students get to college they demonstrate a degree and range of surface problems that is impossible to address to a group of 25-30 students showing the whole degree and range of such problems; to address problems that were only problems to a few at any one time was a waste of time for most everyone involved; the best I could do was identify those few problems shared by the majority on any one assignment to work on in class. Also, and more important, as we ask students in college writing to engage in subjects new to them (that’s much of what college is about), whatever fluency they have when writing in their range of knowledge and experience inevitably goes by the way. (It does for me – and you – as well.) Writing is a skill that’s really a constellation of skills, attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors that are developed over time through experience, reading and writing, in school and beyond. (I’m still learning – and so are you.) Finally, too much emphasis on the surface problems (what the lay public and students tend to think of as “writing”) draws attention away from what really matters in effective writing, the global issues – content, focus, organization, and development. So by the last decade of my teaching college writing, I’d cut back considerably on the surface problems, focusing in class and in comments on papers on the global issues (except when it was necessary to point out excessive surface problems that led to the distortion or distraction of ideas).

That being said, there remains in me the stereotypical stickler English teacher that bristles at certain misuses of the language. And here are my top five:

1. seem(s) – “I seem to have forgotten my book” or “It seems to be raining.” When something is obviously the case, you don’t need to equivocate. Take a stand. Go out on a limb. Demonstrate you have the ability (and courage) to observe and describe the world around you as you see it.

2. I think/I believe/I feel – “I think American Idol is the best show on TV” or “I believe that we should get out of Afghanistan” or “I feel Obama gets too much credit because he’s black.” As in #1, don’t be defensive. Take a stand. Write a declarative sentence. You’re the writer, so we know what you write is what you think or believe or feel.

3. ! – “I couldn’t believe I’d finally graduated!” or “I woke up and the sun was shining!” Exclamation marks should be used sparingly, preferably not at all. As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” Only use them when quoting direct dialogue that exclaims (“You’re shitting me!”), but you probably won’t be doing that much in your academic or work writing.

4. downfall for downside – “The lack of explosions and car chases is the downfall of this movie.” This problem started showing up in the past decade and has grown in the past few years. “Downfall” is the failure or ruin of a person (“Watergate was Nixon’s downfall.”). “Downside” is a negative aspect to an otherwise positive thing (“The cost of the Maserati is a downside.”).

5. everyday/every day – “You should go to the psychiatrist everyday” or “The every day price is less than $10.) You can find this problem not only in student writing but in national advertising, publications, and businesses; just the other day (otherday?) I found it in The Washington Post. It’s pretty simple: “everyday” is an adjective meaning normal or routine (“I have my everyday routine.”) and “every day” is an adjective-noun compound meaning “each day” (“I go to the psychiatrist every day.”). If you can substitute “each day” for “every day,” then it’s two words. (There is a sense of “everyday” as a noun – “This has become a part of the everyday” – but it’s mostly literary and rare.) This isn’t a major problem, I admit, as I typically know what is meant. But I don’t know why the distinction is so difficult to make and that’s what stops me each time I see the error. It’s just a personal thing.

Curiously, only the fourth of these is a usage error, and the fifth a spelling error; the first three are stylistic faults, not errors. I can live with comma splices and dangling modifiers and its instead of it’s. I mark them, yes, but they don’t make me cringe as the five above do. And I suspect that that’s because they don’t disturb or distort the point trying to be made the way my five (or at least the first four) do. Again, I’m an English teacher. I’m allowed my quibbles.