By Eric Erickson (SNHU Class of '14)
“Do you really think I could ever really teach anyone anything?” I ask aloud to my sleeping wife. The question goes terminally unanswered and remains filtered through the many layers of hubris that surround the task of formal instruction. As teachers, we often like to redefine our roles to something more precise - facilitator, advisor, mentor - and while there is probably something prescient at work here, such diction does little to ease the transition from graduate student to teacher. As someone who could fairly be considered a “dope” by most of society, I frequently wander through my days interacting with inscrutable tasks and people with specialized skills that leave me largely helpless, at the mercy of systems that I curse, systems that leave my voice reduced to a meaningless pattern of platitudes. The academe, it seems, has been rightly marginalized as the receptacle of those who can’t do. Otherwise, the dopes of the world wouldn't need the skilled technicians that can do.
Long before the word “dope” came to infer a slang for illegal opiates, the term was, in fact, the appropriate term used for social idiots, those who needed the assistance of others to make sense of a nineteenth-century world spinning into modernity. But the term is derived from the Dutch word for “deep” – usually referring to the act of plunging a utensil into a thickened sauce. The evolution of the term seems to prophesize many elements of the eventual marginalization of the study of composition, and the role of the humanities in general. As a family friend, and longtime newspaper columnist, once said to me upon hearing of my choice to pursue English as a major, “Ah, you will do everything, and nothing.” Of course, he said this laughing and wildly gesticulating with his arms to demonstrate that his life had veered toward the “everything” part of this dilemma. While it may be true that those who can’t do are left to teach, I take solace in the complicated etymology of the word “dope,” and suggest that such slang always evolves through a type of heteroglossia – a multitude of voices, and that such stupidity can also be expressed as a recognition of a less-valued type of depth.
Students today, or really of any day for several generations, are used to seeing language use in school in the same or similar context to which they see mediated content on television or their smartphones. The language brackets itself in specific purposes, expectations, and formalities. Thus, they – even the potentially intuitive creatures we might call future “writers” – see academic writing through preconceived brackets of legitimacy and acceptability. The means and ends are all predetermined before the teacher enters the classroom or virtual learning platform, and writing is no longer the sloppy, complex and intersubjective arena of ‘many-voicedness’, but merely the practice of matriculation. It would seem then, that the role of the composition instructor is to channel, harness, and cajole the language of students toward those acceptable ends. When I take my car to the mechanic, I am at the mercy of their knowledge, skill, and even creativity in hopes that I won’t simply be taken advantage of as an obvious dope, but students do not arrive in class with such lofty goals. Through careful scaffolding and ongoing modeling, they have learned syntax, but no context; they have learned structure free of dialogue, free of answerability.
Or so it can seem. Before finally accepting the only chance I could find teaching college students 70 miles from my home (it seems there have always been a large amount of fish trying to fit into a modestly sized barrel), I familiarized myself with some prevailing social discourse related to the horrific plight of part-time instructors. While there is no shortage of laments, a consistent element of these discussions eventually arrives: Nobody forced you to do something so obviously undervalued by society. I have often ruminated on that thought applied to other contexts and found myself buried in this quandary, and the layers of hubris mentioned earlier. While it is true that many students find themselves perplexed at having to take “English” as a subject required for their matriculation, it may be necessary to separate this perplexion with the actual task at hand. For adolescent and adult college learners, such separations and perplexions are somewhat expected. School is an external barrier to their future. For our part, for those of us who have struggled to call ourselves writers in a world that sees writing as a secondary concern at best, for those of us who aspire to live within the protective walls of academe, for those of us who say “f%&# it, I’ll just teach writing; I’m already poor,” we face both daunting and ill-defined responsibilities to draw something out of students that they don’t even know they have – everything (said with wildly gesticulating arms). So then, what is a composition instructor supposed to teach?
The desire to humanize students must never be dismissed or abandoned to the task of creating good technicians of communication, but such a false dilemma still needs a type of negotiation. Students, it turns out, are a fabulously odd bunch of dopes. They are curious, strict, apathetic and inquiring. Many are innocent to the pandemonia of adult life. They have already normalized many efforts and foibles in their own self-discipline and come to terms with a type of anomie and dadaistic absurdity inherent to twenty-first-century social life – a quality that they know they may never escape. Nevertheless, they seem to always know something about teachers, too. For today’s students, empathy is on the table in a way that seemed so distant to past traditionalists. In a 1964 essay for the Journal of Higher Education, Mordecai Marcus speaks to the continued need for the college composition instructor to impart humanism alongside the technical skills required to communicate effectively, or as he projects for the voice of the composition instructor, “I am not a worthless aesthete divorced from the real world of science, technology, business, power politics.” Marcus goes on to describe how students tend to view the composition instructor:
“...the students have an additional cluster of misunderstandings and disrespect for the English teacher. If they don't regard him as a technician (the role he is half-consciously forced to assume to claim their respect), they believe that he wants to teach writing as an arty accomplishment with no special goal, or they see him as a prim grammarian devoted to correctness for its own sake. Also, they strongly feel for him their basic distrust of all teachers as opponents of their individuality, freedom, and self-respect...Students believe that the composition teacher, more than any other teacher, judges them personally – through the judgment of their writing.”
Despite the notably gendered language, it could be said that these propensities are still very common, and are simply produced by the externality of the classroom and college institution itself. As time goes on, however, perhaps something else has evolved that Marcus overlooks. When I began teaching in a composition classroom, with students on edge, waiting to defend their own externally imposed atomization as a path to self-sufficiency, I thought that I had to overcome the “dope” inside me to carefully construct a learning environment, one that valued the technician in a cocommittment with the artist. What surprised me most about this experience was how little was required of me in this respect. As a dope, I feared having to teach such insulated creatures about the world “as it is” - as the required fare for entering collegiate conversations. What I learned was that the classroom – whether a blank, windowless cell, or an equally bleak virtual world of glitches and silent voids, already provided something to students akin to a priori knowledge. Students have learned to quickly adapt to terror, global pandemics and deep fakes – the very real environment of an unreal world. The amount of compassion and empathy that has long been emergent, as well as the vulnerability, the confusion-tinged ennui, are what makes the student-centered classroom already focused on a world that “could be.” Quickly, I learned that I only needed to participate in their rare opportunity to live simultaneously inside and outside of this unreal world. Despite what we may have thought, writing may still be intrinsic and essential to this adaptation. Once my graduate degree and general ignorance met college students in this arena, it became clear who would always be in charge of how this went down. Humility certainly comes with the territory. Fortunately, I also learned that if I could learn to interpret my own dopiness as depth, so could they.
Eric Erickson is an Assistant Professor and Chair of English at Pikes Peak State College where he continues to vacillate between the everything and nothing of writing life. He is a 2014 graduate of Southern New Hampshire University with an MA in English and Creative Writing. He remains dope in the best sense of the word.
Very Little Assembly Required
Eric's line about doing everything and nothing is a perfect encapsulation of the writing life (and maybe the teaching life). The entire piece reminds me of Baudelaire's "The Flaneur."