Confessions of a postmodern educator

Reading Boomeritis is bringing back memories, and it's not a pretty picture.

In the early 1990s I was teaching freshman composition to college students who by the end of the term had learned more about vegetarianism, green building, and fluoro chloro-carbons than they did about writing. Since writing is a subject that benefits from interesting content, I used my passion for environmentalism as the focus. Write about your passions, I advised, and your writing can't help but improve. The five-paragraph essay? I pooh-poohed it. Freewriting's the way to go. Just write whatever comes into your head. Topic sentence? Write until it comes to you. Above all, don't let rules or structure prevent you from digressing into the subconscious muck where the most fertile material is lurking. Perfect punctuation? I actually told them that periods and commas were the salt and pepper of a paragraph, and should just be sprinkled in wherever they looked good. In Shakespeare's day, writers got points for spelling creatively. So let's focus on meaning and significance. You've got something to say, right? I'm here to tell you that what you say is way more significant than how you say it.

My "office" was a comfortable booth inside the Common Grounds coffee shop, half a block from campus. I approached my teaching job as the hip, young revolutionary I believed myself to be. Never mind that at 26, I was in the midst of buying my first home, and had a husband who was helping fund my grad school education. Some revolutionary with a mortgage, right? For the class text, I assigned essays and articles I gleaned from the L.A. Weekly, the Whole Life Review, and Magical Blend magazine. Articles about anything that I deemed significant and necessary; pieces by writers such as AlanAtkisson, Michael Ventura, William Burroughs and Terrence McKenna. "Plan, Plant, Planet," a classic McKenna rave about how a tree is a superior being because it stays where it's planted, sends its roots down deep for nutrients, recycles its materials into the soil for future growth, and on top of that, it gives back fresh oxygen for all. Truly a blueprint for us all.

I cringe when I think about those days. At the beginning of every class I made my students move the chairs into a circle, which I explained was the egalitarian arrangement that eventually every classroom, ideally, would take. I was not the almighty teacher, I liked to remind them (duh!), and the very shape of the circle would serve as a reminder that each of us played an equal role in teaching and learning. Meantime, I'd be trying to keep their attention on the whiteboard or continually disrupting their small groups to reconvene and report to the whole class. I may have to spend the rest of my life atoning for my postmodern pathologies.

My English students learned more about environmentalism than grammar. Did I help anybody? I did spend hours writing copious responses to their drafts, and since I encouraged multiple drafts of every essay, my work expanded as the semester proceeded. I loved responding their writing and watching their thinking clarify and crystalize. I intensely disliked grading anyone (you're all equally smart and creative). I grew so nervous of grading that I became obsessed with a point system that attempted to remove all traces of subjectivity from the process. As much as I despised losing precious classroom hours to presenting, analyzing and defending my system, it was the only boundary left between me and my students. And I hated having it there.

I don't claim to be the only screwed-up one. My students, for their part, weren't above kissing up or tantrums if they thought such behavior could influence their final grades. I'll never forget the day 19-year old Tali walked into my office and proceeded to break down in tears because I had ruined her GPA, caused her parents to lose all respect for her, and condemned her to a lifetime of menial labor. With her grades now, she would never make it to dental school at UCLA. My crime? I gave her a B-minus for the class. When I opened my grade book to remind her how she herself had honestly earned that B-minus, her big brown eyes rimmed with tears. Slumped against the booth, sobbing with existential misery, she begged me to change it.

I've been drawn to reviewing this chapter of my career because I'm going to teach again. I've been away from it for awhile. Long enough for my life conditions to change dramatically; long enough to get plenty bruised and shaken. Long enough to be forced up against my own walls and shadows and finally create a life I adore, with a man I love.

I'm not hip and not young anymore. Revolutionary? We'll see. At least I'm not afraid to grade! Definitely still passionate about sustainability and about writing, although I plan to teach totally differently (amen!). I now look at the material of environmental writers such as Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, and many more, from a second tier perspective. Let the atonement begin.