Person on the Page

“I am a liar,” Tony said in my English composition class.

To prepare for a writing assignment, I was leading my students in a discussion of identity markers: race, gender, socioeconomic status. As usual during our class sessions, Tony had been sitting slumped in his seat, arms folded over his chest, staring at me, smirking.

“That’s my identity,” he said. “I’m a liar.”

In the 1990s, I was working as a graduate assistant at West Virginia University, helping to pay for my education by teaching sections of the university’s freshman writing classes. Tony’s comment, I suspected, was another attempt among college students to create a stumbling block for someone they could easily recognize as a novice instructor. 

Some of his classmates laughed. Others shifted in their seats uncomfortably, perhaps prodded by the cognitive dissonance prompted by a liar making what seemed to be such an honest confession. If he was lying about being a liar, did the confession cancel itself out, kind of like a double negative? If he was telling the truth about being a liar, why was he doing it?  Didn’t the truthful confession undermine the claim itself?  Thinking about all of that and deciding what I, the professor, should say next left me a little dizzy.  

He went on to tell us that he’d grown up in South Philly. He’d spent much of his time on the streets, where he’d learned to lie to keep himself out of trouble and to get what we wanted.  He lied to strangers, to his family, even his friends—saying whatever it took to look out for himself.

I guessed that Tony’s comment was an effort to hijack my class. To veer us off topic. To entertain us with his exploits on the streets of South Philly.  In other words, to show me who was boss.

. . . . .

A few weeks later, Tony came to my office to ask why I had given him an F on his last essay.

“Because, Tony,” I replied, “your essay was plagiarized.”

He had copied Judy Brady’s “Why I Want a Wife” nearly word-for-word from the anthology of essays included in our textbook. He had excluded the opening lines, I belong to the classification of people known as wives. I am a Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother, which suggested the writer was a woman. The remainder of the essay, many of the sentences of which began with, I want a wife who . . ., could have been written by a man.

When I read his essay and saw what he had done, I was heartbroken. 

I had come to graduate school to earn a doctorate and become an English professor.  I came with the goal of inspiring a passion for writing in my students—to locate the creative spark within each of them and, with my own enthusiasm as fuel, coax it into a flame. 

Time after time, however, I was met with something a luker warm than fire from some of my students. A few seemed to devote as little effort as possible to their writing, handing in assignments that barely met requirements or didn’t meet them at all. Some yawned in class, apparently bored by what I thought were my energetic efforts to engage them. A few attended class only occasionally, while others handed in only some of the assignments. And some, like Tony, resorted to plagiarism to try to pass the course and move on.  

What had Tony thought as he copied the essay from the textbook, typing each word as if it were his own? (These were days before copying and pasting from online material was as easy as it is now.) Did he think that I wouldn’t recognize the essay? That I wouldn’t remember it from our textbook?  Did he think that I wouldn’t read what he had handed in?  That I randomly assigned grades to students without reading their work?

I feared that I had let him down. I had failed to inspire his interest in writing, to motivate his drive to write an A paper in his own words, consisting of his own thoughts.  Perhaps I wasn’t the professor I’d hoped to be. Maybe I shouldn’t be teaching at all. 

I showed Tony the essay in our textbook, the one he had handed in as his own.  “You understand that this is theft of intellectual property, don’t you?  This is cheating.”

I felt like a fake. A pretender. All of my desire to share my love of language and spread my passion for ideas had fallen flat on him.  I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew about communicating dynamically and effectively. I was a failure.

Tony peered across the desk at me. He looked incredulous. 

“Professor,” he said, “I’m shocked. I can’t believe you are questioning my honesty.  How can you accuse me of cheating?” 

At that point, I was incredulous.

I could have asked him what he thought the odds were that he and Judy Brady would string together the same series of words into the same message and assign it the same title. And since he was a self-identified liar, I could have said, why did he find it surprising that I believed he was dishonest?  But I didn’t.

I wondered.  Was he suffering from amnesia? Had he forgotten his declaration to the class?  Or, was he hoping that I had forgotten?  Or, was this all just part of a mind game he was playing with me?  Me, his inexperienced, incompetent instructor.

Or, was it something else?  Tony’s last name suggested that he might be a member of a population of Italian families that had inhabited South Philly for decades. Working class people. People who navigated the complexities of their urban setting with the precision that those of us outside of that setting might call “street smarts.”  Now, uprooted to the mountains of West Virginia and placed in a university setting, did Tony feel like a pretender?  Did he fear he wasn’t up to college life? Was he masking his fears with bluster?

Meanwhile, I was a first-generation college graduate from a small western Maryland town two hundred miles west but worlds away from where Tony grew up. I had lived in a rural setting in a community where everyone knew everyone else. Where crime was nearly non-existent. Where many people’s parents, including mine, had not earned a high school diploma.

I had excelled in school, but was I really professor material?  Did I belong in a university classroom? 

Perhaps I was just trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking so.

. . . . .

A few weeks later in class, I collected my students’ latest papers. The assignment was to write a lyric essay, using the sound devices, rhythms, and figures of speech often reserved for poetry to write a narrative about the self.

On the way back to my office, I thumbed through the essays and noticed that Tony’s was titled “I Am a Lyre.” I ran the rest of the way so that I could read what he had written.

Had my passion for poetic language lit a flame in Tony?  Had he, as I had recommended to the class, created a sustained metaphor in his essay? Was he comparing himself to the ancient stringed instrument, the music of which so charmed Apollo that he forgave Hermes for stealing his sacred cows?  Or, had he portrayed himself as a mere instrument—a lyre, small and humble—strummed and plucked by the powerful? And the music their manipulations produced, was that the sound of his own weeping? Had he been caught up in the spirit of the lyric essay, named as it was after the very instrument he was claiming to be?

Alas, no.

As I read his essay, I realized that Tony had merely misspelled liar as lyre. Since lyre is a recognized word, SpellCheck didn’t catch it. Or, maybe he had misspelled the word in some other way, and AutoCorrect had turned Tony into a miniature harp.

His essay was a reiteration of what he had told the class. He got through his life by lying. He survived on the streets of South Philly by saying whatever he needed to say to survive. And in the concluding paragraph, he remarked that lying was a smart way to live, and he wasn’t going to let a professor accusing him of plagiarism change his mind about that.

At least, unlike his earlier essay, I was fairly sure that he had written this one himself. 

I thought about sending Tony an email. Not to offer an object lesson on the importance of proofreading, because I suspected that he wouldn’t have recognized that he had misspelled a critical word in his essay. I wanted to write to him to try to reach across the barrier between him and me and to tell him that I was on his side. I wanted him to know that, as his instructor, I was his friend, not his foe. Then I thought about the slim but real possibility that through the slip of a finger or a momentary brain freeze,  foe might be misspelled and autocorrected as, say, faux. How easily that could happen.  I am friend, not faux. 

A faux professor.  A fake.  A failure. 

Homonyms can be hazardous.  They can betray us, uncovering our vulnerabilities.

Now, after working as a professor for twenty-five years, I have experienced firsthand the transformative power of higher education. Even considering its current troubled and changing state, I still believe in its power to awaken intellects and enrich lives.

But for those who are the first in their families to go to college, those who have not been raised with the sensibilities of the highly educated, those like Tony and me, the transition may be daunting. 

The climb up the ladder to a better life can be precarious.

Cover Photo: RDNE Stock at Pexels