Discouragement, privilege, compassion, blindness, admiration

If you start to read this, you have to read the whole thing; don't quit halfway through. You'll get the wrong idea.

Discouragement
A student asked me one day how to solve a certain problem from the homework. I wrote the problem on the board, and asked her what she did.

Nothing, she answered. I didn't know how to do it.

What do the notes say? I asked her. Did you look at example such-and-such, which is done exactly the same way? I received a class full of blank stares. Look in the notes! I exclaimed. I gave them to you for a reason; what do they say?

At the same time, I noticed the T-shirt worn by a student sitting at the front of the class:

! NOT MR. RIGHT

But I'll f**k you until he comes along.

This is one of those times where you want to tell me, You're taking this way too seriously. I rebut that no asterisks censored the T-shirt.

Somewhat related to this, another student told me that his girlfriend had just given birth, and he wanted to know if I would object to his going to visit her for a few days. Not at all, I answered, just so long as you keep up with the work that you miss. It would not be cynical of me to remark that this is wishful thinking; this is a student who doesn't keep up with the work that I give his class even when he's on campus.

I'll return to the student who had a homework question, but hadn't looked in the notes to try and solve it. I asked the class what to do, and none of them had any ideas. I spent the next five or ten minutes leading the class in solving the problem. I gave them no further instruction than repeating, What do the notes say to do? With that prompt alone, the students told me what to do, and solved the problem themselves.

To summarize: they've been in my class for two full months now, and they still don't understand that the first thing to do when they're stuck, is to look in their notes. This helps explain why nearly every student in this class is failing. Does that mean I've failed to communicate an essential lesson? If so, how? I say the same thing in every class.

I gave the students time in class to rework the assignment. Imagine my dismay as they struggled even to add and subtract negative numbers. Only a couple of months ago, they seemed to have achieved proficiency. How could they have lost it? I can't attribute it to "disuse"; we have used negative numbers in every class since then! By any "fair and objective measure", I have taken a class that had some knowledge on negative numbers, and transformed them into morons. I have no idea how.

I'm exaggerating slightly, of course, but not when I say that my primary purpose appears to be to introduce these students to the reality that they will fail if they don't perform. I say this quite seriously: the only lesson most of them will learn is realizing that there are consequences to not learning. I used to joke about this with other grad students; now I find it immensely depressing, especially since students' reaction is to blame either me for being incomprehensible, or the material for being unlearnable. They never ask themselves, What can I do differently?

I do not relish the notion of spending the rest of my life as someone who points to the safe path up a narrow cliff, then watches most people ignore him and plunge to their deaths.

Privilege
Most of these students are the beneficiaries of grants, scholarships, and loans designed to help them earn a college education. My taxes and yours are contributing to their college experience.

I have no idea why. These students are given so many opportunities to get help; they can come to my office; they can visit a study session with a paid tutor. They don't take advantage of any of this. Why not?

In the last decade or so, I've noticed people attributing success and failure in life to whether someone is the child of "privilege". By "privilege", they typically mean "wealth", although they can also mean various other measures that are not measured by money. For example: being born in the right social class, in the right ethnic group, etc. Many of them go so far as to assert that we could solve all social problems if we only "leveled the playing field" in terms of money, racial discrimination, etc. I entertained the idea for myself awhile; this is one reason I entered teaching.

After ten years of contact with teaching, I agree that "privilege" is a good sign of success. However, privilege is not a matter of wealth, social class, or ethnic group. Growing up privileged means growing up in a family that values:

• education above entertainment;
• taking responsibility above casting blame;
• self-discipline above self-gratification;
• self-sacrifice above self-aggrandizement;
• moderation above excess;
  
• chastity above licentiousness;
• respect for others' knowledge above delusions about one's insight;
• etc.

True privilege is about values and virtues. Sadly, our culture is teaching students the opposite, and many of our teachers do the same.

Compassion
This presents me with a real challenge. Compassion is a virtue, and I am obliged to practice it. I do try to help those who are less fortunate than I. I don't try to judge who is "genuinely" less fortunate, and who is "disingenuously" less fortunate. I've tutored inner-city children and poor immigrants for free, and I would do it again. I believed that teaching would give me a way to help people rise above their current level.

No more. It reflects badly on me, but the older I get, and the more experience I acquire with the "underprivileged", the more sincerely convinced I am that the vast majority of them deserve to be underprivileged. I'm sorry, but I can't find a rational reason to believe anything else. I've tried to teach them what they need to succeed in life; the vast majority of them will have no truck with it. They don't want to learn about interest rates, or percentages, or any of the other tools necessary for understanding and succeeding in society. Some of them will even counter that the educational system is part of a conspiracy to keep them docile.

I observe and listen to their conversations and their behavior. One day I realized that when they and I were in grade school, they were mocking me because I didn't wear the hip clothes, or because I respected my teachers, or because I did the homework, or... any one of a number of reasons that I didn't fit in. In other words, they were squandering their youths, and mocking those who prepared for adulthood. They have no right in their adulthood to whine that they are underpriviliged; I attended the same schools, lived in the same neighborhoods, and suffered the same disadvantages. My first-grade teacher even decided that, since I was the son of an immigrant mother, I couldn't speak English or read properly — despite the fact that my father had taught me to read when I was four years old. I was assigned to a remedial reading group. That ended the moment my father learned that I had a bad reading grade because I actually pronounced the words (i.e., read it) rather than memorize them from pictures (i.e., followed the then-current educational fashions).

The entire construct of privilege has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. An encounter I had last year illustrates this well. While I was waiting at a bus stop, a woman noticed that I was reading something that looked complicated, so she started up a conversation. Learned that I was a professor of mathematics, she asked a question that must surely come naturally to everyone's mind:

You've never mopped a floor in your life, have you?

I was taken aback somewhat. Finally, I mustered a response. As a matter of fact, I have.

Really? she asked skeptically. When?

First off, my mother made me help clean the house when I was young, I answered. But, I also worked at Hardee's and Wendy's for several years.

Really? she asked, skepticism evident in her voice. She genuinely believed that all professors are the children of privilege, who have never worked a day in their lives, and who don't know what it meant to sweat or to work for their money.

Why shouldn't she? Quite a few professors talk that way, and a number of commentators play up this myth — not because it's the truth, but because it's a useful way to grind political axes.

Blindness
I can sit here and whine about all this, but the truth is that it reflects a growing blindness in my life. I don't know what the source of this blindness is; I have some suspicions, but nothing certain.

Friday, seven students attended the class that (still) doesn't know to look in their notes when they get stuck on their homework. That's less than half the class. The guy with the T-shirt advertising his, ah, "services" didn't show, but another student did.

I could shake my head at the seven or eight students who didn't show up at all, and yes, I did grumble about it inwardly.

Then I realized: Wait. Seven students are here for this class. That means that seven young men and women, for whatever reason, didn't consider it a total waste of their time to sit in my class for one hour on a Friday morning. After all, this is college; they don't have to be here. They could be watching television, or sleeping, or... helping someone wait for Mr. Right, or whatever. Instead, they were copying the notes, and offering answers to the questions. Some of their answers were even correct. :-)

Something similar happened the day before, while teaching a different class. Most of the students attended, asked good questions, and have been doing well on the tests.

Why is it that I think more of the students who don't show, who wear T-shirts with disgusting messages, who live dissolute lives, or who don't bother to look at the notes? Why is it that I don't think of the students who work quietly and patiently? Why do I allow myself to resent the bad students, but I don't feel any gratitude towards those who take me seriously and learn something? As I say, a blindness is coming over me.

Admiration
Because of this, I have a more profound respect for those who teach, scattering year after year the seed of understanding on young minds, and seeing most of their efforts go nowhere. I look at the professors who work year in, year out at the college, and I marvel at their dedication. I've always held some regard for those who teach, but never before I joined their ranks did I realize how important it is to focus on the successes instead of the failures — or even to see the failures as successes: from a certain point of view, introducing complacent freshmen to the real world via the reality of failure is a success. Heck, even giving an F to a senior who would otherwise have graduated, can be considered a success if the senior didn't learn the material, and spent the first half of the semester acting like he didn't need the class. (Yup; I gave such an F.)

Everywhere I've gone, I've heard teachers, principals, professors, and administrators comment on this fact: it's important to focus on the successes. I find this very, very difficult.

Could I do this for the rest of my life? I don't know. I feel as if it requires me to amputate a part of myself that cares about the end result in the student. By this, I mean that I can only care about whether I have done the best I could do; beyond that, I have to let go, and resign myself to the student's cooperation. Perhaps that's part of growing up; one professor here told another, If you want it more than the students do, you want too much.

I'm also realizing that I don't like teaching so much as I like learning. But that's another topic, for another day. In the meantime, our nation is in dire need of good teachers. North Carolina's public schools, for example, needed 11,000 teachers one year, but its colleges only graduated about 3,000. After all these years, I'm fairly certain that's not the life for me. If you think you can handle it, maybe Christ is calling you to it.

Originally drafted: 22nd March 2006 11.39am; completed 25 March 11am.