Professor X by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic Read Free Book Online Page B

for the third and perhaps the fourth time, my stack of baseline essays. I did not then own a cell phone and had never sent or received a text message, but I needed the phrase that would become one of the greatest of electronic clichés.
    WTF. What the fuck.
    The essays were terrible, but the word “terrible” doesn’t begin to convey the state these things were in. My God. Out of about fifteen students, at least ten seemed to have no familiarity with the English language. It seemed that they had never before been asked in school to turn in any sort of writing assignment. I can say that there were words misspelled, rather simple words at that. I can say that there was no overarching structure to the paragraphs, that thoughts and notions were tossed at the reader haphazardly. I can say that there were countless grammatical errors; sentences without verbs; sentences without subjects; commas everywhere, like a spilled dish of chocolate sprinkles, until there were none, for paragraphs at a time; sentences that neither began with a capital letter nor ended with any punctuation whatsoever. I can say that the vocabulary was not at a college level and perhaps not at a high school level. I can say that tenses wandered from present to past to past perfect back to present, suggesting the dissolving self of a schizophrenic consciousness. I can say that some of the mistakes concerned matters of form explained to me by Sister Mary Finbar on—as God is my witness, I can remember this—the very first day of first grade, matters such as the definition “a sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought” and the requirement that, before nouns and adjectives and adverbs beginning with a vowel, the writer is obligated to use the article “an,” not “a.” I can say all that, and you may still think to yourself: English teacher. What do you expect? Nitpicking bastard.
    Perhaps, dear reader, you think the main issue is the arrogance and superiority of the aforementioned teacher rather than any problem with the students. Perhaps you think of me as Guy Crouchback, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, who during World War II censors letters and observes snootily of the writers that some “wrote with wild phonetic misspellings straight from the heart. The rest strung together clichés which he supposed somehow communicated some exchange of affection and need.” I could quote broken sentences all day, but I won’t. The words banged against each other in unnatural ways, twisted up like mangled bodies. There is something pornographic about viewing such poor work.
    I think of a four-line utterance without a verb—the world’s longest sentence fragment—and the old joke about the world’s tallest midget comes to mind.
    Nothing I can do can really convey—so that you can feel it, as I did, in the cold pit of my stomach—the true abilities of many of these students. Fine-tuning—that’s what I had expected to be doing: turning workmanlike prose into something substantial, something rounded, something that occasionally even sang. Instead, that lonely night in my little Cape Cod, I drowned in incoherence. I was submerged in a flood of illogic and solecism and half-baked coinages, this last being a charitable spin on the use of made-up words.
    There were exceptions. The older students were better. The woman with the tattoos and cardigan knew what she was doing, in the sense that she didn’t make up any words, and she had some sense of having embarked on a piece of construction, something to be fashioned, like a birdhouse or a ladder-backed chair, something that needs to be plumb. To my relief, she had her tenses firmly corralled, her verbs and their auxiliaries lined up in formation like little tin soldiers. There was another competent paper, this one from a woman in her forties. Her fourth child, the last one, was poised to leave the house