Literature is no place for sex and violence: Dual Credit and the questionable future of literature.

"Literature is no place for sex and violence."

So I was told by a dual credit high-school student taking an English course at my institution. The student was outraged by the presence of foul language, sexual content, and violence in our common text, John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War.

My first response to the student was tongue in cheek: "Shakespeare much?"

My internal response was much more serious.

At my institution, as is the case at hundreds of community colleges across the country, many high school students are enrolling in college classes while they're still in high school. Ostensibly, dual credit is a win-win situation. High-school students get some college credits on the cheap. The community college gets increased enrollment and an increased funding line.

This is all good stuff.

However, there are some issues with dual credit and literature. These students are high school students. Many of them range between 15 and 17. They're minors attending classes designed for young adults.

The college English classroom is very different from the high school English class. At least I hope it is. It should be. The college English classroom is about ideas, some of which might be disturbing to students and the parents of the students.

What is literature? One working definition is what Northrup Frye said, "It's equipment for living." It's often about the way people think and what they do.

My student, who cited Pride and Prejudice and Ben Hur as shining examples  of "proper literature," has a pretty old-fashioned view of what literature is. Literature is about the human condition. And the human condition in the last 200 years has been anything but simple. We've lived through a period that has seen the creation of human rights, but also genocide. We've seen the development of both the nation state and the weakening of it through globalization. We've seen sexuality morph into all sorts of things:  LGBT, BDSM, transgender, female liberation, MGTOW, MRAS, and polyamory. We've seen corporations take on the power of gods. It's been a wild two centuries.

And literature has been on a wild ride as well: Dickens, Thackery, Pynchon, Orwell, Atwood, Burgess. These people all have held up mirrors to the culture. Sometimes what they show us isn't very flattering.

The problem with dual credit is the problem with freshmen, squared. These dual credit students (and, often, their parents) think that literature is like a nice table cloth. It decorates the table and makes one feel sophisticated.

Literature is nothing of the sort. I went into literature because I like new ideas. I like writers who show us how we really are.

The problem with dual credit is that there's pushback, a kind of Victorianism at work.  Don't offend us. Don't challenge our world views. Don't say bad things.

Eek, get my smelling salts out.

Dual credit can help both students and institutions. But it can also push to make college more like high school. And that's a mistake, especially in the state I live in, New Mexico. The high schools here are god awful. That's not just an opinion. That's a numerical reality. New Mexico ranked last in the nation in terms of k-12 education. I think I know why. But that's a subject for another post.

Second First Place

In my composition courses, before students write rough drafts, students engage in a debate in order to help create arguments. The debates also help students to see what kinds of counter-arguments they can make effectively.

I structure the debates along the lines I learned when I was a high-school debater. We have two teams. The students not debating serve as judges.

Last semester, at the end of one in-class debate, the judges voted. Clearly, one team had done a better job than the other.

I congratulated the winners. And I consoled the losers. But one guy on the losing team said, "We didn't lose." I said, "I'm sorry, but you did. The judges clearly voted for the other team. And I can go over the reasons why you lost one more time."

He was insistent: "We didn't lose." He smiled. "We took second first place."

Second first place?

I thought to myself:

Did Rommel take second first place to Patton?

Did Custer take second first place to Sitting Bull?

Did Cornwallis take second first place to Washington?

The student who declared himself in "second first place" was actually one of my favorites. However, he is an IGEN. I'm a Gen Xer who was raised by the Greatest Generation. My parents were older when I was conceived. I mostly have their values and attitudes toward competition.

My first reaction to the declaration of second first place was incredulity. Igens tend to be--like millennials--much more egalitarian than Gen Xers, Boomers, and the Greatest Generation.

On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with some egalitarianism. But life isn't completely egalitarian. Some experiences are pretty zero sum. And "second first place" seems to me to sidestep the fact that in some activities--job seeking, contract obtaining, and even dating--there are clear winners and losers.

And there's nothing wrong with that state of affairs. When I was a teenager, I ranked sixth in my prep school class out of 300 students during the first quarter of my freshman year. When I talked to my father about my ranking, he just said, "Why aren't you number one?" And the next quarter, I really pushed hard, and I was number one. I didn't rank first every quarter, but my father's push helped me to compete and, more important, achieve my best. It's not so much the ranking that mattered, it was the drive to achieve it, the desire to have it, and the work it took to get it.

Second first place seems like a cop out to me.

Some people might say, well, competition is bad. (and if you're  Marxist, you could make Jameson's social constructivist argument that a respect for competition is just part and parcel of being blinkered by a capitalist system that doesn't allow for the possibility of other ways of being)

But I don't buy that argument. Don't you want your surgeon to be almost OCD in terms of getting things right?  If you run a company,  don't you want your sales reps to be driven to achieve market domination? If you're accused of capital murder, do you want your defense attorney to be ok with taking second first place?

Second first place, not a good place to be, for any generation.

Mornings

This week I received my evaluations back for the fall.

Most of them were pretty good. Generally, they're pretty good. But the evaluations revealed something really interesting. Last semester, I taught two sections of English 1110, a basic composition course.

The scores for the two sections were pretty different. At first, I couldn't figure out why. I do basically the same things in every comp class.

What was different?

Nothing except the time. The first class was at 8 in the morning. The second class was at 11:30. The first class also had a rather large number of high school students. The second class also had some high school students, but not as many.

The 11:30 results were much higher than the 8:00 scores.

I realized that I had had the same split the previous semester: the early class scores were yucky, and the later class scores were pretty good.

This discrepancy made me think about the fact that most college students and most high school students are not morning people.

I've always been kind of an anomaly. Currently, I get up at about 4:00 am every day. Even when I was a teenager, I usually went to bed before 11:00 pm and was up by 6:30. But I've read literature that says that most teenagers have huge amounts of trouble getting up in the morning, not because they're lazy but because their body clocks are set differently.

This semester, I'm going to really focus on my 8:00 am courses. I have two of them: both American Lit I Surveys. These are the classes that are going to be interesting. The last time I taught this survey was at the University of Minnesota. The students were mostly juniors and seniors. And I taught from about 6 pm to 9 pm.

So, my goal this semester is to figure out how to make an 8:00 am course that covers some rather difficult material interesting and a destination.

I'm going to focus on the following:

1. a lot of in-class activities.
2. lighting: I am going to make it as bright in the room as I can.
3. a lot of group work.
4. High energy.

Let's see how this turns out.