The community-college class I’d long dreaded was before me. There were no highly competent adults eager to mine college for gold. No clutch of top high-school students. Grades were abysmal. No matter what question I asked or whether I was cheerful or strident, the students had no opinions, interest, or energy. They squirmed uncomfortably, while my other classes at Monroe Community College eagerly engaged the topics.
Why couldn’t I stir this class to life?
One young woman—I’ll call her Stacy—picked and squeezed zits, furtively blotting blood with a tissue. Or she pulled out crooked eyelashes or worried the scabs on her forearms. Her head was always bowed, long hair veiling her face. She seemed to represent them all. Yet the class was respectful, not rebellious, and instead of making oily excuses for missing or poor work, students would shrug and say, “I don’t get it. Sorry.”
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Another professor smiled at my frustration. “Ah! A class of nice, quiet boneheads. I’ve had a few.” She advised me not to fret over a lost cause, but to sleepwalk through the term.
“Just let them fail?”
“The open door opens both ways.”
Several colleagues culled the unworthy, proud of their high withdrawal and failure rates. They were gatekeepers, defenders of high standards who kept the species healthy through natural selection. Perhaps I needed to become more ruthless with students who drained college resources and produced so little. Yet I also wanted to shout at that class, “Prove us wrong! Don’t be boneheads. Fight!”
One balmy April day, I entered the room exasperated. Instead of analyzing a reading, they had summarized it—again. As I gathered words to blast them, I noticed many heads hanging—they knew they’d botched the assignment. They expected a lambasting because they were not college material. And I was programmed to deliver it.
I caught my breath as if walloped in the stomach. We were tangled in a web of self-fulfilling expectations. I glanced at Stacy. She was cross-eyed, fingers sifting through the hair hanging over her eyes, searching for split ends, perhaps. She yanked a hair out with a grimace. She wasn’t just odd—she hung on the edge. Anxiety disorder? Was she a cutter? For years, education had shamed these people and tossed them aside. A knot of blame could be assigned to genes, family, school, environment, and their personal flaws. But these students were under my watch this semester. Was I going to join the gatekeepers and smack them one more time to clear the path reserved for their betters, or try something else? But what?
I glanced out the window. The lawn, dotted with yellow dandelions, sloped toward the campus pond, where geese paddled. The sun was bright. “It’s nice out,” I said. A few heads lifted. Spring doesn’t care about analysis papers or gatekeeping. “Let’s go to the pond. Leave your books. I’ll lock the door.”
“What are you going to do?” a young man asked, perhaps suspecting that I intended to drown them like unwanted kittens. But I had no plan beyond escaping my agenda and the institution’s shadow. They hated themselves in here—they were all Stacys. Maybe outside they’d be different.
“I want to hear how you feel about this course. Maybe we can do something to make our last month better.”
Silence. “Really?” someone said.
“C’mon.”
They streamed outside, picking up speed as the building receded. “Where do we go?” a bushy-haired young man asked. I gestured for them to pick a spot. That felt right. I should loosen my grip and follow them. Why pretend that I knew where we were going? They sat beside the water and stretched faces to the sun. I sat among them.
“So, how can I help you?”
I expected them to complain about my strictness. But they said I wasn’t to blame; it was them. They stunk in English, and I shouldn’t worry about it. They didn’t want more school, but what else could they do? Their choices were community college, the military, or McDonald’s. They knew they screwed up, but they worked 40 hours a week and had no time. Home life was a mess. What did English have to do with their jobs? Their bosses, too, spoke and wrote badly. Someone joked, “Just pass us and we’ll be happy.”
“You can do better,” I said.
One man replied. “Teachers always say that, but sometimes you can’t.”
“With 10 percent more effort, you could get B’s.”
He shrugged. “I ain’t got 10 percent more.”
“You should just relax, Professor Bauman,” a thin young woman said. “We’re doing OK for us. It makes us nervous when you want more.” Others nodded.
“Don’t you want more?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“I do,” one said.
“You can’t keep getting better,” said another.
I sighed. In my code, you withered when you ceased improving. “Well, what can I do to help?”
They shook their heads: Nothing. As they said earlier, it was them. I had degrees and was the professor. Now I felt ashamed of that. What a sham I was! For 10 weeks I had abetted their self-destruction.
“Give us B’s and cancel class!” a young man said.
“No,” a half-dozen others yelled back. They told me to do what I had to do. They wanted “regular” college. Anything less was insulting.
“There’s one thing you could do,” the thin woman said.
“What?”
“Don’t get upset with us.” More nods.
“That’s all?”
Stacy spoke up. “You make me feel guilty.” These were her first words all term. I never would learn her secret, but its grip paralyzed her. While many community-college students do reveal family turmoil, violence, crushing workloads, hidden handicaps, and the excruciating, implausible traumas they have endured, the mystery of what churns beneath the facade of incompetence often eludes me. To survive, they have practiced hiding their wounds.
The professor’s dilemma in a situation like this is to assign legitimate, but often disparaging, grades while trying to guide students from a self-destructive cycle into one of reward and achievement. We have more power to intimidate and cripple fragile people than we suppose. I had to learn to grade honestly without demeaning either the person or the grade received.
Many underperforming, seemingly apathetic community-college students have internalized labels given them. They expect to fail, and, in numbing themselves for the coming pain, cultivate failure. Why expend energy that is futile? Why express opinions their professors will consider worthless? That class made me accept an implicit duty to penetrate this numbness, and I vowed not to blindly stamp another “failure” on any students while waiting for anointed ones.
After our talk at the pond, I worried that the students in that class might think I was “easy” and simply relax. But in that final month, more of them risked turning in work. They did not become good writers, but they engaged in the course because I made them the agenda for an hour. I did not abandon standards. There were no A’s and only two shaky B’s. But most of the students passed on their merits.
Colleges like to crow about classes that hold poetry slams or build robots, not the D students who scrape out C’s. But I was modestly proud of my class of boneheads. They’d survive for another semester.