Teaching English at the College Level

A Walkthrough

DAY 1: Introduce yourself to

Not yet. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves.

DAY -8000 – DAY -5750: Years before you can even conceive of teaching English at the college level, you’ll need to have been gotten through to by one of your own English teachers. He or she must awaken a love of language and literature in your callow heart and set you on The Path. This special teacher could be the rogue adjunct you had during the second semester of your freshman year at college, who swapped out the standard syllabus contents for early twentieth-century socialist fiction and read passages from The Grapes of Wrath out loud with such verve that he came under investigation by the NSA. Or it might be the kindly matron who presided over your Brit Lit class in high school, whose enthusiasm for the material and recognition of your uncultivated talents encouraged you to start applying yourself instead of skipping homework to watch Sailor Moon and Totally Spies with your hands down your pants. No two students are ever gotten through to in precisely the same way.

DAY -5749 – DAY -300: Don’t get ahead of yourself. After earning your English BA, take a gap year. Take ten. Take fifteen. Get up close and personal with the post-crisis economy like a modern-day Steinbeck. Rack up certifications during those repeated spells when you move back in with your folks after your job disappears. Read the classics you recall those snooty AP English kids toting around: Homer, Tolstoy, Woolfe, Eliot, Balzac, Brecht, Barth. Get inspired. Write unpublishable novels. Maintain a blog. Go to open mic nights. Eventually decide it’s about time you brought your career (such as it is) into alignment with your passion.

DAY -85: Sit down for a third interview with Tiffany, the hiring manager at a community college or state university seeking untenurable bodies to position behind its lecterns. Express your profoundest gratitude for this opportunity and promise her she won’t regret this. As you pour on the thanks and oaths, notice the gelid sparkle in Tiffany’s eye and be reminded briefly of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula.

DAY -35: Receive the course syllabus. Be astonished by the distance between its contents and the Fifty Great Essays and American Fiction Reader selections you read during your first semester as a college freshman. Among the highlights: Instagram’s Terms and Conditions, a wikiHow entry on changing a tire, brief articles from Teen Grievance, the Program Director’s favorite tweets of 2018, and a single impregnable chapter from Derrida’s Grammatology. Enter into an out-of-body experience that lasts for two weeks.

DAY 1: The fall semester begins. Introduce yourself to the eighteen-year-olds constituting your section of ENG 101. Try not to be discouraged when all twenty-five of them resist every persuasion to speak during the icebreaker session.

DAY 3: Try not to be discouraged when twenty-one of your students bring in letters from the Disability Resources Center which legally prohibit you from calling on them in class unless they raise their hands. (They never will.) The remaining four students don’t show up, and you’ll learn afterwards that they dropped the course.

DAY 9: Try not to be discouraged when none of the students do the homework, check their email, or appreciate that the letter q is typically followed by a u.

DAY 14: Break the class into small groups to discuss the weekend reading assignment. Observe them poking at their phones in silence as the drone of the HVAC system grows inexorably louder.

DAY 16: Take a knowledge check: did everyone learn about “thesis statements” in high school? When the entire class nods yes with an attitude of impatience and frank contempt, give them the benefit of the doubt.

DAY 22: Regret giving them the benefit of the doubt when only nine students submit their five-page essays on time, and none of them do it right. Six turn in word-for-word transcriptions of the assignment prompt, riddled with misspellings. Two write about their summer vacations. One student produces a screencap of an Amazon customer review for a laptop charger. Try not to be discouraged.

DAY 28: Determine that the problem is the course’s lackluster reading list. Begin assigning more edifying, exciting stuff—George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, even a Marianne Moore poem or two—to be read alongside and related to thematically similar material from the standard ENG 101 syllabus such as “Inclusive Urban Crosswalks for Clubfooted Persons with Attachment Disorders: A Précis.”

DAY 44: After speaking to friends and roommates in other sections of ENG 101, your students learn that you’ve been assigning them extra reading homework. (Not that they had any intention of doing it, but evidently for them it’s a matter of principle.) When they stage an in-class protest by brazenly donning noise-cancelling headphones, gazing into their devices, and flat-out refusing to do anything, try to perceive the subtle tinges of difference from how they ordinarily behave. Take it personally.

DAYS 55–60: As you review their midterm essays with them during one-on-one Zoom conferences, casually mention to your students how exceedingly difficult it is for an instructor to know for sure if a paper was composed by generative AI. Offer to show them how ChatGPT works.

DAY 72: It’s a good thing nobody is even pretending to listen to your attempt to make a PowerPoint lecture about works cited pages and in-text citations interesting by way of a strained and elaborate analogy with detective procedure on true crime shows. You sound ridiculous.

DAY 76: Log in to Blackboard and feel a jubilant flutter in your heart when you discover that all twenty-one of your students turned in the latest assignment on time. Then feel your stomach clench and sink when the pattern becomes clear. Paste TikTok clips are not appropriate sources for a research paper into twenty-one response fields and call it a night.

DAY 85: Receive over a dozen angry emails from students who take issue with your deducting points from their papers over improperly formatted works cited pages and omitted citations. It isn’t fair of you, they say, to penalize them for not knowing how to do something you never made an effort to teach them. Recall that your kindly Brit Lit teacher’s blouses always smelled of Lucky Strikes, and feel a strange new affinity with her as you bite down on and swallow your eleventh nicotine lozenge of the day.

DAY 93: The semester is almost over, and your every ploy to get the little gargoyles engaged has failed. You’ve tried PowerPoints and Prezis. You’ve tried games, sock puppet shows, and memes. You’ve tried deepfake videos of Taylor Swift singing about the rhetorical triangle. Now try arriving to class with a 100° fever, a bottle of NyQuil, a 24 oz. can of Red Bull, and an extinguished sense of proportion. Reenact King Lear by way of Hunter Thompson by way of Kermit the Frog in a forty-minute jeremiad about how nobody fucking asked Microsoft to have Word insert eight-point spaces between paragraphs by default.

DAY 117: Don’t linger on the baleful RateMyProfessors reviews. Instead, read and reread the email you received from the quiet young man in the back of the class whom you saw nodding attentively during your delirious remarks about Bill Gates, Jeffery Epstein, and automatically superscripted ordinals. He writes that he learned a lot this semester and asks you to recommend a book he can read over the break. (Nothing too long—500 words max, please, and preferably with illustrations.) Exhale a gratified sigh when you come to the line about how taking your class convinced him to switch his major to English. He’s been gotten through to, the little shit. The ancient curse has been transmitted. Your part in the cycle is complete. The poor kid’s will soon begin. For now, take a well-deserved rest. You’ll apply for a job at the Amazon distribution center tomorrow. Shut your laptop, set it on the nightstand, and fall asleep beside Tiffany.