Wake Forest football coach Jim Grobe could have left the university for the University of Arkansas and gotten PAID handsomely for abandoning his players. Any Wake Forest football player who wanted to do the same, however, would have been PENALIZED by the NCAA — forced to sit out one season. Frank Deford comments on the inequity.
Just another problem with the NCAA, “which is,” as Deford notes, “essentially to college athletic departments, what the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce is to casinos.”
Everyone I know who is a good writer is also a good reader. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, then, helps to explain why so many of the students I teach are (to put it bluntly) bad writers.
The article reports on a study released by the National Endowment for the Arts called “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence.”
Among the findings: in 2006, 15- to 24-year olds in America spent just seven minutes on voluntary reading (including online reading) per day during the week and 10 minutes a day on weekends. On the other hand, they spend 2-2.5 hours a day watching television.
There it is.
Somewhere along the way, probably in high school, college students learn that “good” writing means long sentences and big words. But in my experience, most students don’t have the linguistic dexterity to pull this off. It just becomes an overwrought jumble of words and punctuation.
Not that I can do much better myself, but I do try to take the advice of William Zinsser in On Writing Well to cut everything I write IN HALF.
I was reminded of the strength of spare prose in a review of Run by Ann Patchett in the September 30th issue of the New York Times Book Review. Reviewer Leah Hager Cohen writes, “Among the many things to admire about Ann Patchett is the lack of frivolity in her prose. She prefers nouns and verbs to crowded flights of lyrical adjectives and adverbs, and she doesn’t dally excessively over a pretty phrase. Patchett is more hammer and nails than glue and lace; small wonder, then, that her books tend to be such solid, weight-bearing constructions.”
Although I doubted their innocence at the outset, thank goodness that justice was done in the end in the infamous Duke lacrosse case. It’s hard to imagine the disruption experienced by the Duke players and coach (exiled from Duke to Bryant College — whatever that is). I couldn’t help but marvel at how unique the circumstances were that produced this case: a white District Attorney, needing to pander to the black population for an election victory, brings a flimsy case against white college students at a prestigious university on behalf of a black stripper.
I also couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened to the players if they were poor minorities (or poor whites, for that matter) represented by overworked public defenders. They might have ended up like Darryl Hunt, who was wrongly imprisoned for 19.5 years when he was only 19 years old, or other innocent individuals like Calvin Johnson (15 years in jail), James Curtis Giles (24 years), Travis Hayes (10 years), et alia. (Coincidentally, the documentary “The Trials of Darryl Hunt” will premier on HBO at 8pm on April 26th.)
Had a conversation with a good colleague the other day who marveled at the fact that the knowledge we are trying to “sell” students in class is the only commodity that people willingly shortchange themselves on. That is, most students pay full price for their courses but want to do as little as possible in them. Have fewer assignments? Fine by them. Less reading? Even better. Cancel class? Fine by them. My colleague said it’s like paying full price for a Coke and getting only a half full cup — and being happy about it.
It’s easy for professors to get upset about how students devalue the educational commodity we think we are providing. I get upset about it myself. But the reality is this: the commodity that college students are buying for their tuition money is not an EDUCATION (knowledge, understanding, insight, or anything like that). The commodity the students are buying in each class is a grade and a certain number of credits, and over the course of their undergraduate careers, a degree.
Herein lies a good deal of the misunderstanding between professors and students: what we think we’re selling and what they think they’re buying are two different things.
I was reminded the other day at a teaching seminar of this truism: Students may not remember the substance of what you teach, but they will remember how you made them feel.
Now, I’m no proponent of “emotivism” as a moral philosophy, but I do know that the professors who took the time to make me feel like I was someone worth talking to made all the difference in my own occupational choice.
Are you feeling me?
I guess I took the summer off. I didn’t mean to, but teaching summer school wiped out 8 weeks, then I had 4 weeks to do 12 weeks worth of other work. A couple of brief points by way of getting back into things:
1. I (heart) Montreal. Spent a week up there with my boy, Shattuck Slim, at a conference and LOVED it. I also developed a fondness for The Netherlands while there. What I learned: in French, a bow tie is called “noeud papillon” — knotted butterfly. Beautiful. Thanks to Nadia at Harry Rosen for that.
2. I (heart) Ana Ivanovic, who won the Coupe Rogers in Montreal the week after I was there.
3. Now that classes have started again this fall, I have to ask: why do so many students refer to any book as a “novel”?
“Senator Hillary Clinton is being criticized because she recently called today’s college kids lazy and uninformed. A spokesperson for college kids said, ‘Whatever, lady from TV.”
–Conan O’Brien
On the occasion of graduation, an excerpt from Alan Lightman’s novel, Reunion (in which the narrator attends his 30th college graduation reunion):
“Young people explode with their discovery of the world and the newness of life. They sleep and sleep in their tiny cocoons, and suddenly one day, perhaps in one moment, as in the moment Juliana first kissed me, suddenly a young person wakes up and finds the universe tilting and gasping in front of him. Infinity. So many things are happening for the first time. What young people don’t realize is that so much is happening for the last time as well. The world is both opening and closing at once.
The first kiss, the first ecstasy of love, the play of light in the trees on a particular fall day, the endless flood of strength in our biceps and thighs. We have the illusion that all of this will happen again and again. In a way this falseness of youth is even more painful than the branching channels ahead. For the young are very much aware of the moment of the first kiss, the first ecstasy of love, and so on. They are keenly aware. Their terrible miscalculation is thinking that these moments will repeat in the infinity of time, that their bodies and minds will hold.”
Enjoy the rest of your lives, Graduates of the Class of 2006!
Recent interaction with a student of mine:
Student: Did you try T’s tennis racket?
Me: Yes. It didn’t feel quite right, though. It’s very heavy and at the same time very head light.
Student: Well, Wilson is coming out with a new line of women’s rackets, aren’t they?
Me: Thanks alot.
