You Haven't Seen Bravery Until You Draw the Short Straw And Have to Clean the Compound's Fridge. Leo Longfellow On the RYS Effect.

I've been putting my moldy brain to RYS and its impact lately. I know I enjoy reading the stories, most of them more horrific than my own boring tales of bothersome students and braindead Deans. But as a social scientist I'm always interested in how shared constructs (like this blog, for example) affect participants, in this case the RYS readers.

The RYS Effect, I'd guess, could be measured if there was some data, even anecdotal, and that seems like a worthwhile enterprise to me.

What happens to us when we hear horror stories of terrible students? I know that the first few pieces I read on RYS made me thankful for my own job, my relatively peaceful existence, and my students, who - for the most part - have never made me crazy enough to want to write to you about them.

But as I've read more and more, I've discovered a sort of power in RYS that I'd not imagined.

I think the RYS effect is bravery. The pieces that resonate the most with me, the ones that stick to my soul - if you will - are ones like this morning's Deadwood Darren. I found it thrilling. It was a piece of real theater, and I've been in enough classrooms to know that he did the right thing, but still a brave thing. I am at least 90% sure that I'd not done the same, nor would I have even thought of it. But when he threw that bill down AND walked out, I learned something, and I cheered him like nobody else I can think of in quite some time.

When I was a boy, my mother and aunt both were teachers, and on long summer weekends they'd pull me out of the alley or off the baseball field and teach me things I did not want to know. My aunt read to me, and to this day I remember sitting in the attic of our house, no air conditioning, my head out the window finding the only breeze I could find, and hearing her voice read Longfellow. I don't remember much from that, but I remember a line about bravery. (I've had to look it up, sorry Auntie.)

There's a brave fellow! There's a man of pluck! A man who's not afraid to say his say, Though a whole town's against him. (from "John Endicott")

"Not afraid to say his say," indeed. That's the RYS Effect, for those willing to feel it, to accept it.

Darren Deadwood, don't beat yourself up. Those of us who are listening are with you, and one day we will be brave enough to join you.

Darren Deadwood from Des Plaines Finds the Secret to Student Motivation. (And the Pathway to This Confession.)

Confessions? You take those, still, right?

I'm deadwood to most of you, 36 years in the career, careening toward retirement in 20 more teaching weeks. It can't come soon enough.

I admit freely that I no longer have the ambition I had once. Tenured forever, etc. Hate me. Hate my pretty office. I can't control any of that.

I teach in a fairly static field, where my "longevity" is not as harmful as it might be in a quickly-evolving field. That has likely saved me some.

As a sop to the Vice-President, in addition to my grad courses, I teach one freshman level course a year, a writing intensive version of our basic intro course. I've done it for 20 years now and it's always been a bit of a kick. Students get to study something I love AND they get to write about it, feeling their way, sorting out their own ideas alongside classical ideas from the field.

Usually it's a kick.

This semester I've come up against a brick wall, and I have to confess I handled things horribly.

We meet on Friday afternoons to discuss rough drafts of papers-in-progress. It's 90 minutes for me and my charges and in past years it's been the best meeting of the week. They bring drafts, read them aloud, we take them apart, celebrate the good stuff, weed out the bad. Usually we're still there 95 minutes in and I have to make them leave. Their papers get better, they get smarter, and I know from experience that they go into the sophomore course more able to contend with the workload.

Not this semester, though. I've been unable to get them to understand that this time is for them. Friday is the one day I walk into class with nothing, no notes, no books, no pen. We sit in a circle, a trick I learned years ago from a kindly composition instructor who - despite being 20 years my junior - mentored me skillfully.

Each Friday this term has been a trial. I wait for volunteers. Nobody bites, not even the better students. I call on some folks and they beg off - they have a right, I think. We've had a couple of 45 minute Fridays and it started to irk me.

This past Friday was the breaking point.

After ten minutes of near silence, a few requests on my part, nothing was happening. I could see some folks had drafts, and finally I said to Dean, a very good student, "Would you mind reading yours?"

"Uh, I'd rather not. It's not ready."

"Well, that's fine," I said. "I'm sure it's not ready to be turned in, but this is rough draft day, and I'm sure we could help you some. I know you could help some of the rest of us."

Dean pulled his paper out, looked at it for what seemed like minutes, and then said, "No, I don't think so. I'm going to pass." And then he folded his paper and put it in the bookbag at his feet.

Whatever it's been that's been bugging me about these scenes just got the better of me.

"What if I gave you 20 bucks," I said. "Would you read it then?"

And there was an alert glowing of eyes around the room. Dean contemplated the offer. I kept looking at him, my face - I hoped - still and serene.

When nothing happened I pulled my billfold out and brought out a 20, putting it on desktop. "I'm dead serious. Would you let me and the rest help you if I paid you 20 bucks?"

"Okay," he said, and he reached for his bookbag.

I stood up, quicker than I wished I had. I balled the 20 in my fist and dropped it, crumpled and obscene on his desktop. "Good luck with the paper. I've already heard enough."

And I walked out.

I sat in my office for an hour after that, just playing it over in my head and hating myself and hating the whole scene.

I didn't see any of my freshmen the rest of that day, and not today on campus either. I don't have the foggiest idea what I'm going to do this coming Friday. I have a sick feeling in my gut that I can't get rid of.

Darren's a hero!

Darren messed up.

A New RYS-er Brings Some Old School Smackdown. Otto from Omaha, You Have the Floor. Let the Bitchslap Begin.

Miss Hotness:

Why in the name of God do you show up for a nine a.m. class dressed like you're about to go out for a night of drinks at the club? I realize you're still a freshman, and maybe you like to look good or whatever - anyone who's seen the way I dress knows I can't throw stones. But seriously, is this an attempt to sway me? The quivery lip and the doe eyes when you came to complain about the grade on your first paper made me wonder. However, I quickly came to realization that the spectacular decolletage on display that day wasn't just for me so much as for anyone who cares to look. That's fine, honey, if that's your deal, but see if you can tear yourself away from the wardrobe and makeup mirror long enough to, I don't know, implement ANY of the NUMEROUS suggestions I made on your draft, even some of which might have moved your grades up out of the nearly-failing range to something respectable.

Dipshit Jones:

You came to class twice during the semester, failed to turn in one of three papers on which almost your whole grade is based, and missed the midterm. Why the fuck would you get up to go to an eight a.m. final? What possible purpose could it serve? Especially when you "finished" the whole test in twenty minutes, on precisely one page of the blue book. You scored in the single digits... on a percentile scale. Congratulations. On the other hand, your arrival did provide one of the funniest moments of the semester. Remember, just before the final started, when you asked for a blue book and one of the other (good) students volunteered to give you one. She started to dig into her bag, then looked at you quizzically and asked, "Are you even IN this class?" It was all I could do to not die laughing right there. So, yeah, actually, thank you for your bottomless stupidity. I wouldn't have had that moment without it.

Douchebag Nontrad:

If you tell me one more time how you make more than I do already, and how that somehow means that my subject is irrelevant to you and that you don't feel, therefore, you should have to do any of the assignments, I swear by all that's holy I'll find a way to make SURE you fail the course. Thankfully, you're saving me a whole lot of work by skirting the edge of flunkdom already.

Hipster Scum:

I am not your fucking friend. I do not want to grab coffee and talk shop. I do not want to do these things because you are eighteen and think, having read a book or two and come to my class sporadically for two weeks, that you have some insights to share. You don't. Go grab whatever horrible torment your kind has inflicted on coffee this week with some of your text messaging, iPod wearing friends and share your inane observations with them. I'm sure they'll reciprocate. If we grabbed a drink together and tried to talk shop, it would turn into private tutoring for Intro, and that's not what I do to relax, believe it or not. The people I enjoy talking about my discipline with are the people I consider colleagues - professors, graduate students, and even some bright and well read upperclassmen majors who hang out in the lounge from time to time. If you want me to care about anything you have to say on the subject, show me you know something about it... something your first paper failed at, miserably.

The Sweet, Sweet Smell of Hiatus. (And Guacamole. And Burnt Leather.)

On the occasion of our 3rd anniversary, and the bacchanal that followed (where Yvonne from NBC's "Chuck" kicked the living shit out of Compound Chronos and left him in a ditch 40 miles out in the desert), we're going on hiatus.

Two moderators are taking time off from the site, and a number of folks who've been involved with the site over the past three years are having spirited discussions about the future of RYS. (Spirited means we're all being assholes to each other, acting entitled, being petulant, etc.)

One idea that came from a longtime reader last year - which we've seriously considered for quite a while - is lining up some of the more prolific "correspondents" and giving them regular space on the site once a week, that sort of thing. There is a large group of folks who write to us fairly regularly, and there are some characters who always deliver top notch material that usually is met warmly by readers. So we're thinking about that.

But as always, we're open to your thoughts, and we encourage you to send them to us. We may not be posting or answering mail for a period of time, but at least one moderator is going to monitor comments and help the rest of us sort out what will become of year 4.

In the first 24 hours after the anniversary postings on November 3rd we received 440 emails that covered everything from our apparent "casual misogyny," to where we could stick the empty bottles of absinthe, to (truly) scores of very sweet and supportive notes about the site and its role. We may still not have clear vision - nor are we able to make a fist - but we hear you all.

Our best,
RYS

3 Years. And It Seems the Compound Kids Are Well Into that Second Bottle of Ether Already.

Today we celebrate the 3rd anniversary of Rate Your Students. None of us has been around that long, but we take any excuse for a party, so we've loaded in the fur pelts, the absinthe, and the battery cables. It's going to be a long night at the compound. We've got some special guests coming, so we've had Wicked Walter and Weepy Wayne working all morning getting the blood and mud off of the furniture.

Last year at this time we posted a retrospective that included a brand new note from this site's founder, the more and more elusive "The Professor." We thought we'd check in with him to see if he'd like to say howdy again this year, but he's apparently living up in Forks, Washington with his new family, and passed.

So it's left to us, we suppose.

Three years in a blog's life. It's an eternity, of course. Almost 1700 posts over that time, tens of thousands of emails, and more than 7 million visitors.

And we're not even trying hard.

Actually, many of you have noticed our thinly veiled attempts to kill the site, JobFinder, Coolest. College. Students. Ever. CrimeBeat. The inane hot links.

Every new feature we try is designed to piss people off, annoy them. We love it when the first line of a reader's mail says, "WTF?" Of course we're trying to disappoint you. Of course we get up at 3 or 4 every morning Pacific time (in order to be online when school starts on the east coast) to read mail and post the best stuff just so that you can get all high and righteous and tell us how sucky we're doing our job.

We've been especially successful ruining everyone's fun with our indiscriminate changing of the page design. "The colors, my god, the colors! And what's with that font? And what are those fucking leaves doing on the page? WHY CAN'T YOU MAKE THE PAGE LOOK THE WAY I LIKE IT?" Oh, it's delicious.

Of course we're trying to ruin the site. It's all we dream about. That and pouring honey on that blonde spy on NBC's cool show "Chuck." We Tivo that shit just so we can watch her run around. We have slow-mo. We've got it down to a science. In fact, she's here with us tonight. One of the former moderators taught at a juco in LA and met her when he was working a craft services job. How he got her on a plane and to the compound, we'll never know. But it's not as if she'd be the first person to arrive on site a little woozy and tied with heavy rope.

Anyhow, it's been 3 years. Blah blah blah. Big fucking deal. How many is that in dog years? How far along the tenure clock are we? Oh, who gives a shit. If there's a fourth year - and we're not even going to think about it until every last one of those shrimp gets eaten - we're just going to do what pleases us. We're pretty sure we lost our way this year. After all we have the emails to prove it. But if we return, we're going to all shave our heads, get down to our high school weight, and let the freak flags fly. If it's something you dig, we'll be happy to have you along for the ride, sending in your own screeds, being one of those nifty "chief correspondents." We might even send you one of those great RYS purses.

And, if the site's not for you, just shuffle right on past. We'd recommend you check out another academic blog, something like Highly Emotional Academic with Cats.

Anyway, it's just turned midnight here. Bring us some of that absinthe, and don't be skimpy this year with the portions. Tell Yvonne that we're out of dip, and to get her skinny ass over to the CD player. No more Talking Heads. Put some fucking Kool Moe Dee on there.

Oh, and it's little. Do you hear us? Years ago The Professor made a promise. This world. This fucking academic bullshit. It's little and we're saying it.

You decide what you want to do with that. We'll hit you on the flip.

Our Favorite Birthday Wish of All. We Figure With This Kind of Support We Might Be Able to Kill The Site Off Before Christmas.

Mistah College - he dead.

I’m not gonna lie - I’ve been over it for a while now. Not just RYS, but the whole deal. Congrats on three years, big yippee, but I’m thinking about leaving the professor business and becoming an insurance salesman or a drug dealer. Something fulfilling, something I can be proud of.

The majority of my students are bored silent all the time now, my colleagues are either full of shit or assholes like this hard scientist churning out doctors; thanks for the depth of your vision, by the way, and for ensuring that my physician isn’t also a citizen. (I would love a few minutes with this kid to show him how “pale and wan” the back of my hand is.)

I get that there’s a rhythm associated with the academic year, highs and lows – it isn’t my first donkey ride. (President Kennedy has been shot!) It’s not that I’m some idealist douche bag either, but I’ll give him that many folks around here have that disease.

Worse, they don’t even have the idealism – it’s a fashionable act assumed for a few hours each day on passing through the faculty lounge. Just another lie in the pile.

Grade inflation is now encouraged by our Deans and CEOs, another face of the absurd mendacity in academic culture. Students can’t handle the truth, admin can’t handle the truth. But deceit pays and business is good. So your whiskey I drink, and in shit I sleep.

I can’t in good faith pass even half of my lit class - for their unwillingness to read past the shady Google summaries, for their boredom and indifference, for their incomplete understanding of what it means to earn something. Professor Pussyfoot down the hall, on the other hand, will tell these same students their writing is brilliant, their insight promising.

It’s not just them, honey, it’s the whole fucking machine.

Shit, I wish I could still respect myself and pass out congratulatory grades based on effort and teach to the exam, suck administrative dick with the other side of my mouth and jerk off my colleagues all at the same time. I would save a lot of energy otherwise lost on trying to keep it real. This isn't the same as it ever was.

So for next year could you fuckers just bump up the potency, stop cutting my shit with so much sell-out merchandising and filler? Crack the safe and let your balls come out and play, light up the blender and make RYS honest again, push it back underground.

If not I may be writing into Rate Your Cracker instead - we'll have bags too.

Heidi & Hildi, RYS's favorite Sexy Scholastic Twins, Both Send Congratulatory Notes On Our Big Anniversary. Yet Won't Tell Us Why They Won't Call!

• On anniversaries, it is important to take a moment to mark the passage of time. With that comes the inevitable meandering through our shares memories of days gone by. The stories roll out, we laugh again at those golden moments grown dusty with age. We acknowledge that things have changed. So today, here at RYS, we give a nod to the enormous accomplishment we celebrate with our bantering. Our snowflakes are getting dumber. They fall asleep in class, they don't do their homework, they cheat on tests, they make up excuses. To the unseasoned observer it might appear they are exactly the same from semester to semester across this great land of ours. But listening carefully to their questions, it becomes evident more surprises lie in wait. They ask, "Where was World War 2." They think Saddam Hussein is a Nazi. They can text, but they can't type. They can download anything, but they can't remember their passwords. So, when we are referred to as complainers, whiners, big babies, crotchety old farts, inexperienced idiots, we can stand proud and say we are not just the keepers of knowledge. We are scientists. We are the preservers of records. Long live, RYS. Together we are chronicling the de-evolution of a species.
  



• So, it's been three years has it? Does that qualify you for some interwebs version of tenure? Ah I remember when I stumbled upon RYS the first time so long ago, when I was in my first year of teaching and ready to shoot myself in the face to make it stop. It was the middle of night; I was living in Buttcrack, USA in a department of people who lectured me, in hushed, fearful tones, about my publication record and the need to 'pick it up' for tenure even though I had published more as a grad student than they had...ever. Whipsawed between some jackhole provost who believed that our road to the top 30 could be paved by flogging the junior faculty and the departmental deadwood's insistence that we all meet weekly with our freshman advisees, I had both insomnia and tears rolling down my face. After drowning my sorrows with Midori mixed with Sprite and vodka, I lay, still in tears, with my laptop on my chest surfing the web. In a brief moment of complete honesty, I fired up Google and wrote the following the search box: "My students are complete fucking dolts." The first assortment of links proved unsatisfactory, but one contained a link that led me RYS. It took me hours to read the entire archive. I woke my husband up I was laughing so hard. And, even though it is an angry and bitter compound, I still read every day. Sure, yeah. It's a mess. It's dysfunctional. It's snarky. But just like that first night, it helps to know that I am not alone. The crazed Kool-Aid world of my colleagues is one universe, where I smile like a Stepford wife and gush about the joys of teaching and the brilliance of a central administration whose leadership consists of exhorting us to both fix pancakes for undergraduates and win Nobel Prizes. This RYS is another universe, where there is always salt for my margarita, where there are always some students who are bigger dolts than mine, and where there is some proffie so infinitely more pathetically fracked up than me that she LIKES that her students call her "Mom." Here's to the parallel universes. Now pass me the blender and get out of my way. I've got snowflakes to melt.

What We Do When We Can Do Nothing Else.

I must admit I had dreamed about the moment. We're in an enormous seminar room with twenty observers. Kayla is on one side of the table, I'm on the other side with the college's Dean, a representative of counseling, and someone is officially taking notes. It's a proceeding for expulsion.

Flashback to the classroom: Kayla throws a half of a submarine sandwich against the wall with enough drama to win an Academy Award. Everything she says is punctuated with wild hand gestures. She raises her hand in the middle of a truly rocking discussion in an otherwise totally dead class and asks: "What do you think it feels like to have metal skin and the heart of a frog?" after which all breathing stops because we're all just a little bit afraid. And that's a good day.

On a bad day, she picks at her fingernails as though she's trying to pull each one clean out, mumbles and chuckles under her breath, and rolls her eyes when I shush her direction. On a really bad day, the day that brought us to that table moment, she threw her tennis shoe across the room. She screamed that there was water running into little pools in her brain. Her ever shaky demeanor melted. We were more than a little frightened.

Flash Forward: It's an otherwise sunny afternoon. Kayla seems to understand she's been expelled. She recognizes what she did was wrong. She can't make the connection that she's trapped in a repeating cycle of being a little odd and being totally whacked out. There are meds in her purse, we've seen them. It's better when she takes them, but it's never good.

When it's over, there are no victory dances even though there will not be another moment when I have to try to avoid asking probing questions that might just set her off. I will not have to cringe when I watch the other kids laugh at her. I will not have to wonder if this is the day she stands up and takes off her shirt.

It was a day when the downside of open enrollment slapped me in the face. Anyone can sign up and be a college student. Anyone. And when it goes badly, sometimes really badly, no one wins.

Pass the bottle. It was a long, long day.

Not So Pale and Wan After All. An Avowed Humanist Goes Medieval on a Recent Pocket-Protector Dickwad in an "Ice Cream Coat."

Here's one Humanities prof who's got a little 'sweet' science to share with Poindexter the Puffed-up Pocket Protector and his cackling over Cory's situation. It's easy to be dismissive of students when you're separated from that horde of unwashed frosh by a phalanx of toadying TAs and a Scantron machine. Cory may not be cut out for teaching. Riding herd on a 25-headed blob that cares more for ring tones than Rilke is not for the fainthearted. But this much is clear from your pompous post: Squaring the circle between what is culture (humanities) and what is cultivation (teaching) lies far beyond your feeble grasp of what we here know as the "hard" science of teaching.

Let's forget the fact that most sartorially-challenged science profs look as if they've been dressed by their own lab monkeys. Forget that top-tier med schools now mandate some form of humanitarianism (i.e., bedside manners) for the heretofore sociopathic Dr. Poke-n-Slice, so ably trained in the "hard" sciences by fuckwads like you. Forget that none other than Hippocrates himself emerged from the same osmotic wellspring of Greek Philosophy championed by the "thin Philosophy proffie" down the hall. Forget all that. Let's focus instead on what a dick you are.

Humanities profs concern themselves with their students for two reasons. 1) We're not self-righteous pricks in ice-cream coats 2) We engage our students because we're the ones who read their papers. We don't teach them WHAT to think. We teach them HOW to think. We engage them viscerally through poetry or intellectually through philosophy only so that they might cough up something beyond a sputtering cut-n-paste hairball of aimless Googling and/or stillborn Wikipedia entries. The reality that this seldom occurs is why RYS exists. That's why the majority of posts emanate from Humanities profs, Dr. Sherlock Q. Fuck-knuckle. We're the ones in trenches grinding out the entry-level courses. We're the ones imploring these corn-syrup-infused zombies to consider for moment that their minds were never intended to be a Superfund site of corporate sludge. We introduce them to the concept of empathy. Then we send them to you. If you were in charge of that responsibility, this campus would be a fucking ghost town.

Walt Whitman and Wittgenstein leave you cold? Who gives a fuck what you like. Badmouth my side of the sandbox? This "pale and wan English proffie" is going all Cormac McCarthy on your shit.

When It Comes to Underprepared Students, The Buck Stops With Mitzi from Medford.

Ben from Boston has just experienced what I have seen in my classroom for the past few semesters, courtesy of the high school mantra "Every Child Should Go to College," combined with the parental mantra of "Get Out of the House and Do Something Productive or I Won't Pay For Your Car Insurance," coupled occasionally with "Well I Passed High School, so Now I'm in Your Class."

The first two categories will wash out on their own, but the third specifically concerns Mentally Disabled Students, and here's where it gets REALLY tricky. I have a student in my class currently who has (according to my college's Disabled Students Office) a severe case of Asperger's Syndrome. The kid is incredibly bright, cracking jokes over the rest of the students' heads. He is a veritable "Peanuts" Pig Pen character, trailing bits of detritus: papers, pencil stubs, drink bottles so most the students won't sit within two seats of him.

His body language is as interesting as he is. He comes regularly, speaks in groups haltingly (no social skills are a hallmark of this condition). He has not turned in one assignment or one paper, except for the in-class essay. Mostly he surfs the web on his computer (I only allow computers for the Disabled Students) and I tell him to stow that away plenty of times. He's just not equipped to be in a college classroom.

I spend a lot of time at the Disabled Students Office trying to figure out what to do, mostly letting them tell me "He's got to meet college standards." Yeah, okay. Then how did he get in here?

What standards did he pass somewhere that decided he was college-abled? At grade time, I am frustrated beyond belief at having to justify grades that I know are right, but rip me up because I know what they mean. (I'm doing my best to buck up here, so no slanderous comments.)

The other memorable student reminds me of Ben from Boston's guy, only my guy was not brilliant. Just incoherent. And in his research papers he quoted his grandmother, mother, the gas station attendant on their trip to Montana (his paper was about global warming) and one of the people standing next to him when "Old Faithful" went off. (Sample line from the discussion section: "The possibility to prevent air pollution is true, as long if the types of air pollution are not regulated through personal and careful attention to our interactions with Mother Nature.") I still see this student on campus; he shuns me as I gave him a D, effectively ending his chances of succeeding in English 101 on his third time through.

I can only say this here, to RYS, but WHAT are these students doing in my Freshman Comp class? Was it some other teacher who, when confronted with them, didn't have the heart to say, you know, college isn't for everyone and here's your D (or F) and good luck? Is it their parents, who don't know what else to do with these adult children and figure that our campus is their playground? In my book, a loving parent wouldn't like their child to flunk English 3 times in a row.

At the root of this is money, of course. A warm body means money from the state. A group of these warm bodies means federal money for disabled students. (Disclosure: I have had other disabled students in my classes: those with things such as bone diseases, severe learning disabilities and they work hard and earn their grades.)

Like Ben of Boston, I can't figure this out.

But unlike Ben of Boston, the sound you hear at grade time is my anguish over having to give them their grades--I pride myself on running standards equivalent to the Big U down the road.

It's unfortunate that I have to spend my time, efforts, energy on students who clearly should not be here. It seems that I'm where the buck stops.