READINGS IN LANGUAGE

A teacher's job in “America’s most expensive Ponzi scheme”

For those thinking of getting an MA or PhD to teach English composition and literature, Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions Of An Accidental Academic (Viking Adult, 258 pages) should not only be an eye-opener but highly entertaining reading as well. The book is a self-deprecating satire by a former English major—one with a creative writing degree and several unpublished novels—who took on a job as a night teacher in a low-end U.S. community college to support a growing family and amortize a horrendously stiff house mortgage.

That teaching stint became an initially self-actualizing but eventually painful learning experience for Professor X. To get the solid grounding needed to teach English 101 and 102—composition and literature—to adult working students, he had to rediscover the classics himself. Over the years, however, he also discovered to his great dismay that the college system is a business that’s often more interested in meeting its financial objectives than in fostering the academic advancement of its students, that not a few schools ruthlessly take advantage of people who believe that teaching is an important and noble calling, and that as a whole, college education is actually “America’s most expensive Ponzi scheme.”

“My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must,” Professor X wrote in an essay in the June 2008 issue of Atlantic Magazine (an essay from which his book grew). “Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult… Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught. Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.”

In “Lost in the Meritocracy,” a review of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower in the April 29, 2011 issue of The New York Times, writer Caleb Crain says that he found himself wondering by the end of the book whether education reform was X’s real subject at all. “Maybe X has actually written a book about shame,” Crain says. “To teach a rising tide of students, colleges have increasingly turned to adjuncts, holders of advanced degrees who are lured in by the prestige of college teaching, hired on a piecework basis, paid low wages and shut out of academic decision-making. They’re cheaper, they don’t expect offices of their own and it’s easy to get rid of them if enrollment drops.”

Read Professor X’s essay “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” in the Atlantic Magazine now!

Read Caleb Crain’s “Lost in the Meritocracy” in The New York Times now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Professor X has been teaching English composition and literature for a decade at two small colleges somewhere in America. His essay in The Atlantic, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” was chosen by David Brooks for a Sidney Award and has since become much trafficked and debated on the Web. That essay became the inspiration for the author’s book, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions Of An Accidental Academic.

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Read Ross Douthat’s “A Case for Hell” in The New York Times now!

More Tongues, More Brainpower. In “Bilingual people are smarter?”, a column he wrote for the May 1, 2011 issue of The Manila Times, Dan Mariano suggests that the Filipinos’ competiveness in the overseas job market may not be entirely due to their facility with the English language, but to the simple fact that most educated Filipinos are bilingual or even multilingual. Mariano cites an article of Gretchen Cuda-Kroen in the NPR website that reported that “the growing numbers of bilingual speakers may have an advantage that goes beyond communication: It turns out that being bilingual is also good for your brain.”

Read Dan Mariano’s “Bilingual People are Smarter” in The Manila Times now!

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