Getting Real about Failure in the Classroom

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. By Gerald Graff. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Teaching, like any other form of communication, is necessarily partial, incomplete. It tempts its practitioners into dreams of perfect success but always contains within it the possibility of failure. In Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), Gerald Graff, who is professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of, among other works, the American Book Award–winning Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1993), takes a stab at analyzing the "cluelessness" he sees as the open secret of the contemporary educational system: "the bafflement, usually accompanied by shame and resentment," felt not only by students but also by many teachers "in the face of the impenetrability of the academic world" (1). Cluelessness is indeed an often-disavowed but permanent element of the pedagogical scene. Any honest teacher will admit to knowing the feeling of despair when nothing works in the classroom. Even your most reliable techniques and gimmicks—small-group work! Turn to your neighbor! Brainstorming! Freewriting! Peer editing!—fall flat and you feel in your heart: we are speaking different languages. Ernest Renan wrote that nationalism requires the forgetting or repression of ancient tragedies—massacres and wars that would prevent group identification if kept in mind.¹ Something similar might be said about teaching, which also seems to require the repression or forgetting of these terrible moments of noncommunication, blank stares, and freefall panic at the lectern—moments that can momentarily convince you that teachers and students are members of warring tribes, hearing one another's speech as noise or babble. Graff's aim is to bring these shame-streaked memories of failure and miscommunication in the classroom into the light of analysis in order to demonstrate how we might banish them for good. His book is well worth (even necessary) reading for any teacher open to new ideas about the ways classrooms function and malfunction—even if his attempt to diagnose the problems lurking in the heart of educational practice sometimes falls into a reformist or self-help optimism that is not completely satisfying.

We have no shortage of books and essays addressing local failures of pedagogy, but Clueless in Academe stands out for its more searching attention to pedagogical failure as a fundamental and even perhaps structural condition of the academy. One explanation for the general reluctance to pay more attention to failure in the classroom may be that many of those who most enjoy school and who feel most sympathy with the teacher, themselves become educators and writers. There is a mystifying circularity here. Those who teach draw on a reservoir of positive memories of the classroom, while forgetting that they were sometimes surrounded by more typical peers tuning the teacher out. It is easy to teach those who will themselves become teachers, much harder to instruct those who find the classroom a fundamentally uncongenial space. My colleague Murray Sperber, in his recent Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education (2000), draws on an early 1960s study by sociologists Burton Clark and Martin Trow that characterizes U.S. college students as falling into four basic subcultures: the collegiate, the vocational, the rebel, and the academic. Almost all college professors, Sperber observes, were themselves members of the latter small subculture of students who identify with the intellectual concerns of the faculty members—which leads to the problem of academics becoming a self-perpetuating tribe, congratulating themselves on their pedagogical successes achieved with those students who were already predisposed to being taught. If many students continue to view the language, methods, and culture of the school with skepticism, miscomprehension, or distrust—well, those kids tend to disappear quickly enough after class.

Graff, who wants no part of an educational system that reaches only the...