Tompkins: lessons learned or a game of follow the leader?

I recently asked my students to read Jane Tompkins' piece on history and textualism, "'Indians': Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History." I was surprised by the responses of students in one of my two classes. I have taught this essay before and while students in the past have certainly found it challenging, they did not have the viscerally negative response that students in my one class this semester did. I've been trying to understand how and why this group of 18-20 year olds found the essay so inaccessible, so off-putting. Had my other group of students this semester responded similarly, I might conclude that it is a generational issue . . . Tompkins is rehashing what they already know, that her language is too foreign to them. Such was not the case, and so I am left to do a little research myself. I spent Wednesday afternoon reading through these initial posts more closely, taking in not only the rants against Tompkins, but also reading through comments to each others' posts. I set myself upon this task assuming that students were simply lazy and had not bothered to read the entire article. To an extent, I now believe I was correct. But I also discovered something else about my students that I find even more troublesome than insipid laziness. I came to such a discovery not through my reading of their blog posts, but by analyzing and assessing the comments they wrote on each others' posts.

Overwhelmingly, students admitted in the comments posted to their peers' responses that they didn't read the entire article--just as I had suspected. They were confused by the jargon; they were mad at the length (at 19 pages, it is certainly the longest piece we have read, but is certainly not the longest we WILL read this semester); overwhelmingly, they were bored. I rather expected to read these kinds of comments. I also assumed students had waited until the last minute (late night before the assignment was due) to read the article, despite my warnings against procrastination. But then I noticed the time stamps. At least two students had posted the afternoon/early evening the day before the assignmetn was due. Their posts were overwhelmingly negative. I noticed these posts had been responded to by quite a few of the writers' classmates, all agreeing with these early assessments of the article as worthless. I checked some of the posts written by those who commented. Interestingly, most of the students had commented about the reading before posting themselves. Okay . . . not much of a problem. I have, after all, advised students to read each other's work especially if they didn't understand an article.

But what if those earliest negative posts were authored by students who had evolved as leaders in the class. Is it possible these student's post spawned a class-wide backlash against the article, the author, and even me for assigning the piece? I think it is a possibility, though I certainly am uncorfortable admitting as much. Doing so would not be fair to those students who had every right to respond negatively to an article . . . and it isn't right for them to shoulder such responsibility . . . is it? Afterall, students have their own minds and chose to respond in a similar way to the article.

Still, I cannot help but think what happened with this article is a result of students reading the posts of these class leaders and feeling some how justified in responding likewise, even to the detriment of their grade. How else are we to account for the disparity in my students' posts from one class to the next? After all, students in my other class, as I mentioned, did not seem to harbor the resentment toward the article this group did though they also mentioned they struggled with the text. So what I find so troublesome now is not the apparent laziness, but the possibility that students in the class are using others (those class leaders) as crutches. They have stopped thinking for themselves and are now willing to adopt the attitudes and views of their peers. Okay, I admit this may be a generalization ... but what if it isn't?

I have no strong feelings towards' Tompkins piece one way or the other. But I assigned it because I felt students could learn a great deal from the experience of reading it. Yes, it is difficult. But in the experience of struggling with a text, don't we learn a bit about ourselves, about how we read, and how we learn? More importantly, in writing an essay that details the obstacles she, herself, encountered while conducting research, Tompkins sheds light on just how messy research can (and should) be. Often we approach research as a very linear process. We search for articles on our topics, we find them, we scan them, we pull out a couple quotes, we slap them in our papers, done. Right? Well, no, not exactly . . . certainly not if we are doing our jobs as research writers. Contrary to what we might have been led to believe, not everything has been said/written on a topic that could be. And what has been written about a topic in the past may not hold true now. More importantly, research, even quantitative research that yields numbers, must be interpreted and, as Tompkins tells us, interpretations are influenced and directed by the cultural lens through which we are looking. This is an important lesson to learn, one I fear many of my students may have allowed to pass them by.