\n<\/p>\n
To the editor:<\/p>\n
I was absolutely appalled at the\u00a0anonymous AP Literature and Composition reader\u2019s summary of his time in Salt Lake City. I was even more appalled by his tone, which was condescending, arrogant and unapologetic, and by his sense of superiority. Far be it from me to evaluate how he might be as a teacher (especially if he had a bad night\u2019s sleep, poor lamb), but his emphatic victimhood at the circumstances that accompanied the reading, which\u00a0he signed up for<\/em>, was more than off-putting; it was flat out reprehensible.<\/p>\n His attitude, that this whole event is beneath him, is hard to understand. Again, he chose to be there. He blatantly ignored his table leaders, skimmed rather than read essays and, behind the shield of anonymity, celebrated only giving a handful of 5s. He took it as a personal affront when he was asked to follow the rules. I feel especially bad for any AP student who suffered because of the negligence of this dismissive and self-pitying reader.\u00a0<\/p>\n Worse, he used his entire experience as a microcosm for What\u2019s Wrong With Education Today. The other readers are a part of this excoriation: While he gets up to give himself additional breaks, his colleagues \u201cseem well adapted to the AP regimen, and to regimentation.\u201d He, though, has escaped from Plato\u2019s cave and has come back to tell us all\u00a0\u2026 that the free coffee wasn\u2019t very good.\u00a0<\/p>\n This, while there are actual problems plaguing the state of college writing, from students\u00a0uncritically using AI\u00a0to\u00a0assignments\u00a0and\u00a0essays\u00a0that aren\u2019t accurately evaluating student learning. With these legitimate concerns, it seems myopic to worry only that he encountered too few essays that contained \u201csomething insightful or fluent.\u201d From that small sample, he concludes, \u201cIs this how we\u2019re educating the best and brightest, these college students of the near future? Are the vaunted humanities\u2014assailed for years from without\u2014rotting from within?\u201d<\/p>\n A sharp reader might resist stooping to make such generalizations. A sharp reader might conclude that work written hastily on an unseen topic while myriad other concerns are influencing its writer will rarely be sufficiently fluent. But the author\u2019s preoccupation with these flawed essays reveals something worse: an attitude more concerned with signifying his august tastes than celebrating some of the essays\u2019 successes\u2014which AP readers are explicitly tasked with doing. As many happiness scholars have noted,\u00a0expressing gratitude\u00a0is an often-effective way to combat negativity.\u00a0<\/p>\n If I were the sort of writer who uses few examples to draw overconfident conclusions, I might argue that the anonymous author represents the worst sort of virtue signaler: one who simultaneously laments that the \u201carmy of food service workers, mostly Hispanic or Asian,\u201d must serve all the readers, but who also overindulges on the free food (\u201cmy waistline expands\u201d). He likewise points out the inequality women professors face (\u201cThat fits with the service-heavy load female professors typically shoulder at most universities\u201d) while demeaning his own female table assistant-leader (ignoring her when she asked him to put away his phone). Dare one conclude that he is staring at the mere shadows of true virtue down in his cave of concrete convention center floors and thick black curtains?\u00a0<\/p>\n Maybe I am overreacting. I have a visceral dislike for the sort of persona he displays here, and it was part of the reason I left higher education after finishing my Ph.D. At most academic conferences, especially in the humanities, where our findings aren\u2019t as obviously helpful to the field as, say, the sciences, postering and self-aggrandizement were pervasive. Seven years ago, I became a high school teacher and now an AP Literature reader, and I\u2019m happy to report that I find myself surrounded more by the optimism of youth than the performative jadedness of some of those in higher education.\u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m sorry the author wears his ennui and disillusionment as a signifier of his superiority. I\u2019m sorry he celebrates his misanthropy alongside his impractically high standards. And it\u2019s a shame that he was so disheartened by this experience, he felt the need to trash it publicly. To what end?\u00a0<\/p>\n I was not at the author\u2019s table this year. I\u2019m sure my sunny disposition would have made me fodder for his future displeasure. (When he got to his table and saw so many people excited to start reading, he responded, \u201cThe enthusiastic vibe can\u2019t help, either.\u201d) But perhaps instead of focusing our energies complaining about the task of wading through essays or the state of writing today, we can embrace the role we have as educators. Few other positions offer that sort of direct influence on such a large number of people.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hopefully, as we teach our students to write well and insightfully analyze texts, we can also teach them to see the hope that comes with possibility\u2014to see that they can always find something to celebrate, as long as they try to have the right attitude.\u00a0<\/p>\n Andrew J. Calis is an English teacher at Archbishop Spalding High School in Maryland. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To the editor: I was absolutely appalled at the\u00a0anonymous AP Literature and Composition reader\u2019s summary of his time in Salt Lake City. I was even more appalled by his tone, which was condescending, arrogant and unapologetic, and by his sense of superiority. Far be it from me to evaluate how he might be as a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16513,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[9849,1124,678,566,9850,1126],"class_list":{"0":"post-16512","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-educators","9":"tag-hope","10":"tag-students","11":"tag-teach","12":"tag-welland","13":"tag-write"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}