Free Professor X by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

went off with them to the copy machine. We were going to use the workshop format, with everyone looking at and helping to revise several of the submissions.
    I had told them to write from personal experience but warned them that everyone in class would see their work. I also warned them about the pitfalls of writing workshops. “I’ve taken a boatload of college classes in my time,” I said, “and only in writing workshops have I seen people cry.”
    Not every student’s piece would be a success, I knew, but I wanted to share the joy in real time with those students who had made progress.
    I returned to the classroom and handed each student a pile of photocopies. “Keep them in order, so we don’t get confused,” I said crisply. I gave instruction. I had wavered on whether or not to have the students read their essays aloud; I decided not to, for the time being. “Everybody read with a pen or pencil in hand. If great language jumps out at you, note it down. If something is unclear, note it down. If you have questions after reading a paragraph, jot them down. Let’s read through the pile and come back and do individual pieces.”
    I knew what was certain to happen. Inspired by my passion for writing, the students had labored mightily, and turned in the best work of their lives. I would see that they had made small but discernible progress.
    How I would love, dear reader, to deliver a different report from what I am about to write. I would love to say how blown away I was by their work. I would love to concede that the grammar was rough, and that as first drafts the essays needed lots of spackling and releveling but that we had tapped into their experiences and the stuff they had written was pretty neat. That’s what I thought would happen. I pictured us as being comfortably swaddled in a quilt of narrative. I had worked hard to teach them. They seemed eager to learn. Surely the lot of us would progress somewhere. It had to be. We were all playing our roles, as though we had played them thousands of times before.
    Our narrative had derailed. The story took an unexpected twist.
    The papers were even worse.
    Once, after I’d been instructing for a few years, I eavesdropped for the first time on another English 101 class. The instructor was a very experienced woman of about my age who had seen it all. She was rather a classic adjunct type. Slim and intense, unsmiling, she wore a long brown skirt with as much material as a schooner’s sail, mustard-colored tights that pilled, naïve-looking flat shoes. She wore no wedding ring. Her voice was throaty, from years of smoking or teaching. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d had a tough go of it. Her first-night speeches to her class were remarkably similar to mine, but she did have one ringing catchphrase all her own.
    â€œPlease do me a favor,” she said to the class. “Don’t hand in garbage.”
    I hadn’t told my students that. I’m not sure it would have mattered.
    For there is no other word but garbage for what my students handed in. My older students did all right, I suppose, but even their work had fallen off. It was bad. When I categorize the lot of assignments as barely literate, that’s an average; some papers were not literate at all, and I’d be hard-pressed to say what exactly, in their compare-contrast essays, was being compared or why. Words were randomly assembled and weirdly spelled, and does no elementary or high school teach the capitalization of the first person singular pronoun anymore? Some essays seemed, in their obscure reasoning, to make connections that would be apparent only to a lunatic. Was it the best work my students could do? That’s a slippery question. The fact that they handed it in seems to indicate that, yes, on some level, it was the best they could do. But scattered liberally through the poor writing was much evidence of lack of care: