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

for college. She was a true minivan mom, the picture of unruffled composure. The personal essays she would hand in that semester portrayed all the complexities of suburban living. She wrote of Brownie troops and uniform swaps and soccer tournaments; she wrote of brokering complex favors with three other mothers so that none of their boys would have to miss an optional T-ball practice; she wrote of the struggle to make and serve dinner around four competing sets of extracurricular activities. With her youngest about to leave, she had gotten a job coordinating training sessions for medical and clerical staff of a hospital. She wrote how nervous she was about it, but I knew she would do fine. Compared to managing a household, taking guff from condescending surgeons and disgruntled X-ray techs would be a breeze.
    The tattooed woman and the hospital administrator wrote nice essays, but let’s not go crazy. Their essays were organized and cogent, but their writing was small. This was not truly college writing, if we define that animal as writing that manifests the intellect. Their writing was polite and muted and almost Shaker-like in its simplicity and barrenness. It’s a gift to be simple, and the artist may rattle on about how difficult it is to achieve simplicity, but shouldn’t college writing flex some cognitive muscle? “Indefensible”—that’s the sort of word I expect to see in a college student’s paper. “Apex.” “Trenchant.” “Heretical.” “Casuistry” (when in doubt, I always worked “casuistry” into my college papers). “Facile.” “Unassailable.” “Axiomatic.” Chewy words. Words that slow the jaw, like jerked beef. My professors no doubt caught the whiff of the undergraduate blowhard in my writing. But we are, after all, in the realm of undergraduates. Isn’t it more appropriate for an undergraduate to wrestle with bulky concepts than to not have a notion of their very existence?
    It’s a good question, but I was facing a bigger one: what to do about the students who not only couldn’t write, but who seemed to have no business in a classroom at all. How could I hope to teach them? Where would I begin? It would take me a year just to make up the deficiencies: a year of five-day-a-week meetings and six-hour classes, a year during which there was no expectation that we would actually get to doing college-level work, a year in which we would start again at the very beginning.
    The enormity of the task was breathtaking.
    I pictured it: “All right, everybody. Listen up. A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought.”
    I read the essays again, drank my coffee, and went to bed. The next day my wife asked me, rather cheerfully, how my students were.
    â€œNot so hot,” I said blandly. Of course, that didn’t quite cover it. “Actually, they’re kind of terrible. They’re bad writers.”
    The matter dropped. Over the course of the next few days, I thought about their work. Disjointed sentences—sentence fragments, really—swam before my eyes as I mowed our compact patch of grass, fiddled with the downspouts, freshened and fluffed the mulch around the boxy hedges. I may have worked much more industriously than was usual; the pile of bad work in my briefcase filled me with a sort of buzzing nervous energy. I didn’t want to think about it. I started to resent the amount of time the students and their bad prose were weighing upon my mind. I watched with alarm as my per-hour teaching rate dropped.
    A door had been opened to me, and I found myself surveying a landscape as drawn by M. C. Escher (that old favorite of undergraduates), in which the laws of logic and physical reality ceased to function, the sort of place where circular staircases ascended infinitely and fish transformed into birds and college looked a lot like junior high.
    But I sang a happy tune