It’s not just because it’s stupidly underpaid.
Not because you have to establish a Roman emperor’s dominion over teenagers who are disrespectful to everyone around them.
Not so much because the benighted ignorance with which American students pass out of secondary schools leaves one weeping for one’s country and for its hapless children.
Not because reading their drivel is excruciatingly time-consuming and excruciatingly boring.
Not even because spending one’s time trying to assess said drivel intelligently and trying to advise its authors in ways to write less idiotic pap is a heartbreaking waste of energy and hours.
No. Not necessarily those things.
It is because no matter how much effort you put into them, no matter how much faith and hope you invest in your students, sooner or later they will disappoint you.
And you will be disappointed not just in them but in yourself and in your profession and in the entire flicking society around you.
They cheat. They lie and they cheat. And they do it all the time. It is so routine as to be unremarkable. And it’s not the ones who are so hopelessly dense that they have to cheat to pass a lightweight course like freshman comp. No. Half the time, God help us, it’s the smart ones.
I just returned (and forwarded to the division chair) a 300-point paper that failed because a good third of it is a copy-and-paste job.
Annoyingly, the author is one of my favorite students. She’s bright and gregarious and funny and she even seems to be paying attention in class. And, even more annoyingly, she’s no young kid who might be expected not to know better. This is a grown woman, thirty-five…maybe even pushing forty. And she’s a pretty typical plagiarist: smart, articulate, and full of potential.
Why do they do this? They’re not cheating anybody but themselves. They’re not cheating me. They’re not even cheating their classmates, since every person who enrolls in a college course gains from it as much as she or he individually puts into it. Why would you pay for something and then waste your time and energy on it? Is it arrogance—are they so smart they think they don’t need to be bothered?
When I was a kid, I was too terrorized to do this kind of thing. I would get caught (for sure!), and then I would be thrown out of school. My mother would weep and my father would disown me. I would spend the rest of my life in abject disgrace. So socialized was I to believe that you could not get away with cheating, lying, stealing, embezzling, arson, or murder that it wasn’t until I reached my mid-40s that I began to realize how much people do get away with. It was about then that I met a young woman who had spent a fair amount of her adult life committing insurance fraud.
She was minting money and new cars. Even whole new houses—twice she got insurance companies to tear out and rebuild the interiors of entire dwellings! That was an eye-opener.
By then I was on a university faculty. Informed by my young friend’s revelations, I began to notice the number of colleagues who pretended to serve on committees. They’d show up (sometimes) at meetings, do exactly nothing, and at the end of the day take credit for the work two or three other people on the committee actually did.
Should I mention the associate dean who arrived at his elevated position (and salary) on the strength of a three-volume magnum opus? When you opened the covers, as apparently few of his colleagues ever did, you discovered it consisted of offprints from the Congressional Record! Yes. In three volumes, the only parts he’d written were a short introduction and a series of two- or three-paragraph headnotes: maybe 35 or 40 pages in total.
How about the associate professor who was asked, three years running, to write a proposal to establish a program for which funding and administrative intent already existed and who never could manage to choke out anything acceptable, and how the program didn’t happen until a certain non-tenure-track lecturer of your acquaintance sat down and wrote the damn thing?
The search committee that was determined to hire a minority to its faculty, even though they openly admitted that a WASP woman was by far the best of the applicants? When the single African-American applicant accepted a job elsewhere, they closed the search rather than hire a better-qualified white candidate, and they conspired to flamboozle the Affirmative Action office with a set of phony reasons for rejecting her.
Dishonesty and cheating and devil-take-the-hindmost ethics are endemic to our culture, from the kid who pastes a web page into a term paper to the merchant who sells second-rate goods at first-rate prices to the manufacturer who fills “NEW!” packaging with less product at the same price to the pharmaceutical industries that foist unnecessary and even harmful drugs on “patients” who shouldn’t even be patients to bankers who entrap borrowers in loans everyone knows they can’t repay to crusading politicians who think the end justifies the means to presidents who lie to get us into unjust wars.
No. It’s not because they’re arrogant that the cleverest students cheat. It’s because they’re smarter than I was at their age. They’ve already learned they can get away with it, because everyone gets away with it. It’s the thing to do.
That is why I hate teaching. It is, in a word, profoundly demoralizing.
