pagers, nikes, and wordsworth: teaching college english in a shopping mall

Pagers, Nikes, and Wordsworth: Teaching College English in a Shopping MallAuthor(s): Martin ScottSource: Profession, (2001), pp. 92-98Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25607187 .

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Pagers, Nikes, and Wordsworth.

Teaching College English in a Shopping Mall

MARTIN SCOTT

Our Dean of Something thought it would be good For Learning (even better for PR.) To make the school "accessible to air

And leased the bankrupt bookstore at the Mall A few steps from Poquitos Mexican Food

And Chocolate Chips Aweigh. So here we are?

?R. S. Gwynn, "The Classroom at the Mall"

My first month as a full-time instructor at Houston Community College, Northline Mall Campus, was marked by a fight and major loneliness. One

day while I was giving my American literature students a nice, quiet exam, the sound of banging and thrashing came through the thin pasteboard

walls of the classroom. I walked next door to investigate and found two stu

dents throwing punches and desks at each other while screaming death

threats. I foolishly placed myself between them and, when security finally came (a well-armed off-duty Houston policeman), I learned what this vio

lence on campus was all about. One of them claimed the other had stolen

her pager. Or rather, she had loaned it to the other to get it activated, which

evidently had not happened. Therefore, she was going to kill her and her

children, too. I left the room and the two boxers as they were giving their

statements to the cop.

The author is Instructor of English at Houston Community College, Northline Mall

Campus, and a published poet and essayist.

Profession 2001 92



MARTIN SCOTT ||| 93

The loneliness came from the way almost no one would speak to me in

the faculty workroom for the first year. The instructors seemed intent on

preserving their private pain and entered the room collating their personal humiliations. They sat down on the hard plastic chairs to coddle these

hurts like insane, deformed kittens. If we had spoken, we would've had to

admit to one another how broken and defeated we were. It got better when

they hired some more new (read naive) people and remodeled the work

room into gray but spiffy carrels. Nevertheless, we all kept staring into the

dead end right before our seats and, try as we might to make fun of it, felt

the dust of death settling on our shoulders like a permanent dandruff.

I guess we all sensed, rightly or wrongly, that we were made for better

things than this: for students who would come to class prepared, who came

from decent high schools, and who could understand what we were saying if we said it clearly. Instead, we had students on the sophomore level who did not know the moon causes the tides or who, halfway into a semester of polit ical science, would ask the instructor, "But what is government, anyway?"

They weren't questioning authority; they did not know what authority was.

And after surviving the ego thrashing required to receive a PhD, if we

couldn't feel entided to teach at Harvard or even a good state school without

publishing more, maybe we could at least have offices and be treated as if we

were highly trained professionals who knew what we were doing. But such was not the case: faculty meetings were all about how we were not turning in some form on time or not giving out our home number to students when we

called to tell them their class was canceled. Or perhaps the issue was we were not happy about our twisted teaching schedules (five classes a semester?

and most of us taught overloads as well?at widely spaced campuses). Judg ing by the faculty meetings, one would think that education, what goes on in

the classroom, had no place in a community college. Cynicism is perhaps unavoidable anywhere, as I'm sure some Ivy League professors feel they have much to complain about, but the danger here at Northline was bitter ness and the sense that life had taken something from you for which you were not compensated. I didn't want to be warped into bitterness.

After a few months of trying to get a good discussion going at Northline in class, I gave up. I had extensive teaching experience in the Houston area, and I had always prided myself on my ability to get ninety percent of any class to contribute to the flow and debate, but Northline beat me down. It wasn't that my students were mean or bad people; they were mostly

friendly and attractive. They just didn't understand. Anything, it seemed. So I had them write in class much of the time and stopped asking too many

probing questions or expecting probing answers. I think this was a good solution, because they certainly needed the writing practice, but something



94 II PAGERS, NIKES, AND WORDSWORTH

was lost. What can you do with a college class that doesn't know what hier

archy or enchantment means (I mean the literal definitions?they've never

heard the words)? My questions in class now have to do with vocabulary and basic reading comprehension. My sophomore literature classes are

now all about basic reading skills. Anything beyond that is asking many students to use an analytic thought process beyond their grasp, which can not help being a little depressing if you have had a few classes of bright and articulate students in the past. For me, moving up to full-time employment

meant leaving better schools behind.

So there are definitely times in your teaching career when you must bal ance ambition with reality and make some kind of compromise agreeable to

both intellect and pocketbook. That is, you have to come to terms with the

fact that even though there aren't brilliant graduate students lined up in the

halls to confer with you, you still do some good with the community col

lege undergraduates (should one call them "students," "clients," "custom

ers"?) who sometimes come to class. The people you serve as an instructor at such an institution are important to society, or so our democratic system

encourages us to think, but it is also clear that the status bestowed on "in

structor, community college" is quite beneath that of "professor, major uni

versity." The underclass never merits the attention or prestige of the

middle class, though, ironically, the pay scale for community college teach ers is often significantly above that of university professors. I guess we like our top professors a little bit desperate, so we can yank the chain on them, if we need to. And we need to keep our instructors on the bottom solvent, or who would bother to teach those all-important accounting and reading classes to the workforce of the new service economy?

Before I acquired my full-time job teaching at Northline, I was a free

way flyer. That is, I pieced together a schedule of classes at three or four

different colleges working for the reduced pay given to adjunct professors. When I was lucky and had a full schedule of eight to ten classes, I would

spend up to two hours on the freeways each day, commuting among the

different campuses spread all over the Houston area, the radio turned way

up. This was the early nineties, so I got very familiar with alternative music, Nirvana and Hole, Pearl Jam and Bush. It was not unusual to begin my day on the extreme west end of town, in Sugarland at the Wharton County Ju nior College campus, and end up on the extreme east end of town, the

north campus of San Jacinto Junior College. Sometimes I would listen to

cassettes of John Lee Hooker or Robert Johnson during the long trips out

to nowhere and back. Every night I'd stop in at the same convenience store

for a package of Twinkies and some Diet Coke, the only compensation I

could afford to balance off the blues of moving from campus to campus.



MARTIN SCOTT ||| 95

Descend, O Musak! Hail to thee, World Lit!

Hail, Epic ("most of which was wrote in Greek") And hail three hours deep in Dante's Hell

(The occupants of which no one could spell)? As much as our tight schedule might admit Of the Great Thoughts of Man?one thought per week. (72)

So R. S. Gwynn has it, crying out from Beaumont, Texas, to the rest of the

mall-teaching world. There is something fundamentally wrong with mix

ing the sale of Nikes and cheap imported clothing with education, but if

one considers that education dollars are in competition with Montgomery Wards, one realizes just how far the groves of academe have been over

grown with poison ivy. A class including Milton and Wordsworth costs a

little less than a pair of the coolest basketball shoes, but you can see and

feel the shoes on your feet while they last. The whole internal education

thing requires abstraction and discipline, two qualities not encouraged by our culture. Empiricism has won the day, undercutting even empiricism's child, science. The world is one black box tucked inside another, at least as

far as our students are concerned.

O you who would judge me for my cynical attitude, come sit with me in some community college class down the street from the chemical refiner

ies, where the sulfur and the plastic weigh heavy in the atmosphere and you breathe in mental hell with every assignment. As if in reverse compensa tion, the administration of the worst schools is the most oppressive, watch

ing the least move of every instructor, since it is clear to administrators that teachers would not do their job if not coerced. You can feel the IQ points

pouring out your ears as you try to talk to people whose ideas of college come from advertising slogans ("Learn more to earn more!") and their fa

thers' bitterness about factory work. Even the administration wants to take it out on the faculty, the smarty-pants and the eggheads, the pretty boys and the spoiled brats, as if those with their fresh PhDs hadn't already just got their asses kicked in the hazing of comprehensives and defenses and

large student loans. I remember one administrator circulating through the

building, making sure that none of us released our class five minutes early. The back wall of my classroom was glass, and every night she passed by,

checking off her list. There was always this stern look of disappointment on her gray face, as I was too responsible and she could not have the plea sure of docking my pay.

Everyone's got a reason to be bitter: I've known elder statesmen poets and fiction writers who had published many books and won many awards but could not hide their bitterness at the world for not giving them more.

They never had to teach at a community college, but the universities



96 II PAGERS, NIKES, AND WORDSWORTH

weren't giving them the chairs and fellowships they deserved, and no one ever gets enough applause and brownnosing. Out of bitterness flows poli tics, and out of politics flows bitterness?when someone outmaneuvers you.

I remember there was a time when I felt like education was sacred, that the initiation into the inner meaning of texts and concepts was an ecstatic

occupation. Reading Wordsworth and Nabokov for the first time was like

discovering new territory of the heart and mind, as if one were ascending to a new level of being. "Resolution and Independence" and Pale Fire are like nothing else, a pure intellectual drug. I still think about the high I got

reading them the first time, and I search for that same feeling elsewhere in obscure or classical texts, the terror and beauty of the unknown book. The

beauty is the aesthetic of the surface dimension of the text, and the terror is the depth of the symbolic and metaphoric: the waxwing flies into the mir ror of the window, just as the leech gatherer wanders off to streams un

known. "By our own spirits are we deified" (Wordsworth, "Resolution"

155)?or so we will believe in solitude, but not in the company of unpre

pared students or perplexed administrators, who would rather we be less than human in perspicacity. The rush that brought us into teaching has lit

tle to do with class time and committees.

But there are moments when even the dullest classroom full of students is paying attention to every word you say, and the rapt look on their faces tells you they are getting your explication of Roland Barthes's essay "Toys"; are really moved by Whitman's compassion for a bird in "Out of the Cra dle Endlessly Rocking"; or, during a personal conference, are beginning to

understand just what a comma splice is and how to fix one. And then those

very sweet moments when you say something funny and the whole class

laughs for thirty seconds nonstop?they got something intellectual, and

they laughed. These victories are hardly large, but they are real, and they do mean something to students. They make you feel that you're not speak

ing into the void the way you thought, that you are having an effect on how

people think about life and reading. Then there are those students who

manage to get into four-year private colleges or nursing schools because of

the recommendations you wrote for them and the very optimistic lies you told about their performance in class. My students are all working to break out of the overworked, the underclass, or the criminal world, and a lot of

them really do make it. And maybe I'm a part ofthat escape. I can't say that what I do is sacred, though there have been times I've felt

like a priest when students wanted to tell me their personal problems. Sometimes you have to listen?their fathers died and they are sure an un

answered telephone ring was from him in his last hour, or they were or

phans growing up on the streets of Mexico City and did things to stay alive



MARTIN SCOTT ||| 97

they would rather not remember. They broke up with their boyfriends or

their girlfriends; their children have been murdered by their boyfriends or their girlfriends; their parents will not go into rehab but are the only ones who can baby-sit their children. Sometimes they cry and confess their

sins in class; sometimes their husbands or their boyfriends stalk them on

campus and even come into the classroom and you have to shoo them off.

Sometimes their pagers and cellular phones go off over and over in one pe riod. Sometimes you think the demons are hovering around their tender

lives and you wish they'd just back off for one semester. It's a wonder they ever hear anything you say, but when they do, it's heaven.

I want my poor class to be the place where one can find

That blessed mood, In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:?that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,?

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul [...].

(Wordsworth, "Lines" 67)

Maybe literature is religion, or at least the best of it we have left to us. I don't know what it is that I'm supposed to be doing, but I know what my students need: a reason to go on and read a bunch of really hard texts. Then

go home and face a hard life they cannot leave behind. I've heard all about it: violent fathers and husbands, the creeping hand of disease and murder,

disloyal friends and the hamstringing cut of poverty and loneliness. It is the

"still, sad music of humanity" (68) one hears in community college, in the

papers and the discussions, in the journals and the conferences. This is the life the young Wordsworth lived and turned into poetry. It is the shudder of unbearable pain, the illness that tells us we must believe in something:

Nature never did betray The heart that loved her [. ..]

[.-;.] [. . .] neither evil tongues,

Rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. (69)



98 HI PAGERS, NIKES, AND WORDSWORTH

The reason to live and get educated is that words contain some hint of

where salvation is to be found, and why should anything else matter to any one? Maybe the walls are falling apart, but we have to believe that in the ru

ins lie the secret plans to the new temple and the heart of flesh on which the

law is written like a tongue of flame. "Thanks to the human heart by which we live" (Wordsworth, "Ode" 145)?we make a family and a life out of

everything we have been thrown into, as if there were a plan to this, a plan that we cannot possibly believe in but that we cannot possibly do without.

WORKS CITED

Gwynn, R. S. "The Classroom at the Mall." Rebel Angels. Ed. Mark Jarman and David

Mason. Brownsville: Story Line, 1996. 72-74.

Wordsworth, William. "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey." Words

worth, Poems 66-70.

-. "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Wordsworth, Poems 139-45.

-. "Resolution and Independence." Wordsworth, Poems 153-58.

-. Selected Poems. Ed. John O. Hayden. New York: Penguin, 1994.



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