The three readers of this blog may begin to develop the inaccurate impression that I support the emergent plot line of the right: we have overreached in our effort to provide college education to the mass of Americans who are unable to make the grade. I'd no sooner blame the kids who fail my classes for that failure than the boys in Gaza who take up arms. In fact, they are creatures of their environment, groomed to be just what society has wanted them to be for the last generation, a permanent class of pliable consumers and ready workers for the dull, poorly paid jobs a debtor economy provides.
Take the case of a SSC athlete who graduated from a good state public school thanks to METCO (thanks to a loyal reader for research on this). Now METCO is intended to bus black kids from poor schools to good schools in white towns in Massachusetts. According to the state, "It is a voluntary program intended to expand educational opportunities, increase diversity, and reduce racial isolation, by permitting students in certain cities to attend public schools in other communities that have agreed to participate."
But somehow this student graduated from one of these good school without having been able to take advantage of the educational opportunities allegedly afforded to him or her by the METCO program. Clearly the student's parents made an effort by opting into the METCO program, but somehow the system didn't work. Perhaps the kid is a bad seed, unable or unwilling to learn. More likely METCO doesn't live up to its promise. I offer this bid of evidence: on a snowy morning Marblehead Public Schools announced that school would be in session but that no METCO kids would attend. No bus, no black kids. If the school district took seriously its commitment to integration, the proper decision, inconvenient as it would have been for all of us parents and school workers, would have been to cancel school. That they did not suggests continuing inequality perpetuated in what is allegedly one of the most liberal states in the nation.
Beyond this is the litnay of commentary epitomized by mark Bauerlein's book, The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and Jeopardizes our future. These are what I'd call the "kids today" jeremiads, as in "Kid's today don't know what it was like to walk in the snow five miles to school in bare feet, each kid carrying her bible and slide rule." True enough, they don't, but then we don't know what it is like anymore to live without tomatoes in January. I'm certainly skepitcal of "progress" but don't blame the teachers and the students for the world you have wrought.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Friday, December 12, 2008
How to Succeed in College without Really Trying
By now one might wonder from a student's perspective, what's a body to do if a body catch a body coming through the rye. How does one succeed in college at this level, not the Ivies where the rich are perpetuating their status generation to generation hallelujah, but here in the belly of the beast that the Great Society's educational ideals followed by a quarter century of attacks on the Great Society's educational ideals. (That's the part the unreconstructed Gingrich/WSJ types forget to mention when they try yet again to institute "market reforms" into education, but that's another blog.)
How does one get through the core curriculum and onto something one really wants to study? Or, how does one succeed given an utter lack preparation, no matter who's at fault?
Let me give it some thought, but meanwhile, here are two good ideas:
Don't go to college straight out of high school. Wanting to go to college is a noble thing and hoping to get a degree that earns you a good wage is a worthwhile goal. But you will waste your energies unless you really want it. So, try this for a change: go make a life without going to college and see how far you can get. Can you afford to move out of mommy's house? Can you afford to keep your car insured and running? Can you afford to keep up your habit in alcohol, cigarettes, or other drugs? Can you endure 8 hour shifts at Starbucks or Home Depot or waiting tables? If you can, more power to you. You've reached a level of zen happiness that I will never achieve.
More likely, however, you'll realize the state you're in, get motivated to get a degree and then start saving up. It may take a year, it may take two, but the payoff in the ease with which you will slide through college is worth it. And once you've made the realization, start reading: the newspaper, a good book, whatever, just read and keep reading, stuff written at a 13th grade level at least.
The other thought is this, in case you're already in the soup. It doesn't take that much to succeed and the fact is much of what it takes is what it takes to succeed in any business. Sit up, take notes, and go and visit the prof. at office hours. Give a firm handshake, look people in the eye, and pretend to be interested even when you're not. Do those things and the profs will go the extra mile to help you out of the pickle you're in thanks to 12 years of bad schooling or other unfortunate history.
Okay, so that was a blatant commercial blog posting, trying to get people to come to the site and click on the ads, but hey, the market may be god for some things
How does one get through the core curriculum and onto something one really wants to study? Or, how does one succeed given an utter lack preparation, no matter who's at fault?
Let me give it some thought, but meanwhile, here are two good ideas:
Don't go to college straight out of high school. Wanting to go to college is a noble thing and hoping to get a degree that earns you a good wage is a worthwhile goal. But you will waste your energies unless you really want it. So, try this for a change: go make a life without going to college and see how far you can get. Can you afford to move out of mommy's house? Can you afford to keep your car insured and running? Can you afford to keep up your habit in alcohol, cigarettes, or other drugs? Can you endure 8 hour shifts at Starbucks or Home Depot or waiting tables? If you can, more power to you. You've reached a level of zen happiness that I will never achieve.
More likely, however, you'll realize the state you're in, get motivated to get a degree and then start saving up. It may take a year, it may take two, but the payoff in the ease with which you will slide through college is worth it. And once you've made the realization, start reading: the newspaper, a good book, whatever, just read and keep reading, stuff written at a 13th grade level at least.
The other thought is this, in case you're already in the soup. It doesn't take that much to succeed and the fact is much of what it takes is what it takes to succeed in any business. Sit up, take notes, and go and visit the prof. at office hours. Give a firm handshake, look people in the eye, and pretend to be interested even when you're not. Do those things and the profs will go the extra mile to help you out of the pickle you're in thanks to 12 years of bad schooling or other unfortunate history.
Okay, so that was a blatant commercial blog posting, trying to get people to come to the site and click on the ads, but hey, the market may be god for some things
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Done...
...but for the grading papers and administering the exam. Now I'm really faced with the question of how many can I fail. In one section, 18 out of 30 registered turned in the final paper. I'm scared to think how many will come out of the woodwork after the fact and I cannot imagine how some of those will do even if I were to accept their papers. But the fact is there are plenty of students who were there today, and Monday and every day before that who want to learn and the others are just gumming up the works.
I gave a speech today: according to 2006 stats, Salem State accepted 25% of its students as "Special Admissions" meaning they did not qualify for state college by virtue of poor SATs or GPAs. Now only 10% of the class that came in 2006 were special admits, and that puts SSC not far out of the norm for other state schools. But the 25% figure of admissions is staggering. I'm not sure how the college got dispensation from the state to do that, but it has got to be an interesting story. I do know that SSC claims to have support services for these students, but clearly the support services are not there. It is an open secret that the so-called "Learning Center" is unresponsive and I have still not had a reply from my request f0r them to do something about the 17/27 LC students they dumped in one of my sections without telling me (the idea is that the LC students should either be "mainstreamed" in ones and twos or put in a block in a section with 20, not 30, so they can get more attention).
So, we're back to the old question: let them slide or fail them? If I thought they were given the best chance and didn't take it, then the answer would be much easier, but I see them getting the wrong end of the stick. Of course they don't help themselves much either at times...
I gave a speech today: according to 2006 stats, Salem State accepted 25% of its students as "Special Admissions" meaning they did not qualify for state college by virtue of poor SATs or GPAs. Now only 10% of the class that came in 2006 were special admits, and that puts SSC not far out of the norm for other state schools. But the 25% figure of admissions is staggering. I'm not sure how the college got dispensation from the state to do that, but it has got to be an interesting story. I do know that SSC claims to have support services for these students, but clearly the support services are not there. It is an open secret that the so-called "Learning Center" is unresponsive and I have still not had a reply from my request f0r them to do something about the 17/27 LC students they dumped in one of my sections without telling me (the idea is that the LC students should either be "mainstreamed" in ones and twos or put in a block in a section with 20, not 30, so they can get more attention).
So, we're back to the old question: let them slide or fail them? If I thought they were given the best chance and didn't take it, then the answer would be much easier, but I see them getting the wrong end of the stick. Of course they don't help themselves much either at times...
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
End of term
One more class to go and I'm assessing what we've accomplished and what we haven't. I'd like to think we've accomplished a fair bit and, in keeping with my philosophy, that has little to do with the fact that they've now heard of Hammurabi's code.
It's always fun to ask questions like, "What does E=MC2 mean?" Most are blank, others have a vague notion that Einstein had this equation and that it's important, but have no idea why. That's where Hammurabi's code will be inside of 6 months.
But we have done a few things and some of it will stick: we've learned how to look for the argument in an article, we've learned how to look things up on a serious database, we've learned how to write a precis that is concise and to the point. Of course many of us haven't learned that and even those who have can more properly be described as being introduced to a set of skills, practiced them a bit, and then moved on.
Here's two scary things that happened in the last two weeks: I had a student reading aloud in class and it sounded for all the world like my 8 year old reading a passage a bit above her grade level, stilted and missing pronunciations, certainly missing meanings, and when I mentioned this to a colleague he said, yeah, the textbook is written at a 10th grade level and the students come in some of them at an 8th grade level so they cannot read the textbook, god forbid they should see a long sentence like this one; second, I looked at a student's homework for Intro to Political Science and saw it was about what I'd consider 9th grade material.
Now maybe I'm being unfair, but here's the way it went: the student was given a table with three categories, American, Indian, and Chinese political systems. They had to fill in the boxes with words describing the types of systems, eg. two party, parliamentary, one party. They then had a page-long assignment sheet that told them how to write their paper based on the table they'd filled out with paragraph by paragraph instructions for most of it. And in talking to the student, I realized that I'm trying to get them to look beyond the dominant public discourse, beyond the pop interpretation of events to a deeper, more interesting, more useful, and more accurate understanding of the world, and I'd not realized that they were not even aware of the dominant pop discourse. So they are learning that the Republicans were conservative and the Democrats are liberal and that's a start. In my class I would ask them why the supposedly conservative party is so eager to nationalize the banks. I would tell them, as we told our students at Michigan, that all of the shades of gray in mainstream American politics are liberal in a historical sense. So, I'm still missing the strike zone, but I'll try again next term with a wonderful thing called "learning communities."
It's always fun to ask questions like, "What does E=MC2 mean?" Most are blank, others have a vague notion that Einstein had this equation and that it's important, but have no idea why. That's where Hammurabi's code will be inside of 6 months.
But we have done a few things and some of it will stick: we've learned how to look for the argument in an article, we've learned how to look things up on a serious database, we've learned how to write a precis that is concise and to the point. Of course many of us haven't learned that and even those who have can more properly be described as being introduced to a set of skills, practiced them a bit, and then moved on.
Here's two scary things that happened in the last two weeks: I had a student reading aloud in class and it sounded for all the world like my 8 year old reading a passage a bit above her grade level, stilted and missing pronunciations, certainly missing meanings, and when I mentioned this to a colleague he said, yeah, the textbook is written at a 10th grade level and the students come in some of them at an 8th grade level so they cannot read the textbook, god forbid they should see a long sentence like this one; second, I looked at a student's homework for Intro to Political Science and saw it was about what I'd consider 9th grade material.
Now maybe I'm being unfair, but here's the way it went: the student was given a table with three categories, American, Indian, and Chinese political systems. They had to fill in the boxes with words describing the types of systems, eg. two party, parliamentary, one party. They then had a page-long assignment sheet that told them how to write their paper based on the table they'd filled out with paragraph by paragraph instructions for most of it. And in talking to the student, I realized that I'm trying to get them to look beyond the dominant public discourse, beyond the pop interpretation of events to a deeper, more interesting, more useful, and more accurate understanding of the world, and I'd not realized that they were not even aware of the dominant pop discourse. So they are learning that the Republicans were conservative and the Democrats are liberal and that's a start. In my class I would ask them why the supposedly conservative party is so eager to nationalize the banks. I would tell them, as we told our students at Michigan, that all of the shades of gray in mainstream American politics are liberal in a historical sense. So, I'm still missing the strike zone, but I'll try again next term with a wonderful thing called "learning communities."
Friday, December 5, 2008
9 Little Indians
What a day. I put together two sets of primary documents: one from Ibn Battuta and one from the Ming Dynasty's traveler Zheng He. They didn't go for them half so much as for the Sogdian letters I did on Monday, perhaps because it was nothing personal. That, the Sogdian lady of the 4th c. was pretty pissed at her husband and really let him have it.
The real problem is maintaining any momentum or continuity. They just don't show up for a 3.30 Friday section. In fact, the woman who made an appointment with me for 11.00 this morning to discuss her failing grade didn't show at all. My basketball player is really working hard, so he tells me, but didn't make it to class either. Even the young woman who has been so diligent, who told me last week that she is the only person in her family to go to college, that her parents never encouraged her to go to college, didn't show today.
I honestly don't mind, don't get angry about it and wonder whether taking attendance will actually make a difference. To see I'll make attendence a huge part of the grade next term and rely on the quality of the classroom experience to keep them coming. On the other hand, having only 10 people in a room is a much better way to educate them, 30 is 5 or 10 too many.
I spoke today with one student, parochial school graduate, who came to my office to discuss her paper. She's always been a bit angry, about what I'm not really sure, but she doesn't seem to have an interest in history to put it lightly. Today she revealed that she wants to become a nursing major. It's hard to make the case for the value of liberal arts in the face of human services training. All I can say, and perhaps I will say this in my final day, is that the kids who tortured people at Abu Gharab should have known better, and would have known better if they had been well educated. That's not so say they wouldn't have done it, and it's not to say that highly educated people don't do evil things, but I get the sense that they wandered into it, that they let a dumb American sensibility take over and all the time they should have known better. Perhaps they did.
The real problem is maintaining any momentum or continuity. They just don't show up for a 3.30 Friday section. In fact, the woman who made an appointment with me for 11.00 this morning to discuss her failing grade didn't show at all. My basketball player is really working hard, so he tells me, but didn't make it to class either. Even the young woman who has been so diligent, who told me last week that she is the only person in her family to go to college, that her parents never encouraged her to go to college, didn't show today.
I honestly don't mind, don't get angry about it and wonder whether taking attendance will actually make a difference. To see I'll make attendence a huge part of the grade next term and rely on the quality of the classroom experience to keep them coming. On the other hand, having only 10 people in a room is a much better way to educate them, 30 is 5 or 10 too many.
I spoke today with one student, parochial school graduate, who came to my office to discuss her paper. She's always been a bit angry, about what I'm not really sure, but she doesn't seem to have an interest in history to put it lightly. Today she revealed that she wants to become a nursing major. It's hard to make the case for the value of liberal arts in the face of human services training. All I can say, and perhaps I will say this in my final day, is that the kids who tortured people at Abu Gharab should have known better, and would have known better if they had been well educated. That's not so say they wouldn't have done it, and it's not to say that highly educated people don't do evil things, but I get the sense that they wandered into it, that they let a dumb American sensibility take over and all the time they should have known better. Perhaps they did.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Teach the students we have or uphold standards?
Hey Professor Albert,
>
> I know you have said in class that we should come to you whenever we may
> have in issue within your class or of any sort. I usually do not ask for
> help from any professor but I really need MAJOR help in your course. I am
> well aware that I am very far behind in the work and I was wondering if we
> could meet ?? and possibly discuss what I can do to make up for my grade.
>
> Please & Thank You,
Student
Well, here's where the rubber meets the road: This student has been in class maybe 30% of the time and when there doesn't have anything particular to offer having not done any of the assigned work. The student has a roommate who is also in the class, and (according to the roommate) the student cannot be dragged out of bed for the mid-afternoon class.
There is no doubt that this student should not receive college credit for the work done thus far. It is possible, though highly unlikely, that the student could pull out a D- at the last minute with perfect scores on remaining assignments, but pigs could also fly.
So, what is one to do? The dimwitted Peter Sacks (author of Generation X Goes to College) would get angry at the student and probably me for not maintaining standards. After all, the correct response to the plea below is: you haven't come to class, why don't you just take your F and not put us all through this.
But, we'll meet and see how it goes.
>
> I know you have said in class that we should come to you whenever we may
> have in issue within your class or of any sort. I usually do not ask for
> help from any professor but I really need MAJOR help in your course. I am
> well aware that I am very far behind in the work and I was wondering if we
> could meet ?? and possibly discuss what I can do to make up for my grade.
>
> Please & Thank You,
Student
Well, here's where the rubber meets the road: This student has been in class maybe 30% of the time and when there doesn't have anything particular to offer having not done any of the assigned work. The student has a roommate who is also in the class, and (according to the roommate) the student cannot be dragged out of bed for the mid-afternoon class.
There is no doubt that this student should not receive college credit for the work done thus far. It is possible, though highly unlikely, that the student could pull out a D- at the last minute with perfect scores on remaining assignments, but pigs could also fly.
So, what is one to do? The dimwitted Peter Sacks (author of Generation X Goes to College) would get angry at the student and probably me for not maintaining standards. After all, the correct response to the plea below is: you haven't come to class, why don't you just take your F and not put us all through this.
But, we'll meet and see how it goes.
Friday, November 14, 2008
No need to pay attention, I have a learning dsability
I've never been one to get along easily or be easily understood, so sometimes I worry that what I'm saying and what students are hearing are two different things. Perhaps that's what happened with the exchange below.
| | hi professor Albert, i was wondering where i went to get the information on the topic for the precis
|
| | student signature
| From: Daniel Albert
| Subject: RE: precis
| To: student
|
| Hi Student,
| You have me worried as I mentioned this several times in class and because the materials are right on the front page for the course, the links with the Maya face. This, combined with your difficulty in grasping the goals for the literature review make me wonder how much of your attention you're able to devote to class.
|
|
| | From: Student
| | Subject: precis
I've realized that it was on another link. But I do have a learning disability, sometimes it's hard for me to grasp the material right away, and to understand it but I am trying, esp with getting all my work done.
| | hi professor Albert, i was wondering where i went to get the information on the topic for the precis
|
| | student signature
| From: Daniel Albert
| Subject: RE: precis
| To: student
|
| Hi Student,
| You have me worried as I mentioned this several times in class and because the materials are right on the front page for the course, the links with the Maya face. This, combined with your difficulty in grasping the goals for the literature review make me wonder how much of your attention you're able to devote to class.
|
|
| | From: Student
| | Subject: precis
I've realized that it was on another link. But I do have a learning disability, sometimes it's hard for me to grasp the material right away, and to understand it but I am trying, esp with getting all my work done.
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