Annalisa Castaldo

The Disgusted Teacher

     In her paper, a student must not only support her belief in the death penalty, but also present counter-arguments to the readings. In response to an essay which claims that the death penalty is used in a racially biased way, the student writes, "Mostly blacks are given the death penalty because blacks are more violent and commit more crimes than other races."

     A student's assignment asks whether or not the U.N. should put a stop to infibulation in the Third World. The assignment is couched in and refers back to readings about multiculturalism and respect for other systems of belief. The student bypasses these questions and, as his main argument, suggests that infibulation should not be stopped because women who have had the operation, unlike American women, do not cheat on their husbands.

     A student comes into the University Writing Center, seeking help with a first year composition assignment on homosexual marriage. Her ideas are unfocused and she has no support for her view that gays should not be allowed to marry. After a half-hour, the student finally reveals that she is having trouble because, like Queen Victoria, she doesn't believe homosexuals actually exist. The frustrated (and gay) tutor bursts out with, "Well, you've been talking to one for the last half hour!"

     It can happen at any moment, to any instructor, that sudden, unreal feeling when a student voices a view that seems simply wrong. Not unsupported, or badly thought out, but simply, obviously and completely wrong. Women are biologically programmed to be neater than men. Vegetarians are cold all the time and die early because they don't eat enough protein. Children placed in day care grow up to be psychopathic killers. These kinds of views can surface anytime, but they seem to come up more often and to be more of a problem in first-year writing classes. They come up more often, it seems, because first-year writing classes are small, discussion-driven and tend to focus on building arguments by examining such controversial topics as abortion and the death penalty. First-year writing classes also focus on the student's ability to present and defend an opinion, rather than master a set of facts or theories. They are more problematic in these classes than elsewhere because the opinions form the basis of written work. During a verbal exchange, an instructor may choose either to ignore or to reveal her reactions to an argument. Papers, on the other hand, require grades. In a class where the grade is based on mastery of facts, the feelings may be separated from the grade. This is difficult when the argument is the reason for the grade. Can a well-written, coherently argued paper which claims that AIDS is God's punishment for perverted sexuality earn a high grade?

     The standard method of dealing with a student's belief which is antithetical to one's own is to remain objective and deal with the offensive material on the level of argument. Many feel that to react and then grade on a subjective level would mean enforcing a viewpoint, which would be a misuse of our authority as teachers of writing. In fact, many writing instructors begin their classes by assuring the students that it is the way the argument is presented, not the content of that argument, that will be graded. Most instructors feel this is the only fair method and that a liberal (such as myself) should be able to put aside her personal beliefs and respond to a conservative paper in the same manner as a liberal one.

     This is how I handled the first case--the student who believed blacks were inherently prone to crime. I did not attack the rest of her paper, although I am personally opposed to the death penalty, but I felt that I could not let this specific sentence go unremarked. I suggested, in a neutral tone, that this point was controversial. She agreed. Did she have any proof or support? Not only did she not have proof, but she did not entirely believe the statement herself. Rather, she was responding to the requirements of the assignment that forced her to present counter arguments to the essays she had read. Unable to think of a better argument, she had rejected the author's claim that African Americans were treated unfairly by the justice system by simply assuming that they were treated fairly. Once that decision had been made, she had very little choice but to claim that the author's statistics on the race of death row inmates proved the inherent criminality of African Americans.

     With her thought process uncovered, I was able to turn the tutoring session toward a discussion of possible counter arguments (my disgust at the sentence did not have to come into play; she was never made aware of my feelings because the reason for those feelings was easily discarded). However, later I spoke with an African American tutor who had seen an earlier draft of the paper. She told me she refused to deal with that sentence because she had been afraid of getting into an argument with the student. So she had simply skipped over it. She recognized this solution as problematic because the argument---unsupported and inflammatory---certainly weakened the paper. Therefore she felt torn, but did not see how else to behave.

     Neither of us, of course, has any way of knowing if the information I imparted would have been as well received from an African American tutor. But her belief that she could not confront the student---that this would be a misuse of her authority as a tutor---caused me to reconsider the path I had chosen in this and other cases. I wondered if maintaining, or attempting to maintain, a politically neutral and objective stance when a student's thinking deeply offends us is, in fact, the most useful approach. This exchange made me reflect on other moments in my teaching career when I was literally disgusted by a student's beliefs and how I reacted to that disgust. I realized that there were times I had felt that it was impossible to stay neutral and yet unfair to the student not to.

     One of these moments involved the discussion of infibulation, which was contained within a paper a student wrote in one of my first-year composition classes. For two weeks, I had been attempting to complicate my class's thinking about multiculturalism. Much of the class remained resolutely determined to be good liberals and allow other cultures to do whatever they wanted, no matter how odd, barbaric or inhuman it appeared to them. When I created the paper topic on this issue, I specifically wrote that women from within the culture were appealing to the U.N. for help in stopping infibulation so that I could push the students to recognize that a culture is not a monolithic structure, with every person believing the exact same thing as every other person. I expected to read papers which ignored this aspect of the paper topic and insisted that "A Culture" be allowed to do what "It" felt was best. I did not, however, expect a paper which argued that the practice of infibulation was actually a good thing.

     My reaction to the paper was not the neutral, objective stance I was able to maintain when faced with the argument about African Americans and the death penalty. I am not African American, but I am a woman and a feminist. My reaction was therefore much more personal. I not only failed the paper; I also wrote a comment longer than the paper itself. However, despite my personal anger, I couched my comments in terms of the weakness of the argument--the lack of support, the failure to take into account the whole assignment, the logical flaws. By the time I was done writing my comments, I felt perfectly justified in failing the paper.

     The truth of the matter is that I could have failed almost any paper in the class for the same reasons, if I had wanted to. The student's arguments were perhaps a bit weaker, but not by much, than his peers. I wanted to fail the paper because I found the beliefs expressed there not only offensive but dangerous. However, I did not feel that I could tell the student that, just as the African American tutor did not feel she could confront the racism in the death penalty pused my superior skill at constructing and supporting arguments to make the student's paper seem worse than it was. In other words, I took the question that ended the first paragraph of this essay, "Can a well written, coherently argued paper which claims that AIDS is God's punishment for perverted sexuality earn a high grade?" and answered "A paper that claims that AIDS is God's punishment cannot be well written and coherently argued." But this is dishonest because it refuses to accept any views but my own.

     Not only was it dishonest, but my belief that I could not confront the student on any political level without misusing my authority as an instructor prevented me from seeing what I now believe was the true conflict. In this and other cases where students express beliefs their instructors find offensive, it is because of separate warrants---the ideologically based axioms which underpin an argument. All arguments and beliefs are based on such warrants. An example is the belief about when life begins (as used in the abortion debate). In this case the warrant is clearly stated, but most often they are submerged in the writer's mind because they are considered to be facts, not beliefs. Even when warrants are clearly stated and argued, they are often still treated as facts (as with the question of when life begins).

     My student was a first-generation college student who came from a strong Hispanic background. His warrants---as he made clear in class and in other papers--were the absolute sanctity of the family and the maintenance of the family in troubled time by a strict adherence to the chain of authority: women obey men, children obey parents, and so on. The fact behind this chain of authority appeared to be that it was the only way to maintain both financial independence and cultural unity in an unfamiliar, sometimes unwelcoming world. I could never help him to articulate his beliefs and learn to understand both them and the way others might perceive them because I was too busy attacking his grammar in lieu of engaging with his views.

     At the time I felt I was being as fair as I could. I now think that engaging this student in an actual political discussion would have been more useful for both of us. It would have allowed my anger to dissipate somewhat because I could have explained to him why I found his views upsetting. It would have given him a chance to understand that some of his warrants were problematic within the university setting (or at least in classrooms run by women). Most important, it would have prevented me from the authoritarian move of failing the paper "objectively" through my superior critical skills. As it was, the student left my class without learning that there were other ways of looking at his world (and perhaps with a lower grade than he deserved).

     Engaging a student's warrants, that is, attempting to explain clearly why things they see as factual are actually ideological and subjective, has two great benefits. The first is the creation of an actual intellectual community. It is, I think, too easy to feel that our critical thinking skills are superior to those of our students and therefore never to reveal our own warrants, even to ourselves. To take the beliefs of our students seriously enough to argue with them means putting our own beliefs and warrants out in the open, intellectual debate, in which both instructor and student are willing to haul out the big guns, will also foster the development of critical thinking. Whatever we say to our students at the beginning of the semester, most of them see school as an exercise in giving the teacher what she wants and whatever critical thinking skills they develop in First-year Composition are not transferrable to the real world. Perhaps idealistically, I believe that letting students know all of my reactions can let them use the critical thinking skills we cherish in a way that matters to them.

     I want to make clear that I am not proposing we fail students who disagree with our political or social beliefs. I believe, however, that pretending that we have no political or social beliefs can ties us in knots and keep us from treating our students as the critical thinkers we hope they can be. If we only engage in debates on safe subjects, and retreat to issues of grammar or paragraph organization whenever we feel threatened or offended, we value neither our students nor ourselves. If we do engage our students, if we let them know when their ideas are unacceptable to us as people rather than as teachers, they can have the chance to defend their warrants. And even if the warrants remain unacceptable to us, we can only approve of the skills required to defend them.

     A different model--less objective but even more fair--is suggested by the third case in which the writing tutor used her own sexual orientation to educate a student. The tutor could have remained silent, allowing the student to go on holding to her belief that homosexuality was a media creation and also allowing a part of herself to be erased. She could have continued to try to work within the confines of the paper topic in an objective way, concentrating on helping the student to support arguments she did not believe. Her comment presented the student with absolute proof that at least one of her warrants was wrong. Homosexuals did exist and they were not all living in Hollywood. The student's warrant was wrong: it was not a case of bigotry but of incorrect information. The tutor could show her she was wrong if she were willing to step out of the objective, instructor mode and react as a person and a homosexual.

     Of course, not all cases are this simple. The African American tutor could hardly have launched a sneak attack because her race was and is always apparent. My student's warrants about women's fidelity were wrong in my world, but acceptable and even important in his. But education is based in the belief that students should be challenged (certainly Socrates never worried about remaining neutral in a debate). A teacher is not a robot and we should not require of ourselves that we grade, teach, or think like one.

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