Posted on 12/24/2008 12:35:29 PM PST by Zack Nguyen
...I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.
...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 ...
My point was a correction to the general statement that employers don’t care where you got the degree. I said that some do. And, since I have a state school degree, I’m quite happy that some don’t.
These days, that is true in pretty much any profession in America. Law, medicine, business, all of them are a pretty brutal meritocracy, especially at the higher levels. America's prestigious law firms, banking institutions and hospitals aren't full of trust fund kids- those kids don't have the work ethic to make it in the highly competitive environment that exists in such places.
And from what I’ve seen, Ivy League grads, with the possible exceptions of Princeton and Dartmouth, prefer to trade on their connections rather than their skills.
I didn't attend an Ivy undergrad, but I went to Cornell law. I knew only a handful of kids who were "old money." A lot of the kids were from fairly standard middle-class backgrounds, including a lot of Asian kids who were first or second generation immigrants. The idea that the Ivies are full of a lot of legacy students is mostly an urban myth.
Bull, she didn’t care enough to even pretend to care. She was so bored that she didn’t care what her professor thought of her.
It might be an urban myth, but it was obviously enough to get GW Bush into the MBA program at Harvard if he was only a ‘C’ student at Yale undergrad. Most grad schools won’t admit you with a ‘C’ average unless you’ve significant in-field experience since your undergrad years. And GW Bush’s business experience wasn’t what one would call indicative of a brilliant MBA student. Didn’t seem to hurt his admission much.
With such high profile cases as GW Bush, JF Kerry, et al... the Ivies don’t need urban mythology to hurt their image. They have graduated such high profile PR disasters as Bush, Kerry, Paulson, Rick Wagoner, et al. All are helping bury us with their brilliance right about now.
Wow. I think you completely missed the point.
True but my point is that those name schools do open doors that state schools don’t open for some majors.
At the K-12 level, teachers and administrators are usually pressured by parents to pass their kids.
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How many doctors would amputate a child’s leg because the parent pressured him?
So....Not only are teachers and principals who pass children from grade to grade according to you they are unprofessional as well.
So....Not only are teachers and principals who pass children from grade to grade according to you they are unprofessional as well.
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That should read:
Not only are teachers and principals who pass children from grade to grade LIARS, according to you they are unprofessional as well.
That should read:
Not only are teachers and principals who pass children from grade to grade LIARS, according to you they are unprofessional as well.
I can think of another example.
How many oncologists would say to a parent, “Ok, you don't want your child to have the cancer that he does indeed have. OK, I'll change my diagnosis because you want me to do that.
Home schooled students - and they are admitted as young as 15 - are a standout in every class.
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The homeschoolers that seem so exceptional are **normal**. It is the child who is institutionalized in prison-like brick and mortar schools who is artificially retarded in their social and academic development.
My 3 homeschoolers were admitted to college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. All three finished all general education requirements and Calculus III by the age of 15. The two younger finished B.S. degrees in mathematics by the age of 18.
The oldest will soon finish an MBA at a normal age. He is a highly ranked athlete and has trained vigorously and traveled extensively over the years. He also worked for our church in Eastern Europe for a few years and is fully fluent in Russian.
If we examine history we see many, many examples of adolescents who rose to the chanllege of adult responsibilities. It was common for teens to be in college. Meriwether Lewis, at age 16, was **expected** at age 16 to take over the management of the family’s 20,000 acre estate when his father died.
Our government K-12 schools are essentially kiddie prisons and warehouses intended to keep youth off the streets and out of the labor market.
“I can’t believe it,” she said when she received her F. “I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper.”
Such a sentiment is inconsistent with boredom. If you look at Prof. X's analysis of the paper, you see she had not acquired the skills to write a research paper. I repeat, she either needs to get remedial help and re-take the class or give up.
Needless to say, the paper she turned in was a discussion of the pros and cons of gun control. At least, I think that was the subject. There was no real thesis. The paper often lapsed into incoherence. Sentences broke off in the middle of a line and resumed on the next one, with the first word inappropriately capitalized. There was some wavering between single- and double-spacing. She did quote articles, but cited only databases—where were the journals themselves? The paper was also too short: a bad job, and such small portions.[her quote, above, was here...]
She most certainly hadn’t written a college paper, and she was a long way from doing so. Yet there she was in college, paying lots of tuition for the privilege of pursuing a degree, which she very likely needed to advance at work. Her deficits don’t make her a bad person or even unintelligent or unusual. Many people cannot write a research paper, and few have to do so in their workaday life. But let’s be frank: she wasn’t working at anything resembling a college level.
By Lit Crit major I assume you mean English major. Or more specifically a Language major. It’s a set of skills that are rather important for everyday life much less fields like publishing, editing, writing. And since it encompasses history, psychology and philosophy as well, it’s the most well rounded field of study that produces the most well rounded humanities education.
The ones that do this are yes. The instructor (teacing in a state college I assume) in this article obviously didn’t go that route. I know plenty of teachers and they don’t do it either. A lot depends on where you teach and how much involvement the parents have.
Not really. 'Lit Crit' is a derogatory term for the politically correct postmodern nonsense. It wasn't intended to refer to a well rounded education in the classical sense.
And I'd still like to see a reference to an employers recruting ad for someone versed in Literary Criticism.
Yes, some doors open more easily for graduates of name schools. A lot of times it is alumni contacts that open those doors. For example, if you want to get into television or movies, Boston University is a place to go. Alumni contacts are very strong.
Literary Criticism = English. It’s what you study as an English major. Reading something and thinking and/or writing about it is an act of literary criticism.
She did exactly what he told her, in detail, not to do. She looked him in the eye and said she was proud of herself.
She wasn’t just bored, she was attempting to play him. Or, maybe she was just rebellious.
You think she did it because she was uneducated. If that was the case, no one could ever get educated, LOL.
She found a tutor made it through and graduated in four years. On interviews no one asks her what her grades were in college just that she has that piece of paper.
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