Regrettably, no, writes "Professor X" in the latest issue of The Atlantic:
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish.
But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions.
They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.
I suspect our Professor X is correct. But this strikes me as a tragic failure of the U.S. high school system, not of the individual students. It's a point I suspect Professor X would agree with, but fails to note. Without it, the essay feels uncomfortably elitist.
Read the full article here.
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Addendum:
One commenter asks if I had the same experience with my own students. My students are not precisely representative, but it's worth noting that they're not immune. I once had a Harvard grad student call me at 10pm the night before the exam (not sure how she got my mobile number) to berate me for discussing something called the "Cold War" in class as if everyone was supposed to know what it was about. She said she hoped it wasn't testable.
5 comments:
I hated that article. I am biased - my dad taught community college for 35 years. But it seemed clear to me that those students were the victims of a lazy teacher who couldn't let go of his idea of what college should be like for a professor. Every example he gave of a student who couldn't handle the work seemed to me to be an example of a teacher who wouldn't reach out to his weaker students.
If your students can't write a college paper, require an outline from them 2 weeks before the paper is due. Critique the outline. Have them read a real paper and identify the parts of it. Sign them up for library time if they don't do it on their own.
Every student may not be able to jump immediately into a university course, but every student can learn.
Have you had similar experiences with your own students?
@jsavage: Given that I only taught at Harvard, Berkeley and Yale, my students aren't precisely representative. However, a close friend teaches at CUNY, and I think it's her experience that her students get a lot out of the experience, even if there are weak ones who aren't yet prepared to handle college-level coursework.
But you've just made me think of an addendum to the blog post worth making.
Paper idea: comparing the outcomes for students accepted to college, but who didn't go, with their school loving peers'
I personally find it hard to believe that our country would be worse off for investing heavily in higher education - even if there are plenty of people who don't have school focused research or writing abilities -where else will they have the free time and instruction to develop them?
I suspect that the author, being from a non-empirical discipline, is probably more interested in what college is supposed to represent than the macro outcome for the well-being of peoples who attend regardless of capability.
Personally, I think a world filled with state troopers and medical techs who at the very least had the long term thinking ability to pay for college now in order to advance later is more than worth it (not counting any ethics, business, or writing classes they picked up along the way.)
Professor X's complaint is common enough around "Freshman Writing" teachers, a role often dished out to underprepared PhD and MFA students by underfunded English/CompLit departments at research universities. I was one of those. And while I did appreciate the teaching experience, I'm sure those students would've fared better during my first two quarters at the front of the classroom.
As for underprepared students, I've taught at UC-Irvine, U Maine, and several community colleges in between, and there's virtually always a large percentage of the class who enter without the skills necessary to write a precise expository paragraph. During a study/symposium involving regional high schools (where many of my students matriculated from), we found that writing wasn't a hard focus, and neither was any sort of critical thinking. A "five paragraph essay" was required every now and then, to prep them for the SAT, but that's basic reading comprehension and argumentation that boiled down to simply regurgitaion for these kids. To buck them up to speed, which is what you must do if you care at all, there are many things to do: outlines, templates, hold tons of conferences, use Hjortshoj's "Transition to College Writing" as an intro text the first two weeks, etc. But one of the main issues here is that we want to make college a true "higher education" and not simply transfer the teaching of high school skills to the university classroom.
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