Lucky Jane

In today’s work email I found not one, but two, requests for overrides into my upper-division class next spring. These were the eleventh and twelfth such requests I’ve received in the past two weeks. That class doesn’t begin for—what?—two months. But I teach at a public university, and even after what the local papers have declared the most significant tuition hike “in history,” we’re a bargain compared to the private and even the other public colleges and unis in the area, so if our classrooms were packed like sardines before, then, well, I can’t think of a good canned-goods simile for our enrollments.

I’m not even a popular teacher. For one thing, most of my colleagues have mad teaching skillz. (Not only are our average customer satisfaction survey course evaluation scores stratospheric, but the program assessments we send to the state have been improving every year.) It’s like teaching at Lake Wobegon. For another thing, I have a terrifying reputation. I’ve heard the young folk claim I make them read until their eyes pop out, and that I make them really think about their writing. And actually, I’d like to keep it that way.

Yet, as I said, I’ve got pleas galore for overrides, which I don’t handle. I refer the students to the appropriate authorities. Then I check my roster. I am mildly shocked to learn that the cap had been raised from 36 to 45, thanks to a room change to one of Soviet buildings across campus, which boasts not more capacious rooms, but smaller desks.

My eye darts down the list of forty-five names. At first I’m pleased. Hey! She’s really sharp! And he can be depended upon to say something insightful every class. I’m so looking forward to teaching her again! And him, too! I’ve heard great things about that student (our hallway gossip tends to violate FERPA poison the well in a good way)! And her, too!

(from kamranweb.com)

But one name in the middle of the list stops me cold. It is the name of a student I last taught in the most miserable class I’ve ever taught here. Nothing went the way it should have. The class even met on the Soviet end of campus, the most direct route to which consists of an odiferous and not-at-all scenic footpath behind one of our student commons, near where the biggest dumpster I’ve ever seen is parked. As winter thaws into spring, this route becomes increasingly unpleasant. English majors, who are ostensibly interested in aesthetics, often mutter about attending classes in such environs.

This student was one of the complainers. The last time I taught her, she was as wonderful a discussant as I could have wished. Her essays were diamonds in the rough (and that’s accounting for the artificially inflated value of diamonds), flashing with insight but falling short of coherence because of lackluster signposting. I first antagonized her by pointing out this shortcoming, assuring her that once she foregrounded the “so what?” of her arguments, her essays would really sparkle. She sulked, countering that she had always received A’s on her papers, and that she had worked harder on mine than on those. She rolled her eyes. I soon learned that eye rolling was part of her natural expression, but still it was discomfiting.

I knew someone in grad school who once threatened a student who re-enrolled in her comp class after failing it the first time. He was an athlete who wrote at best semiliterate papers and, in the classroom, was like a black hole, sucking all the enthusiasm out of the discussion. On the first day of classes, the second time around, my grad-school colleague told this student she had changed her syllabus, that he couldn’t depend on turning in his half-assed assignments again. She assured him he would fail. Since he was not stupid—just a slacker—he dropped her class, and all was right with the world. He never even made it into the pros.

Even if I wanted to do something similar to my student, I wouldn’t. She smiles sweetly and says hello whenever I run into her in the halls. But she makes me uncomfortable. This is my problem, and I must overcome it.