On Both Sides of the Desk

Last spring I took an A­­dvanced Essay Writing class with eight students and Professor John Gordon. Each week, we were asked to write one nonfiction essay and edit three of our peers’. The audience was clear—Gordon and my classmates—and the essays were open-ended: memoir, argument, review, et cetera. Our writing was read in class, forcing us to face each word choice in public after handing it in. We strove to improve and to impress each other. It was a consuming, self-exposing class that made me a better writer.

One day toward the end of the semester, classmate Jazmine Hughes called across the table, “Beardface! Will you have us over for dinner?” He looked at us, mystified, as our eyes widened. If we’d had tails, they would have wagged. So he agreed, and invited us to his house in Mystic the next week.

We drove up in two cars and saw him leaning on the doorframe of his gingerbread house. He gave us a tour of the first floor, warmly lit and smelling delicious. His wife was in the kitchen among shelves of spices and jars, moving casserole dishes from the oven to the countertop. The floorboards creaked. The boys ducked their heads to enter rooms. Professor Gordon showed us his office, a small shed in the backyard, filled floor-to-ceiling with books, where he spent evenings writing his Dickens manuscript. As we ate dinner, we talked about our futures (“Marriage advice for men: pick the right woman, then give up”), his childhood (“Well, now that we’re on the subject, I have to tell you all the story of my conception.”), and how he and his wife met (“Did he have a beard then?” “Since the womb.”). In retrospect, it was a night that has marked some ineffable landmark of my college experience. We shook his hand, hugged his wife, and took a few cookies for the road.

This is not as common an experience at Connecticut College as it once was—until recently, most faculty members lived in or around New London. The Ammiratis, Dean of Studies Theresa and physics professor Tom, moved into River Ridge in the early ’70s with other young, reproducing faculty couples; the trend earned the apartments the nickname Fertility Flats. Winchester Housing was also built for professors and their families. Faculty often hired students living in Abbey House to look after their children—Dean Ammirati suggested that these babysitters became part of the family. Nelly Murstein, Professor Emeritus of French, had her seminar classes around her dining room table at her Winchester house in the early ’60s. Her older daughter, around nine at the time, would walk around the table and pour tea for students during their breaks. Today, young faculty members choose to live in cities like New Haven, Providence, even Boston instead of sleepy New London, making casual interactions like these few and far between.

I walked into Ernst Common room on Wednesday for a Writing Center event on effective essay prompts, and sat at one of four tables of students and professors. The conversation initially revolved around identifying the types of essays students feel motivated to write for class, and those that professors are excited to read. Ultimately, students wanted assignments on topics that intrigued them, that gave them clear expectations and freedom to explore. Professors liked pieces that took risks, that didn’t regurgitate their lectures, and that read with authority, clarity, and creative thought. Philosophy professor Simon Feldman said, “Often students want me to give them exact criteria they can follow to get an A.” To which Writer-in-Residence Blanche Boyd replied, “I know what it is. It’s ‘impress me.’”
The issue is bigger than the wording of prompts: it’s about getting students excited about writing and learning. How do you get a student to want to impress you? Impress them.

Throughout high school, I saw my teachers in one context only—nothing challenged my assumption that they planned, taught, graded, and lived at school, subsisting on coffee and muffins from the teachers’ lounge. If college has taught me anything, it’s that my mother is a real person, not some all-knowing Elder who birthed me and taught me right and wrong, and that at the end of the day my professors go home to boyfriends, wives, dinner parties, and unfinished manuscripts.

If we can’t have these familial conversations with our professors, there’s another important context we can see them in. Getting students excited about writing and learning has a lot to do with professors showing passion for what they teach. In many of our courses, class work can become mechanical. We go to class, study and write in pre-due-date frenzies and drop our papers in a pile on a professor’s desk, only to have them shot back at us without a word the next week. If we don’t know our professors, we don’t know our audience. It’s as if we’re writing to no one at all. If our work doesn’t get acknowledged beyond its letter grade stamp, it can be easily thrown behind us, leaving us with no motivation to take meaningful ownership of it. No wonder, as Jeff Lee suggested in his op-ed last week, classrooms are so often filled with glassy stares and awkward silences. No wonder professors gets essays that, as Feldman says, “Are not written like they’re meant to be read by a human being.”

A close friend of mine has always researched his professors—he looks them up on academic databases or buys their books. John Gordon is a James Joyce scholar. He is one of four people in the world who has deigned to publish a plot summary of the almost incomprehensible Finnegans Wake (a sample sentence: “Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin o on thon bluggy earwuggers”) and he teaches a 120 class to students looking to fill a requirement—do they know? Assistant Professor of English Courtney Baker, wrote a dissertation titled “Misrecognized: Looking at Images of Black Suffering and Death,” that focused on what it means to bear witness, firsthand or otherwise, to racialized violence. She mentioned in class, after a bit of prodding, that she studied “dead bodies,” and left it there, hanging, for the rest of the semester. I took a course called “Economics of War Among Nations” with professor Edward McKenna my freshman year. I knew he gave brilliant lectures without using any notes; I didn’t know he had six articles on JSTOR about post-Keynesian economics until five minutes ago. Maybe professors think students don’t care. I am daring to suggest we do.

I assume it’s uncomfortable for professors to enter a classroom and discuss their achievements. One argument follows that it’s poor taste to assign your class your own writing. But here we are, entering a world bigger than our hometowns, knowing vaguely that this school is “important” because we sit in small numbers and “develop relationships” in classes fully taught by published and PhD’d professors. Departments bring in speakers to lecture on their research, but what better than to have the writer of a text we study right there in the classroom, elaborating on their own stories, discussing the process of creating a piece of work, showing what it means to be dedicated to a topic? After hearing a professor give an animated talk in class on their dissertation, how could we continue to offer that professor regurgitated work?

Professors, the best thing you can offer your students is a look into your intellectual lives. We’ll know our audience. We’ll see you as real people we’re writing to, or battling a topic with, not as vague Charlie Brown characters with deadlines, chalk and bad handwriting. We want to be engaged.

From our baby five-page essays, simple lab reports and 15-photo portfolios, professors want ownership and unique thought. Teaching and learning should happen on both sides of the desk. Show us what ownership and unique thought means, and the rest will hopefully come.