I'm having a conundrum. I'm slated to teach my own freshman English class next year, and to be partially responsible for teaching it next semester. This semester, I'm tutoring in the campus writing center and I'm also taking a "How to Teach Freshman English!" class.

The problem is that I don't believe in freshman English. I'm sorry, but you can't transform a grammatically challenged person with minimal research skills into a functional writer in fifteen weeks. You just can't. Either you've been on the ball since elementary school, doing your Daily Oral Language and writing your book reports, or you haven't. Structuring a paper, putting the commas in the right place, reading comprehension...these are skills that one acquires over the course of years, not weeks.

Not to mention that the English-challenged kids don't want to learn how to write a paper anyway. They just don't. The do their 10-pagers the night before they're due, without a thought to all of the punctuation and organization lessons they've slept through all semester.

I've got a small amount of experience in this field. I was a "student mentor" for my Jew's freshman English class once upon a time. She was pretty hopeless about the whole affair...she knew that the improvement from the beginning of the semester to the end was minimal, that she hadn't made a writer out of anyone in her class. My Jew had no delusions.

So what can I do? I get a tuition waiver and a stipend. I would, eventually, like a job -- and this experience will help. I just have to suck it up, smile and nod, and pretend that I'm doing something worthwhile. And that blows.