Culture Shock, Upside The Head

Over the last year or so, I've been been wrestling with a rather intricate conundrum. My particular rat's nest of a conundrum – my Gordian knot – my paradox – I now lay before you, whoever you are who may happen to read this blog.

Those of you who have followed my writings know that I used to belong to a fringe, abusive church, and that involvement in that church was a damaging experience for many of the members, including myself. A summary description of that church was that it was both legalistic and excessive in its demands and its strictness, and that this was due to the particular character of the narcissist who was our “head honcho.” The head honcho fostered a culture in which people were measured on the basis of the “authority” they were allowed to exercise over each other, and this led to people competing intensely for positions of “leadership” from which they might boss each other around.

Leaving that particular church meant leaving that culture behind, and the act of leaving produced in me an intense “gun-shyness” regarding authority, strictness and discipline. That gun-shyness extended to my treatment of children, because in our old abusive breakfast-club of a church, it was often considered a godly thing for adults to be extremely heavy-handed and rigid in dealing with children. (If you want to know more of what I'm talking about, see Abuse in Christian Families, Assembly Kids, MK's and PK's and Critiques of 'First Time Obedience'.) For years after leaving, I dealt with both adults and children with a great deal of fear and trepidation, anxious not to make an idiot out of myself by relating to them according to the manner I had been taught in my old 'church.' After leaving, I wanted very much to become a decent person. In fact, I still want this very much.

Fast forward several years, and here I am, living a thousand miles away from where that old church used to be. Now I'm living in a multicultural, multi-ethnic city, and I've had the chance to get to know several people and families from places other than the United States. As I have observed some of them, I've sometimes been taken aback at the strictness of their culture. It goes against the persona I've built up over the last several years – a persona like that of sympathetic, relational Dr. Malcolm Crowe, or like Pete Dixon from Room 222. Yet as I've talked to older members of these cultures, I've heard many who were thankful for the strictness, including people who thanked their teachers back in the old country for spanking students. It's been hard to wrap my Americanized mind around that one...

At the same time, something else has been happening over the last year and a half. I've been teaching engineering courses at a local college campus. I must admit two things about myself when I started teaching college students: first, that I naively believed that college students attend class because they want to be in class, and they are intensely interested in the subject matter. (After all, who in his or her right mind would pay money to attend classes in which they had no interest?!) Second, I tended to relate to my students as if I were Dr. Malcolm Crowe or Pete Dixon. There was only one hitch, however. When I graded assignments, I tried to assign grades based on an honest assessment of a student's competence rather than using grades as a means to build self-esteem. In my book, an “A” grade therefore means that a person is an expert. If a student can't demonstrate expert knowledge, then I can't give that student an A in good conscience.

This approach to grading has caused some, er, friction. I can see that friction in some of the instructor evaluations I have received from students, as well as some of the conversations they have had with me. A number of evaluations submitted by students have complained that I am too hard in my grading or that the class is too difficult or that the material is hard to understand. Students have turned in sloppily written reports and when I have marked them down for sloppiness or poor grammar, the students have become almost combative, insisting that correct grammar, punctuation and spelling have nothing to do with a correct grasp of technical principles. I had a student this summer who yelled at me during a class lab session because I marked down one of his homework assignments due to incompleteness. (The assignment called for a computer plot of a circuit function, and I guess he thought that the plot was “optional”!) This same student protested to me that he was an “A” student and he couldn't understand why I would not give him an A for substandard work. (If ever I wanted to throttle someone... but steady there! Temper, temper...) I had another student who complained that the course required too much reading on his part, as he was dyslexic and couldn't concentrate for very long. When I checked with the student liason, she mentioned that this particular student had never mentioned dyslexia to her. I've had two students try to answer cell phones during exams. I've had students get teary-eyed because I would not accept late work, even though the syllabus clearly stated that late work would not be accepted.

In short, I've seen Americans (and foreigners who have been Americanized) – grown ups, mind you – who act like children with a monstrous sense of entitlement. And here I am in my living room, looking at another batch of student evaluations and seeing in my mind's eye some of the faces who were in my spring term class, remembering some of the battles that were fought, the excuses that were made. On my computer I have open a number of Web pages written by journalists and academics who have sought to probe the roots of the present college student culture of entitlement. Some of them trace its origins to the constant efforts made in upscale schools to guard and build up the self-esteem of students, regardless of whether such self-esteem was realistic or not. Many of these kids have grown up into incompetent adults, yet no one dares to tell them the ugly truth. It's like being among people who don't have the guts to tell a person that his fly is unzipped or that his shirt is buttoned wrong.

At the end of a quarter, I must stay up late finalizing grades in order to submit them before our school's deadline. On such nights, I have fallen into the habit of listening to Youtube videos of young (teen and pre-teen) classical and fingerstyle guitarists. I have a handful of favorite artists, and they are all very, very good. The funny thing is that only one of them is an American citizen, and his parents are Chinese. These people did not get as good as they are without pushing themselves. On the other hand, in the faces of many college-bound Americans today I can see one more sign of the impending death of the American empire. (That death is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way.) Empires grow stupid before they die. (I'll have more to say about that on my other blog.)

Meanwhile, here's a question. Cutting a person open can be a very good thing, or a very bad thing. Getting knifed by a mugger is a bad thing. Having a surgeon perform an operation on you can be a very good thing. In the same way, strictness (or “firmness,” if you will) can be a very good thing if handled properly, and a very bad thing if mishandled. On the one hand, in American evangelicalism we have muggers, murderers and practitioners of mayhem (like Bill Gothard, the Ezzo's, Michael and Debi Pearl, and others). On the other hand, we have a nation of people in dire need of some surgery.

So then, is there a right way to be “strict” or “firm”? Is it possible to learn to do “strictness” or “firmness” the right way?