Breakthrough Writer

12 Biggest Challenges of Being a College Composition Instructor

In an earlier post, I analyzed the 10 Qualities of a Good College Composition Instructor. Now I want to look at the 10 biggest challenges I've had to face during the last 25 years.

1. Getting students to read the assigned text. On a good day, 50% of your students come to class prepared, meaning they've read the assigned text. More commonly, though, about 10-15% of them come to class having read the assignment. I always start the class by asking who's read the book or the essay. It's demoralizing to know only 3 out of 30 students have read the text. But then I remember when I was a student, there were a lot of assignments I didn't read. I was no different.

2. Because a lot of my students speak English as a second language, I have to remember to slow down and abstain from my favorite polysyllabic words, unless I define them. 

3. Grading an essay in the student's presence that is half-baked, done on the fly, and is so egregious in so many ways it doesn't seem fair to put more effort into the student's essay than the student. I usually kick these students out of my office and tell them to come back when they have something that's worth my attention. But I do this in a manner that is less blunt than I've just described.

4. Competing for the students' attention. They've got hunger issues (because they don't manage their time well), relationship obsessions, text-messaging compulsions, money worries, and a host of other concerns that put me, their cynosure, on the back burner. I have to sell them my stuff every day and make them believe I've got something they need. 

5. I always have to remember that the guy who teaches my English class is a better, smarter, wiser, more fascinating, more magnanimous person than I am, the morose schlub who traipses around my house in a tattered robe with a gloomy disposition. It's liberating to be the Exciting Super Smart Professor for a couple of hours and being cognizant of this helps me appreciate what I do on days I feel discouraged. 

6. Not letting student praise and fawning get to your head. The majority of time students are being obsequious to butter you up for a better grade. So I try not to believe that I'm as grandiose as I'm often treated.

7. Remember the humble fact that students often don't respect the institution of education. Often students will see me five years after taking my class and they'll ask, "So do you still teach at El Camino College?" Their tone suggests that I should have "moved on" to a "real job" by now.

8. Grading illiterate papers infects your brain with misspellings and elephantine syntax so that you unconsciously imitate it.  

9. Grading stacks of essays stirs a relentless, voracious appetite resulting in weight gain.

10. For the most part my students are decent. But there are some who are willing to pay others to write their essays or they find ways to plagiarize that are so cunning even the most alert instructor is fooled. 

11. Transferring my lectures into real life. It's great to be able to lecture to a class of 40 students. But I find it deleterious to my relationships to go into lecture mode during a conversation, a debate, or some negotiation or other, for I come across as arrogant, non-spontaneous, affected, and solipsistic. 

12. It's very difficult to maintain strict standards on an endearing albeit pitiable student for whom you find yourself in conflict: You want to be "nice," but you don't want to cripple the student by creating a flexible, forgiving environment that is completely the opposite of the real harsh world. Forgiving students' trespasses is like giving them a black belt in jiu-jitsu and then sending them into a match against a real master who immediately destroys them. The adage is true: You sometimes have to be cruel to be kind. 

10 Qualities of a Good College Composition Instructor

 

1. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to teach. You must find a teaching method that is compatible with your own personality.
2. Students are smart. They can smell B.S. a mile away. Be authentic and have a real passion for what you do. Your students can smell not only B.S. but boredom, lethargy, and complacency and if they detect this in you, they will eat you alive.
3. Follow Oscar Wilde’s edict: “The first duty in life is to assume a pose.” By this, he does not mean be a phony. Find an identity, a larger-than-life character, for your students to hang on to. If you don’t, they will project their own image of you and what they project is never as effective as the identity you create. Always be in control of the message.
4. Related to Principle #3, leave your pedestrian personality at home. In class, be your most exaggerated self, one filled with huge passions and a gargantuan appetite for your subject, so that your enthusiasm with be contagious.
5. Know your students don’t want to sit in class and hear you talk about composition. Therefore, you must impose your will on them and find a way to persuade them to believe that what you’re talking about is the most compelling point of their attention. This requires immense energy and preparation. Not all are cut out to go muster the sheer will that can dominate their students’ attention and imagination.
6. Related to Principle #6, always assume your students are bored with your subject and their minds are on other things: food, relationships, job, whatever. To win their attention, always use a grotesque, hyperbolic anecdote (painting yourself as a hero or an innocent victim) and find a way to transition the story to your lesson plan.
7. Always assume your students know nothing. Just because they’re in freshman composition, for example, doesn’t mean they know how to write a paragraph or distinguish a clause from a phrase.
8. Always remember that your vocabulary of 200,000 words is bigger than the average American’s, which is about 20,000 words. Write down or explain any “vocabulary” word you might use.
9. Whenever possible, make them fearful of their ignorance, for example telling them that a composition with as many as 3 comma splices or fragment sentences will be discarded at the university level and that these errors are considered so egregious that students guilty of these errors will be escorted off campus by the college police.
10. Never accept late essays. Tolerating late essays always encourages other, more grievous irresponsible behavior, which will contribute to classroom chaos.      

Tribalists and Cosmopolitans

The Ten Signs of Tribalism, (tribalists only associate “with their own kind”)

1.    You see the world in the oversimplistic “Us Vs. Them” template.
2.    You interpret history and current events through a screen or prism of narcissistic self-interest.
3.    You are closed to other cultures as you cling to your cultural myopia.
4.    You suffer from a condition known as provincialism, which means you deem people from your “province” superior to others.
5.    You operate on self-image of victimization and entitlement. 
6.    You have a reductionary view of the world, which means you reduce all current events and history to
7.    You constantly “beat the drums” of tribal self-exaltation that serves the purpose of therapeutic self-affirmation
8.    You drink the “Kool-Aid,” which means you believe everything that is said by your tribal leaders.
9.    You embrace paranoid conspiracy theories.
10.    You embrace the romanticized historic “narratives” that show you and “your people” belong to the “pure” tribe before it was “contaminated” by “outsiders.”

The Ten Signs of the Cosmopolitan (the opposite of a tribalist)

1.    You are exposed to the world’s diversity, which defies stereotypes.
2.    You thrive on “café society,” a lifestyle that is a synthesis or hodgepodge of cultural influences. Thus you embrace an eclectic mix of influences.
3.    Your strong identity allows you to mix with diverse groups of people without feeling threatened.
4.    You see more unity and common ground in the human condition regardless of who people are or where they’re from.
5.    You are skeptical of self-serving propaganda and the “Kool-Aid drinkers” who follow it.
6.    You are open-minded to ideas that contradict your long-held assumptions.
7.    You are driven by intellectual curiosity so that you thrive on exploring new ideas.
8.    You’re more interested in understanding people than being “superior” to them.
9.    You have an intense distaste for those who fancy themselves as cosmopolitans or “hipsters” as they look down at “the peasants” or the “bridge and tunnel” or the “tribalists” because their snobbishness is what precisely makes them tribalistic.
10.    For you being cosmopolitanism is not a pose to appear trendy or hip but a sensibility of humility combined with genuine curiosity and reverence for life.

Why Going to College Is Probably a Good Idea

In 1979 when I was seventeen, my father, recently divorced from my mother, picked me up in his silver Peugeot to take me to his apartment for dinner. On the drive he asked me if I had any plans for my future. I told him that at the gym I had met a couple of garbage men who said they had connections for me if I should ever want to work with them. I was tempted to take them up on their offer. After all, I had no specific college aspirations. And the thought of making thirty grand a year, a handsome salary in the 1970s, and being finished with my job by eleven A.M. appealed to me.

Shifting into fifth gear, my father looked at the road ahead of him with a knowing calm, then said: “There’s no way you’re going to become a garbage man. ”

“Why not?”

“Because someday you’ll be at a cocktail party and someone will ask you what you do. What are you going to tell him, that you’re a garbage man?”

That was the end of the discussion. My father knew that even though I was a confused adolescent full of sloth and harebrained schemes, that ultimately my vanity, my pride and my class consciousness would steer me clear from becoming a garbage man.

But my foolishness persisted. Six months later as we gathered ingredients inside a supermarket for another dinner inside my dad’s apartment, I told him I knew people at my gym who worked as cashiers at this same grocery chain. The money was good, the benefits were decent and the work seemed relatively easy.

“You’ll never become a grocery clerk,” my father said with serene confidence.

“Why not?”

He stopped pushing the shopping cart and told me to take a good look at all the employees with their box cutters, their feather dusters and their slack-jawed, lizard-eye expressions. Were these the kind of people I wanted to hang out with for the next forty to fifty years of my life? Were these the type of people whom I aspired to converse with and to befriend? Indeed not. These were Lifers, mushy-brained cookie-cutter personalities whose banal, predictable, culturally-bankrupt existence would drive me to existential despair.

However simplistic my father’s caricature description of the supermarket Lifers, I was suddenly averse to the idea of working all of my adult years at the generic supermarket chain. I decided to take my father’s advice to go to college and study English for a career in technical writing.  The vocation was a modest one and it was doubtful I’d make as much money as a garbage man, but there was no shame in telling someone at a cocktail party that I was a technical writer--or a college English instructor.