Professor X (13 page)

The writing of my new students was even worse than what I had encountered at Pembrook. Almost none were at college level. I did not attend anything resembling an Ivy League school, and Pembrook had tempered my expectations. But some of my community college students were not even at high school level. Remember “I” spent some time in the dreaded junior high classroom, and some of those students were miles ahead of my new college class.

I've taught in community college for nearly ten years now, and the writing hasn't gotten any better. How often is the first person singular, the letter “I,” uncapitalized? Too frequently to count. I know, I know—I'm a grouch with a stick up his ass. Language is all casual, e-mail and texting have altered styles dramatically. Everybody's e.e. cummings. Who am I to deny the transformative vibrancy of language? What's the big goddamn deal anyway? Unfortunately, for me and I think for many others, fair or not, the lowercase “i” is a marker of shoddy thinking. I tell the students in no uncertain terms: do this, and the arguments in your paper, whatever the merit, will not even be considered, because no one will want to read what you say. I know this is true, because when I see “i” for “I,” it is only the contract I sign as an adjunct instructor that keeps me reading.

Misspellings, of course, abound. “Tight nit” for
tight-knit
; a hero as a “knight in shinny armor”; “ludacris” for
ludicrous
(shame on you, rapper, for what you have wrought!);
theirs, there's,
and
they'res
chasing one another around in a fugal counterpoint of inaccuracy—what's the big deal here, Ms. Grundy? English spelling is difficult, and that's why the spell checker was invented.

Like it or not, college is not merely an extension of high school, another four years of bells, study halls, lunch, gym, and extracurriculars. Without heaping too much solemnity upon it, college is something that one must ascend to. No one would expect to pass a calculus class if he had not yet mastered basic arithmetic. Why, then, are most attempts to adhere to basic standards in the use of the English language in college courses heaped with scorn?

John Rouse, a rhetoric and composition theoretician, writes of a student struggling to begin an essay. In his abortive attempts, the student takes opposite sides of an issue, struggling to see which one he is able to write about. Now, I admire this student's practicality—I tell my classes that an important, if overlooked, factor when selecting a topic is that it must give you sufficient material to write about—and, as a writer, I sympathize. Often I have jumped full-tilt into a piece only to discover, as the prose came slowly and crankily, that I didn't quite believe in the position I had taken, and I would be better served approaching the writing from a different angle. But Rouse doesn't cotton to that sort of thing:

Rouse objects vehemently to the teaching of grammatical structures as just one more way to keep the beleaguered student in his place. He sees grammar as inherently sinister:

The problem with Rouse and his ilk is that they presuppose a level of student difficulty with the structures of English that still allows instructors to understand their papers. I do not care if my students get “who” and “whom” wrong; the distinctions between “shall” and “will,” or “which” and “that” are stumpers to me, and I wouldn't expect the students to be able or willing to negotiate them. But I do believe in teaching basic grammar and usage, even if the lessons are invariably rushed and ad hoc. College writing, the manipulating of ideas in a sophisticated fashion, requires a sturdy latticework of form; doing the thinking about sentences, which should have happened in high school, trains the mind to approach ideas with rigor. The birth of subtext, like the nurturing of a fragile Asiatic lily, requires proper fertilization: nouns and verbs, sentences that parse, that we can understand. Writing teachers don't go off in search of error. We don't shudder with a surreptitious thrill when we find it; we don't read as “policemen” or “examiners,” in the words of David Bartholomae, who seems to think that an inability to understand poor student writing is the teacher's fault anyway.

It goes without saying that we're not teaching creative writing here. We don't approach the spatterings of a first-grade art student in the same way we do a Jackson Pollock. What I encounter regularly in my students' writing are yawning canyons of illogic and error. Certainly the students don't read back to themselves what they write, but also, while they are writing, they appear to work with but the thinnest sliver of their consciousness engaged. They don't seem to remember that sentences need verbs; they deal freely in a currency of disconnected phrases and sentence fragments. It is difficult to know how to proceed with college instruction when this is the place at which we begin.

A woman writes in her research paper about America in the late 1940s and gets many details about World War II, details which are common knowledge, wrong. Her storehouse of knowledge about the world is inadequate to the task. In a paper on government wiretapping, a student seems to think that the American Civil Liberties Union is indeed a union. In an essay on acid rain, a student writes that water molecules in the sky absorb toxins and send them back to earth—because they have nothing else to do. A literature student, analyzing Flannery O'Connor's story “Everything That Rises Must Converge”—in which a mother and son ride a city bus to her exercise class at the YMCA—writes with confidence that it is set during the Civil War.

In no other age but our own—idealistic, inclusive, unwilling to limit anyone's possibilities for self-determination—would some of my students be considered ready for college. They have been abducted into college, sold a bill of goods. Despite having performed indifferently in high school, they were told that they have no choice but to attend college. Barack Obama speaks at Hudson Valley Community College, and says:

The president is a cheerleader for community colleges. Were I looking at it from the outside, I might be right there with him. His words might make me experience the tug and swelling of inspiration in my chest. I might feel the endless possibilities of America. But I am in the classroom, struggling to teach unprepared students, and I can't stop thinking about the very real obstacles and difficult personal challenges his oratory glides quickly over—obstacles and challenges that sometimes cannot be overcome. President Obama goes on in the speech to detail his outline for the since-abandoned American Graduation Initiative, much of which was to be paid for by the American taxpayer. Increased funding for Pell Grants. New tax credits for college tuition. Funding to the states to close budget shortfalls for public universities and community colleges. President Obama talks about helping five million Americans earn degrees from community colleges in the next decade. How many new enrollments will that mean? A great many of my community college students are already on the path to crushing defeat. I'm not sure we know what to do with the students we already have.

I
F I HAD BEEN VERSED in the world of community college before my first night teaching at Huron State, I might have been less surprised at the low level of work. Thomas Bailey, the George and Abby O'Neill Professor of Economics and Education at Columbia University, puts the matter bluntly when he writes that “a majority of community college students arrive with academic skills in at least one subject area that are judged to be too weak to allow them to engage successfully in college-level work. Thus, a majority of community college students arrive unprepared to engage effectively in the core function of the college.” The usual solution when confronted by students with such poor academic skills is to enroll them in “developmental” or “remedial” courses. The numbers of students enrolled in such courses is revealing. One study, using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study sponsored by the United States Department of Education's National Center on Educational Statistics, says that 58 percent of students enrolled in two-year colleges had to enroll in at least one developmental course. A national database set up by Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, using information from 83 community colleges, sets the figure at 59 percent.
¹

The numbers are daunting. The University of Colorado at Boulder mandates a writing exam, and 85 percent of students turn out to require developmental writing.
²
Exacerbating the problem, and putting both community college administrators and instructors in a difficult if not untenable position, is the fact that both placement in and testing out of developmental programs is a quirky business. Rules and regulations vary by school and by state and with each individual remediation teacher. Dolores Perin, in “Can Community Colleges Protect Both Access and Standards? The Problem of Remediation,” studied 15 community colleges in six states and reports that a “wide variety of practices were used to determine student readiness to advance in or exit from remediation.” Students don't want to enroll in remedial courses—it is embarrassing for them, and because no college credit is awarded for completion, students feel that they are wasting time and money. So what happens is what one would expect to happen: “assessment and placement mandates appeared to be softened either at the state or institutional level, with the effect of reducing the number of students who were required to enroll in remedial courses.”
³

When looking at regulations regarding remedial education, the term “crazy quilt” comes to mind. The Perin study reveals that the skills assessment is, in the overwhelming majority of schools, mandatory, but what exactly is done with those assessments varies wildly, the end result being that fewer students are placed in remediation than should be. A number of colleges studied did not test all skills areas. Others allowed instructors to sidestep the tests by signing students into their programs who hadn't been tested. Still others did not test students enrolled in vocationally based programs. The selection of tests and assessment instruments varied from state to state and college to college; some states mandated which tests to use, others did not, leaving the colleges free to choose. Assessment strategies also vary from year to year for reasons that have more to do with politics than educational theory. Perin reports a conversation with an administrator from a suburban community college in the Southwest:

Virtually all community colleges mandate placement in developmental courses for students who do poorly on the entrance examination, but very often feel great pressure to maintain the intellectual status of their institutions. As Perin puts it succinctly, given “the extent of the need for basic reading, writing and math skills, if all students who needed remediation were actually required to enroll in developmental education classes, the community college could acquire the reputation of a remedial institution.” At one school, students who tested poorly in math and reading were mandated to attend remedial classes in only one of those areas; testing poorly in three areas meant remediation in two.
⁵
It's all like some vastly complex game show, where choosing Kathy Griffin in the corner square entitles the contestant to a free pass. The nadir of this sort of illogic is reached in New York, in a suburban community college which required students who scored poorly on the placement examination to attend remediation—no fooling around, now—but released them from the mandate if they signed a waiver.
⁶
And as for those who actually enroll in developmental education, Bailey tells us that, overall, “fewer than half of students who are referred to developmental education complete the recommended sequence.”
⁷