By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: Septemeber 18, 2013
There’s a point in most fizzling relationships when the magic is gone and everyone is just going through the motions. My relationship with UFV’s English department reached that point in a Fall 2011 class when, like a threadbare superhero plot, everything just became too easy.
It wasn’t the prof. He was great. It wasn’t the material. I loved that too. Perhaps it was the fact that I scored an A- in the course and knew I didn’t deserve it. Perhaps it was the fact that all of us were scoring grades we didn’t deserve; that the department was convincing us, inch by inch, that we actually did deserve them.
I remember bragging about my ability to ‘shovel.’ My friends and I would swap stories about our papers, laughing about how we’d pulled the wool over a professor’s eyes. We all had similar stories: late nights, unfinished readings, rambling and incoherent essays. Amazed by the grades we’d receive, we attributed our success to some inconclusive and ambiguous skill we called the ‘bullshit’ factor. Each of us thought we had mastered an arcane art, that we had navigated a rite of passage for our major. Our pride protected us from the real truth: that we were victims of a system that was (in many senses) exploiting us.
I should not be able to get an A- in an English class without having read most of the text on which the class is built. If I can, the best explanation is that I’m some sort of literary prodigy. But what if (as was true) my friend also gets a good mark without having read much of the text? Is he a prodigy as well? What of our several other friends? What of that girl who sat in back, never talked, and skipped roughly half the semester? How did she even pass?
The other explanation is that we aren’t prodigies, and that we aren’t fooling our professors at all. They see our offerings for exactly what they are, ‘bullshit,’ and yet still we receive As and Bs and are shunted upwards through the degree program. I understand that we want to believe we are uniquely special, that we’ve all found a way to manipulate the system, but if that’s true then we’ve simply created a new system and it’s not the one we paid for. This system sits us down like monkeys at typewriters, gleefully accepts our pages of nonsense for four years, and then hands us our certificate at the end. The problem is that the certificate was never the goal to begin with, since it’s the monkey, not the certificate, which has to apply the learning, get the job, and live the life.
Which begs the question, what was I doing in my English classes? What was I promised, and what did I gain?
Admittedly, I loved many of my classes. I became a much better writer, and I am still proud of the short stories and plays I wrote under encouragement from my professors. I loved reading texts, debating them, interpreting them, and writing on them. I have many good memories.
Yet I struggle to understand the methods behind my instruction. We would read texts that were decades, sometimes centuries old, and were expected to interpret them with only a smattering of historical background and understanding. We would ignore the entire history of scholarship on a text, reinventing the wheel again and again, and were applauded for it. Perhaps the goal was the journey itself and not a useful end result – dozens of liberal arts apologists speak of the importance of critical thinking development – but even that seems suspect. In a post-modern discipline which does not believe in authoritative answers, indeed can barely even agree upon rules, how is critical thinking truly being encouraged?
One student may write an eloquent interpretation of Shakespeare through an historical Catholic lens; another may reinterpret The Tempest as a communist (anachronisms be hanged) allegory. Both receive the same mark, and neither can be assumed to be less ‘critical’ than the other. Like art, literary criticism has become uncritiqueable – and yet somehow it is still supposed to produce critical thinking in its students.
A few semesters ago a number of friends and I took the same upper-level English class together. We each attended the class, took occasional notes, participated to a greater or lesser extent, and wrote a large final essay. After finishing the class, we all discovered that, except for one person, we had received the exact same mark on that final essay: 93 per cent.
The individual who did not receive this mark had written his essay in the four hours before the final class. He received a B.
Perhaps I deserved the grade, perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps one of my other friends deserved 93 per cent. Either way, I strongly doubt that we all deserved it. My essay might have been graded on my comprehension and interpretation of the course material, but post-modernism has rendered such judgments subjective and difficult. Was my grade indicative of my writing then? My paragraph format? My use of adverbs? Suddenly it felt like a sham, like a magic trick; it destroyed my sense of accomplishment.
I could have graduated as an English major. I could have stayed in the program, skipped out on my readings, complained about my workload, and still (honestly) enjoyed it. Yet when you realize that much of the acclamation, the grades, the ease, is not a product of your intelligence, but instead that of a system which encourages mediocrity, it seems dangerous to stay within its ranks.
After all, I don’t need to be told how good I already am, or encouraged in some sort of macabre myth-building – a grotesque dance around the truth. In university, I want to be part of a department that makes me better, that challenges me, and fails me when I deserve to fail.
Most of all, I want to be part of a department that calls me on my bullshit.
