just what sex are student pronouns anyway?

I remember the first time I read an essay that referred to all students as "her," and had two thoughts--one: the writer was female so must just be using her own pronoun, which I've been told you can do; two: what a nice change from the usual he/his or he/she or his/hers because no matter how much Vitannza loves throwing in those "/'s" and no matter how much I did the same thing in my latest Marback essay, replacing a singular personal pronoun with a "/" construction gets old about two pages into an article, let alone 20.

But when I was reading for this week something gave me pause. Cynthia Hayes reminds us that T.R. Johnson talked about students as sado-masochists in "School Sucks" and somewhere very close to the "happily bound and gagged" by writing line refers to students by the feminine...

I have, admittedly, been reading too many feminist bloggers recently. But I really began to wonder where this "student as female" set-up came from. Eveyrwhere else we as a country refer to unspecified people as male and yes, feminists complain about it. But think, just for a moment, all the things we usually say about students. Think of all those commonplaces that we have to think about students:

They can't write. They're bad writers. They can't think. They don't read the way we want them to. The way they respond to our assignments is boring. They don't care. They...

And I think that it's sort of strange that in the ONE field where we constantly make the statement that our object of study--students--are doing poorly but that WE--their opposite--have the magical bullet or pedagogy that somebody could use to turn that around--that we refer to all students as female.

I remember writing up the research study I ran for my thesis and avoiding personal pronouns like the plague. If I used "she" somebody would know what student I was writing about--I had that few female students. If I used "he" I was clearly being a bad feminist. But they were nearly all "he's," and thus I started designating students by letters--by fake names--anything, really, to keep from having to use a bloody pronoun.

I'm relunctant to feminize all students. Females are still considered the weaker sex, and if we're going to take on this pedagogy where student writing and circulation is important, if we're going to value abstract writing and juxtaposition, I don't think that we can ALSO consider students as weaker. That's going to either screw up our values or just prove that our values aren't quite in the right place to begin with.

Because, you know, students ARE weaker--right? Isn't that what some people are going to say? That they DO need to be shown the way and that it is our job--as the teachers, the male in this situation--to do that? And I'm sorry, but I'm not so sure. I've never been sure about that, and that's been the driving force of my pedagogy since day 1. Richard Grusin told us in a meeting on Friday that under the "old" program before this class, some students would graduate with their BA and be in the classroom 2 weeks later--well, that was me. And it changed me. Hearing all the other GTI's ripping apart students and saying they couldn't learn but oh THIS might work really truly hurt me because I had just been one. I'd crossed that invisible line to the other side and the way people treated me changed so drastically that I actually went home and laughed one day. "Oh you're one of us now, no need to be rude or denigrating anymore," yeah well, screw you I thought.

And I set out to teach in some way different, I suppose. I value student ideas and intelligence and I ask them to go above and beyond the projects that would normally be assigned in whatever class, and mostly, they seem to appreciate that. I actually have a few exceptions this term, and have to keep reminding myself that I cannot and should not change what I'm doing because one person or two people in all the hundreds I've taught the same material to is resistant...

Anyway, I'd like to close thinking about this sado-masichism thing. Johnson says we teach our students to value pain in writing, if it isn't painful it isn't good for you. And they learn to like that. All the while, this supposedly "female" student learns to like it. To be honest, that construction gives me the willies (if indeed, we are to write as if all students were female).

The BDSM movement is bigger than ever here in the great old USA, and I've even lost several friends to it. Once somebody is "in" they don't seem to be allowed any out. I knew a few female dommes, but to be honest, most of my female friends were subs. And I had to listen as they told about their chosen dominators asking them over time to do more and more ridiculous things--be held underwater, be held underwater and anally penetrated, as the beatings became more severe, and as they would say that the fellow didn't listen to the safeword anymore--but oh, that was okay, because saying "no" was "vanilla."

Yeah, so I lost a lot of friends that way. No, they didn't die, but they thought I was a prude for not approving, and for not diving right on in.

So yeah, what does that have to do with students? For one, I think that BDSM is bad for a lot of women. Likewise, I think that feminising students--whether consciously or not--is also a potentionally bad thing. Seeing students referred to as sado-masochists and all of us nodding and saying "of course?" Well, clearly things have to change. I'm not going to give you a magic bullet though (partially because I think the blender by the same name sounds an awful lot like a vibrator, which would fit into this conversation oh so nicely, but I'm not quite that depraved just yet). I'm not sure that ANY pedagogy picked up all around by all teachers could save our students from being submissive, I think that, instead, this is at least partially a function of teacher personality and teacher investment in the classroom. Last week at the writing center an adjunct marched a student in (as if she couldnt' do it herself--and it was a girl) and asked us to show this student, in front of him, how to do some things in Word. And when we didn't have time, proceeded to do so himself, very poorly--guy didn't have a clue, AND he was being kinda rude abou it. I finished up with my student and calmly and carefully helped this girl learn how to center text and set up a hanging indent.

I could almost see the invisible leash that fellow had his student on though--and that should make us all feel a little ill.