“Every good manager effectively threatens his players with professional extermination if they don’t give him the best effort that they are capable of giving; Casey Stengel, Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and Earl Weaver are masters at it, as was Durocher. They are not nice people. . . .”
– Bill James, The Bill James Baseball Abstract, 1986, Ballantine Books, 1986
My first, foremost piece of advice for any classroom teacher: before you do anything else, put the fear of God in your class. Every class. Every time. First thing. If you don’t, the class will devolve into one of several sorts of train wrecks, and there’ll be no fixing it later on.
I don’t think you need to play Leo Durocher, but you need to play a version of yourself that gives and expects respect, a version that believes deeply and implicitly in the value of whatever it is you’re proposing to teach.
To do those things, I started out by explaining my grading system: Every paper started out with 100 points, 30 for clarity, 40 for organization, 30 for support. Spelling errors cost 1/2 point each, grammatical errors cost 1 point each, sentence errors cost 2 points each and use of any form of the verb “to be” cost 5 points. I won’t burden you by defining or explaining all those terms, though I tried to do so in discussion until they were clear to my classes. Letter grades followed the standard 90 – 100 = A and so on.
It should be instantly apparent that “clarity, organization and support” evaluations allow for a lot of subjectivity. I tried very hard to grade objectively and fairly, and I think I mainly did so. But one great advantage of this ( or a similar) grading system, assigning numerical values to all the aspects of writing being evaluated, lay in the American people’s devout respect for and meek submission to numbers. In the twenty or so years I used this system, I received one student complaint about a grade. (The student brought his mother in. She shared his indignation – probably had fostered it. I showed them the numbers. They bowed to the numbers and went away.)
The grading system explained, I gave my students a fairly simple writing assignment, due the next class meeting. I will grade it, I told them, exactly as if it were your final, though the grade won’t count.
For many, maybe for most, people, the verb “to be” serves as nearly their sole verb, relieved only occasionally by “to have.” Those 5-point reductions added up in a hurry, and quite a few students over the years received scores in negative numbers. Enter the fear of God. For many years, whenever I’d run into a former student, the first thing that student would mention would be, in one formulation or another, “your goddam ‘to be’ verbs.'” Almost always, that began a statement of gratitude because learning to avoid the passive voice had made them better writers, in their own and others’ opinions.
I’ve been retired for nearly twenty years, and I’m often told that community college students have changed a great deal during those years. I hear that many of them no longer view teachers with any respect at all. Little wonder. They’ve been raised in a culture in which any values but the monetary have been relegated to the dustbin of contemptible fable. They’ve been sold higher education solely on the basis that a degree or advanced degree is alleged to up one’s earning power by a factor of X. And they’ve been taught to view themselves as canny consumers and teachers as readily replaceable service providers whose function is to dispense grades needed for the granting of those valuable degrees. This all started back in the 1980s. Ed McClanahan, a novelist, protegé of Wallace Stegner, running buddy of Robert Stone and Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey, who supported himself as a college creative writing teacher for many years, described the birth of the consumer/dispenser model in his quirky memoir My Vita, If You Will:
. . . . In the beginning, in the context of the stuffy, uptight late-Eisenhower era, any class in which students were enjoined to seek Truth and Beauty through – as needed – profaning and blaspheming, not to mention trashing Mom and Dad and all they stood for, was bound to prove popular. . . Ah, the atmosphere was heady, friends, I’m here to tell you. . . .
Little did I suspect, however, that even then I was sowing the seeds for the collapse of Western civilization. For in those days, I’ll remind you, a C was still a pretty respectable grade among undergraduates. So on the first day of each term, when I told my students . . . that if they’d just produce the requisite number of pages of fiction – no matter how woefully inept – they couldn’t possibly get below a C, the students were positively jubilant.
. . . . But by the late 1980s, every college teacher of any description, in every discipline from Flower Arranging to Bidness Administration to Mechanical Engineering, thought he or she was a creative-writing teacher! They all dressed down and did first names and had forelocks, they all inflated grades! A’s were suddenly (to borrow a phrase from Wendell Berry’s grandmother) as common as pig tracks! We’d been co-opted!
Making matters even worse was yet another truly terrible idea of which we forward-looking progressives had all been much enamored back in the olden times: Students’ Final Teacher Evaluations. SFTEs are these harmless-looking little questionnaires that the teacher is required to hand out in class at the end of each term, soliciting the student’s (anonymous, of course) personal opinion of the educational experience he or she has just endured….In other words, not only had the faculty copped out, for all practical purposed, on its solemn responsibility to grade the performance of students but now we were letting the students grade our performance! The monkeys had taken over the zoo.
. . . by the late 1980s, administrators were not only reading the damn things, they were actually making personnel decisions on the basis of these fink sheets! You could get fired or passed over for tenure on the strength of some post-adolescent twerp’s opinion of the way you held your mouth. The sort of shared confidence and trust that I’d always nurtured so carefully in my classes was now utterly out of the question; threaten to tack a “minus” on some kid’s A, and the little snitch was liable to rat you out – for tardiness, say – on the next SFTE.
This re-definition of roles of power and control didn’t affect me much at all. I continued to operate as if my knowledge of writing and writers was worthy of respect, and my students continued to respect me, at least to my face. This allowed me to do what I came to consider the real job of a teacher – to find what to praise in my students’ writing, to find individualized ways to tell them, “You can do this. Look how well you just did this or that part of the job.” After years of listening to students talk about their past experiences, I’d come to believe that nearly all of them had had their confidence destroyed by some sub-human posing as a teacher who’d told them they were stupid, that they’d never get it, that they just didn’t have it. I got to the place where the paragraph that followed Bill James’ riff on Leo Durocher’s “Nice guys finish last” made sense to me:
Of course the generalization [“Nice guys finish last”] contains as much falsehood as truth; the point here is only that it contains much truth. For if you believe in sports, then you must believe in stretching abilities to the limit. What is the sporting arena, but a world in which the best is demanded from each and every one; what else?…The sporting world is a refuge from a universe of laziness and sloth, indecision and lack of commitment, hedged values and shortcuts, a corner in which individuals are commanded to reach down inside and find the best that’s in there, and apply it to…this nothing, these games, these silly rules that tell them where to run and when to run there.
While James was talking about athletes, I felt the same way about learning to read and think and write carefully and clearly. It demanded that you give your best, and do it within what sometimes seemed silly rules. And encouragement and praise were much more likely to enable people to discover the best within them than threats and disparagement. Encouragement and praise given after that necessary fear of God, the inexorability of those rules and requirements, had first been fostered in them.
I believed then, as I still do, that reading and writing constitute our best inventions yet for identifying and avoiding laziness, sloth, lack of commitment, hedged values and shortcuts, hasty generalizations and judgments, and illogical conclusions. I believe this is true for all people, not just for the tiny handful who want to become writers.
Because I believed those things, I was able, I think, to encourage a lot of my students to reach down inside and find the best that was in there, often to their great surprise. And I believe they left my classes with increased confidence in themselves that would stay with them throughout their lives, because they’d earned it by not only learning those silly rules but by learning to make them work for their own self-expression.
That’s why I think my grading system is worth sharing. It created the salutary fear of God so that I didn’t have to pose as some kind of heavy-handed, Old Testament deity. I could just be out there in the field with the rest of the players, hollering encouragement.
