Seriously Dude?

Presented 7/17/2010, WPA Conference, Philadelphia. Part of a panel with and grad student mentors and mentees.

Seriously Dude?

I want to use Liz’s discussion of the power structure of the academy as a jumping off point for my own talk. As a graduate student and a teacher, you are sandwiched already between the power levels of your professors and your students. Adding the layer of grad student mentor creates a double-decker effect, if you will. As a creative writing masters candidate – as opposed to the more “serious” literature and rhetoric PhD candidates – I found myself having to contend with a fifth layer to my sandwich. I believe we “creative types” contend with this kind of rhetorical bind throughout our careers, which often (and in my case certainly does) includes both creative and other work: academic, administrative, pedagogical, etc. Is what we do – our creative work - serious, and can we be taken seriously as creators, as students, as teachers, as academic thinkers, as workers?

I think Liz’s point that the approach to mentoring – and the discipline she found inherent in that position – can be taken with a bit too much gravity. What she was able to impart to me was a bit of levity. For all the reasons above, and especially because I was unsure about my own ability to teach, particularly my ability to lead a classroom and keep it in order, I approached the classroom and its attendant issues of discipline with entirely no sense of humor. When students texted in class, I threw them out. When students fell asleep I stopped class to point out their evil ways. If students brought computers to take notes, I was constantly checking the screens to make sure they weren’t looking baseball stats or IM-ing. When homework was late, I dutifully marked it in my little black book.

Not that they should be doing these things. They show a lack of respect for the instructor and the material. But what was my approach to be? How was I to gain that respect? As in a terrible case of male penis envy, I seemed to need to prove how big mine was. I believe I thought I was taking the “walk softly and carry a big stick” approach, but I began to realize it was coming off as a case of “little dick in a big dick world.”

I felt like a fraud. For one thing, who hasn’t nodded off in class themselves? I used time during boring class discussions to write my grocery lists. For another, I didn’t really care if they checked their Facebook accounts instead of discussing the rhetoric of reality television. Their grades would reflect their levels of effort. I was reacting out of principle, and as I have learned from dealing with my 3-year-old son, that is rarely a practical or productive approach to discipline. I would have hated an instructor like me.

I brought my problem to our teaching circle. I asked Liz what I should do if a student fell asleep in class. Her answer shocked me. She said she never wanted to embarrass anyone (I had been trying to do so in hopes of discouraging similar behavior) so she would ask another student jokingly to prod the sleeper. That way, she said, everyone felt like they were watching out for each other, and she became part of the group, rather than the disciplinarian. They made it into a light joke and laughed together, but not at the sleeper. This was a revelation to me. Liz was not suggesting that her students were her colleagues. I understood that. But she was suggesting that the power structure I carried in my head was both untrue and unworkable. It was making no one happy.

Basically, I decided to lighten up. Texting in class is annoying, but it’s not the end of the world. The holier than thou attitude – I was up until 2am preparing these notes, so it’s the least you can do to pay attention to me – was getting me nowhere. Instead, I took notes from my 13-year-old stepson. When I do something that annoys him, he looks at me as if I am crazy and says, “Dude – really?” It is usually enough to make me stop and laugh – and stop doing the thing that annoys him.

I tried it last semester when I caught one of my students – I kid you not!- watching a movie on his iPhone. The rest of the class was engaged in group work, so I was not their central focus. I stood over him for a minute before he realized I was there. When he looked up I said, “Seriously dude? Not cool.” He shut off the iPhone and apologized. I believe this served as a wake up call for him. He had already missed several assignments, and after class that evening I received an email saying he would be dropping the class. Of course, I would have preferred the wake up call to have been one that got him motivated to work harder, but I feel that he got the message: – he was seriously not taking the class seriously, dude, and that was not going to fly. Most importantly, I felt like I had delivered the message well. I stuck to this method and the class became enjoyable. I felt most of my students liked and respected me, and I began to like and respect most of them. At the end of the semester one man even thanked me for “actually” teaching him something. That was cool. Seriously.