I teach for a living. (Technically, I'm a professor...but I'm one of those professors that's in the classroom all the time.) Occasionally in this blog, I'll refer to "students," or "the students," or, if I'm feeling unusually possessive and happy/furious, "my students." I love my job, so there won't be a huge amount of Work Related Bitching here. Usually, I'm a pop culture guy.
For now, I want to talk about an issue in Academia that's just as much of a problem as the students. It's the instructors. Many of them are idiots. I recognize that academia is largely self-justifying...academics write articles that are reviewed by other academics that come out in journals read almost exclusively by other academics. It's a big circle jerk. I get it. I go to the conferences where people in ill-fitting suits talk at length about incredibly arcane and tangential subjects to Literature (which is what I've got my Ph.D in and teach). There's a lot of solemn nodding at these affairs, and not nearly enough drinking.
Several years ago, I was at a conference that had a panel on Classroom Authority. As in--how to get authority, how to keep from losing authority, and how to maintain authority in the classroom. I'd like to remind everyone that we are talking about people who teach at the college level, which means they can
1) Swear at students, and
2) Throw students out of class--permanently!
both of which I personally do. So cool!
A man was at a podium nattering on about "sharing authority to gain authority" and how that could be done to keep students in line when discipline became an issue. Lots of solemn nodding. The gist of his--and several others, apparently--argument was that an instructor could regain lost authority in the classroom by sharing power with the students that had, somehow, taken over. I had to ask questions in the Q and A. Had to. "How do instructors lose authority in the first place?"
A natural opening. Maybe I'd missed something. Several people gave me short, staccato bursts of answers. It turns out that college students can sometimes be snotty or rude or actively disinterested and disruptive. Heads turned toward me; I was obviously an interloper of some sort.
"But...can't we just throw them out?" Lots of murmuring. "You know, just kick them out of class." I knew we could; like I said, it's one of my weapons of choice. So I went on. "I mean, we're the teachers. It's our class. We design the curriculum and grade the work. We have the right to boot students who are disruptive. We've already got the authority. Unless we're stupid enough to give it away."
The people on the panel and the listeners in the audience looked at me with expressions that were half poker face (sort of a ten year old look--"Don't tell Mom we put the cat in the dishwasher, 'kay?") and half disbelief ("And you are...?") The general reaction was to make some "Mmm!" sounds and ignore me. These people wrote books on how to teach. They researched it for a living. They were professionals. And, yet, so was I. And I had probably taught more students in the previous five years than any of them had taught in their careers. We were at an impasse. So they tried to ignore me. The furtive glances told me that wasn't working either. And here's the thing; they could have thrown me out. But they didn't. Just by sitting there, I was being disruptive. They had the authority and didn't use it.
Anyway, I let them off the hook and went to the bar. I remember they had Newcastle on tap. And I still didn't have authority issues in my classes. So it was a successful conference all around in my book.
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