Read Online Professor X by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic - Free Book Online Page B

classroom. This was mere schoolwork, quite divorced from life. I envied the opportunity those who had enjoyed the Barry piece now had: to go out and scarf up everything Dave Barry had ever written. And yet I knew that this was not going to happen.
    Finally, we read “The Black and White Truth About Basketball,” Jeff Greenfield’s famous analysis of black and white styles of basketball play, first published in 1975 in Esquire. And now I had a new writing ambition: to write an essay that would be published, edition after edition, in college textbooks for a minimum of twenty-five years.
    We’d dredged everything we could out of Barry, Greenfield, et al. We’d looked for examples of thesis statements and topic sentences, which wasn’t easy; writers often leave these items unstated, drawing in the reader. And though we could generate some topic sentences where Jeff Greenfield hadn’t, my students didn’t exactly understand why they had to—which is why using the essays most texts include as models is problematic: the writing is simply too subtle and too idiosyncratic. I would think it a bad bet for anyone to try to imitate Dave Barry: my students, Vladimir Nabokov, me, anyone. The benefits of our reading would, I knew, be small and indirect; reading this handful of essays must be better than reading none, and we were trying to make up, with a small clutch of baby steps, for a lifetime of not reading.
    Now it was time for the students to plan their own essays. The textbook had boiled the compare-contrast essay down to a series of steps, with examples and tips and Venn diagrams and checklists. My students had been instructed, by the chirruping text, to develop a plan of organization and stick to it. As we used to say in the old neighborhood: No shit, Sherlock.
    We considered the list of topics in the text. “The main characters of two films, novels or stories.” “Computers: Macs vs. PCs.” “City life and rural life.” “Malls and main streets.”
    â€œThe topic has to come from deep within you,” I said. “It has to be a comparison that only you can make. In specificity lies the universal.” I repeated that last sentence, and they wrote it down dutifully. “Talk to me as though I were on a barstool beside you, or across the table in the diner at three in the morning. Be that detailed. Give us the comparison that’s been eating away at you for years. Give us the whys and wherefores.” I was a new teacher of writing, but I knew that much: that the writer must be obsessed by the topic. As Jennifer I. Berne of the University of Illinois says, “Control of topic is essential in writing workshops because the writing student must feel that they have the most knowledge in the room about what they are writing.” She quotes Lucy Calkins, who wrote in her book The Art of Teaching Writing, “By supplying a topic from my experience and giving it to my students, I indirectly taught them that their lives aren’t worth writing about.” 3
    The period was over. The students arose, full of determination to succeed at their task. They were nothing short of abuzz. The building contractor said that he had never felt better prepared for a writing assignment in his life. If only, he said with some anger, someone had done this sort of work with him twenty years ago. The entire cast of his life might have been different.
    Well, yes, I thought to myself. But at least you encountered me now, before it was completely too late. Professor X can’t be everywhere, you know. In a lifetime, how many students can one man lead out of the writing wilderness? (My interior voice was sounding so rich and plummy!) I try my best.

    The following week, they brought their essays to class. Were some of them actually swaggering a little? The mood in the classroom was bubbly. New friendships seemed to have sprouted. I collected the essays, their first drafts, and