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* Reprinted from Change , Vol. 5, No. 7 (September 1973), pp. 5657, 64.
TWO YEARS ago I left the shelter of an Ivy League university to teach at a community college in New York. I was neither populist enough, Marxist enough, nor level-headed enough not to feel a pang of shame the first time I awkwardly pinned on the cardboard nameplate at a national convention that read Staten Island Community College instead of the name of the Ivy League college. The Ivy League school had been permeated with a historically developed educational mission which seemed inextricably linked with its very age: to preserve and develop knowledge and wisdom, to foster excellence. Standing on the hill which overlooked the city beneath, teaching in buildings which were a record of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history, reading in libraries surrounded by thousands upon thousands of books, walking on lawns where old trees grew, cut off from the world by the black iron fences which ringed the campus, their sections donated by the classes of 1880, 1882… I had many reminders of this mission.
At SICC the black fences and old trees of the Ivy League have been replaced by nondescript chain-links painted city-silver and by scrawny saplings. The school where I now earn a living (I never thought of it that way in the Ivy League) seems to have been plopped down, not on a hill overlooking the city, but on some of those anonymous bumpy hillocks which line our typical American superhighways. When I first saw its buildings in the wrong light, they looked like the facades of pancake houses, hamburger stands, or Dunkin' Donuts; many of them are temporary trailers, designed to serve not the past but the prescription for survival of our time: change. The college assumed its present direction, form, funding, and curriculum not from the nineteenth century but from the events of recent history: the burning cities of the 1960's, administrators locked in well-paneled offices, scholars screwed to their cubicles in the massive cold stacks of Ivy League universities. A new urgency, a new technology, a new egalitarianism rather than an old sense of continuity with the scholarly past provide the reasons for this college's existence. Chain-link fences are easy to cut and the admissions office here helps people cut them and get in. I see more clearly now than I did two years ago that the black iron fences of the Ivy League were symbolic of the admissions office there whose purpose, of course, was not to admit but to reject students. I like the looks of the community college better these days than I did two years ago.
Ten percent of the English department faculty at SICC, of which I am a member, have come from teaching in the Ivy League, and perhaps another twenty-five percent have come from institutions in other leagues of nearly equal stature. Given the trends in higher education in America today, I see the movement of teachers out of the Ivy League into the community college league continuing, and so my experiences on this journey may be typical of many.
The influential members of my new department are not among those who have been through the fires of publishing “important” books which help to shape the way the rest of us look at language and literature. Instead, most of them identify themselves as “teachers.” Most of these people fall into two categories: those who tend to take an impersonal, empirical, task-oriented approach to teaching and talk about “standards,” and those who tend to be more romantic, more personal, subjective, process-oriented and talk about “releasing energy.” On the whole I would say that both groups, tempered by the students they teach in common, are less shamanistic about their teaching than were my former Ivy League colleagues.
The pervasive questions raised about teaching in the Ivy League had to do with the discipline: How do we approach a particular text or problem? The pervasive questions posed in the community college tend to be centered on students: How can we reach them? Should we teach literature at all, given their apparent needs?
The students. Rather than talk in abstract terms about them, I'd like to cite two student responses to courses I gave, one from the Ivy League school, the other from the community college.
The first response, a clipping of a New Yorker cartoon, came from a graduate of the Ivy League school who had taken a seminar on Walt Whitman I had offered there to twenty selected juniors. The cartoon shows Whitman looking rather morose at a bar. A well-dressed gentleman at the other end says: “Who is he? He keeps muttering that he doesn't hear America singing anymore.” The student accompanied the clipping with a neatly written letter in which she said: “… in case you missed it, I thought I should send it on to you. I think it expresses a great deal of what we were struggling with that semester!” And after detailing her plans for the future, which included taking an M. A. in English and American literature at the University of Leicester, she concluded with an admonition: “Beware of old men with gray beards; they often mistake ideals for wisdom.” Both the letter and the cartoon express qualities which I found in most Ivy League students but do not find in abundance at SICC: a pervasive sense of irony, coolness in expression, politeness, gentility, good taste. Very un-Whitmanlike qualities, these. Also an inability to deal in meaningful terms with the failure of the promise of American life to pay off and all that that implies. New Yorker slickness does not work here. I think she missed the whole point of the course.
Contract the cartoon and her method of approach with the poem written by my SICC student, one of the forty people in a nonselective sophomore course that he took because he was forced to by the demands of his curriculum and because it fit the right time slot for him. Whitman's name is mispelled five times in four different ways; the poet does not deign to capitalize the first letter of each line; the poem is not punctuated; it is written in a childish scrawl, so childish indeed that some of its phrases are untranslatable. The paper on which the poem was mailed had been crumpled, and it did not come with a “cover letter” obliquely expressing the student's sense of what he gained from the course in ordinary, discursive prose. Nevertheless, I like the poem.
Break the bars of the prison
Waltson says
Break the bars of all
prisons Walt Wittman says
of all the prisoners
languisurshesingising
prisonisons of stoned
prisons of forgotten
prisons of alone
prisons of tomorrow
prisons of today
may all prison bars
be torn away
I live to see the green
grass of spring be grown
and live the life of freedom
nearsearching for my own
of Walt witzman you gave
me the strength to carry on
the strenghthth to find my
place in the sun
Oh Walt Witman
may your soul be blessed
in heaven it loved
the soul of a junkie
searching for another fix
the soul of another whore
searching for another trick
the searching of another
alcoholic searching for another
drink
the searchiching of another
unused mother for the father
the searching of another
soldier for love
and the searching of the
world for love,
and the searching of God for peace
Oh Walt Whitman you
are a bard
And a bard is only second
I to God to enchant ones
soul
and seeing the spring green
of a million soul
and wondering why
the soul can't be as pure
as spring's fresh green
of the grass and
trees
of Walt Witman
I close my song
of a world that
goes on an on
blessing to thee
pure soul Walt
Wittmon
As part of my preparation for class, one day near the start of the term I observed the student who later wrote that poem, and I took some notes. They read in part: “Red pants, slim, wispy mustache, the epitome of facelessness. He gets up at 5:30 a.m. to do homework, comes to school, works at Sears in the afternoon, goes to sleep at 8:30. His mother, he says, thinks he works too hard. He says that last term he did not learn anything in his English class. His instructor thought he could interest the class in writing about such things as a corncob pipe and a smelly black thing he brought in one day. They had to guess what that smelly black thing was. It turned out to be a seasponge. While the class tried to talk about the sponge, Fred looked out the window… an adolescent, pubescent baby, innocent, ignorant of everything except the need to get into a four-year school and then law school. He stutters badly, has upswinging, expressionless eyes. No apparent curiosity about anything. A strange and fragile kid, like a lot of the others.”
My first reaction was to dislike this student, and the feeling intensified when I discovered that he hadn't done any of the reading for the course until we were well into the fourth week and that he would submit no papers on time. But as the term progressed, my opinion of him changed. I found that his apparent lack of curiosity was a mask veiling a real desire to know. Although his class comments were always stated contentiously, I came to believe that was an appropriate style for expressing the powerlessness he felt while grappling with the ideas we were exploring. And reading now the poem written months after the course had ended, postmarked from a “good” four-year college, I not only discover the misspellings, the punctuation and grammatical errors, the uncouthness of its handwriting, but also I see the imaginative transformation of “forgotten” and “alone” into nouns; the use of “green grass” and “spring” in ways that would have made sense to Whitman; the internal rhyme; and above all the sense of commitment with conviction to Whitman's drift. I think, too, that the fact that the student took the trouble to put those scrawled sheets in a dirty envelope and mail them shows that he absorbed well one of the great lessons of “Song of Myself,” that old poem whose first word is “I” and last word “you”: the lesson that “whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud.” He got the point of the course.
One needs more than sympathy or Whitman's faith in the common people to teach well at a community college, although I am convinced that without these qualities there isn't even a fighting chance. What one needs most of all is the capacity to meet the student where he is, the patience to help him discover where he is, the willingness to see oneself not only in relation to subject matter and ways of thinking of the discipline but also in relation to strange and fragile people who happen to be students. My basic assumption as a new community college teacher is that I am there for the people in my class as well as for my subject matter, rather than primarily for the subject matter. I try to meet my students through the subject matter, and its meaning derives from our relationship with it.
The problem of discovering how I could meet students realistically was more easily resolved in the Ivy League than at the community college. Not only did the general aura of the place and its sense of history help both me and the students give our attention to knowledge, but we also shared certain important characteristics. Chief of these, I suppose, was that we had received early rewards for exceptional intellectual performance and hence felt apart from the rest of American society, and on that sociological or psychological ground we could meet. But at SICC most of my students are that anti-intellectual portion of American society from which I feel and am estranged.
At the Ivy League school, aware that we were living in a time of accelerating change, of much confusion, uncertainty, anxiety, I thought of myself as a kind of pontificator—a bridge builder, to go back to the root meaning of that word—between the human core of the literature we read and the students. Of course I was “professional,” immersed in my “field,” American literature, and I attempted to transmit a sense of the discipline to the students. I called myself a “contextual critic” but understood that my real work was that of a humanist, concerned with what Faulkner called “the truth of the human heart.” My subject matter (the text or problem we were considering) was usually not an end in itself but a means toward living out the values of the discipline, and this is what I wanted to transmit and exemplify.
I think of myself in the same terms at SICC and find that even given the great gulf in background, class, values, ability, and aspirations that separates me from most of my students, we can meet when the literature or problems we confront together concern the common human core of our lives—birth, love, suffering, joy, death. Of course, because many of my students—perhaps forty percent in a typical class—do not seem to be able to read, write, or speak at a level which most of us would call literate, I must supplement my general humanistic goal with the aim of helping each student read, write, and speak a little better at the end of the course than he did at its start.
All of this has changed my behavior as a teacher in several ways: I spend much more time than I did before observing the students, listening to them, reading their work. (This year each course my department offers meets four hours a week rather than the conventional three, which gives me more time to do that than I had before.) Since in general my students have been academic failures, they are easier to meet on nonacademic, rather than academic, terms. We digress from the text or problem under consideration more often now than I would have tolerated in the Ivy League. I would have thought of those digressions as unproductive rap sessions years ago. I use the fads of our time much more than I did before as a source of classroom material. Among these—and I suppose I am conservative in considering them faddish—is the use of technological aids: tape recorders, films, videotape. I've used W.C. Field's “The Barber Shop” as a way of getting into Benito Cereno , something I would not have done in the Ivy League. It worked, I think. I try to be as “open” and nonjudgmental as possible.
I suppose that a philosophical basis for what I am saying can be found in the old utilitarian principle for moral action. As Stuart Hampshire recently put it in The New York Review of Books : “When assessing the value of institutions, habits, conventions, manners, rules and laws [the classroom situation] and also when considering the merits of individual actions or policies, turn your attention to the actual or probable states of mind of persons who are or will be affected by them. That is all you need to consider in your assessments. In a final analysis nothing counts but the states of mind, and perhaps more narrowly, the states of feeling of persons…”
Teaching, especially teaching in a community college, is a moral action. But observation of my students has convinced me that something in addition to “states of mind” or “states of feeling” does count: commitment to knowledge, wisdom, whatever I can appropriate of that inheritance from the past which the Ivy League school carries in its being. The student who wrote that paean expressing his own sympathy for the downtrodden had taken Whitman as his own and would have been worse off had he not done so. The closer I bring myself to Whitman's spirit, the better I'll be able to deliver what both my former Ivy League students and my new community college students need.
Staten Island Community College
© 1973 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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