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

crazy misspellings of grammar-school words, misspellings that the spell checker would catch but for which it could offer no alternative; words repeated, like the pounding of a sledgehammer, nine or ten times in a paragraph; crucial words omitted; batches of words pressed together in the hopes of forming a sentence, like old slivers of soap jammed together for one last shower. There were times I suspected an easy explanation to the whole mess: that the writers had not had their fingers placed on the home keys while they typed.
    Here was my first hard lesson in life as an adjunct professor in the basement of the ivory tower. The students are poignantly desperate for success. Many of those I teach have done poorly in high school; college is not a goal for which they prepared single-mindedly for eighteen years. College is a place they landed in. I teach those whose names don’t come up in the debates about advanced placement courses, adolescent overachievers, and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose high school transcripts show poor attendance, indifferent grades, and blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. But now, shanghaied into college classes because of the demands of the workplace, they have seen the light—in a panicky sort of way. They want to do well. I want them to do well, and I teach subjects about which I am crazily passionate.
    Many nights for the past decade, I have taught in a classroom crackling with positive energy. No matter where I lead, the students follow. If in my literature class I choose to spend an hour on the splendidly written opinion by the Hon. John M. Woolsey in the case of United States of America v. One Book Called Ulysses (“. . . whilst in many places the effect of ‘Ulysses’ on the reader is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac” [the students don’t get it at first; “emetic” throws them for a loop until I prod the memories of the young and not-so-young moms: “Ipecac!” they cry]), or if in my college composition class we detour off into such an arcane point of grammar as restrictive vs. nonrestrictive relative clauses, the students stay with me. On those nights when I am in the teaching zone, the class will follow where I lead.
    For a while, I thought I was all the legendary charismatic teachers rolled into one: Mr. Chips and Conrack and Jaime Escalante and Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. I assumed my results would match theirs. But now I better understand the immense hazard-strewn distance between teaching and learning. On any given night, I may very well be entertaining, informative, illuminating, and even inspirational on the subject of essay writing, but ultimately my gyrations are those of a semaphore signalman on the horizon, and it’s every man for himself on a dark battlefield navigating past indolence, despair, fear of failure, fear of success, lack of foundational skills, lack of time, lack of aptitude, the allure of Internet surfing, lack of sustained interest. It’s hard to teach writing for the same reasons it’s hard to change any human behavior at any time. The students’ essays are poor for the same reason my sporadic efforts to learn French have invariably stalled. Though she owns books and floor mats and has taken lessons at the YMCA, my wife can do no yoga.
    When the essay that prompted this book was published in the Atlantic Monthly, education-minded bloggers were bent out of shape by my characterization of the students’ writing as being so profoundly poor. Alex Reid, an associate professor of English and professional writing at the State University of New York at Cortland, wrote that he supposed “what makes such students the ‘worst’ is that they are distant from a certain ideological notion of students. They are perhaps unlikely to share in conventional notions of literacy and academic discourse.” 4
    My notion of