Blame game

The most recent Profession featured two essays that addressed the culture of academic complaint--about undergraduate writing, that is.  First, David Gold:

Obviously we cannot reach all students.  And certainly it is frustrating when students do not share our conviction that writing is important, that we are important, that we have something to offer.  But that frustration is part of the background noise of teaching.  Many students also do not believe that math or science or foreign languages are important.  But do Spanish teachers publish editorials lamenting their students' inability to use the subjunctive? Indeed, does any other profession so openly mock the     population it serves? Blaming the victim is not just misguided, it's unethical.  [1]

Next, Marshall Gregory:

I am making a strong argument about this point [attitudes to students] because there is no community more toxic to the professional socialization of graduate students and new professors than the community of professors bonded together by the belief that students are not adequately prepared.  This community is toxic because new professors seduced by its appeal inoculate themselves against either self-inquiry or student criticism for the rest of their careers.  Just as Wonder Woman deflects a volley of bullets with her magic bracelets, the professor who begins a teaching career with the expectation that few students will be prepared arms himself or herself with a magical deflection of all self-blame for any teaching failures.  All problems with teaching will always be the fault of the unprepared student.  [2]

Gold points out that some of the complainers inadvertently indict their own pedagogy, like the professor who does little to help, let alone accomodate, a badly floundering student (89-90), while Gregory notes that undergraduate complaints about "boring" coursework may actually mean that the student has not been told either how or why to complete the assignment (126).  Both authors call for greater self-reflexivity on the instructor's part, not to mention an end to nostalgia for the halcyon days of yore, when all undergraduates (supposedly) entered college writing perfectly grammatical essays and performing exquisite close readings of John Donne.  We tend to forget that students know when instructors don't like them, and tend to perform accordingly.  Contempt breeds yet more contempt.       

[1] David Gold, "Will the Circle Be Broken: The Rhetoric of Complaint against Student Writing," Profession (2008): 90.
[2] Marshall Gregory, "Do We Teach Disciplines or Do We Teach Students? What Difference Does It Make?" Profession (2008): 123-24.