January 27, 2007.  I have just completed thirteen of twenty-seven freshman compositions that I'm dubiously blessed with having to read this week.  They aren't good (but who can expect miracles?), yet they weren't as bad as I expected – until the last.  I do need a break after this one, which contained "to often" (twice), "know one" and "know matter how small or big," "a self-inflicked injury," and "asensale."  (In case you're wondering, that last word was supposed to be "essential.")

A student who assured me that he is a good writer (and claimed, with remarkable chutzpah, to be better than anyone else in the class – which he is not) did write a decent, if short, essay.  However, in it he refers to "drugatics" and wrote "im" for "I am."  For the latter alone (no doubt fallout from chat room writing or instant messaging), he should have failed.

January 29, 2007.  To digress briefly from my rant about student papers (I have now completed 21, with six to go), I turned 70 today.  That is, perhaps, a significant marker (three score and ten), but I choose to look upon it as being one day older than I was yesterday.

Of course, when our biographical odometers reach a count that ends in zero, we do tend to reflect a bit on where we are.  For instance, I have long been accustomed to the idea of having started teaching before the oldest of my students were born (scary, since a few of my night students are in their thirties and I've had some older than that), but now I realize that I've been teaching since before most of their parents were born.

So I'm 70.  How did that happen?  It seems like only yesterday I was climbing trees, bounding up stairs two or three at a time, and chasing girls.  For quite a while now I have not only not done these things, but I can see no point in them.

I haven't stopped playing, though.  I like the slogan that my wife has on one of her sweatshirts:  "We don't stop playing because we get older; we get older because we stop playing."  I also believe that, though we cannot altogether prevent physical deterioration (what the French call décomposition géneralé), we can delay brain ossification by remaining mentally active.  For me, writing every day serves that purpose very well.

January 30, 2007.  I went to the college tonight to monitor two students who came to my office to make up an in-class essay.  ("My office" is one I share with about thirty other adjuncts.)  While I was there, another adjunct stopped in.  He is another "veteran"; although he hasn't been there as long as I have, he probably has as much experience since he carries almost a full-time class load.  He also has a broader view of the college and the students than I do because he's there during the day classes, whereas I teach only at night.

As instructors will do, we started comparing notes.  Although we all usually grumble about how poorly prepared some of our students are, I was astonished at how despairing this man had become at the deterioration of students' work.  In a negative way, it was sort of encouraging because I had begun to think that I was expecting too much or that my aging memory was playing tricks on me, making me believe that students used to be much better when they really were not.  On the other hand, I took no comfort in finding out that my colleague (who has three or four times as many students as I do) was finding more and more students to be "virtually illiterate" and "ignorant."

Even more distressing were the tales he told about students' attitudes, especially their arrogance.  He must get more of this than I do because he teaches day classes that contain a higher proportion of adolescents.  Nevertheless, his anecdotes were shocking.  One will suffice (though there were many others).  He was explaining the structure of the essay, how one builds around a main idea or thesis, and so on.  One student interrupted, "I don't like that."  "What don't you like about it?" he asked.  "I write the way I want to write.  Do you have a problem with that?" she said.  Good grief!  (Incidentally, my colleague is quite sharp.  His reply was:  "And I grade the way I want to grade.  Will you have a problem with that?")

Even though, as I said, I teach night classes that contain older students, many of whom have been in the "real world" long enough to learn some humility, I have also noticed an increase in this alarming blend of ignorance and arrogance.  That's not good.  Arrogant know-it-alls are not teachable, and even though I know that most of them will get their come-uppance, that is little consolation.  Part of me wants to see them shoot themselves in the foot; another part of me wants to prevent them from doing so.  Moreover, it takes only one or two such people to poison the atmosphere of an entire class.  Instead of an environment in which everyone is working together to learn something, we have gladiatorial (yes, it's a word – I looked it up) arena.

Teachers who know their subject have little trouble standing their ground against challenges to what they are teaching, and anyone who cannot has no business in the classroom.   That's not the problem here.  The problem arises when students who have never taught have the audacity to challenge the teacher's methods and, worse yet, when students who have enrolled in the course because institutions throughout the country require it have the arrogance to question whether the course is worth taking.

Before we parted company, my colleague said that he was seriously considering giving up teaching.  His other area of expertise is theater and the performing arts.  He said he might return to that.  "I can take that kind of rejection," he said, "But this is starting to be intolerable."

I am, fortunately, not in the position of having to make a choice such as that.  When the combination of ignorance and arrogance makes the classroom utterly purposeless, I can quietly fade away and find something else to do in retirement.