“The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid…”
By Allison Kaftan on Fri 23 May 2008 |
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It was a breath of fresh air to read the anonymous Professor X’s essay in the June edition of Atlantic Monthly entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.”
In a nutshell, Prof. X debunks the notion that a college education is attainable for everyone, using his own experience teaching at both a community and private college. Of his (mostly nontraditional) students, he says, that “they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.”
It’s no wonder he decided to stay anonymous, though this is pure assumption on my part as to his reason(s).
Though I’ve only had the opportunity to teach undergraduates for three semesters, that’s enough time for me to be familiar with the double-bind many English teachers (and instructors in other subjects) find themselves in. On one hand, teachers feel responsible for guiding students as they develop critical thinking skills and reach the goals described in the course catalog. Many of us begin our semesters with a drop of idealism; it’s easy to hope your students will get just as excited about the material as you do. On the other hand, the day the semester starts, it’s quite clear which students even have the ability to reach those goals, much less be interested in them. Do we teach down to them, hoping that they’ll make leaps and bounds in fourteen weeks, or do we ignore them and adhere to our academic standard?
But the truth, at least as I perceive it, and as Professor X writes with a decidedly Marxist slant applied to academia, is that academic ability can be a crapshoot. I’d add that by the time a student reaches college age, the success of the student, more often than not, is already decided.
So much of it depends on the nature versus nurture equation. Are you able to study as the education establishment demands you do, and did you take advantage of that ability during your formative years? And then you add in the identity politics prevalent in whatever area of the country you came from. Did your family foster a healthy learning environment? Were they even able to, or did you have parents who needed to work double-shifts to make ends meet? Were you on your own?
Did you live in a good school district? If you did, was your instruction a good fit for you? What were the values in your community? Were you expected to sacrifice to help your family make ends meet or resist certain activities because that’s not what people in your neighborhood do? Or did you live in a family with a heavy emphasis on self-betterment and striving for a very hegemonic ideal of success?
All of Professor X’s points aside (of which he makes many — the article really is worth the read), what gave me relief was knowing that I wasn’t alone. Someone else noted the feelings of despair you take on when you teach students who really aren’t prepared to be in your class.
And, gol’dang it, it was nice to read this — for once! — about students who, I presume, aren’t products of deaf or mainstreaming programs and don’t struggle with any of the varying educational stereotypes we always find ourselves putting on deaf students. Suffice it to say, the development of cultural and academic literacy and critical thinking skills in the educational field really are universal issues that teachers, researchers, and parents everywhere worry about and continually aspire to improve:
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
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21 Comments
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Excellent write-up.
I agree with most things you’ve written; I also agree with Professor X’s premise that college is not for everyone.
I was mainstreamed. One of the biggest problems I had were teachers who felt my parents wrote my English papers for me. Even one teacher asked my mother how it was possible a deaf boy could write English papers better than an entire class of hearing students in a public high school.
Ironic, ain’t it?
Thanks for a great read.
:o)
Paotie
Paotie-
Your posting hit it right on the bullseye. When I was at RIT, one of my professors in the business school department recommended that I meet up with the English writing center on campus thinking that I would need some assistance with my writing as I was the only deaf student in his course. He had heard of how atrocious research papers of some deaf students were at RIT and assumed that my paper would be like theirs. How so wrong he was I thought to myself!
After a few days of banging out my 25 double-spaced page paper, I walked over to the university’s writing center and threw the paper at the “editors” there to critique it. One of them took a stab at it and after some time, her jaw dropped open and remarked that she needed a moment to share the paper with the senior director of the center there. The woman came back with the senior director after what seemed like 15 minutes and asked if I had a few minutes to spare with her. I replied that I did.
She motioned me over to another table and asked where I had “gotten” this paper from. She asked me point-blank whether I had help in writing this paper. I laughed out loud and said to her, “Are you seriously asking me that?” She remarked that she had never seen a deaf person write so well and asked me what my background was like and so on. So I gave her my background and she said that there was no need for me to come back to the center for any further help because they felt it would be a waste of their time helping me as they felt that the paper was an “A” paper at best.
The next day, I dropped my finished paper off at my professor’s office. After a few weeks, I got word that the professor wanted me to see him in person. He asked how the hell the paper could be so good since I was deaf. He asked me if I had any papers from my past that I had written academically. After giving him one of my papers from the past, he grudgingly gave my paper an “A” and challenged me to write another “A” paper for the next assignment. I asked him why he had reason to doubt me — He said that he just never had heard of a deaf student write so well like I did.
After writing another “A” paper, he left me alone knowing that I was capable of doing the job myself without any assistance. It didn’t bother me that he had questioned my capabilities but I often wonder if he ever attempt to call the writing center to see if they did ever give me any assistance on the paper.
Of course, college is not for everyone. Right now, as a manager, I am dealing with the possibility of terminating a hearing person who has a bachelor’s degree from his job because he has NO motivation to do the job the right way. He’s constantly making mistakes, isn’t motivated to help others, has no “logical thinking” skills, and more. After constantly making sloppy financial mistakes that is costing my department in missed goals (he never quality checks his work), I am beginning to build a case in preparation of terminating him if he doesn’t (within a suitable amount of time) achieve performance improvement goals I implemented for him.
It is true that I am seeing more and more college graduates coming into the workforce who are inept, incapable of analyzing things, incapable of putting together at least one coherent paper/memo that makes sense to others, and are reluctant to work hard to help the company. These are the folks that aren’t going to be rewarded with bonuses, awards, salary increases, and promotions for some time.
These inept hearing people who can’t write worth a damn are legion. I worked for a hearing doctoral thesis graduate student in physiology who needed someone else to edit his writings. Although his foot-in-the-mouth English was obvious, he was well regarded as a scientist and his awesome capabilities just happened to be somewhere else.
Same as it is with deaf people. There are many who write well, but also many more whose talents shine in other fields.
One of the most decisive elements of a student’s academic potential is whether he or she had the ability to communicate with the world at an early age. Unlike patoie, I grew up in a deaf school. However, me and the seven classmates with whom I grew up all had hearing parents who signed and lobbied for deaf teacher aides (there were no deaf teachers at PSD at the time). Aesult? All 8 of us went to college. And excelled. (Well, I didn’t excel at first admittedly but that was due to other factors :))
JCT
JCT — Correct. There are several factors at play here. Parental involvement, willingness of the student, and the structure of the school. Paotie and you had different experiences and benefited from different structures and excelled.
I had a mixture of both, and I had the same reaction that Paotie got — that teachers would question how I was able to do so well with English, yet, they treated me with a “pooh-pooh, poor deaf boy” attitude.
Now that I’m a high school teacher at a school for the deaf, it’s difficult for me to perform multiple roles of these students that Professor X calls at the bottom of the pyramid, so to speak. These bottom dwellers starve for the attention they lack and teachers (and other school staff) often fill-in these roles. I’m not objecting, I do provide that kind of stimulation to those students who need it, but they should be getting that from their own parents and other people in their life as well.
Requesting a little clarification, please: what bottom dwellers? Are all your students that just because they go to a deaf school? Or do you only mean to refer to a number of your students who may be “bottom dwellers?”
It baffles me how teachers in any school could question papers written by deaf students. It doesn’t sound like the teachers are very smart.
A simple test is seating the student in front of the teacher and asking him to write an opinion page about an item from a newspaper handed to him. That writing sample will decide for once and all if his papers were parent-written.
More than the content of the writing, it is also revealing to observe the student as he writes: does he eagerly attack the task, writing furiously and fluently, or does he chew the pencil, sigh and muss his hair and laboriously scratch away?
Does he read quickly, jot notes and analyze as he goes along, referring back and forth between scribblings? Or does he reread and reread, write little, copy blocks of text, and produce little for a lot of effort?
This does not rule out the student that sweats a lot but writes decently using spellcheckers and grammar checkers, but it will give the intuitive teacher a very strong clue as to his competency.
Like Paotie, I had a mainstreamed education in the public school system. I didn’t have much parental involvement other than their concern that I wasn’t flunking any classes (they raised four kids). Heck, not sure what teachers saw in me but I’m sure the teachers talk about the achievers and the “bottom dwellers” of the pyramid amongst themselves when in the teachers’ lounge or offices.
I’d often received my graded papers with high school teachers’ comments saying I wrote at college level at the bottom of the last page. Then again, I’m sure the same teachers despaired at some hearing students’ levels of comprehension and writing skills.
Because our house didn’t have air conditioning in the old days, I took any and every opportunity during the summers to escape to the public library which was a nice frosty cool place with its air conditioning. It was there I soaked up books like a sponge while cooling off at the same time.
I was fortunate to have in grade school and middle school some teachers who loved telling stories to the students, some of the stories were personal ones but fascinating nevertheless, and then tied in a class lesson with the stories. I guess key here was to gain the students’ attention on anything but books and rote, yet weave in the class lesson for the day somehow.
Had a Latin teacher who was of of the first women barnstormers in the country when she was a young woman and she often regaled us students with her hair-raising tales about stunt flying in those double-wings. Then she would pull a particular word or phrase out of her story and ask for the Latin translation or teach it at the blackboard, LOL. Some of her tales paralleled some of the Greek or Latin epics we had to study for homework. She was a clever and inspiring teacher.
Also had an English teacher assign as homework made-up short stories using our imaginations and what we’d learned over two weeks’ time in her class. Those were 2-week assignments over the entire semester. By the time I’d entered high school, I already knew how to write papers just in class or in study period. Other students struggled with their papers. Like you said, AK, it’s a combination of factors, and it’s not necessarily the educational system alone at fault.
I strongly believe that a careful yet nonrestrictive pedagogical strategy is an obligatory, if not pivotal, factor in any and all forms of education. To encourage, to guide, to challenge; all these encounters are necessary. To embark upon a premise that, against all endeavors conducted by the teacher/professor to diagnose and medicate, leaving to the Nature as the last, failsafe logical truth that not all students are created equal, seems to risk being amiss in the educational philosophy department.
Even so, I have to say that for those deaf children who use sign language and manage to reach a college-level education are merely anomalies of nature, whether mainstreamed or not. It is our duty to maximize, even go beyond, what we can to impact the Nature, in order to guarantee preferable Nurturing paths. Thankfully, we have technology; we have cochlear implantation. This is undoubtedly the cure to the seeming socio-linguistic malady that deafness generates in and by itself; its Nature.
Perhaps, to be able to transcend Nature only to arrive at an uniform statehood that then would invite a reasonably even progress fostered by pedagogical innovations, such as oralism, is the solution.
Great article.
I’m with you 100% on the absolute necessity of a well-designed pedagogy. Nonetheless, there are more factors at play here, including class and privilege, which calls into play identity politics like race, family dynamics, gender, and deafness.
Even within the deaf populations you referred to (cochlear-implantees and oralists), these factors are significant determinants in their academic opportunities.
While I agree that people who grow up using only sign language can face difficulties in a society that privileges spoken English, I’ve met enough signing people qualified for college and beyond to question whether they truly are “anomalies of nature,” as you called them. I’m convinced there’s something else going on here beyond socio-linguistic privilege.
Allison made a good point about the article’s focus on inept hearing students.
I teach at a university, and I know many professors from other universities as well. Whenever we get together, the conversation inevitably drifts to anecdotes about students who have no motivation, no writing skills, and virtually no justification for being in college. Only one of those anecdotes has been about a deaf student.
Clearly, the plague of academic incompetence is endemic among hearing people.
And Paotie, after all these years, your distinguished teachers must be certain that your parents now write your blog entries.
Yeah. So why are they in college anyway?
That question has two directions I can see: 1) why are they admitted to college when they’re not qualified, and 2) what’s up with this all-encompassing direction toward a college education?
We’ve got enough nearly-illiterate college graduates walking around to prove that a college education ain’t always the validation we make it out to be.
In my view, there are a couple of key responses to Allison’s question, “So why are they in college anyway?” Both of them are cited, but not thoroughly developed, by the author of the article in The Atlantic.
Answer No. 1: Money. Universities around the nation would collapse or otherwise suffer a merciless phase of consolidation if they actually insisted that everyone demonstrate college-level potential before matriculation. Somebody has got to pay the rent, and the masses of poorly performing students are the lucky ones to fund these universities. It is true that a handful of universities (e.g., Stanford and Harvard) can turn away roughly 90% of their applicants, but most universities cannot be so choosy about their customers. If the student can somehow pay tuition or bring in some level of financing, the university will try to accommodate the person. Because this person is a customer, and the university needs the $$$, money and not academic standards will dictate the university’s course of action. In theory, the ultimate recipient of the degree will see his/her own income increase, regardless of whether he/she truly mastered college-level skills.
Answer No. 2: Self-Esteem. The article hints at this factor when explaining that “more-widespread college admission is…nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself.” Professors nowadays are routinely reminded to phrase suggestions, comments, and criticisms in the most affirmative manner possible, so as to bolster the self-esteem of students. Everybody is special. No one deserves to be excluded from the feel-good moments of college. So everyone deserves to be admitted to a university and benefit from this positive experience. The care and maintenance of students’ self-esteem can take many forms.
There are a gazillion universities out there where a significant portion of the incoming student body must take remedial classes, often to cover skills that should have been mastered in elementary or junior high school. While that is dispiriting information, it provides steady income for the universities. And, in theory, the students improve themselves at least somewhat through this experience. But this side of the American educational system does need greater attention in the nationwide discourse on whether college is appropriate for everyone.
This blog entry reminds me of another discussion initiated here last year by Richard Brklacich about the merits of a college education for the deaf. Perhaps a partial answer comes from this recent New York Times article that explains that women saw their income increase as a result of pursuing college degrees in greater numbers than before, whereas men got college degrees at historically constant levels and therefore saw no significant change in their average salary. So, one can secure financial gains for oneself as a result of going to college. And perhaps that explains why so many people make the attempt to get a degree, despite their lack of preparation for the effort.
The women/men comparison in the New York Times is very interesting. It would be even more interesting for us to see a comparison of the deaf and hearing populations and the correlation between their education and income levels over time. Of course, such a study would also have to take into account the factors of discrimination and unemployment among the deaf, of which the latter is a notoriously difficult figure to determine, as noted in Adam Stone’s blog (link is iffy – if it doesn’t work, my apologies).
That was a crazily excellent answer and the link to Adam’s blog was much appreciated.
Now I’m intrigued by the idea that we as a society have determined — through the use of a capitalist and imperialist mindset — that there is only one way to be a successful breadwinner, and that’s via a college degree.
Where does that leave the people not well-suited, either because of ability or temperament, for academia?
Imperialist? I understand the capitalist reference, but why is this mindset also imperialist? America is seeking world domination through academia? How quaint.
Ha. Glad you asked. The minute I left that comment, I said to myself, “waitamin, what did I just write?” And then I went off to do laundry or something else equally mundane. I was *attempting* to use the term “imperialist” to refer to the attitude anonymous references in the article insofar that by admitting and passing students who are clearly not a good fit for whatever academic activity, the USA succeeds in inflating its own ego.
To quote anonymous: “The article hints at this factor when explaining that “more-widespread college admission is…nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself.”” Upon re-reading, an imperialist attitude probably isn’t what anonymous meant, but I think it still kinda works, when you think about how much we like to praise ourselves for being such a smart and superior country, no matter what statistics say.
Sorry for the semantics gaffe. How quaint, indeed.
College is a reservoir of knowledge…
The freshmen bring a little bit in, the seniors don’t take any out, and the stuff just naturally accumulates.
Yeah… all the BS, MS, and PhDs… these letters don’t really do the
bullshitknowledge justice….:)
wow, I’m surprised that didn’t get asterisked out! sorry if I offended anyone…
Yup, Hilary… I agree.
We all know what a BS degree is… an MS is just “More of the Same” and a PhD is a “Pile Higher and Deeper”…
No offense meant, folks!
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