Dissent in the classroom (Harris Response)

I just finished reading A Teaching Subject and I was reminded of several incidents by the student letter that appears in an interchapter late in the book. The student has written to his school complaining that the composition class he took expected him to agree with his instructor, always be extremely liberal, etc. in order to get a good grade.

This has been a hot topic this past year, it seems, since student groups have been formed to oust liberal instructors (and if you didn't know this already, there are plenty of news articles about it at Google News).

I can't completely disagree with this student and others. There was a grad student, that I worked with previously, who made her students jump through ridiculous hoops to get an A. I suppose there's a possibility that she might read this some day, and to some extent, I don't care.

She was the local extremist, perfectly willing to mark down students that didn't agree with her--but she didn't fail them unless they actually refused to do the work. A few did. Common assignments in this class included writing letters to representatives, attending peace rallies and marches, and so on. Students felt like they HAD to do these extra curriculars to get a good grade in the course.

In 2001, courses started and nearly immediately 9/11 occurred. She restructured her entire course around having her students write about what had happened and how America deserved it, about how Americans are overwhelmingly bad people, and so on.

And it doesn't really matter if you agree or disagree with that, the point is that students shouldn't have to feel forced to agree with her--or else. A few students that refused to do the huge projects she had them working on, and instead wanted to do the syllabus work, got far lower grades than they might have otherwise. And it's also important to realize that this course had nothing to do with composition anymore (or rhetoric, or visual rhetoric) so the students weren't getting the instruction they deserved to begin with.

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My second example is.... me. In my second year of teaching I was presented with a difficult student. From the first day of class on she would whisper "I hate this fucking class" and generally made life hell for everybody else that was enjoying the class. As a TA I couldn't ask her to leave, I could only ask her to speak to my supervisor. We figured out it really wouldn't matter who was teaching, she'd obviously hate it just as much, so I felt like I was on damage control all term. (Apparently my supervisor thought I could handle this. I really wish she'd been shuttled off to somebody else more experienced, but I guess it *was* a good experience for me in the end.)

She got around to writing her paper, and it was ragingly, flamingly racist. All she did was talk about how much she hated black people, blamed them for everything that went wrong in her life, and how THEY were the reason she didn't get into U of M. It was supposed to be a position paper against Affirmative Action, but she couldn't represent the other side of the argument, and that--plus the racism--made it a pretty horrible persuasive paper. The only people that this paper spoke to were the turds that post on Stormfront.org, and her audience was supposed to be her classmates (some of which were students of color).

So hey--moral dilemmna. Do I flat out tell her I won't accept her opinion in my class (which as an anti-racist advocate is probably what I should do) or do I tell her how to fix her argument (which was a non biased teacher is probably what I should do).

In the end, I chose to try and help her make her argument palatable to more people. She still got a C on the paper because she still couldn't understand anything might be positive about Affirmative Action. I won a small amount in the end by having her tone her argument down a lot for her in class presentation. But she still swore at me, claimed I was trying to change her mind, and said she hated the "fucking" class every single day.

I can't even explain how happy I was when that term was over.

But even with many more classes behind me I still can't figure out what a teacher is supposed to do in this situation. Today I'd probably just disallow those topics entirely, but if I want to leave political topics open, how do you deal with students like this girl?