Five Things Students Really Should Know Before They Get To College

"A man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore"

--Samuel Butler

MTV & the Associated Press recently released a "landmark study" that found that almost half of all "young people" think they will be rich, but only 17% think they will be famous.

What's wrong with these numbers?

They are, obviously, divorced from reality -- and many of them assume, for one reason or another that they are going to get by on charm or something equally nebulous.

Most of them are in for a rude awakening.

If, by chance, their band doesn't make it big or they're not picked to start for the Chargers (I've had several students tell me that one or the other of the above was gonna happen to them any day now) -- what are they gonna do?

Without some basic academic skills, skills they should have learned in high school if not before, they're gonna be in trouble -- to say the least.

Many young adults show up in my classroom without these skills-- some because they've been clever enough, up until now, to get by without them, some because they had another talent worth nurturing, and they were allowed to squeak by without learning, some because they had teachers or parents who thought that if they could just give them a sense of accomplishment, that they would eventually rise to the occasion, and some, because they were part of the tragic 30%+ dropout rate here in California.

The problem is that if these students are going to continue their college educations, if they are going to graduate and move out into the real world, they must have these skills. I know this. I also know that if I let myself be tempted by any of the reasons above, and I have been, that I am always, always, doing the student in question a disservice.

The fact of the matter is that without some basic skills -- at some point, each of these four kinds of students will crash and burn -- though the vast majority of them are blissfully ignorant of this fact. I do my best, painful as it is, to make sure that most of them who deserve a wakeup call get it from me, rather than coming to the realization (after, say, a year of unsuccessfully filing out job applications) that they should have listened better, sooner.

1. The ability to listen, consistently, for some minutes, to someone speaking about something you don't really care about.

Who wants to listen to me talk about independent clauses?

As Charlie Meadows put it in Barton Fink, "I can feel my butt getting sore already."

...but as those of you who have had real jobs know, as dull as the boss is, as dull as the lecture is about how to run the software -- you pay attention or you won't be working there long.

2. The ability to read for comprehension. My students can all "read." None-the-less, I'm amazed all the time to be discussing something they've just read, and I find as often as not, that for anything written above about a sixth grade level they are as likely as not to misunderstand disastrously. I regularly teach an essay by Mike Rose called I Just Wanna Be Average, about how incredibly destructive it is to assume that students can only rise to a certain level.

Here's what Rose has to say:

What Ken and so many others do is protect themselves from such suffocating madness by taking on with a vengeance the identity implied in the vocational track. Reject the confusion and frustration by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe. Champion the average. Rely on your own good sense. Fuck this bullshit. Bullshit, of course, is everything you - and the others - fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling, complexity, scientific reasoning, philosophical inquiry.

The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own gray matter to make this defense work. You'll have to shut down, have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm, have to cultivate stupidity, have to convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world. Keep your vocabulary simple, act stoned when you're not or act more stoned than you are, flaunt ignorance, materialize your dreams. It is a powerful and effective defense - it neutralizes the insult and the frustration of being a vocational kid and, when perfected, it drives teachers up the wall, a delightful secondary effect. But like all strong magic, it exacts a price.

I once had a classroom full of students write about this essay before we discussed it -- almost half of them told me that Mike Rose was extolling the virtues of average-ness, and that Rose was asserting that we should all embrace the glory that was our mediocrity, and thus become satisfied with our lot in life.

In a word: no.

I've also been teaching a fantastic essay by Ray Suarez called Familiar Strangers, which he starts with this reducto ad absurdum argument exposing a little of the racism inherent in our society:

Weak of mind and strong of back, we populate your dreams of fabulous sex and immigrant invasion. We fill your jails and fight your wars. We live here for years and never learn your language, so you've got to pass "official" English and English-only laws. We veer between reckless bravado and donkeylike deference. Our men can't hold their liquor, but they can carry a tune. They beat their wives and anyone who dares insult them. Their wives turn to lard after a couple of babies, and remain sweetly compliant as they take care of yours.

You know us so well, it seems.

More than one of my students (in an "advanced composition" class, no less) assumed that he had 'sided with his oppressors,' backed the wrong horse & was a traitor to his people. If only they'd managed to read and understand the entire two page article, perhaps they would have come to a different conclusion.

It's depressing sometimes.

3. The ability to speak, spontaneously, specifically, and with concrete examples, on topics about which they are supposed to be informed.

No one has ever, ever asked most of them to do this. Still fewer have been required to do this.

I'm sorry, but you can't even make it as an auto mechanic or plumber if you can't do this (No offense to auto mechanics and plumbers -- I'm pretty sure they both make more money than I do).

4. The ability to write down what they just said above, and add a parenthetical citation.

What's good about this particular skill is that, if you can manage to get them to do numbers one, two and three above, four follows pretty naturally.

If I'm lucky, really lucky, I end up with a majority of students who only need to learn the latter. That's a cake walk, but trying to teach them the first three, particularly the first two, in three hours a week for fifteen weeks, that can be like pulling teeth.

5. The willingness to understand that even if you didn't learn something last year or the year before, that you still can learn it now -- if you choose to.

I want my students to have fun in college -- hell, I wish I had more fun in college, but I also want them (particularly the talented ones -- no matter if they are talented in academics, athletics, or bullshit) to "learn to learn" -- because that's the only thing that's gonna keep a roof over there heads when they don't end up rich & famous, just like everybody else.

Comments

[notsylvie]

I don't know whether the problem is that kids don't get told how the world works, or that they don't believe it when they hear it. I have two kids, both high schoolers. One is in IB, really started working much harder this year, has learned to be more self-critical (although not to the point of self-destr­uctiveness­), and embraces challenging courses as a way to increase skills and self-confidence. The other kid is another story altogether, and currently labors under the delusion that you can have a brilliant university career on a cumulative high school GPA of 1.9. I do what I can as a parent to give a reality-check, but there doesn't seem to be much happening at the school end. It seems like there's one big collective shrug of indifference. There's a lot of talk about setting "goals" but few discussions about what exactly is involved in achieving them. I don't doubt that teachers have a hard job managing the range of kids of different abilities, inclinations, maturity levels etc. But somehow the message about what grades mean, what performance means, and how everything is connected together, just isn't getting through.

[5150]

America is a nation of fervent believers. You lose your audience unless you psychologically and emotionally engage their core beliefs. I saw a panel presentation called Orwell Rolls Over In His Grave where George Lakoff threw out the playbook and handed the mic to the team's emotional leader, some psychologist. Lakoff said Enlightenment reasoning isn't even reasoning: it's wrong not just in some particulars but in all particulars.
I believe Welbutrin is a harmful chemical that was pulled from the market then reintroduced as Xyban to be inflicted on smokers. I believe the vast majority of smokers do not die either of cancer or emphysema but the public's perceived risk is so severe that America demands smokers (who sin against their health) be punished with Xyban. It's one of those life or death, danger to self or others, crisis management decisions Americans feel they must make for others.

[CommanderCodpiece]

This reminds me of an article published in "Harper's" by Mark Edmundson called "As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students." I read it as part of my freshman composition course last semester. I was pretty aghast at some of the interpretations of my classmates.

...Here's a link. It's a pdf file so I don't know if it will work, but it was the only one that didn't require a fee to view. neugierig.­org/drop/l­ite.pdf

[robivecchi]

It is a mystery to me why our culture seems to be obsessed with fame and fortune. Neither appear to bring happiness. Some CEO or Senator is always going jail and some socialite or actor is drunk or on drugs. What kind of life is that? Have we lost the American dream of a stable job and a family and loved ones (the house with the picket fence if you please)?

I know they can't teach a class on this but where did this dream go and where has this new "philosophy" come from?

[phoquemyope]

Hello, time for a H.S. teacher's opinion: although we as a group bear some of the responsibility for this lamentable situation, it is not the one popularly cited, that we don't know what we're doing. Rather, it is pressure from three sides (students, parents, administrators) against which we're afraid to fight. Parents and students supposedly want higher standards, but only so long they apply to other people's kids. Administrators daily preach about the importance of fighting grade inflation, but only if no parent complains. We're afraid for our careers, so we go with the flow. I've done it, and I'll probably end up doing it again.

This could be combatted by giving K-12 teachers higher job security, but watch out that for which you wish: if we stick to higher standards, the GPAs of many "excellent" institutions are going to go way down, and the number of students who actually graduate will go down as well, almost to the point of where we were in the first half of the Twentieth Century, when comparatively few folks graduated. The problem now is, of course, we need better-educated people to make society run. Furthermore, higher education institutions need hordes of Freshmen eager to pay outrageous fees, and without hordes of diplomas, that's not going to happen.

[Rob Stafford - Huffpost Blogger]

I would agree with everything you say here. & am certain I and my peers bear some responsibility as well.

Thanks--I hope to start to talk about this in a later piece. I think much of what we are dealing with is cultural--one way or another.

[ljmck]

Thank you for putting the case so plainly. I'm in sympathy and wondering where the levers of change are. Unions? Politicians? I find it helpful when a teacher illuminates the quandary.

I'll keep voting for education measures, willingly raising my taxes, in the hope that something will help, but the system seems immune to positive change, in spite of educators and administrators who are clearly committed. We all suffer the results of a broken and derided system, and today's students most of all. It must be exquisitely painful for you. I hope a new administration with offer far more than the mandates you've suffered for the last eight years.

Thanks for hanging in.

[derrick99]

Great article. I admit that, even as a highly functional professional near the top of my field, I struggle with each of these thing every single day - and I was one of the "smart" one is the AP classes. This kind of thinkg is hard, necissary and rare. Now the big question is, how do we teach

[Rob Stafford - Huffpost Blogger]

Now that's the question, isn't it?

[JScott]

My how things changed I could do those and I didn't expect to be famous, popular or rich.

[LitDr2B]

And it's amazing the number of so-called AP students who come into my classroom who cannot do the above 5 things. Most of them, in fact.