In my “The Teaching of Writing” class yesterday, we were prompted to think and write about our English teachers of the past and their demeanor in class and tactics they used to teach us how to read and write. Looking back, I realized that my teachers in junior and senior year and my freshman English professor in college all used kind of a scare tactic in the beginning of the course, and then gradually lightened up. At first I was kind of turned off by this, and wondered if this is just something random that followed me through my education. But when I thought about it more – I think this tactic kind of… works.

On the first day of my first college English class (which wasn’t taken at Drexel), the professor handed out the syllabus and went over the books we’d be reading and all of that normal stuff. We were given a reading assignment for the next class. The beginning of the next class started with a question by the professor – “How many of you actually did the reading?” About 11 out of 20 hands went up. The people that didn’t raise their hands were told to get their things and leave the class. Leave the class! The professor locked the door after the students left so that they couldn’t go skim and then come back. It cracked me up. Luckily, I had read for that day and was able to stay in class. 

You would think that this would make some people drop the class, and it did. A few of the non-readers weren’t there the next class. But I think this was the professors way of “weeding them out.” I never went through the freshman writing sequence, so English class was a choice for me that semester. I could have dropped as well and taken something else just as easily. But it’s not always about things being easy or you loving your professors. They are here to teach you, to push you, to make you write at the top of your game. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but it’s also a wake up call. I’ll never forget the look on some of those kids faces when they were literally told to leave because they hadn’t read. I think about that day often, and what it means to be a student who is willing to put in the effort not only to get good grades, but also to learn.