Preparing for classes
Moo:
[The horticulture professor] really believed that gardening would save the world that agriculture was destroying. "How do you think everyone was employed for thousands of years?" he would rage. [. . . The students] loved his lecture on how agriculture actually promoted starvation by first promoting overpopulation. They would surge out of the classroom, electrified by the passionate vision of agriculture as a catastrophic historical mistake--he could produce fifty new revolutionaries every semester without any classroom preparation (194).
Performing in the classroom
Straight Man:
By requesting early morning and late afternoon classes, but enforcing a strict attendance policy, and by devoting the first three weeks of class to differentiating between restrictive and nonrestrictive noun clauses, Finny halves his teaching load each term. Students start dropping out by the second week of classes, and by the end of the term he has a seminar of seven or eight where once there were the regulation twenty-three. This, he maintains when challenged, is the result of genuine university standards, evenly applied (61).
Moo:
Irritated, Cecilia looked around. Most of the students sat upright, but removed, like horses asleep on their feet in a field. Their pencils had fallen out of their hands, and their notes drifted to an end about a quarter of the way down the first page. It was always true, Cecilia thought, that ignorance was the prime element of boredom. She sighed (68).
Straight Man:
So instead of earning my pay with this group of expectant students, I exercise the prerogative of all bad teachers by conveying that I'm disappointed in the lot of them, that they have proven unworthy of my guidance, that they will now have to earn their way back into my good graces. I tell the class that I don't intend to say a word until somebody locates an issue worth discussing. Something specific and objective, not general and subjective. Sorting out these terms, I rationalize, will give everyone time to simmer down. I take off my watch and set it on the table beside me. . . (100).
Moo:
Dr. Lionel Gift was well aware that he could teach this class, and even entertain and please the customers, with no thought whatsoever. What he was saying to them now was like a television program on another channel that he could switch to whenever he wanted, just to see that it was still on, just to see that he, the talking head, was still adhering to the script. Somewhat more often, he checked the audience. Heads down, pencils moving, the occasional nod, all the way back to the last rows. It touched him, it really did, the imparting of knowledge, the initiation of a whole new group of customers into the domain of truth (143).
Wonder Boys:
I handed my story to the professor, and he began to read, in his manner that was flat and dry as ranchland and as filled with empty space. [ . . .] The professor finished, and looked at me with an expression at once sad and benedictory, as though he were envisioning the fine career I was to have as a wire-and-cable salesman. Those who had fallen asleep roused themselves, and a brief, dispirited discussion followed, during which the professor allowed that my writing showed "undeniable energy" (23).
Straight Man:
The majority of my students have persuaded each other and themselves, and they've done so in such an enthusiastic and raucous fashion that they're effectively smothered dissent. Among my twenty-three comp students, I have half dozen or so who are daring to frown disagreement, but that's all they're daring. My best student, Blair, [is] paralytically shy, and, perhaps because of this, she thinks it's my job to show these louts the error of their ways. I'm the one who's paid to be here, after all. Everyone else pays. There is some merit to this argument, though I disagree with it. Still, it probably is my job to start the process.
"I'm not persuaded," I finally tell my unworthy majority, eliciting a massive groan. They've suspected as much. They know me. They know that if they think one thing, I'll think another (265).
Advising or supervising students:
Straight Man:
Not only does Leo never miss class, he usually arrives early and paces in the hallway, hoping to have a few words with me beforehand, a strategy I defeat by arriving exactly one minute after the bell and pointing at the clock face at the end of the hall (347).
Wonder Boys:
"I just finished a novel that's kind of about all that."
"A novel," I said. "God damn it, James, you're amazing. You've already written five short stories this term! How long did that take you, a week?"
"Four months," he said. "I started it at home over Christmas break."
[ . . . ]
"You ought to let me read it."
He shook his head. "No. You'll hate it. It really isn't any good. It sucks, Prof—Grady. Tripp. I'd be too ashamed."
"All right, then," I said. As a matter of fact, the prospect of crawling across hundreds of pages of James Leer's shards-of-glass style was less than appealing, and I was glad that he had let me off the hook of my automatic offer to read his book. "I'll take your word for it. It sucks." I smiled at him, but as I said it I saw something swim into his eyes, and I stopped smiling (63-64).
Straight Man:
A couple of months ago [Leo] told me, as if he suspected that I alone might understand, that he despises all his other courses, not so much because they are taught by fools as because he laments any time spent not writing. He even regrets the necessity to eat and sleep. He lives to write.
"There are lots of other reasons to live," I assured him. "Especially at your age."
"Not for me," he declared adamantly, as if he suspected that this was what I really wanted to hear, unequivocal testimony to his commitment.
[. . .]
Since we had this conversation back in February, spring has arrived, and everything is in bloom but Leo's talent (71-72).
Grading or evaluating
Straight Man:
I pick up and begin to read Leo's [a student's] latest effort, with which I have to be at least marginally conversant by this afternoon's workshop. [. . .] In a handwritten note appended to the story and addressed to me, Leo expresses one or two slight misgivings. He wonders if the rape scene is overdone. And he wants to assure me that the narrative is not finished. Originally, he'd thought of it as a short story, but now he suspects that it may be a novel. Next to his query concerning the rape scene, I write "Always understate necrophilia." Then at the bottom of the final page, "Let's talk" (74).
Moo:
"Gary—
I think this story needs some work. You seem preoccupied with Lydia's fatness. Does fatness itself make her unlikable? That's why you seem to be implying. What is her personality like apart from her fatness? [. . .] You need to explore her character some more. The boy needs a name. What is his personality like? Is he malevolent? I don't quite understand how you want me to take him. If you decide to rewrite this story, please see me first."
Gary finished reading the comment with some resentment. He himself had found the story both poignant and thrillingly scary. He had, in fact, stayed awake for some hours after writing it, thinking what a revolutionary combination it was of Stephen King and Charles Dickens. AND he had fulfilled the assignment exactly. Three people in a room, something happens, they react until they've used up all the possible reactions. He turned the paper over, looking for a grade, but there was none (84).
Moo:
"Bring your own blue books," he said. "Exams will be returned in exactly one week after the date of the midterm. I remind you that exams are graded on a strict statistical curve, so seven percent of you will get F's, no matter what. You may not thank me for that now, but I hope you will later, when you have attained greater wisdom" (145-46).
Straight Man:
[My] explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician's expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest stylistic revisions. They like the sentence the way they wrote it. They defer to my greater knowledge and experience because they must, but they still like the way the original sentence sounded when it had a dangling modifier, and they secretly suspect that my judgment, while generally sound, may be flawed in this instance. And they're a little miffed at my insistence, just as I'm now miffed at [my physician] (274-75).
Moo:
Dr. Lionel Gift was all set. His summer-weight suits were packed. [. . .] He had his laptop, his modem, his internal communications program. He had his tickets and his money.
As usual, his exams would be given out by his graduate assistants and graded by the university computer. These grades would then by added to those already on the computer from the midterm, tallied according to a statistical curve, and reported to the students. By then, Dr. Lionel Gift would have been in Costa Rica for over a week. Let it snow let it snow let it snow: He would not be here to see it, and that suited him perfectly (245).
Wonder Boys:
I set [the paper] on the nightstand beside me. Maybe, I thought, I was not the fairest possible judge of what James Leer had done. In my heart, I knew, I was jealous of the kid: of his talent, although I had talent of my own; of his youth and energy, although there was no point in regretting the loss of those [. . .] (250).
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