I thought folks might be interested in this.
Evan Cooper
http://villagevoice.com/arts/0531,education1,66450,12.html
In the fall of 2002, Rebekah Nathan, a 55-year-old anthropology
professor looking to become more "crazy in a good way," enrolled in her
own university. She moved into the dorms, hung a cutesy message board
outside of her room, and chatted on Instant Messenger, using plenty of
smileys. Soon after, she "got busted for drinking." She hoped her
illicit can of beer would win over the other students on the floor, who
appreciated her friendliness (she joined in on all hallway events,
including games of Twister and meetings about protected sex) and also
found it a little pathetic.
"You look like their mother in the beginning," she told the Voice, "but
you don't act like their mother. There were a series of 'mom incidents'
[everyone immediately assumed she was the loving parent of whomever she
was standing next to], but eventually they began treating me like a
peer."
Nathan went back to school, after more than 15 years of teaching,
because she no longer understood her students. They never did their
reading and when they came to class, they slept or played with their
cell phones; "I was on the verge of being offended," she said. In My
Freshman Year (out this month from Cornell University Press), a series
of essays about her two semesters as an undergrad, she never reveals
the name of the university ("Rebekah Nathan" is also a pseudonym), but
describes it as both a big state school andin a more academic
moment"a remote overseas village." She takes "censuses" of all the
flyers in the hallways, scrupulously writing down mundane messages like
"Good luck with classes!" or "Come on in." No one ever asked her what
she was doing. According to rumor, she was hiding from a traumatic
divorce.
For all the drama of going undercover, though, Nathan's revelations are
relatively predictable, confirmingscientificallya rush of college
stereotypes. After delving into the art of door decorations, she
impressively outlines seven "genres" of photos. In each image, students
carefully arrange themselves into positions that will convey something
like "Here I am being fun and spontaneous!" They stick out their
tongues or butts, or point at each other, mouths open, in mock
surprise. In one particularly popular pose (type no. 6), a mixed-gender
group lies on the ground, each person's head resting on the next
person's stomach. The shot is taken from above. Everyone is laughing.
Accompanying the photos are strings of words and phrases, cut from
magazines, which round out the image of this perfectly irreverent dorm
resident: "Friends don't let friends party naked; Bitch; 24 Hours in a
Day. 24 cans of beer in a case. Coincidence? I think Not. Z-man!!"
Nathan said she never overheard a conversation about the actual content
of a course, only whispered questions like "When is the paper due?" or
"What is the font size?" During her second semester, she went around
campus asking people if there was "any course you think I shouldn't
miss." After getting the same response from almost every student, she
took their suggestions and enrolled in a class called "Sexuality." When
the teacher walked in and immediately began using the word
fucking, the 19-year-old next to her whispered, "This guy is so cool!"
Michael Moffatt, an anthropology professor at Rutgers who spent four
semesters living in the college dorms in the '70s and '80s, found
students similarly disposed toward "friendly fun," as he puts it. While
Nathan spent all her time on campus, Moffatt dipped in just one night a
week, carefully graphingwith triangles, squares, and dotted linesthe
evolution of friendships down the hall. He interviewed more than 200
students, and eavesdropped on their late-night conversations by
pretending to fall asleep in the common lounge. One roommate accused
him of being a "returned Vietnam Vet infiltrating the system." The
title of his 1989 book about the experience, Coming of Age in New
Jersey (a play on Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa), situates his
research process within a familiar framework. Carefully keeping his
polysyllables under control, he deconstructs the culture, dividing
students into romantic categories like "Neanderthals," "Sluts," and
"Good Women."
Although the focus is less sexual, Nathan and her "remote village" rely
on similar metaphors. When she told other faculty members about the
project, they thought she was "on the verge of crazy." Three colleagues
individually came up to her and said the idea reminded them of Black
Like Me, the 1961 bestseller by John Howard Griffin, a white writer who
dyed his skin and then traveled throughout the South. "Likening my
projected freshman experience to changing one's racial identity in the
1950s," she writes, "said volumes about the psychological distance
educators perceive between their world and that of their students." She
altered her appearance in just a couple of minor ways, but the few
times she ran into colleagues on campus, they didn't recognize her: She
was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a backpack.
Even in classes, she had no trouble hiding her identityshe was a
dismayingly solid-B student and resented when professors assigned
things just for the sake of an "interesting read." In engineering, she
was the worst one in the room. "I asked stupid questions. People would
look at me. I had to go to the tutoring center."
With a much better sense of what it means to "suck at a class," Nathan
said she wishes other professors would at least be more curious about
the people they're teaching. All the spectacular quotes that the RAs
affixed to dorm walls ("The world is but a canvas to the imagination";
"It takes two to speak truthone to speak, and another to hear") were a
little absurd, given the displays outside of kids' rooms bosomy girls
in bathing suits, holding forties. Understanding the enormous gap
between student and faculty values has prompted Nathan to be more
inventive about the way she presents things in class. "I would have
preferred less noise, drama, throwing up, but it made me a better
professor," she says. "If kids have to sleep through lectures, I
understand. At this point, it'd be pretty hard for me to feel
alienated."
