I
It seems that now we must teach many more things at once in each course. This semester I taught three courses, to wit:
A senior/graduate course in Comparative Literature,
A senior course in English, and
A sophomore course in Spanish.
About the Spanish course I have already railed at great length. We must now teach elementary, middle, and high school skills, in addition to freshman skills and content, when we teach sophomore level courses.
About the English course I have not railed, and will not. Everyone was a senior in English and acted like it. For its consistent record of producing senior majors who seem like senior majors I quite like our English department.
Now I am reading papers for the course in Comparative Literature. The students came from various departments and backgrounds. Only one of them was actually a graduate student, and only this student provided a correctly prepared list of works cited.
I realize now that I neglected to teach this class how to prepare such a list. I assumed that, having completed the prerequisites for this course, they knew.
II
An ethnographic speculation: the sophomores have no self-discipline and are yet very authoritarian. I would have thought they had an authoritarian upbringing and were rebelling, but now I think that to the extent they have had an authoritarian upbringing, they are reproducing it.
My second insight is that they have no self-discipline because they have too many things to do and theoretically, the means to do them all. They have suffered, and suffer too few limits on the one hand, and too many intrusions on the other. This combination creates in them a chaotic way of operating which in turn tends to create chaos for others.
Finally, they are abusive. I believe they have learned this from television. I also notice that the abuse started on September 12, 2001, when we became official victims and used this to justify our abusiveness, just as these students do: they are victims of a university which forces them to take courses, and they are therefore justified in abusing its personnel.
The only way to deal with abusive people is not to put up with anything. But when one teaches foreign languages one must engage. This creates a conundrum I have not yet discovered how to handle. I believe I may seek advice from the military. I always did say you had to be somewhat “militaristic” about teaching foreign languages, but I never meant it literally. Now, perhaps, I do.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
There is so much pain and craziness already in your students’ lives that they can’t endure the pain and craziness of learning a foreign language.
OMG I think you have hit on it. Eureka. It is true. I have been thinking about the lives of the students who do do well and it is precisely this: they are (a) the ones without an overload of the craziness and pain, (b) the Afghanistan / Iraq veterans, other slightly older students who have their lives in control, etc.
What is the answer, though? *Not,* I think, to walk them through a fake foreign language course, where they do exercises but do not learn material, and have grammar explained to them in English but do not assimilate the information (this appears to be what is going on in most of our classes now).
I have often said that since we are not actually teaching them a foreign language via the language requirement, we should ease up on that: still teach the language, but emphasize it less and spend time in English on deep and interesting studies of culture, something I can do well with beginners by discussing news items, short stories, films, songs.
I can do this starting with the first course and I’ll bet my students would, along the way, learn as much actual Spanish as they are learning now, but my colleagues say this is to demand too much and too little. Students cannot be asked to consider any serious cultural information before they have mastered the language completely, and if we do not pound them with verb tenses and vocabulary, we are not doing our job.
The way the Australian educational system deals with those who will not conform is by a kind of detachment from them that is guided by principles of behavioural management — ie. only notice the behaviour that you want to reinforce. (I don’t like this “solution” at all.)
I can’t speak to the specifically American situation of people being in pain, however. Things work differently here. Why are so many in pain?
That wouldn’t work here because the poor behavior is so noticeable. It has to be addressed. If you have someone screaming abuse in a lecture hall, you can’t ignore it, you have to call security.
This is south Louisiana, not A-merry-ca (as the Field Negro would say), although A-merry-ca in general is a hard place to live. This state is poor. It rates close to the bottom of 50 in everything desirable, and close to the top in everything undesirable. It has many Wal*Marts and few opportunities. And it is Dysfunctional Family Central. And the general way people customarily run their lives is very stressful.
Television is very violent and in rural areas the only radio stations you can get are Christian talk, which does its best to convince you Al-Qaeda is attacking tomorrow. And personally, I do not think belief in punitive gods helps very much, either.
My Reeducator was from this zone. I couldn’t believe he really believed the things he believed, thought as he did, had the expectations he had at the time because I did not know Louisiana culture outside N.O. very well. Now I get it.
Or perhaps they’re just in pain as I am: too much low level stuff to do, too many people from too many quarters wanting too many things, not enough ground for inspiration, it can be extremely stressful.
I’d love to be in school since it can insulate one from the outside world – you can bury yourself in studies far more than it is possible to do in the faculty jobs I’ve had.
One of the questions we ask our Japanese is “Do you think that the growth of a class of invisible poor in Japan is a problem? After all, America has a huge gap between its rich and poor, and it is still a world power.”
The invisible poor are a weakness, though. Better not to systematically underdevelop whole swaths of people.
They might be a weakness, unless they can be used as cannon fodder. The point is not just to look at it in terms of global strength and weakness. What about moral strength and weakness?
The question frames the issue in terms of being or not being a world power, though. I’d put other considerations first but I am in the minority, it seems.
The question frames the issue in terms of being or not being a world power, though.
A good politician only answers the question he or she wants to answer, though.
I am not a politician and I read the whole text. What point were you trying to make with the question to the Japanese?