Hildegarde

This is what I think of as a calm week in the middle of the term. 

I used to design courses with an ever-increasing stress level–more work every week, harder assignments every week, tote that barge, lift that bale.

It made sense to me, at least theoretically.  First you do a little, then you do a little more, and if you keep it up, you’re suddenly in a place you never expected yourself to be.

I finally figured out that real life didn’t work that way. Or, at least, it didn’t work that way for “remedial” and “developmental” students, who tend to feel that they’re drowning. 

And a lot of them are drowning.  I’m still wandering around wondering what I’m supposed to do about that, and I don’t really know.  If there’s one thing that drives me crazy about this particular process, it’s the professional-speak with which many of my fellow teachers approach it, full of theory and jargon.  The professional-speak hides from them–as well as from anybody in administration or the state government who wants to look in on the program–the fact that there are substrata of our students for whom it is not working. 

What I did, finally, in order to give everybody a chance to catch his breath before we hit the research project–or the attempt at the research project–was to move a week that used to be early in the course to about now. 

That week is the observation and description paper, which is about the easiest thing we do.  It requires nothing much in the way of cultural context.  The assignment itself isn’t long.  I can bring show and tell that makes people laugh.

This term, it also turned out to be the week when the library ladies wanted to come into the class to do their presentation. 

We schedule two presentations every term for classes like mine, because one of the hardest things we have to do is to convince them that they will in fact have to go to the library, that looking up things online will not be acceptable as college research–at least, not if they stick to those exclusively–and that they will, in fact, eventually have to deal with books.

Most of my kids seem to thing of books as alien artifacts.  They know books exists, but they’ve never had anything to do with them except to carry them around from class to class in high school.   While they were there, their teachers assigned readings, which they didn’t do.  Their teachers then spent class time reading out of the book and recapitulating what was in it. 

In college, therefore, they see very little reason to actually buy their textbooks, and they get highly indignant when they find out their teachers expect them to know things without having been told all about them in class.   Teachers should teach, they insist.  And by that, they mean teachers should read out of the book so that they don’t have to.

But the library ladies wanted to come in this week, and I didn’t see any reason why not, so they did.  And this time, for the first time, I sat in the class while the presentation was going on. 

And I was, quite frankly, stunned.

I’m used to the fact that the teachers around me are basically doing work on a junior high level while describing it in terms that make it sound like a seminar at Oxford, but this was truly and thoroughly incredible.

For one thing, the teaching style was out of fifth grade, if that.   “Misinformation is what we call it when somebody tells us something that is wrong, but they don’t know it’s wrong,” the woman said.  “What do you think disinformation means?”

Then there were the homework handouts, that consisted of little blocks of declarative sentences with one or two blanks the students were supposed to fill it.   An article is more credible if it’s ______, one of them said.  The answer was “peer reviewed.”

The whole thing was astonishing.  I found myself waxing indignant myself, on their behalf.  If anybody had ever come into any of my college classrooms and treated me like that, I would have been furious beyond belief.

But the real kicker was this:  they weren’t furious.  In fact, the longer I watched, the more I realized that this was what they wanted.  It’s what they think “school” should be like.  Encouraging little voice.  Simple little questions.  Everything chopped up and boiled down to a level that would be an insult to a bright ten year old. 

Everything, in fact, that I had fled to college to escape.

And I don’t know what to make of it.  On one level, the presentation was a roaring success.  They all felt they’d learned something, and possibly they had. 

But I’m not too sure how we get there from here.  Now that they know about professional journals and peer-reiviewed articles, how are they going to be able to use them?  What’s going to happen when they pick up a copy of the American Journal of Social Psychology and even the abstract isn’t divided up into easy to swallow little bits, when they have to read page after page of little tiny type on the relationship between expressive behavior and social norms?

I am not, now, talking about introducing them to the Canon, or the Great Conversation, either.  People who need to fill in the blanks this way to learn something are not at a level of competence capable of doing actual college work.  They’re barely at a level of competence capable of doing high school work.

And I do understand that the point is to get them there.  But is this how we get them there?  Can we get them there like this?  At some point, don’t we have to bite the bullet and give it to them straight?

I don’t know.  The throw them in the deep end school of learning to swim isn’t something I’m usually in favor of.

But this is…I don’t know what.

Tomorrow or Thursday, maybe, a bit about readers and vocabulary, techniques and referents, plus controversial subjects.