Hildegarde

Well, the biggest waste of time this morning is singular.  But I’ve only got a few minutes before I have to get going, so…

Today, I’m going in to school half an hour early in what is already a very early day.  I am doing it because, last year, we started to test students in English and math twice a year, first to establish their skill levels coming in, then to establish whether they’d learned anything in the program.

I’m not opposed to testing, and I greet howls of rage over “teaching to the test” with something less than sympathy.  It seems sensible to me that if a community is paying for a service, they ought to be able to measure whether they’re getting the service they’re paying for.  If the community wants kids to learn specific things in language and mathematics, then schools should teach those specific things, and communities have the right to find out if they’re being taught.

If the only way schools–or colleges, like mine–can manage to teach what they’re being asked to teach is by “teaching to the test,” then they ought to teach to the test.

And yes, I know.  The real life situation on the ground is considerably more difficult to explain.  At the moment, however, we’ll skip the parts about teachers and systems that cheat and all the rest of it, and go directly to this specific test.

The test we’re using is meant to test specific abilities for college level work, and for that reason it would be a good basis for an admissions decision.

What it is not designed to do is to tell you why students lack the skills they’re supposed to have.  It is therefore useless at telling you what needs to be done to fix the problem. 

The idea that it might not be possible to fix the problem at this stage–that too much time has gone by, that the window of opportunity for learning what you have to learn to do these specific things–is not on the table, so for the moment we’ll ignore it.

The reason my kids are not able to do college level work has different causes in different individuals.  Some of them–I’d say the majority of them–are simply purely prepared.  They’ve attended schools where not much of anything was taught.  They’ve lived in families where there was little or no contact with current events, never mind history and literature. 

The ones who are simply purely prepared are not the real problem.  We can fix that problem if we want to.  We would have to want to fix it more strongly than we want to pat ourselves on the back for being good egalitarians, but if we did want it that much we could fix it.

Give me a couple of hours some day, and I’ll show you how to design a K-12 program that will insure that every one of its graduates is capable of doing “college level” work, and that even those who drop out at sixteen are more skilled in English, math and basic American history than the vast majority of today’s college sophomores. 

That’s not the hard part.  The kids who come in whose problems are the result of the lack of such a program can in fact be brought up to speed.  What they need is the kind of remedial program the women’s colleges ran right after the Civil War.  They wouldn’t water down their programs to accommodate the silliness of “finishing schools,” so they demanded the women who could not pass the usual entry examinations do a couple of years getting ready to pass them before starting actual college courses.

The real problem is twofold. 

In one corner are the kids who can’t do college level work because they can’t do it–they don’t have the native intelligence, period.  Many of them are hardworking, pleasant, ambitious kids.  They come to class.  They try to do the homework.  They don’t get in anybody’s way.  They’ve been passed up the line on the basis of their affability, mostly, and now we have them. 

And one part of me is convinced–absolutely convinced–that we have them as a kind of safety valve maneuver.   They’ve been told all their lives that this is a meritocracy.  They’ve also been told that they can be anything they set their minds to being.  This second thing is not true, but instead of being truthful about it, we need to convince them that their failures are entirely their fault.  So we rope them in, put enormous pressure on them, and then flunk them out.

I can go on for several years about the moral culpability of the schools and colleges in what is happening to these kids, in the way we get them to waste their lives and resources, in the end result of nearly crushing levels of self-blame.  But that’s another post for another time.

In the other corner are the kids who just don’t want to be here.  They haven’t wanted to be in school for years, really.  Lots of them are bright enough.  Some of them are very bright indeed.  I’ve seen a kid who was flunking out of “college algebra” (actually 9th grade algebra given a face-saving title) work out the numbers for pawning a piece of jewelry and getting it safely back within the time alloted, figuring in paychecks from two different jobs paying at two different rates along with necessary bills and a trip to the movies.  It was an impressive performance.  I would have needed a pen and paper.  She didn’t.

The problem with the kids who don’t want to be here is just that.  They don’t want to be here.  And they’re very, very angry about it.  They feel as conscripted as any draftee.  They’re bored by everything they’re given, except every once in a while by some piece stray piece of information that strikes their fancy.  They like learning the word “stercoraceous.”  They don’t give a flying damn about the structure of the five paragraph essay.

Almost all the kids who don’t want to be here have jobs.  Many of them have two.  A few have three.  A lot of them are actively involved in the local music scene, meaning that they write and sing, not just listen.  A lot of them are actively involved in their churches.

These are not the passive kids I’ve talked about before.  The passive kids fall mainly into the category of kids who are not actually capable of doing the work–or maybe that’s what I think they are because that’s the impression such passivity makes.

The kids who don’t want to be here see time spent in the classroom as costing them not only the money they pay for it, but also the money they forgo by not having that time free to do paid work.  They’re aware that people with college degrees are supposed to make more money than people without, and that certain kinds of jobs are open to them only if they get a college education.  My impression is that they’re not much interested in the kinds of jobs college actually prepares them for.

The kids who don’t want to be here lack college-level skills because they want to lack them.  They don’t see any point in acquiring them, and they few attempts to make them as assaults on their persons.  They fight them tooth and nail.

I think all these categories of kids would be served better if the high schools went back to actually teaching high school level skills and in the process making the content of academic work plain to both the kids who are capable of doing it and those who are not.

But I also think that we should not be forcing kids who do not want to be here to be here.  They’ll take the test today, and they’ll do badly.  They’ll take it again in the spring, and do just as badly.  We’ll all sit around and bemoan the fact that they just don’t seem to be learning anything.

In the meantime, they’ll disrupt class after class, chew up great swatches of class time acting out, and generally make life unpleasant and unproductive for their fellow students. 

And in the end, most of them will drop out anyway.

I’m going to get ready to go.  I’m out of a book, too, and that means I’m going to have to find something to tide me over.

God only knows, I’m going to need something to read while all this is going on.