State College 101

About the Book

Unsung Heroism:
A Long, Hard Look at A First-year Writing Class

"First-year writing is the make-or-break course," author Alan Feldman says. "Some students triumph, but forty per cent of state college students don´t return for a second year. Why is that?" His new book tells the story of students in one classroom during their first semester—their struggle, under the guidance of their professor, Elaine Beilin.

"I wanted to look hard and long," Feldman writes, at daily life in Elaine´s classroom, "like a person trying to see a leaf unfolding." He hoped to see the way "a better, more just world is being made."

But what Feldman found shocked him, despite his twenty-five years of teaching. "Many kids worked thirty hours or more to pay for college. Their lives were so disaster prone."

In Feldman´s view, Beilin is a model for what the modern college professor has to be. "It was a case of ´attention must be paid.´ Millions are waging this struggle. Thousands of professors like Elaine are helping. I guess this is my poem to this brave and difficult kind of teaching."

About the Author

FOR PAPERBACK: “This invaluable book, among the truest and most subtly observed studies of the educational process to have appeared in years, dares to look steadily at one of the most crucial, prevalent yet unsung activities: a freshman writing class. . . . The students at Framingham State are, as the author notes, ‘the ignored middle,’ kids who continue to hold down jobs of thirty or more hours while in college. . . . Their efforts to secure a good college education are complicated often by focus problems (exhaustion), family problems (divorce, alcoholism), car problems (lemons and gas guzzlers), love problems (loutish boyfriends), roommate problems. . . .The heroine of this educational romance is Professor Elaine Beilin, who has taken it upon herself to stretch each of her enrolled students’ thinking and writing abilities. . . . As one who has done similar kinds of teaching, I read this account in a state of continuous suspense. . . . More impressive than [Feldman’s] lyrical economy and fine ear and psychological sensitivity is his selflessness, a sympathetic quality he shares with Beilin. Nothing could be more alien to our present culture or more unfashionable: it helps to account for the strange, disquieting dignity underlying the text.. . . . The high road is to read, re-read and ponder this book.” Phillip Lopate from the Introduction Alan Feldman is professor of English and former Chair at Framingham State College in Massachusetts. He also teaches at the Radcliffe Seminars at Harvard University, where he has been cited as Distinguished Instructor of Writing. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Poetry.