Curmie retired from full-time teaching in August of 2021. It was August instead of May because I was hoping—to
no avail, as it turns out—to do one more iteration of a Study Abroad program in
Ireland; the trip had already been postponed from the previous summer. I did teach one course per semester in the
2021-22 academic year, but then not at all for two years.
I assumed that I’d never be in a classroom again except for
an occasional guest appearance to be, apparently, the local authority on
absurdism. But then a colleague got a
one-semester sabbatical to work on her book.
It would be extremely unlikely to find someone who had both the ability
to teach all the courses in question and the willingness to move to small-town
East Texas for a one-semester gig at crappy pay. The powers-that-be then decided to try to
staff those courses locally. I suspect I
was the only available qualified person in a 75-mile radius, so I was asked if
I’d teach Theatre History I and II this semester. I agreed.
There were a lot of changes for me, completely apart from
the two-year hiatus. I’d taught both
courses numerous times, but never in the same semester, and always on a
Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule; this time it was Tuesday/Thursday. Back in the days when I was the only person
teaching these courses I could insist that one of the research papers be on a
certain type of topic; that’s no longer a requirement. And I ditched the expensive anthology I’d
used for years, switching to things that were available online. This also allowed me to choose the plays I
wanted to teach instead of necessarily the ones in the anthology: critics may
agree that the The Cherry Orchard is Anton Chekhov’s best play,
for example, but there is absolutely no question that The Seagull is far
more important to theatre history, so I used that.
Anyway… what caught my attention?
First, the students were incredibly polite. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or
not. There’s an obvious upside, but it
also suggests that they were less comfortable talking to me. And, of course, there’s always the lurking
suspicion that they’re trying to manipulate me somehow. I’m pretty convinced that was sometimes but
by no means always the motive.
Second, the majority were… well, “lazy” isn’t quite the
right word, but it’s close. They were
interested in doing the minimum amount of work to get the requisite C in the
course. This phenomenon wasn’t new, of
course, but it appeared in a significantly higher percentage of students than
I’d seen before in 30 years of full-time teaching (plus a bunch of part-time
work). Part of the reason may have been
an increasingly anti-intellectual, or at the very least not pro-intellectual, leadership at all levels of the university.
If university leaders and faculty advisors treat these courses as
hurdles that must be cleared rather than as the source of valuable information,
we can’t blame the students overmuch.
I mentioned “requisite C” earlier; majors must receive a C
or better in both these courses. The
percentage of students who dropped the course or got a D or an F this semester was
probably three times as high as I’d ever seen.
Doing the work just didn’t seem an option. Yes, one student in particular was
overwhelmed by other responsibilities (that happens), but another dropped the
course after receiving a C on the first test, worth 11% of the final grade,
because doing the work to do better just didn’t seem to be on her radar as a
possibility.
All that said, however, it’s extremely important to note
that my best students were not only more numerous than average, but they were
really outstanding. They’d not only done
the reading; they’d thought about it.
They asked pertinent questions and made intriguing comments, often
analogizing (appropriately!) to other plays, novels, films, or historical
events. Most of all, and this was
especially true of a couple of them, they were intellectually curious. They’d read things that hadn’t been assigned,
and then they’d ask me questions.
There is nothing more energizing for a professor than having to be on
your “A-game” to stay ahead of your best students.
So the best students were truly wonderful. But there was a paucity of good (as opposed
to excellent in one direction or OK in the other) students. These being upper-division courses taken
almost exclusively by majors and the occasional minor, I’d guess that perhaps
about 40% of the grades pre-COVID were B’s.
This time, it was fewer than half that number, and a couple of the ones
that did exist were either barely a B or barely not an A.
This phenomenon appears to be pretty much universal. My colleagues all note the same thing:
“there’s no middle,” or, rather, not much of one. We suspect that COVID contributed in a
variety of ways. This year’s juniors and
seniors in college were sophomores and juniors in high school when schools were
shut down, with lessons switched over to Zoom or the equivalent, and without
any opportunity for teachers to adapt to the new strategies.
Theatre, being by definition a function of sharing the same
physical space, was hit particularly hard, both in the commercial world and the
academic world. We’re beginning to see
some improvement with incoming freshmen, but many upperclassmen are still
struggling, having lost a lot of momentum at a critical time of their development.
We’re also a non-flagship state university. COVID lost us a lot of money, not just in
tuition, but especially in room and board fees.
Enrollment went down, and the obvious (not intelligent, but obvious) way
to remedy that situation was to lower admission standards. Probably 15-20% of the students in my classes
this semester, in courses that (allegedly) require multiple pre-requisites with
grades of C or better, wouldn’t have been accepted pre-COVID (well, unless they had a sweet jump shot, or something equally promising for success in the classroom). But we’re also a lot cheaper than private
schools, so we get a strange combination of really good students who can’t
afford to go elsewhere and weaker students who shouldn’t be at a university at
all.
But there’s another aspect at play here, too, one suggested
by a young colleague. She argued that
the lack of a middle, while the number of excellent students remained the same
or even increased, was also attributable to COVID. Whereas the average student’s academic
development was thwarted by online courses, inadequate supervision (generally
not teachers’ fault, Curmie hastens to note), lack of social interaction, etc., the
intellectually curious ones had no distractions, and therefore spent more
time reading plays and novels, watching films that were intended to be more
than simply commercial successes, going down rabbit holes of history or
science, or otherwise becoming more engaged with what stodgy old professors
such as Curmie call “the life of the mind.”
There’s no little merit to that observation.
Finally, of course, there’s the question of academic
integrity. There are multiple studies
that suggest that students don’t think cheating is a problem, and that faculty
either agree with that perspective or that they’re too beaten down to fight what
they suspect will inevitably be a losing battle. Computerized solutions don’t work. A few years ago Curmie had a student who argued
that his paper wasn’t plagiarized because he’d run it through a website that
said so. What he’d done was to figure
out that the site he was using looked for five consecutive words used in some
other paper, so he changed every fifth word to a synonym. Curiously enough, I became suspicious of his
multiple references to “Juliet and Romeo.”
I have argued for years that it isn’t my job to catch every
case of plagiarism. My job is to make it
harder to get something past me than it would be to write the damned
paper. This student might have done well
to heed that warning.
Some cases are easy to catch, of course. The student who lifted a sentence from an
online source and cut-and-pasted it into his paper without checking to see if
the font matched would be a good example.
But whereas that form of plagiarism is easy to prove (if they can Google
it, I can Google it), AI technology, which didn’t really exist the last time I
was in a classroom before this fall, creates a new set of problems. You’d have to use exactly the same prompt to
exactly the same program to get a copy of what the student generated through
AI. Luckily, AI likes to cite
authorities that don’t exist at all, or books that our library doesn’t
have. Inter-Library Loan is a thing, but
it takes time, and I know you didn’t even have a topic a week ago…
There are two (at least) ethical concerns I’m noticing in
what I’ve described above. One is the
ongoing battle against plagiarism and other kinds of cheating. It’s exhausting. Once upon a time, you caught someone violating
academic integrity, you gave ‘em an F, and you told your boss what you’d
done and why. Now there are forms and hearings
and on and on. Yes, due process. “Innocent until proven guilty,” even. But there are so many cases: one of my
former students, now a professor herself, noted on her Facebook page that she
spent eight hours this week filling out the forms her university requires. None of us signed up for this, and the power
structure is always going to side with the one paying the tuition.
The other ethical issue is how to treat students who aren’t
prepared to do the level of work required, through no (or very little) fault of
their own. Do we say, in effect, “well,
under the circumstances, this was pretty good work”? Or, alternatively, do we say “this just isn’t
of sufficient quality to merit a good/passing grade”? Curmie is an advocate for the latter, but that
doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand the other argument.
What I’m totally confident of is one thing, Gentle Reader: for all the joy
Curmie felt working with that handful of really exciting young scholars, re-retirement
looks absolutely awesome.
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