The Rudest Students Are No Longer in High School

Two months ago, I contacted a journalism major who had taken one of my composition classes about the possibility of her reviewing my new e-book for our campus newspaper. The young woman responded that she was not yet permitted to write items for the paper, but that she would put me in touch with a reporter. After a wait of some days, I was indeed e-mailed by this fellow. He claimed to be facing several inflexible deadlines… would I please write answers to seven questions (most of them riddled with basic spelling errors) so that he could begin fleshing out the piece before the actual interview? This I did promptly, though facing several rather more important deadlines of my own (if a professor’s work is still more esteemed than a student’s). The date and time for the subsequent live interview at my office arrived… and passed. Another e-mail message: “I couldn’t find your office… I tried to leave a voice-mail… the voice on your machine said he was somebody else… do you really work here now?” I sent back my home phone number, abstaining from caustic comments about a reporter who was too shy to find Room 207 in the oldest building on campus or to risk leaving a message on the wrong machine. (It was the right machine, in fact: no one has been able to figure out how to remove my predecessor’s ghost from the tape.) Thereafter, messages began cropping up on my home phone (no, I do not own a cell). “Sorry I missed you. Call me back after five.” No answer at five-thirty… or six, or seven, or eight. A reporter who is unreachable, even on his cell phone… well, I sighed, I had already essentially written the article for him. He naively confessed as much in our one successful phone encounter. Be patient.

So ended my attempt to have an excellent book reviewed by the sorry little rag of a third-rate college. No review article ever appeared. Postscript: the young woman who was thought too green to compose for this slender bimonthly production was featured two weeks later in a front-page spread, speaking out on behalf of the neo-pagan religion she espouses as an alternative to harsh, hypocritical Christianity.

If this generation’s cutting edge thus nudges the rest of us aside on some occasions, it will also grind us under its steel keel when we float directly in its path. My freshman class this fall has exceeded in rudeness all others whose bow I have crossed in two decades by an alarming exponent. It’s as if some decrepit but yet functional restraining wall suddenly gave way in Fall ’08. I have two yawners—the two otherwise most mannerly males in the group—who simply rear back and exhale into the ceiling with shrill enlistment of vocal chords. Others prefer to put their heads down and black out when tedium overtakes them. Everyone except the silent, intent girl who sits alone up front will constantly carry a class discussion into a private parley full of giggles and sibilant whispers. I gave up long ago trying to browbeat these companionable chatterboxes into some sense of public decorum: I now rasp “ssshh” or sing “yoo-hoo” at them in the congenially humiliating style of an elbow prod, which they take in pretty good form and to which they may temporarily yield. After all, I’m just one of the guys to them. Any gesture that might seek to draw upon my superior age, wisdom, and authority would be wasted. Similarly, to the black dude who shuffles in fifteen minutes late every day (when at all), an iPod stuck in his ear, and immediately starts up a conversation with a chick as he settles himself in, I say virtually nothing. He is so obviously looking for confrontation, whether to have the joy of irritating me or to supply himself with grounds for his future failure (“He just hates me… always picking on me”) that I take a perverse pleasure in frustrating him. There ARE times, however, when one would like to retain a difficult thought in mid-sentence.

The loud, incessant whispering also undermines my larger survey classes, where a comradely “pipe down!” doesn’t work. Last week, I attempted to show select scenes from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a play whose drama woven of sexual harassment, political duplicity, and religious hypocrisy is by no means distant to this generation. Students came and went during the screening until I had to stop the show and prohibit trips to the bathroom. One student sat in front of me very noisily thumbing through a math book (I don’t think her forefinger ever touched a page) as she frantically finished an assignment in the dark. When I at last quizzed the group, having devoted three periods to showing as many key scenes as possible, those who were present (and perhaps had not been present earlier in the week) missed more questions over material they had viewed not ten minutes before than on any other section. Of course, the success is as curious as the failure here. No doubt, the cheating which I have been unable to stifle throughout the semester probably accounts for the former, though the latter remains a mystery. I suppose if the two or three real students in the bunch just happened to have misunderstood my last questions, the ripple of their miscue would have reached from wall to wall.

Returning to teach in a private high school during my silver years grows daily more attractive. Boorish behavior was the awful horror which hounded many teachers of my generation to flee upward to colleges. Now it may just chase us back down. At least a student in a private high school may actually be punished for acting like a peccary dosed with Red Bull. At least he or she will be fairly reliably transported to school every day. At least one’s employers at such a place will be grateful for one’s degrees and experience, not defiant every year at contract time. At least one will not be steadily reviled in anthologies of essays, and perhaps scowled at up and down the English Department’s frigid corridors, for being a straight white male. One may indeed be applauded rather than reprimanded for allowing students to use the word “God” in their papers. (Like today's professoriat, the Puritans of Shakespeare's day would not permit "God" to appear in print, resulting in some very odd lines throughout Measure for Measure).

Maybe the time has come truly to give up on colleges, and to retreat to trenches as close to the hearth as possible.