- Allitt, Patrick.
I'm the Teacher, You're the Student.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8122-1887-6.
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This delightfully written and enlightening book provides a look
inside a present-day university classroom. The
author, a professor
of history at Emory University in Atlanta, presents a diary of a one
semester course in U.S. history from 1877 to the present.
Descriptions of summer programs at Oxford and
experiences as a student of Spanish in Salamanca Spain (the
description of the difficulty of learning a foreign language as
an adult [pp. 65–69] is as good as any I've read) provide
additional insight into the life of a professor. I wish I'd had a teacher
explain the craft of expository writing as elegantly as Allitt
in his “standard speech” (p. 82). The sorry state of
undergraduate prose is sketched in stark detail, with amusing howlers
like, “Many did not survive the harsh journey west, but still they
trekked on.” Although an introductory class, students were a mix of
all four undergraduate years; one doesn't get a sense the graduating
seniors thought or wrote any more clearly than the freshmen. Along
the way, Allitt provides a refresher course in the historical period
covered by the class. You might enjoy answering the factual questions
from the final examination on pp. 215–218 before and after
reading the book and comparing your scores (answers are on
p. 237—respect the honour code and don't peek!). The darker side of
the educational scene is discussed candidly: plagiarism in the age of
the Internet; clueless, lazy, and deceitful students; and the endless
spiral of grade inflation. What grade would you give to students
who, after a semester in an introductory undergraduate course, “have
no aptitude for history, no appreciation for the connection between
events, no sense of how a historical situation changes over time,
[who] don't want to do the necessary hard work, … skimp
on the reading, and can't write to save their lives”
(p. 219)—certainly an F? Well, actually, no: “Most of them will
get B− and a few really hard cases will come in with Cs”. And,
refuting the notion that high mean grade point averages at elite
schools simply reflect the quality of the student body and their
work, about a quarter of Allitt's class are these intellectual bottom
feeders he so vividly evokes.
January 2005 