Quote :

"[...]When I began my first day at Stillman, I was channeling my experiences of long ago. I would be a professor who would inspire and guide the lives of young black women and men who wanted to become successful journalists. [...] At 8 on that first morning, I met my freshman English class. I had volunteered to teach it because I wanted to assess the writing skills of the students in general. Because the chairman of my department had promised me small classes, I had expected no more than 15 students. Instead, I faced 33. All were black; more than half were women. Four of the men had been in front of King Hall earlier. The room was noisy, and two who had been in front of King Hall were horsing around. I put my books on the table and raised an arm for silence. When only a few students paid attention I raised my arm again, and this time I yelled. "All right, knock it off! Take your seats and be quiet!" I could not believe that I had to yell for college students to behave in a classroom. This is not going to be a good experience, I thought, unfolding the roster and preparing to call the roll. When I could not pronounce the second name on the list, I knew for sure I was in big trouble. As I fumbled with the strange combinations of alphabets and apostrophes, the class roared. "He can't even read, " a student said. More laughter. The air conditioner was down, and sweat dripped from my face as I struggled with the last name on the roll. After getting the room quiet, I instructed the students to "write an in-class essay of no more than 500 words describing at least three positive or negative things about your high school." I told them I would read the essays and return them the next time we met. "This is a diagnostic essay, " I said. "I won't grade it. I simply want to see how well you write. If you plan to major in journalism, I want to see you after class. I will hand out the syllabus next time." After class, just two female students said they wanted to major in journalism. During office hours and lunch, I read the essays. I wondered what I had gotten myself into when only one paper demonstrated college-level writing. During my 18 years of previous college teaching, I had never seen such poor writing - sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspellings, wrong words and illogical word order. [...] That afternoon, I met my opinion writing and news writing/reporting classes. I had five students in one and seven in the other. Again, I called the roll and took writing samples. That night at home, I eagerly read the papers. These budding journalism majors were the reason I came to Stillman. But after an hour of reading, I did not see how any of them would become reporters and editors without superhuman efforts on their part and mine. None had any sense of how a news article comes together. None knew how to write a compelling lead or how to use the active voice. Only one, a young woman in the opinion writing class, had written for a high school newspaper. During the next class meetings, I returned the papers. I did not mark the work, but I explained the writing was disappointingly bad and that they would have to work overtime to learn to write at an acceptable level. All except the one student who had a decent essay were outraged. "I thought this was going to be a real English class, " a student said. I asked her which high school she had attended and what she meant. The Selma High School graduate said her English teacher had let students spend most of their time discussing current events and writing short paragraphs. They wrote one essay all term. Most of the other students nodded approvingly. I did not tell the class that Selma High was considered to be academically inferior. I did tell them we would follow the syllabus, which required eight essays and four revisions. I also told them they would have to complete the grammar quizzes in the textbook. Everyone, except the competent writer, groaned. "I ain't taking this class, " one of the students who had been in front of King Hall said. He stood, nodded to his three friends and walked out of the room. One of them followed. The other two stared at me and scowled for the remainder of the period. The journalism students in the other two classes accepted my criticism without grumbling. In fact, they were pleased with the prospect of learning how to write "like real reporters, " said Kristin Heard, a freshman from Montgomery. [...] After a week, I faced another problem that my seasoned colleagues knew well but failed to warn me about: Most Stillman students refuse to buy their required textbooks. I discovered the problem on a Friday when I met my English class to discuss the assigned essay in the text. They were to write an essay in response to the reading. Only one student, the young man who wrote well, had read the essay. He had the text in front of him. The others had not purchased the text. I warned them that if they returned to class without their books, they would receive an F. But only five of 31 students brought their texts to the next class. Most students had book vouchers as part of their financial aid, so I told those without books to walk with me to the bookstore, a distance of about three football fields. Some did not follow me, and I tried to remember who they were. At the store I watched students wander around, obviously trying to avoid buying the book. Only about eight wound up buying one. I became angry that I had to deal with such a self-destructive, juvenile problem. I saw the refusal to buy the text as a collective act of defiance. I knew that if I lost this battle, I would not have any control in this class and no respect. The next Monday, I went to class dreading a showdown. While calling the roll, I asked the students to show me their texts. Eighteen still did not have them. One said he had bought the book but left it in his dorm room "by mistake." I told him to go get it. He gathered his belongings and left. He never came to class again. As promised, I recorded an F for all students who did not bring their texts. The last two young men from in front of King Hall walked out. I saw myself as having failed them as a professor, but I was relieved they were gone. I also decided to take away students' excuses for not having access to the texts. I personally bought two copies of each book and put them on reserve in the library. From time to time, I would check to see who had used them. During the entire semester, the books were used only six times. [...] I tried my best to cultivate a love of language and reading. Two sayings were on my office door. One was a Chinese proverb: "It is only through daily reading that you refresh your mind sufficiently to speak wisely." The other came from me: "Being Smart is Acting Black." But the messages were lost on students who had read so little growing up and had never acquired basic academic skills. I was not surprised to learn that only two of my students had read more than three of the books most high school students have read, books such as Moby Dick, The Sun Also Rises, The Color Purple and Invisible Man. Those of us who were teaching the required general education courses - all of us from the nation's respected universities, such as the University of Chicago, Indiana University, the University of Florida and Princeton - had to face a harsh reality. We primarily were practicing remediation. Every day in my classes, I reviewed basic grammar and showed students how to use the dictionary effectively, lessons normally taught in elementary and middle school. Homework was another major problem. Writing courses, especially journalism courses, are labor intensive for students and the professors. Reporting - going into the field, interviewing sources, finding official records and verifying information for accuracy - is essential. After most of my students continued to hand in articles that had only one interview, I began requiring at least four interviews, with the sources' telephone numbers, for each story. Most of the students balked and continued to hand in work with an insufficient number of interviews. Meeting deadlines, a must in journalism, was yet another problem. Few of my students regularly met the Monday deadline. I would deduct a letter grade for each day the copy was late. Some students received F's on all of their work. To avoid flunking them, I let them write in class. But that required them to show up, and I seldom had all students present. Attending class seemed to be an inconvenience. The college had an official attendance policy, but few professors followed it strictly because most of our students would have flunked out before mid-term. On most days, I did not call the roll. I simply tried to remember who was present. I recall the afternoon I sat alone in my room waiting for the seven students in the reporting class to show up. At 20 minutes past the hour, a white colleague peeked in and saw me in the otherwise empty room. "You must've had a serious assignment due?" he said. We had a big laugh. But it was a painful laugh. "It's the Stillman way, " he said. "A lot of these kids won't attend class, and, when they do, they walk in late. They're on CPT." Although I laughed with my colleague, I was ashamed that a white person so easily joked about CPT. "They don't have intellectual curiosity, " I said. "We weren't like that at Wiley or Bethune-Cookman." "I know what you mean." This time, we did not laugh. I gathered my books and newspapers, turned out the lights and left..."

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/05/13/Opinion/I_had_a_dream.shtml

i know you guys appreciated the pun

8/1/2008 5:16:05 PM

my dick (pretty long)

8/1/2008 5:22:16 PM

useless (w/o pics)

8/1/2008 5:23:17 PM

post office employees (nsfw)

8/1/2008 5:26:00 PM

8/1/2008 5:32:49 PM

^ nice box.

8/1/2008 5:37:45 PM

The tl;dr version of that article is already in the title.

Interesting read. Depressing... English departments generally weren't all that hot at most of the schools I went to. They just kind of keep hitting on the same thing over and over again from year to year, and the main things that changed were the difficulty of what you were reading and how long the paper was that you had to write. There weren't increasingly strict standards on grammar, diction, and sentence formation, they just kind of kept nagging about the same amount over the years and maintained the same standard (only expecting you to work a little "faster' each year and only to have slight improvements in overall grammar and vocabulary). I imagine it's worse in public schools with more dropouts and in poorer neighborhoods.

I think a lot of college kids these days, of all races, have substandard reading and writing skills.

It was painful sitting through a college sophomore-level english classes and hearing

people

read

like

this

so

that

every

single

word

is

pronounced

monotone

and

it

doesn't

flow

and

is

so

distracting

that

you

didn't

even

hear

what

they

were

attem... attempt...ing attempting

to

read

to

the

class.

Hopefully somebody competent (like a motivated statewide teachers' union) will put together a formal redress of grievances with the public education system and try to garner some public attention on what's wrong with how we're doing things these days. Unless I'm mistaken, aren't dropout rates still rather high (if not increasing to some degree), and standardized test scores only slightly improved from years and years ago?

[Edited on August 1, 2008 at 5:41 PM. Reason : omg SOAP BOX. I take chit chat srs.]

8/1/2008 5:40:27 PM

heh, the whole article is probably twice as long--it gives a better sense of the guy's frustration with everything, it's pretty sad. i don't pretend to know what the 'solution' might be, but he gets an A for effort

[Edited on August 1, 2008 at 5:48 PM. Reason : &]

8/1/2008 5:48:10 PM

good yet sad read.

8/1/2008 5:48:13 PM

the solution is not letting people into college that shouldn't/don't want to be there.

8/1/2008 5:53:09 PM

Quote :

""They don't have intellectual curiosity, " I said. "We weren't like that at Wiley or Bethune-Cookman.""

this is part of the key, and they're never gonna have that if educators write them off

8/1/2008 5:55:29 PM

stop acting white

8/1/2008 6:24:46 PM

what's CPT?

8/1/2008 6:31:33 PM

Quote :

"COLORED PEOPLE TIME"

8/1/2008 6:32:40 PM