A Teacher Remembers a Former Student
Steven may have long forgotten Prof. K.
Prof. K. has never forgotten Steven. When Prof. K. alienates her Woke friends
on social media, it's because of Steven. When Prof. K. shouts at the New York
Times, it's often because of Steven. Years later, Prof. K. still tinkers
with key moments. "Should I have … " "What if I had … "
trying to figure out how to rewrite history so that Steven passes the class.
A casual observer would resort to the
word "average" to describe him. Steven was average height, about
5'9". He didn't have the sickly thinness of the kids doing opioids. He
wasn't, as too many students increasingly were, morbidly obese. Steven had the
kind of face that would suit a newscaster or a juror or someone you'd want your
daughter to marry. Not handsome enough for trouble; not ugly enough for pity or
rejection. He wore the American uniform: blue jeans, t-shirts, baseball caps.
The clues that abused kids telegraphed
might be invisible to others, but not to Prof. K. There was that flicker of
wariness in the eyes, that stance and those gestures spring-loaded with fight-or-flight
rapid response. There were the constant apologies – "I'm sorry!" – and
the constant challenges – "Oh yeah? Who says? Why?"
Steven gave off no whiff of trauma. When
he leaned back against his chair and relaxed, his facial, arm, back, and leg
muscles all looked easy and slack. He got along well with other students. His
clothes were clean and new and he never smelled as if he had slept on a park
bench and had no access to a shower, a washing machine, or an indoor toilet. He
arrived, at a leisurely pace, on time, and lingered after to class to socialize
with friends. He didn't have the look of someone struggling uphill through a
wind tunnel as did those self-supporting students rushing to and from jobs.
Someone, probably two loving parents, was paying Steven's way.
Steven entered the writing class ahead
of some of his classmates. Prof. K. hoped that someday she'd write a letter of
recommendation placing Steven as a white-collar office worker, an elementary
school teacher, or a nurse. These were the kind of jobs her students looked
forward to. Such jobs were better than their parents' jobs. These careers,
these futures, were their American Dream.
Students produced a writing sample on
the first day. These writing samples were one of the best things Prof. K. did. They
were so, well – they were so wonderful, that she couldn't bring herself
to throw them away. Even today, when she suspects that Woke hegemony, combined
with cratering college enrollment means that she
might never teach again, she has yet to recycle years worth of "first day
writing samples."
When she is tempted to lose faith in
humanity, she thinks of those writing samples. "I want to serve my country
as a police officer." "My dream is to heal." "I love my
father and I want to have a relationship with my children like the relationship
I have with him." "I have been out of school for a while, working in
the corporate world, but I really want to learn more and I am so excited about
being a returning college student." Even students who would later do
poorly, because life intervened and they hadn't the skills to defeat setbacks
and stay on track, wrote papers full of hopes, full of dreams, and full of
promises to the best parts of themselves.
The first day writing samples weren't
just about gaining familiarity with students' personal lives. "Writing
clearly is thinking clearly." Just as a doctor can diagnose a patient's
overall health from one blood sample, an astute teacher can tell much about a student
from one three-paragraph essay. Does the student know how to organize a
sentence, a paragraph, an argument? What vocabulary can a student command? Was
the student in touch with a reality beyond his street, his tribe, his
worldview? The first day writing sample was as good a predictor as any of how
the student would perform for the next fifteen weeks. The essay was a
palimpsest. Written over the student's words is another document, a
prescription, that the teacher alone sees. This is what we need to work on:
clarity, expressivity, originality, rationality, courage, coherence, power,
focus, balance, depth, truth.
In the pile of papers that made Prof. K.
gasp, or tear up, or hope and pray that this student never dropped out, was
Steven's paper. Steven's paper bored her. Steven wrote an encomium to Tom
Brady, a football quarterback. Steven didn't fill the page, and what he did
write was so repetitious that if all repetitions were removed it would be about
two sentences long. Steven apparently was familiar with jingoistic
sportscaster-speak. His paper was a weak imitation of that style:
"awesome," "the greatest of all time," "awesome"
again, and "no one will ever forget the day that Brady" accomplished
some feat.
Given the paucity of errors in spelling
and grammar, Prof. K. assumed that Steven was underperforming. His words
sounded canned, as if he'd lifted them from another source, rather than his own
head and heart. Somewhere along the line, Steven had learned to fake it in
school. She determined to try to encourage Steven to put more of himself into
his schoolwork, and to take this use of his time seriously.
Prof. K., as she did for all students,
wrote a personal note to Steven. "Dear Steven, I'm not a sports fan, and I
don't know much about Brady. I'm curious as to why you like him so much. I hope
that this semester we can develop your writing so that when someone like me
reads something you wrote about a topic she knows nothing about, after reading
your paper, she will feel familiarity with that topic. In terms of grammar and
spelling, your paper contains few errors, so we can cruise past those aspects
of writing, and continue on to making your writing more memorable for your
reader, and both more fun, and more powerful, for you."
Steven could have easily gotten an A in
the class. His tuition dollars, either from a government loan, that might,
under a Democratic president, be someday "forgiven," or money he or
his parents earned themselves, would be well spent. He'd be better off after
the class than he had been before it. He'd learn not just about how to write
for school, but how to write a letter to his congressman, how to polish a
resume, how to sell his skills to an employer, how to instruct underlings in a
difficult task, or how to communicate his love to his wife, his parent, his
child.
Of course, if Steven did earn that A,
and if Steven went on to graduate from the school, he would be in the minority.
Only twenty percent of students at this taxpayer-supported institution
graduated within a reasonable number of years; that's comparable to national
figures. Steven was an African American male. Graduation rates in his
demographic were the lowest of all.
Liam was a toxic waste dump in the
center of the class. It's really not nice for a teacher to call her student a
toxic waste dump. But Prof. K. believed, with Josh Billings and Mark Twain, that the
difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference
between a lightning bug and lightning. Liam was a living "Portrait of
Dorian Gray" for American manhood. Decades ago, when you thought of an
American male, you might think of a person who might be played, onscreen, by
Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda or pre-Woke Tom Hanks. If a
movie were made about Liam, his character would be played by the overweight,
sloppy, awkward, pot-addicted Seth Rogen.
Liam wore wrinkled, old clothes to
class. He stank of stale human, that is, any liquid or solid associated with a
human body that can go bad and requires periodic removal. Liam kept up a patter
of muttered derogatory commentary. He did no work. Not in class. Not homework.
Possibly not anywhere in his life. Liam had the soft body and flaccid face of
someone whose most demanding pastime was lighting his next joint. Liam was
close to the same age as Achilles when he arrived in Troy. Liam was a bit older
than Joseph Argenzio, the youngest American soldier to storm the beaches on
D-Day; specifically, 17-year-old Argenzio landed at Omaha, the deadliest. Liam
was several years past the age, 15, when Michael Phelps first qualified to swim
in the Olympics. That is, Liam was at the age when a male is conventionally at
the height of his physical powers. Sobering to realize Liam, physically, had no
place to go but down.
Liam was white. "White," in Liam's
case, meaning "living in a suburb with no crime and too many
McMansions." "White" as in "Daddy will pay for that." "White"
as in "I get to goof off, and when the time comes for me to get a no-show
job that will underwrite my pot, porn, and video game addictions, I'll do what
I have to, but not until that day."
Liam, like a lot of white boys,
sometimes known as "wiggers," was a rap fan. As Steven walked past Liam,
Liam, barely holding his slack body up enough to appear to be
"sitting," would look up at Steven and mutter a choice lyric. To
Prof. K., all the lyrics sounded the same: "Kill the pigs, pimp the hos, snort
the coke; my gun; my penis; n-word, n-word, n-word." But that's not what
the lyrics sounded like to Liam, or to Steven. Liam was communicating, "In
spite of my basement-video-game-pallor and my brand new car parked in the lot
outside, I am a gangsta. Steven, though you are clearly middle class, you are
black, so it's your job to fulfill my fantasies. We don't take none o' this "college"
s--t seriously. We be gangstas. It's our job to undermine this entire
enterprise. Keepin' it real, bro."
There were many really tough stories in
that class with Liam and Steven. In front of Liam was a perpetually silent black
student who had suffered extreme abuse at the hands of parents. Prof. K. turned
herself inside out trying to get counseling for that student, and trying to get
that student to make eye contact with her or with anyone else in the classroom.
She failed at both. The counselor did email the student, the student emailed
back, but never showed up for meetings. "We cannot force them," she
was told. "Oh yes you could if you wanted to," she thought, but did
not say. "You just don't want to go through the effort."
There was an older, Hispanic student who
was more gifted and more mature than everyone else in the room. He sat by
himself, handed in a few papers, and then just stopped coming, without ever
formally dropping. It killed Prof. K. to record an F grade for this superior
student at the end of the semester. Bureaucracy demanded that record.
There was a white boy who had already
failed this class, taught by a different teacher, the previous semester. He was
a muscular laborer and wore his blue denim uniform, complete with his name
embroidered above his heart. He was no Hemingway, no orator, no reader of
books. He sat up front, his back to everyone else, to every little drama, and
he ignored all of Liam's shenanigans. He did everything Prof. K. told him to do,
so obsessively that she could assess the clarity of her instructions by his
performance. On his job, he had to place bricks in the right place, with the
right relationship to other bricks; to perform these functions, he had to
select the right tools. Prof. K. told him to take the same approach to dashes
and semi-colons, to restrictive and to nonrestrictive clauses. He got an
A.
Steven kept his eyes on Liam. Liam kept
his eyes on Steven. Steven began to perform for Liam. Liam wanted his black
protegee to disrespect white, female, Prof. K. No real black man would do what
a white woman told him to do. Steven disrespected the teacher, and Liam smiled.
Suburban Steven from a good home would
playact the role of an "authentic" black man as defined by Liam. They
could have dropped the class, and received an I, an "incomplete"
grade. An "I" grade would be less damaging to their records than an
"F" grade. But they stayed in class, disrupted and undermined it.
Playing the spoiler in a freshman comp class on an obscure campus was more
important to their self-concepts than protecting their own permanent academic
records.
Prof. K. observed her students' arcs
throughout the semester. The son of a doctor who had gained admission to an Ivy
League school, screwed up there, and was "too good for this place"
realized that Prof. K. cared, and he soared. The porcelain-skinned girl
returning to school after going off heroin cold turkey looked grimmer and
grimmer, and admitted that she thought of returning to her drug. Prof. K.
implored her. "The choices you make now affect the whole of humanity. We
are rooting for you. Stick it out with all of us trying to be a decent person,
in spite of all of our pains and fears, for one more day." That girl would
earn a final A. The immigrant from Honduras, working full time as a bus boy,
skyrocketed. He produced some of the best student writing Prof. K. had ever
seen. Other students began to defer to him. The other students were not
impressed by Steven or by Liam. They were impressed by a man old enough to be
their father, who worked a miserable job, but, damnit, he knew how to handle a
relative clause.
When Liam discovered that he had failed
the class, he didn't seem to care, any more than he seemed to care about
anything.
Steven appeared shocked. At some point,
clearly, educational professionals had communicated to Steven that he could be
a cut-up in class, he could stop handing in work, and he could still receive at
least a C, a passing grade. Or even a D. But an F? Never an F. Nobody gave out
F grades any more! Steven sent Prof. K. imploring emails. "But I got a B
on that one paper."
"That was one paper, Steven. One
paper out of many. Many that you did not hand in at all."
And then the email arrived.
"Prof. K., my name is Nakeisha
Jackson and I am the diversity, equity, and inclusion officer on campus. I have
a report here from one of your students concerning a racist incident in your
class. I would like to meet with you."
Prof. K. was angry. This happened every
semester and she was sick to death of it.
One semester it was a Ukrainian. She was
convinced that Prof. K., who had a Polish last name, was discriminating against
her, because of historical conflicts between Ukrainians and Poles, conflicts
Prof. K. had never mentioned. Another semester it was a student who was afraid
of rain. She said that Prof. K. had penalized her for missing a mandatory exam
on a rainy day. This was against the Americans with Disabilities Act, the
student was convinced. And then there was the student who claimed that the
syllabus had traumatized her because it stated that one had to attend class in
order to pass. The student went to, and was received by, a dean. If a student
requested a meeting with a dean to suggest a campus-wide charity drive or trash
clean-up or new Christian club that student would probably not be received. If
a student just said, "I'm lonely. I'm confused. I'm overwhelmed,"
that student would not be received. Claiming fake injury, fake victimhood, fake
discrimination, opened the doors and the imitation hearts of the powerful.
What all these cases had in common was
that the campus bureaucracy encouraged the students to regard themselves as
victims, and actively rewarded students for defining themselves as victims. The
bureaucracy punished professors for making any demands on students at all. America
has become "a nation of whiners," many commentators report. If that's
true, the whining was incentivized by educational professionals.
Now Steven, who was failing the class,
had made a false allegation of racism to the DIE office. Prof. K. shot an
enraged email to Nakeisha Jackson. She knew that shooting out angry emails to
people with more power was a suicidal move, but she wanted to live in truth
more than she wanted to play this phony game. "The accusation is false.
Happy to meet with you. Thank you."
Prof. K. arrived early. The meeting room
was a long and narrow basement space with no windows. There were cubicles and
garbage cans that needed emptying, especially of a rotting banana peel. Ancient,
deserted, dog-eared textbooks littered mostly empty aluminum shelving; this was
horrible feng shui.
Dr. Jackson was plump and very black.
She arrived alone. "Steven admitted to me that he lied," she
immediately said.
Prof. K. did not breathe a sigh of
relief. Prof. K. felt no sense of triumph. Rather, she pounced.
"He lied for a reason, Dr. Jackson.
He lied because administrations encourage students to lie, and reward students
for lying.
"Dr. Jackson, do you care about
Steven? Does this institution? I care about him. You want to see the emails
I've sent him, begging him to perform? Simply to hand in work? I can show you
those emails right now.
"Steven stopped handing in any work
a quarter of the way through the semester. He's abandoning his own dream to
succeed. Why does the admin spring into action when the word 'racism' is
dropped, but ignore it when a student abandons his own academic career? I've
got a student in my class who is crippled from child abuse. A black student.
Why no rapid response team for that?
"If you care, Dr. Jackson, demand
performance from Steven. Raise the bar, and make him rise to meet it."
Dr. Jackson surprised Prof. K. "I
can see that you are a dedicated teacher. Can you convey to Steven any of what
you just said to me?"
"Sure, I can say it," Prof. K.
responded. "But talk is cheap. My words mean less than consequences. My
words mean less than institutional priorities. I had no one to report to when
Steven stopped handing in work. I tried talking to my superiors. You want to
know what they said? 'Yeah, yeah, it's sad, it's sad. Can't save all of 'em.'
There was no suggestion of possible avenues of further action. But Steven knew
exactly what door to knock on when he had a bogus story about racism. What does
that tell you? What does that tell Steven? What really matters to this
institution?"
Steven arrived. Dr. Jackson demanded
that Steven apologize. He did. Dr. Jackson then turned to Prof. K. and asked
her to communicate to Steven what she had tried to say to Dr. Jackson.
"Steven, you have what it takes to
get an A in this class. But you'll get an F, because that is what you earned.
Writing is power, Steven. Words are power. My parents were immigrants. English
was not their first language. They saw their parents treated poorly. They
determined to work for better lives. My mother speaks English as well as she
speaks Slovak. No accent. She could harness words to vivify her life. You could
do the same. People would listen to you. Commanding words means commanding
power."
Prof. K. saw, then, in Steven's eyes,
what she craved to see in student's eyes. That look, that light. The student
was, inside, going someplace he never thought he'd go. He was, internally,
released from previous bonds, and ascending to a new level.
Prof. K. wanted to cry. She wished she
had seen that light in his eyes when there was still time for Steven to pass
the class.
In a March, 2006 essay in the New York Times, Harvard
sociology professor Orlando Patterson attempted "a cultural explanation of
black male self-destructiveness." The gangsta pose, Patterson argues,
"was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost
like a drug … it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths …
it has powerful support from some of America's largest corporations. Hip-hop,
professional basketball and homeboy fashions" are all huge commercial
successes. Patterson was aware of the Liams of the world, as well. "Young
white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know
when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book."
America has relegated Patterson to the sidelines
of racial debates. American elites have chosen, instead, critical race theory
and Ibram X. Kendi.
"Any difference in what students
have or what they achieve is due to systemic racism" was a
critical-race-theory-inspired tenet in Virginia education. That tenet was
"rescinded," under the leadership of Republican Governor Glenn
Youngkin, in February, 2022. Other CRT dogma: equity of outcomes should replace
emphasis on educational excellence. Translation: every student should receive
an A, no matter that student's actual performance. White students should be
treated poorly compared to black students in order to make up for past
discrimination. "Power imbalances" should be "mitigated."
Translation: the eighteen-year-old student knows every bit as much as the
professor with decades of teaching experience, publications, and a PhD. "I
ain't got nutin" is as acceptable as "I don't have anything."
Arriving half an hour late is just as good as arriving on time. Being "on
time" is white supremacist.
In rejecting the concept of personal
responsibility, America has chosen Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi is a history professor
at Boston University. Kendi's statements about race are so extreme one has to
read them to believe them; one could start here. Kendi attributes any problem any
black person experiences to white supremacy. He insists that whites must be
discriminated against, and blacks must receive favorable discrimination, in
order to make up for previous discrimination against blacks.
In 2020, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey handed
Kendi ten million dollars. Kendi is a bestselling author. One of his
bestsellers is the children's book Antiracist
Baby. Antiracist Baby recommends that parents teach their
babies to focus on government policy, not individual human beings and their
actions. Yes, the book really does this. Mugged by a black teen? Blame
government policy, not the teen's behavior. Tell your babies this, or you are a
racist. Kendi has received up to $20,000 per lecture.
Kendi is flogging a new book, How to Raise an Antiracist. In a
June 13, 2022, National Public Radio interview, Kendi reported
telling his six-year-old daughter that there are few "brown people"
graduating medical school because of white supremacy's "bad rules."
The NPR host summed up Kendi's ideas thus "If school testing shows Black [sic]
or white or Asian kids performing differently, that does not mean the kids of
one race have some cultural or social problem." Rather, "the test or
the standards or the schools are racist." Kendi himself says, "when
you have a gap between racial groups … in education, in, you know,
incarceration rates, in health disparities, in wealth, there's two explanations
for that gap. Either that gap is the result of bad rules … or racist policies.
Or … certain kids are smarter or they're working harder." The latter idea,
the idea that some kids, like Americans of East Asian descent are "working
harder," is "racist."
America chose Kendi and critical race
theory over the concept of personal choices and personal responsibility.
America made that choice for several reasons. Leftists control the institutions
advancing critical race theory, especially education and media. Leftists want
to overturn the West and replace it with a Woke Utopia. Identity politics
balkanize and weaken national cohesion. Pumping everyone full of grievance
weakens any faith in institutions. Telling everyone that he is a victim weakens
the individual.
Americans are nice people and dread
being labeled racist, so they may embrace something that they don't know much
about but that they vaguely hope will make things better. And white narcissists
want to be the star of the national narrative. When black people achieve on
their own, when even such horrors as Jim Crow can't stop black conservative
success stories like Condoleezza Rice, Shelby Steele, and Clarence Thomas, white
narcissists can't stand it. They want to be responsible for black success. And
Ibram X. Kendi and CRT make them responsible, and strip black people of any
agency, and any adulthood, whatsoever.
A CRT-and-Kendi-inspired professor would
have just assigned an A grade to Steven, though he handed in only twenty
percent of the required work. Such a professor would have ignored the injustice
of assigning such a high grade to Steven, who did almost no work, and the same
grade to the white student who was white-knuckling it through heroin
withdrawal, and still managed to arrive to every class, on time, never speak
out of turn, and hand in every paper, evincing improvement after improvement.
And that CRT-and-Kendi-inspired professor would feel so very proud of herself. She
was the white savior, the white star of the show. She'd never have any second
thoughts at all, unlike Prof. K., who, years later, thinks of Steven. Steven
could have played his victim hand to some handout from the university, but
between the time he first contacted the DIE office and the meeting with Dr.
Jackson, Steven admitted that he lied. There's much good in Steven. To this
day, Prof. K. asks, what could I have done differently, so that Steven would
have passed that class?
Danusha Goska
is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
