Posted on 05/28/2008 7:01:23 PM PDT by tj21807
"The bursting of our collective bubble comes quickly. A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught.
Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.
In each of my courses, we discuss thesis statements and topic sentences, the need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desirable, what constitutes a compelling subject. I explain, I give examples, I cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening, when the class is over and I come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task, as I’m sure my students do. I envision the lot of us driving home, solitary scholars in our cars, growing sadder by the mile."
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I came to the same conclusion from reading the excerpt. After reading your post, I’m glad I stopped where I did.
I never hoed turnips, but I did hoe my share of cotton and soybeans many years ago. And, at other times I walked the hallways of NASA.
I look back as fondly on those days on the farm as those days at NASA ... maybe moreso.
My students are high school grads in either medical assisting, ultrasound tech, or cardiovascular tech programs.
Many of them lack basic grammar skills, much less writing ability.
Do I complain, or just push them through the program?
No.
I don’t care if I have to drag them through remedial English, they either pick it up or fail. I’ve had a few who claimed to spend more time working on my assignments than their ultrasound physics homework!
The majority of students will just do what is needed to pass the exams, but if a teacher can maintain his enthusiasm for the subject matter and find new ways to keep the students interested, at least some of the lessons will stick.
At my school we stress professionalism—uniforms and proper behavior from day one are a must. My family practice doc was complaining to me about how the assistants he’s hired in recent years have turned out to be uneducated and totally unprofessional. I assured him that my coworkers and I are trying to turn things around, but it is a challenge. Light a candle or curse the darkness?
Just wait until she sees how much the Federals confiscate in taxes.
If she has any brains at all, the first words out of her mouth will be "Silflay hraka, embleer IRS!" (Well, maybe I give her too much credit, but Watership Down still rocks.)
It seems to me that the student you describe may have some additional mental problems besides lack of intelligence.
Maybe mental problems beyond that, too. But math anxiety was the fundamental problem.
This was an enjoyable article to read. I went to college for a couple of years and did poor to average while majoring in pool and beer. I then realized I needed to get my head on straight and I joined the Navy for 4 years (1967).
While I was in a hurry to get away from college, the Navy sent me TO college for 18 months at a language college and associated schools. The difference was skipping class and slacking off were not really available options. AND, for the first time in my life, I had to, and learned how to, study.
After the service, I returned to college and it was a snap. I did 2 years in 1 1/2 years and was on the Dean’s List the whole time. I enjoyed the classes and the instructors enjoyed me.
Joining the military was the best thing I have done for myself so far during this lifetime.
I teach an “advanced” high school class one day a week. I am amazed at the lack of writing skills, even with otherwise very intelligent students.
“But a good hoer must know how to not only weed but aerate..”
I’d be willing to bet that most good hoers don’t know how to weed or aerate.
no, Zathrus not understand, but Zathrus do!
Zathrus good a doings not understandings.
“In other words, of course the students are not the best writers in the first couple of courses, but they should get better the more they write which comes later in other courses.”
That’s a lovely thought, but in many universities, the students really aren’t asked to write at all. My husband teaches finance at a four-year university (not a top-tier university, just MOR), and he requires his students to do a book report, just to give them a tiny bit of practice writing. Most of his fellow business school professors don’t have the students do any writing at all, but stick to multiple choice exams to simplify grading. My husband spends a whole weekend every semester grading the book reports (and ripping out his hair at the bad writing!). If the students were in fact asked to write, they might get better at it, but mostly they are not asked to do so, at least at my husband’s school.
Of course they do. They can pull your bull thistle and aerate it like nobody's business.
The author mentioned the lack of computer literacy concerning the Ms. L the older student to whose paper he gave an F grade. That reminds me of when I went back to college in the early nineties to finally get my college degree. (yes, I did finally get it). At any rate I was almost totally computer illiterate and in classes with students half my age and who all seemed to be whizzes with the computer. After I finally learned a few things it seemed stunningly easy to write term papers with things like Word Perfect compared to the old days of the manual typewriters which I had to use in my initial college years some twenty years previous.
It was then a further shock to me when one of my profs openly complained in class about many students turning in shoddy term papers with uncorrected spelling, punctuation, and other grammar mistakes. Apparently many modern students were too lazy to use easy-to-write modern computer languages. In private my same-age profs lamented about the lack of literacy and basic fundamentals that were taken for granted when they and I first attended college twenty and thirty years previous. This is what modern education has done.
yes, while your nephew might be a loser, he almost might be like a lot of the seemingly inept students I knew in high school. They were the ones who slept (if the nun didn't see them) in class. The fact was (and is) a lot of them were intelligent in other areas. Many of the same students who didn't care a whit for formal school learning were geniuses around machines. Something I'm inept at. So intelligence doesn't just lie in the ability to parse a sentence or analyze Shakespeare. I can't vouch for your nephew, but maybe his talents lie in other non-academic areas. Future tv critic? (smirk)
Why can't you do both? Just asking.
I work for a small bank in the commercial and industrial lending section, running three lenders.
My boss makes me vet every loan deal they prepare for submission to loan committee.
I spend half of my time sending their presentations backmarked up for spelling, syntax, unsupported statements etc.
It is unbelievable; and I am no scholar.
In a moment of frustration,I told one of my lenders that he wrote as though English were his second language and he was not fortunate enough to have a first.
Yes, I agree with his basic thesis that college-for-everyone ends up being counterproductive and vapid. But his whole approach and attitude really annoyed me.
How much more useful he would have been to his class if he could have, sure, stretched them with reading a book or two they would have been proud of 9but were also reasonable for the level of the class)—and then had them write paper after paper. All he needed to do to help each student would have been to pick up on six or eight of the most egregious errors in each student’s first paper. Then through focused, individual correction in their subsequent work, he could make sure that they each overcame those specific bad habits.
Sure, he should also give them a standard for what ‘A’ work would be for the class, but he could have made a marked difference for each student who was willing to make a reasonable effort.
It is a well-known (ok, somewhat known) fact that non-traditional students perform better than straight-out-of-high school students. I'm sure your military service helped, but just being older and more mature helped. Maturity plays a big part in college success. When I went back to college in my early forties, I noticed the difference in maturity between freshman and juniors and seniors. Many of the freshmen students appeared to believe they were still in high school. And majored in partying and screwing off in class.
I guess I do both, in the sense of venting in the teacher’s breakroom, and at home to my wife.
My point was that I have to fight my inclinations to become cynical and frustrated with my students’ lack of preparation and/or effort.
If I let myself get jaded, I won’t be as effective in helping them.
Some days it’s tough...
You have my sympathy sir. I don’t deserve it, you do. My only modern experience with correcting papers was vetting my wife’s resumes when she was looking to advance her career. She was well-educated in English schools (the real England), but her expertise was in math and not English. It surprised me a bit that someone as intelligent as my wife needed help with her sentence construction and other elemental grammar areas. Believe me, I’m don’t have a phd in English either. But ineptness in English apparently afflicts many more people than not. I would suspect that less than ten percent of Americans could write a semi-decently well-constructed paragraph.
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