IDS essay -- on idealism at UH

Bruce J. Martin

Dr. M. Backus

ENGL 7390

29 November 2011

Time Line and Dream Liner Essay

Time Line 1993-2016

1993-2003 Worked as a technical analyst for a data warehousing company. I had already received a BA degree in literature and my employer figured out that I could write complete paragraphs, more so than most of the programmers. I was eventually assigned to write press notices, white papers, technical instructions for customers, and marketing products for horrible-feeling massive conventions in Las Vegas. By that time, I realized that, though the money was great, the industry made me feel like I had been living in some scum-covered pond and I never felt clean, so I opted to get out and go into teaching. Finished a second BA in Psychology and an MA in Education along the way.

2003-2007 Began teaching (with alternative certification) middle school English Language Arts in a Title I school in the Klein ISD. I should have realized that with a curriculum with a Newspeak name like “English Language Arts” that I would be head-butting a Texas and district educational establishment more concerned with appearances and the political side-stepping of any lifelong learning skills through standardized testing. The minority and underserved students I had no issues with. The spineless school administration and the testing-or-be-damned attitude of the state made me think that I could still teach, adults this time, and not deal with the district or Austin politics.

January 2007 Began adjuncting (when did this become a verb?) at Lone Star College. Struggled for a few semesters since community colleges don't believe that any competence should be demonstrated to teach, then decided I liked teaching enough to consider getting a full-time literature job at the college, but realized I needed an MA in English (I had one in Education), so decided to go back to school.

2009-2011 After taking Tamara Fish's ENGL 6300 course, realized that composition studies is a real field with real theory and real scholarship and real history and was converted from literature studies and never looked back. If I had wanted just a literature job, I would have stopped at the MA, getting a job at any community college and not being disappointed in any sense. Instead, I realized I wanted to study with some nationally-recognized and respected scholars and decided that there was too much to learn in theory and history and practice that a few courses littered about in the literature requirements wasn't going to give me the world-view that I need to be effective.

2016-ish Finish a dissertation on something like the reaction and experience of Latinos in the FYW course and how, as presently designed and conducted even at UH with a high Latino student population, the course instinctively ignores the local Latino perspective and world-view and thereby is counterproductive to their learning experience. Or something like that. Or something more gobblygook, using lots of Derrida quotations and being totally useless to everyone else, begging the question of why dissertations are written at all.

Dreamliner Essay

I had a conversation a few weeks with another seminarian (who's name won't be mentioned, but it's obvious) about the purpose of PhD school – all the time it takes, the low return on investment, the multiple hoops to jump through that seem to benefit no one but the establishment – and the frustration was contagious. At one time, when the forest was still young and the stars meant something and were still looked at in something like awe or reverence, I told myself that a college education is its own reward; that learning was a virtue; that gifts (intellectual? Or just character – the ones of patience and long-suffering?) should be magnified. Idealism is an empty calorie trap, though, of some high-carbohydrate French desert. It needs to be tempered with cynicism, basted with a patina of experience, and cooled to room temperature to be seen for what it really is. I had expected grad school to be made of something of the same cloth as undergraduate studies. But it's been less than that. I think, at least my undergraduate experience was one of several professors (again, this is through the rose-colored glasses of time and idealism) actually interested in student learning, of sharing some of the enthusiasm for the literature as we did. We were, after all, English majors and in it for the pure pleasure of the field; not to sully ourselves with the dastardly pursuits of crass materialism and Reagan-esque promises of a comfortable way of living. The experience as an MA was less than this. It was more perfunctory, less an experience of professors' enthusiasm for the text and more an experience of jumping through professors' hoops and a through a degree plan that wasn't really designed for learning as much as it was for exposure. This isn't a criticism of the UH program; it's really not. It's just what it is. It might be the private-public divide. It likely is the perspective of someone more experienced and less giddy about reading new texts. I was fortunate, however, to be forced to take a seminar I didn't feel I needed, one required for all new TAs, even though I had two years of teaching college already under my belt. That was a good thing.

Tamara Fish's approach to the course was more like the experience of my undergraduate classes – it sometimes lacked the academic grounding that I wish it had, but considering it was for 20 TAs who were really not interested in rhet-comp theory and more concerned about how to handle the student issues of the week, her distilling of theory still worked for me. She was a professor who actually had living experience with the names we studied and shared her frustrations with curriculum and students that we had. By the time I left her course, I realized that I wasn't meant to teach literature, but that I was meant to teach real writing and that what I was doing as a TA, or as an adjunct previously, actually had meaning beyond the required two semesters of core curriculum. This almost sounds idealistic again, so I'll tone it down now.

Zebroski's History of Composition course woke me, though, from an assumption that the study of the field would be an easy one. Not only is Dr. Zebroski himself an imposing figure in the classroom (we were all scared of him; we still are, but in a respectful fatherly sense. He holds this emotional position among the RCP students somewhere between the godfather in episode I and episode III), but his command of history and theory is something that doesn't show much elsewhere in the program. Perhaps it's just a personal thing, but I always felt that theory should have more of a place in the UH program. When I was studying for an MA at Memphis, theory was a required course; here, it's ignored by many professors, condescended to by others, and assumed by yet others. Dr. Zebroski brought theory to the forefront and expected us to not only come up to speed with multiple theories, but to use them in our discussion and writing. I have to respect that, considering the field is so theory-based and fluency with the language is expected so much in conferences and publications. At the same time, I learned to feel inadequate since then when writing about writing, always feeling like I needed to catch up. This imposture syndrome still haunts me and will until the dissertation is finished; perhaps beyond.

One of the things that I enjoy most about teaching at UH is the student diversity. I prefer these students over the white-bread students of Lone Star College, for example, which – honestly – are mostly upper-middle-class students from The Woodlands who just played around too much in their nice clean, 5A foot-ball winning high schools, and didn't have the GPA to get into UT or Baylor. I prefer the ethnic, national, and socio-economic diversity of UH freshmen, who bring to the classroom a natural respect for other-ness, an expectation that their real experiences living in Houston (since most UH students come from Harris County) amplified by an academic lens in their classroom. It doesn't work that way, however, and I'm frustrated by the fact that most of their instructors in writing don't reflect their own lives and experience off campus. This is where I see my idealism being reborn in some sense – coming to terms with, and perhaps even bridging the incongruence of the Latino experience in their mandatory writing courses. Though the UH is touted as the second-most diverse campus in the United States, the faculty is not – a full 70% of the faces these students will see are white and only six percent are Latino (University of Houston, “Faculty Headcount by Rank, Diversity and Gender”). If the student wants to know about the ultimate governing body of his city's university, he will discover that the UH Board of Regents is composed of seven whites, one Latino, one Indian, one African-American and one appointed African-American student, not elected by her student peers. The student Alumni Association is somewhat more diverse with more African-Americans but with no Latinos. So, I ask myself, what would a Latina student, for instance, see if he were look around herself and expect to engage in her own education around her?¹ I've begun to see that our white-dominated TA corps, well-meaning but busy grad students, also likewise falls easily into the trap of teaching a product-centered curriculum that in fact doesn't show minority that their own cultures are as much a value as the mass-culture of the establishment.

And so that trap of idealism opens up – the idea that perhaps there really might be a usefulness to all this study and that perhaps the academy still has some place in the larger world. I have to be careful about that idealism, however, because I'm already running into others who want to intrude and redirect or divert my own ideas into something that validates theirs. It's one thing to share an enthusiasm of a common idea; it's another to squash that enthusiasm with tired phrases like “I've already written books on this and want to share my ideas with you.” That's dangerous stuff and has all the hallmarks of an emotionally abusive marriage, co-dependent with the subordinated party always being watched. What they don't teach in PhD school is how to navigate the politics of the department. What they don't talk about is all the politicking, much at all.

But that's where my interests fall right now. Dr. Butler is good about encouraging students to share their work in public. Colleagues, who shall remain nameless, and I have started a conference and journal of literary criticism in the hope that other students will learn to share their work publicly and improve the level of scholarship and writing among lit students. We've started a criticism and theory reading group where we read titles on the Comps list every month. We've started an RCP colloquium where we meet monthly to discuss our research and teaching with other RCP students and faculty. We're planning for a writing support group to start in January 2012. All these are done, ideally, to support one another, but in essence I'm the one benefiting more than anyone else. When it's all said and done, I wonder if the dissertation shouldn't be more a collaboration than a work of single-authorship, since so much of the learning going on is collaborative and off-campus. In any case, the educational experience now is a web of various sources, some originating from within the Roy G Cullen Memorial, and others coming from The Montrose, the Third Ward, the North Side, and Spring. This is important, and I feel that wherever this dream liner of an experience finally finds a port, it will be one where these kinds of partnerships will continue in some way. This sounds too idealistic; needs tempering.

Somewhere in this short-sighted planning is an allegiance to folklore and local culture. It's part of the “realness” of folk stories, the sincerity with which they're told and shared within group; the rejection of mass culture and corporatism; the idea that each person in the circle – the teller and the listener are equally valued, unlike refined literature where distance and formalism is the expectation. It's also my own rejection of any assumed canon, the presumption that the folk can be overlooked, and the thought that so many valid ideas and values are so easily swept over by the academy that makes me me want to bring these tales and traditions to light in any way. Again, it's ironic that a university with a mission statement that claims to “enhance the educational, economic and cultural vitality of the city of Houston and the state of Texas” so quickly overlooks a real vitality of the city. Working with Dr. Lindahl and the Archive project has only made me more anxious about gathering and preserving the local folk traditions. It's the feeling of knowing there's a beached whale right outside your beach house, knowing there's nothing you can really do. But my ethnographic approach to my classroom is a small attempt to capture a small part of the local culture. And not “capture,” but value and validate. I think ideally I would like to be a folklorist, but I prefer not to starve so quickly. I'll always be associated in someway with folklore collection and interpretation, and perhaps some day will teach an introduction class on it at some other institution, but it can never be at the heart of my interest in writing studies.

And where it all leads doesn't matter so much. I'd be happy, honestly, at a community college where the students aren't as polished as at other schools; I'd be content at an urban school, too, somewhere teaching FYW and advanced writing. I'd prefer to stay away from most private schools that I'm aware of, just because of their lack of ethnic and socio-economic diversity. But in the end, the location is less a concern than that of doing what I like, knowing that students are challenged and taught. That idealism is slipping back again. Careful.

Work Cited

University of Houston. “Faculty Headcount by Rank, Diversity and Gender.” University of Houston Institutional Research. 2010. Web <http://www.uh.edu/ir/reports/statistical-handbook/2010/faculty-university/FAC_HC_FTE_FTPT_UNIV.PDF>. 23 November 2011.

NOTES

1 For that matter, if she wants to eat on campus, what food – that very essence of each and every culture, the savory safety net of smells and tastes that give us the warm memories of nurture and comfort of home – what food would she choose that represents her Latino culture? Chili's or Pizza Hut? Subway or Chick-fil-A? Starbucks, or Sushi, or Einstein Brothers, or … Taco Bell? Each represents a corporate adulteration of a real food experience, and none represent real Houston communities (even Kim Son is artificial and diluted Vietnamese), and certainly none represent authentic Guatamalan or Salvadoran or Mexican food. That corporate influence dominates the world in something as innocuous as food really mirrors the hypocrisy of our ostensibly public and diverse campus in a city of four million, 40% of whom are Latino. That somehow seems wrong for our university.