Anger

Just met with a student--I meet with all my students for one-on-one conferences before a paper is due; I just vastly prefer it to handed-in drafts, and the small sizes of my classes and the staggered schedule of due-dates make it a feasible practice.

The paper topic was a simple one, since this is the lower-level of the two required freshman composition courses--I like to make the first paper easy, so my kids don't A. vapor-lock on an assignment they can't wrap their terrified heads around, and B. totally screw up their GPAs and decide abruptly to quit college and join the service industry. Some of these kids are training to be nurses, and we need nurses, dammit--they have to stay here and learn.

The topic, as I say, was simple: Describe a moment in your life that changed your view of how you communicate with others. (I stress in class, by the way, that we need not get Lifetime Movie of the Week moments of death-bed conversations or jailhouse confessions--that these pieces can be light and funny--but in general, students seem to have no trouble telling me about how they finally worked up the courage to tell the school counsellor that Daddy was touching them in their 'bathing-suit parts.' Such openness is unnerving for all kinds of reasons, but it does make for a less-than-boring grading experience.)

Anyway--this student had not gone for such a moment--instead, he described the moment he spoke his first word. Which, and this touches my very soul, was "Book"--as he held up a Berenstein Bears tome for his mother to read to him. Love that. And it was a finely written piece--I've already drilled into their heads to keep their writing simple and straightforward--and they've taken happily to that advice, and as a result, very few of them are producing crap, which I consider a major triumph for freshmen.

I made my usual witty and incisive editorial comments, then told him, in summing up, that he should be pleased, that "It's a beautifully written piece." He took a long moment and couldn't look at me. "What?" I asked. He answered, "It's just that...I've never had an English teacher tell me something I wrote was beautiful--or even good." And I smiled and said, "Well, maybe they weren't paying attention." And he nodded, and looked slightly tearfully suprised and pleased, and left as quickly as possible, muttering "I really appreciate hearing that..."

I'm pissed. What the hell happened to this kid? Where were his teachers and what were they thinking? It was good--and good writing doesn't come out of nowhere. He must have done good work before--why wasn't he told this? This poor kid thinks he sucks, and he doesn't--and that's a piece of cruelty I'm angry about. Somewhere out there, there's an English teacher or two who needs a swift kick to the sack (or, if a woman, a cutting remark about, say, her weight.) My job should not have to include teaching kids that they're not dumb. And yet too much of it is just that. Grrrrrr...