A Teacher's Lament

Semester's end fast approaches, and we've been busy reading exams and essays. It's tedious work, at times, but, y'know, these students aren't going to fail themselves. A rule of thumb: The more an essay resembles beat poetry, the less likely it is to pass. In our lower-level writing class, students were asked to write about the advantages or disadvantages of serving in the military. One student responded with a series of twenty or so sentences, all of which began "Been [sic] in the military. . . ." We could almost hear the bongos punctuating the "paragraph" breaks. The smell of clove cigarettes hung heavy in the air.

We also made the mistake of allowing students to hand in late work up until yesterday. Our desk is buried 'neath a mound of rushed mediocrity. It's not the mediocrity that bothers us, though; we're depressed by the lack of self-respect. These young people who wouldn't leave the house if they had a hair out of place, or if their shoes didn't match their nail polish, think little of turning in work in which they represent themselves as hopelessly unkempt thinkers.

We're not talking about an ill-conceived sentence or a less-than-fully formed argument; we're talking about those writers who present work that doesn't even address the questions we've asked, essays that have obviously not even been spell-checked (never mind read through for clarity or correctness).

We had an acting teacher years ago, a wonderfully affected old dear--he wore an ascot, for Pete's sake! As far as he was concerned, students were expected to be in their seats before he entered the room. Anyone who walked in after him--even if he had literally just taken his seat--would be greeted with a withering, "Oh, why bother?!?" One can only imagine what he might say were he to read some of these lesser examples of the compositional art. Why bother, indeed?