"Believing in Yourself" as Classroom Culture

Academe, Jan/Feb 2005 by Weisser, Susan Ostrov

When everyone is right and no one is wrong, what happens to the authority of expertise?

When I was a college student in the early to mid-1960s, I decided to become a college professor because my own teachers excited an intellectual respect unequalled anywhere else in my life. And because I respected them and their judgments, their hard-won high evaluation of my work gave me a strong sense of my own value and selfrespect. For better or worse, I would not have dreamed of questioning their authority, demanding their praise, or even evaluating their performance. In short, I wanted to be like them, or as I saw them: figures of intellectual prestige and accomplishment.

After years of hard work raising three children while pursuing a PhD in English part time, I took up my profession with pride. I believed I had earned my expertise and expected to be valued and respected by my students as I had looked up to my professors, whether I had personally liked them or not. To my surprise, the world had changed, in some ways I admire, in some ways not. It is no longer possible to reproduce my own educational experience and fantasies. I believed in my education; now students believe in themselves, or say they do.

"I don't agree with your personal preferences," my undergraduate first-year writing student confidently responded to my suggestions for how to improve her essay. When I heard those words, I saw my many years of graduate training and even more years of teaching experience dissolve before my eyes. It's as if my student and I live in parallel academic universes. In mine, I am the expert who shares my expertise and evaluates student performance from the position ofthat expertise. In hers, I am not more likely to be right than any eighteen-year-old student; on the contrary, I don't know anything worth knowing better than she does. It's all about personal opinion anyway, so why am I troubling her with my "opinions" when she has her own perfectly good ones already? My intellectual authority as her professor is equivalent to a useful fiction, a semi-ironic game she agrees to for a short time for pragmatic reasons, with the understanding that we both know it is faintly ridiculous. She believes in herself, and that belief is quite unshakable.

Yet it is mandatory that I give this student a grade; moreover, she herself wants an evaluation of her performance. Not just any evaluation, however; she demands-insists-on a good one, because she believes in herself. My job is to confirm what she already knows; in other words, to give it the institutional stamp that will enable her to get the job she desires or entrance to the grad school she covets.

No Definitive Answers

A teacher of math or science would probably not receive the following student evaluation: "She had an attitude like because she has a PhD we were wrong and don't know as much as her." The question of who is "right" and "wrong" and what it means to "know" something is, of course, more problematic in the humanities classroom, where interpretive methodologies are themselves objects of scrutiny, than it is in science or math courses. I imagine that teachers of hard facts and bodies of empirical knowledge have it easy in the grading department; evaluating the quality of what is known or understood is inherently difficult when the "what" of a text is not self-evident. The field I love and have chosen to teach, literature and writing, is notoriously based on a high degree of subjectivity, as are the humanities generally. Subjectivity of consciousness, one might say, is its glory, but therein, too, lies the rub-or, I should say, its ability to rub the -wrong way.

A recent e-mail message from a bright and sincere student illustrates the conflicting messages she receives in her education: "I just get so frustrated. Of course there are no definitive answers, so it seems to me -we aren't supposed to argue anything-just merely accept that there are many different sides and nothing can be resolved. I get tired of saying, 'This seems most likely to mean this, because of these examples . . . but, of course, it could also mean that, because anything is possible.'"

Rather than feeling liberated and empowered by interpretive freedom, this student is inhibited and exasperated. Students often grasp after certainties, if only their own. While doing so might appear to contradict their tendency to "believe in themselves," it seems to me simply the other side of the same coin of our own pedagogical uncertainties.

Students who believe in and champion their own interpretive freedom, based on the presumed subjectivity of knowledge, often face the other way to accuse their teachers of not evaluating their interpretations objectively: "He only praises the writing he likes," one student complained to me of a colleague. In other words, both teacher and student often give lip service to interpretive subjectivity when that is convenient, yet demand adherence to objective standards when it suits their respective agendas. Given the inherent tension between professor and student built into the grading system, the result is that, too often, no one is satisfied.