“Professor X is tired of hearing people say the reason so many children enrolled in city schools across the nation are failing is because the teachers are bad.”
Prompted by this professor friend’s Facebook post, I considered this morning a number of reasons that the American education system—in which I will very likely some day participate and which is completely entangled with the condition of the American literature—is fundamentally fucked. Several people responded to the initial statement in the spirit of commiseration; some seemed to actually agree with the initial proposition: the teachers are to blame. But the general consensus seemed to be that the students should be more accountable, but teachers should also be more “engaged” or “engaging.” I found the latter suggestion vexing. And after mistakenly taking a stray off-brand Day-Quil which had somehow ended up in my Ambien supply, I had time to consider why.
Truly lousy teachers/professors, from elementary through college, were surely a rarity in my experience. But so were truly engaged teachers. Last year, I ran into a professor for whose class I’d signed up (three years earlier) because the subject was of interest—it was an elective, not one of those dreaded compulsory core classes. He recognized me—one of I can’t even guess how many students he’s had—and I had no idea what the hell his name was. It actually took me a minute to figure out why he knew who I was. That’s not a tacit avowal of my academic prowess; it’s a statement of his professorial ineffectiveness. From day one, I was fairly disenchanted with his performance; even his syllabus, riddled with typos, was unimpressive. By semester’s end, when he passed out the obligatory Scan-Tron performance appraisals, I wanted nothing more than to scrawl that lovely little nugget from Good Will Hunting: “I just paid $150,000 for an education I could have gotten for a dollar-fifty in late charges at the library.” Of course, the cost of that class was significantly less than that, there was no such bubble, and he wasn’t the sort of prof. who passed out that common secondary survey paper, not mandated by the university, but which he himself composed in hope of finding his failings, and fixing them.
My final project was a twenty-five page paper which was returned to me with a single comment scrawled in scarlet on its title page: “Good. A.”
His biggest problem as a professor was that every class seemed totally phoned in. One session, we had forty minutes of YouTube James Brown video montages, while he didn’t speak. There was no test on this, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to be learning. This man was, by the time I entered his demesne, completely disengaged. I can’t, however, blame him. At all. I can’t blame the teachers when it’s the system’s fault. His class was unruly. The room was too big for him to see everyone and so students in the back (where I always sit; I can’t stand not having a wall at my back, much less people sitting behind me) read the paper, played handheld video games, listened to iPods. Unless he wanted to waste five-to-ten minutes of class time every session, he couldn’t take attendance, and so people quit showing up when he gave up that endeavor. And this was an elective. Students had chosen of their own volition to attend this class. Yeah, the poor bastard was disengaged. And again, I can’t blame him.
Despite the fact that education is an incalculably more important venture, I actually see a number of parallels between my academic experience and the fourteen years of my life during which I’ve toiled in restaurants. The joint at which I currently work, I manage as well as serve and, almost every time I’ve tried to hire someone, I’ve found only terribly disengaged persons. Until a recent two-year relationship skewed the percentages, I’d spent 91% of my adult life single and, as a bachelor in food-service, I had less than no interest in cooking for anyone once I wasn’t being paid to do so (especially if that someone was myself). During that 91% of more than a decade, I ate out almost every day. And the servers I found in other restaurants were disengaged. Truly lousy ones were rare, sure, but so were truly engaged waiters and waitresses. There are a number of reasons for this phenomenon and, queerly, most of them apply to both professions.
Phenomenally disengaged clientele (diners or students) are an almost insurmountable stumbling block. Impossible standards are set by employers, and these lead to all sorts of ill-advised shortcuts. If your students consistently do poorly, you, the educator, are the one who suffers. Hence, grade inflation. If your diners fly into a frenzy when their food isn’t immediately ready, and they refuse to listen to reason, what the hell can you do? Hence, “Forget doing it right; the guy wants his steak right now, or he’s going to walk out, and I’ll end up stuck with the tab. I know the order’s only been in five minutes, but just microwave the fucking thing until it’s well-done.” (And then, this gentleman goes home to his interweb connection and posts a review of the restaurant which reads, “My steak was rubbery.”) A lot of chain places have set limits. If I recall correctly, Perkins’ was 7-10-10 (seven minutes for a breakfast to be ready, ten for lunch or dinner) and, if you didn’t meet these preposterous deadlines, you could be written up/fired. And if you were fired with a write-up in your jacket, well, then, no unemployment insurance for you.
This sort of behavior is the result of a lousy system of checks and balances between employers and staff and, for that matter, between clientele and staff. “The customer is always right” is a moronic policy for any business that cares about the quality of its work. Alexander McQueen wouldn’t have capitulated and made rhinestone-studded tapered and pleated khakis for some starlet because she insisted and, as customer, was ineluctably right. Good chefs will refuse to alter a dish if that alteration will destroy the quality of the meal. The customer is not always right. And neither is the student. Well, the student shouldn’t be.
I’ve had five college professors (of forty? fifty?) who had the balls/ovaries to say, “No, your answer to that question is wrong.” Or “That’s an invalid observation.” Or “You’ve misunderstood the material at hand.” Granted, I’m in a soft-science. Math teachers probably still get to say, “No, two plus two is not five. You’re wrong.” Nevertheless, if a student raises his or her hand and offers the opinion that an Emily Dickenson poem was written about the Holocaust, the answer is wrong. Chronology makes that impossible. If his or her contribution to discussion is, “This book made me happy because it reminded me of my grandmother,” that’s not a valid observation, as it’s totally inaccessible to anyone else and 100% subjective. But most professors never seem to make these observations out loud. And if I had to venture a guess, I’d say it has something to do with the fact that job security goes out the window the second someone calls administration and says, “That teacher’s abusive speech destroyed my child’s self-esteem!” The word “wrong” must be avoided at all costs, lest someone’s fragile self-esteem be shattered. I’m unsure as to how one can effectively teach when nothing is allowed to be incorrect or irrelevant. But again, if it isn’t abundantly clear, I can’t blame the educators for this.
Most teachers at the elementary/middle/high school level are terribly equipped for their jobs, and essentially required to make up the slack out of pocket. Consistently negative and capricious performance appraisals with absolutely no positive reinforcement don’t help anyone in either field. Nor does shitty, shitty, shitty pay, which is incommensurate with the job. This is considerably worse for teachers; as a full-time waiter, I think I make more than most adjuncts and some elementary/middle/high school teachers. I’ve been toying for years with the idea that every professional athlete in the country should be required to double the salary of at least one teacher in the country. If A-Rod is pulling down $33,000,000 a year playing a game for a living, I think it’s pretty sensible to make it obligatory that the guy contribute $33,000 to the income of someone whose job is exponentially more important than his; more important than, arguably, most jobs in the country. Teachers are on a level with policemen, firefighters, and doctors: civilization could not proceed without them.
And, though there’s no real restaurant analogue (excepting the fact that, thanks to the Food Network, everyone expects every meal to be “infused” with something, near-orgasmic, and pretty as a Jackson Pollock—even if it’s a $3.85 burrito), let’s not forget the completely inappropriate notion that every single person born is capable of successfully completing an actual university-level education. It’s radically unAmerican, I know, but everyone is not born equal. I have the upper body strength of a prepubescent girl. I am, however, according to standardized testing, rather cleverer than most folks. Do prepubescent girls, unwashed idiots, and I deserve the same fundamental human rights? Yes. Should any of us be sold into slavery? No. Should we all be allowed to use what we have at our disposal to pursue our own individual notions of happiness? Yes. Am I capable of the heavy lifting which would make me a good construction worker? No. I would be crushed or herniated on my first day. Can most people handle Fourier systems? No. Should we all be allowed to vote? Maybe. I’m guessing you get my point.
And the brass tacks of the argument is, even well into the 21st century, I still need someone to fix my car when it breaks. If you open the hood and ask me whether my eidelbrock intake manifolds are shot, or if the car isn’t running because all of the magic miniature unicorns which had been powering it had died, I can guess which one is more likely to be correct. But, in all honesty, I won’t be sure you haven’t made up both situations. I shouldn’t be fixing cars. There are people who can, who enjoy doing so, and the world still needs them. So, why should such people be shoehorned through four years of upper-level education, dragging down students whose forte is more academic in nature; why should they be forced to write papers on Shakespeare (about which they couldn’t give a shit/maybe don’t remotely comprehend or want to comprehend) and, when they don’t do well, still end up with a passing grade? The answer, sadly, seems to be because, if he’d failed, the educator would have been held accountable for the student’s immutable disinterest/unfixable ineptitude and, if this happened often enough, fired/denied tenure/denied necessary cost of living wage adjustments.
Considering in aggregate this truncated list of factors for disengagement, I can’t blame anyone for being demoralized. I wouldn’t be able to justly condemn anyone who, immured by such conditions to the point that he or she just loses all hope and says, “fuck it.” Weirdly, I rarely see surrender so complete in either field. In fact, forget “engaging the students”—I think teachers and professors should probably get trophies of some sort for every year completed without a meltdown or suicide attempt. I’m amazed the classic school shooting hasn’t flip-flopped yet; so far as I know, no teacher has shot his or her students which, in some cases (thank you, in-class text-messagers), would seem very reasonable to me. I know that, at the end of most of my table-waiting workdays and workweeks, I come home with nothing left to give. It’s wrecked romantic relationships, ruined friendships. But the fact of the matter is, after spending the day struggling to stay engaged and to engage other people, I just don’t have it in me to do much besides sit quietly with the cat. Or drink scotch in the bathtub. And I’m not responsible for shaping minds, for spreading wisdom and insight to the next generation; I haven’t spent all day or all week being lambasted for my alleged failure, while trying in vain to get through to people too disinterested or incompetent to keep up with the increasingly slow pace of learning; I’m not responsible for assuring the fucking survival of culture. My job is meaningless. On my worse days, I’m not sure if this is a better or worse fate.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way to fix this. Any of it. Not realistically. Like other American institutions—two-party politics, privatized healthcare, and the gratuity-based restaurant structure (“Hey, let’s make the customers pay the lion’s share of our employees’ salaries so we don’t have to. We’ll give them just enough to pay the taxes on the government’s estimation of their tips, but not so much that their paychecks ever amount to anything larger than ‘$0.00′”)—I think its a hopeless quagmire that’s far beyond repair. When, in centuries past, such circumstances became the norm, discontented people would pack up and move elsewhere. Sadly, even though it’s 2010, space-colonization is unfeasible, floating cities aren’t yet fact, Antarctica is still to bloody cold, and Canada’s placed a moratorium on U.S. immigrants. And all the other planetary land is spoken for. Which pretty much means we’d have to burn the whole fucking thing to the ground and start over again.
I am, however, not averse to that idea.
