In this month’s Atlantic, Professor X writes of the misery of teaching in the basement of the Ivory Tower.
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.
He teaches English 101 to students who are required to pass the course in order to graduate, but are completely unprepared for college instruction. They are unable to write an essay, never read books, and in some cases, don’t even know how to use the Internet. He’s forced to fail a good number of students, because no matter how hard they work, they just can’t do college level work.
He writes eloquently about adjunct life at a community college.
But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I
wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is
evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re
trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any
of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity
of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by
which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and
sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our
full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the
contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that
day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of
coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all
day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our
trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.
And he questions the American belief that everyone should have a college education.
America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track.
We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that
college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though
we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with
this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is
with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
I haven’t taught at a school like the one that Professor X describes. I have had smug middle class kids in one school. Lazy, but smart middle class kids in another school. One school had a wide admission policy that had some of the unprepared kids, but they were balanced out by some wildly smart, but poor kids. Grades in that third school had the Twin Peaks phenomenon of lots of As and lots of Cs and Ds, but few Bs.
My husband adjuncted at a community college for several years. He taught Geography 101 to urban kids who were shockingly ignorant about the world. After several weeks in the class, he distributed a map of the world and had the kids identify major countries and bodies of water. A good number of the kids were unable to identify where they were on the map. They didn’t know where the Hudson River was, even though they could see it outside their window. They couldn’t identify major continents. A few sad creatures couldn’t tell the difference between land mass and water on the map, and they thought the Pacific Ocean was near Kiev.
These unprepared students are the product of a shoddy public education system. Community colleges are picking up the pieces for that failure. And only the invisible adjuncts know the truth.
Apt. 11d 
I also question this idea that if you aren’t good at desk work you’re somehow nothing but a “sad creature”. Let’s face it: not everyone wants their day job to be all about books and writing. I have worked with people who are brilliant at computer repair, but can’t even explain what they just did when they’re done (much less write up the paperwork). I myself am great at the kinds of desk work schools love; I keep track of detail, I write in an organized fashion. Yet the one time I tried to work as a restaurant hostess I couldn’t handle the chaos. I freaked out. I think this every time I encounter my first grader’s classroom: too much chaos, I would never survive it.
Isn’t it possible that a system which so overvalues desk work might be part of the problem here? Do we really believe that the only work that deserves a living wage is white collar? Why is it that the restaurant hostess job that I couldn’t handle is considered too lowly? That to me is all about *depressed wages*, not some sort of universal pecking order.
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I think it’s too easy to blame the public education system. Yes, there are some changes which could be made, which would improve the outcome. Allowing schools to expel disruptive and unruly students would help. In my opinion, schools should make certain that students can read, before merrily transitioning from “learn to read” to “read to learn.” I also agree with E.D. Hirsch, that schools should teach content, not just skills, from the start.
The largest problem is student attitude, though. Is the student willing to pay attention, do his homework, show up for school, and ask for help when necessary? This also reflects family culture. Even in our upper-middle class school system, I have heard many parents complaining about their children’s homework load. I haven’t heard anyone complaining about club sports practices, and yet, for many families, when you tot up the time, their kids spend more time on the playing field or in front of the t.v. than on homework.
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Even open enrolloment community colleges (where I teach) use assessment to place students. From that article, there didn’t seem to be a placement into remedial. Our department also successfully insisted that students have to place into college-level reading in order to take comp 101. It’s made a big difference in retention and student success. We also have a cap of 30% on adjunct teaching.
Colleges can make these choices. Or they can take that student-doom-to-fail’s money and blame her prior education.
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enrollment. enrollment.
typing too fast here.
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Thanks for this. Some of my favorite (and most depressing) moments have been working with unprepared students. Most of the ones I’ve encountered are really underprepared and can improve with effort and support.
I agree with @jen above that we seem to have an issue with truly valuing non-intellectual work. Although I think the plumber in my neighborhood makes more than me.
@Julia above. I complain about too much homework because I’m in a dual income family, which makes it very hard for me or my husband to provide supervision for said work. When you’re trying to squeeze in 1.5 hours or so of homework from 7 (post-dinner) to 9 (bedtime), that makes it hard. My older son does do some of his work before dinner, but he often needs/wants support. And what’s wrong with sports? I agree there’s too much emphasis on it in some places and sports programs are largely the reason school lets out at 2:30, but playing team sports can build leadership and teamwork skills, not to mention provide much-needed physical activity.
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“Is the student willing to pay attention, do his homework, show up for school, and ask for help when necessary?”
That last one is harder than it looks. If I remember correctly, I asked for help lots in school when I understood 90% of the material. However, when I was completely out to sea, I don’t think I ever did. When you are utterly lost, there aren’t any questions you can ask. You have to understand a lot already to ask questions and get answers you understand.
“Even open enrolloment community colleges (where I teach) use assessment to place students.”
That’s what I’ve always heard from my relative who teaches at one. The bane of her existence are the low-achieving low-motivation early entrance high school kids who still manage to get in, despite the testing requirements. On the other hand, I think she has often had good experiences with adult students.
One nice thing about community colleges is that students don’t wind up tens of thousands of dollars in student debt while going nowhere.
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Even in our upper-middle class school system, I have heard many parents complaining about their children’s homework load. I haven’t heard anyone complaining about club sports practices, and yet, for many families, when you tot up the time, their kids spend more time on the playing field or in front of the t.v. than on homework.
To echo what Laura said, I’m an academic and value learning but if my children’s schools operated like some of the “good” schools Laura has described in her neighboring town — hours of homework a night for elementary school kids — I would raise hell. I want there to be more to my kids’ life than preparing for an Ivy League matriculation at age 8 — and yes, that includes sports, and unstructured play time, and family time.
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@Siobhan, but the sports are part of a plan for Ivy League matriculation, as are all the other extracurricular activities. It may be my part of the world, but my kids go to school with children whose days are fully scheduled. It’s not a SAHM phenomenon, either, as I know that local day cares are providing shuttle services to after school activities.
All that is fine, _in moderation_. It’s when kids never have down time, when they’re stuck playing the sport or playing the instrument they picked up at 7, because it’ll look better on an application, that I object. The lack of moderation, in my opinion, comes from parents. If you want to bring parents to a school committee meeting, propose to cut after school sports. If you drop academic subjects, and add study halls in their place, because you can’t pay for teachers, you won’t cause nearly the outrage.
I am for homework — also, though, in moderation. I am trying to plead for a balance between school and everything else. The unprepared students in the Atlantic article face different obstacles, though, than not finding a balance between homework and softball tournaments. Is it fair to label these courses “college courses,” when they’re remedial in nature, and intended to cover material which should have been mastered in middle school, or high school?
@laura, your husband’s experience is sad, but not surprising. Geography used to be a separately taught course, but is now rolled into “social studies.” I wonder if those children’s teachers had a firm grasp on geography themselves?
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Isn’t is also true that social studies, because they are not tested for under NCLB, are routinely cut from curricula these days? I believe this would include geography.
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“Isn’t is also true that social studies, because they are not tested for under NCLB, are routinely cut from curricula these days? I believe this would include geography.”
E.D. Hirsch makes the case that reading comprehension involves massive amounts of background information. Under the circumstances, cutting science and geography is very short-sighted, even if one is only interested in improving reading comprehension.
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Half of all students are below average. The Army has figured out through lots of careful testing that it cannot make an artilleryman of a soldier with an IQ below 92.
If you try to sell some poor schlub with a verbal SAT of 375 on going to college to get a swell job which has inherently high intellectual demands, the schlub is going to go thousands of dollars into debt and get the same job he would have had had he not gone.
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“They didn’t know where the Hudson River was, even though they could see it outside their window.”
That might be a useful psychological defense mechanism. Isn’t that where they find all of the bodies on Law & Order. Or am I thinking of the East River?
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Bodies in the East River, though we occasionally get a floater from a suicide jump off the GW bridge.
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This is the thing that bothers me about all the emphasis on college — the morality of selling the kids (or their parents) something incredibly expensive that they don’t need and won’t use. It gets a passing reference by Professor X.
As shameful as this is, employers are also to blame. Why does a government employee need the degree to move up? Why does a cop need a degree? It’s stupid. Yet you cannot imagine the pushback I get at work when I try to promote someone who never finished college. God forbid that doing well on the job be enough! A 35-year-old network engineer needs a college degree to prove he can manage others? When he’s essentially already been doing the job for months if not years? Where is the logic here? And what slays me even more is the people who *do* go back and get those degrees — even MBAs — regularly say they learned nothing new. Nothing. The MBAs will give you some blather about “building networks” — their way of avoiding embarrassment at being snookered out of $35K. It’s a giant scam in my book.
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Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!
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