Students

90% of students who start at a community college don’t finish college.

Is this because of community colleges? Or is it because the students starting at a community college aren’t actually able to finish?

 Most students who do well in high school don’t go on to a community college. The students who typically go to a community college are either

1. those who struggled in high school, who goofed off, who skipped school, who didn’t do their work. If they have not had a major attitude change, they’re going to do the same thing in a CC and they aren’t going to graduate.
2. those who struggled in high school because they did not have sufficient skills. Their skill levels are not going to automatically improve just because they are going to college. They need remediation and they need tutoring. These are available, but they will have to avail themselves of it.

A study in a Boston Globe article, as reported on The College Puzzle, said

Students attending two-year community colleges-the least-expensive option-fared the worst in the survey by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, with an abysmal 12 percent graduation rate.
…
Seven out of 10 public school graduates may get into college, but many lack the preparation to succeed. At Bunker Hill, for example, more than 80 percent of the Boston students from the class of 2000 required a remedial math course.
…
In this study, a student merely needed to earn a diploma or certificate from any institution of higher education, not just the original college. And by providing at least a six-year window, the study made allowances for students who often juggle college with work or family obligations. Rationalizations are now off the table.

A couple of thoughts: First, is it the college’s fault if the students need remediation when they arrive? Or maybe, to what extent is the college responsible for remediation?

If 80% of the students need remediation, then they are trying to go to college without adequate skills. Perhaps we should quit encouraging everyone to go to college.

My brother-in-law did not go to college. He has a good job in management because he learned how to manage people and he is a conscientious worker. (And he got a job with a company that rewards those things.)

If he had gone to college, he would have been one of those students needing remediation and not passing. My husband, from the same family, actually did better in college than he did in high school.

The more I read studies like these, the more I wonder why we as Americans feel it is important to send our kids to school. In the old days people apprenticed. That was like school, only different. As an apprentice you would learn your job and do it. (Or at least it was to be hoped you would.) Were there a lot of failures in those days that we just don’t hear about because they died young? got run over by a horse? or something equally removing-them-from-the-gene-pool?

The [most successful community] college also offers so-called “nested semesters” that allow students to take accelerated courses over 10- or even 5-week periods in addition to the traditional 15-week schedule. The faster pace creates a sense of urgency missing on many campuses. Minority students, who make up 42 percent of the student body, appear to fare especially well at Quincy College. Black and Hispanic graduation rates for a recent class, says Harris, outstripped that of Asian students.

This is an interesting idea and I am going to pass it on to my dean and president.

I wonder why the Asian students were outstripped. What about the shorter, more intense courses, courted Hispanic and black culture, while putting aside Asian culture? That’s an interesting question. I wonder if it would hold up through a second study or a similar program somewhere else.

No one believes that ill-prepared urban students will suddenly cruise through college. But any college that can’t help at least half to the finish line needs to reexamine what value it is adding to the educational experience.

Again, I may be negative, but why is it the college’s job to get the students through?

I guess I have a different view of the responsibility of students and colleges.

What is the role of the college?

I think the college should provide remediation. It should provide qualified teachers. It should provide technology so that the students can learn that aspect of American culture. It should encourage students. It should make sure students are not trying to swim out of their depth, by taking too many classes or classes for which they are not yet prepared.

It has NO responsibility for students graduating.

Now, if the short terms are good for students, they will also be good for colleges. The colleges will retain more students if the students are doing well. Student retention, though not the job of the college, is a goal of the college. They want to retain as many students as they can reasonably do.

But I know that many schools have watered down their programs. The classes are light. And they are doing this in an attempt to get the students to pass. What’s the use of passing if there was nothing rigorous?

Does it do a student any good to get out of freshman composition and be unable to write an essay exam? No, it does not. They will have essay exams and they will need to do well on them to continue on in their education.

But we water our courses down at the CC in order to “help” more of our students through.

Students rise to a challenge and sink to the lowest common denominator thinking.

 Joseph Kugelmass wrote an insightful article for Inside Higher Ed entitled “Stop Using Rhetoric to Teach Writing.”

He says that after five years of teaching composition, he feels it is a mistake to make Aristotelian rhetoric the foundation of writing instruction.

My first thought, sophist that I am, was: Perhaps Quintillian rhetoric would be better?

Then I thought of the minimal rhetoric I have seen taught in composition courses. I would expect since he argues against it that he has seen quite a bit of it. I have not.

Kugelmass makes some interesting points about audience; logos, ethos, and pathos; and advertising. But for me, the pivotal quote was:

The field of rhetoric ought to remain a discipline in its own right, instead of becoming simply another word for using language, and as a discipline it is not broad enough to cover all the moments of aesthetic discovery and delight that initiate students into the writer’s world.

Obviously as a PhD with a first field in Rhetoric and Composition, I have a horse in the race.

I agree with him that rhetoric ought to remain a discipline in its own right. It did not for quite some time in American educational history and I hope rhetoric never again disappears from our universities.

In addition, I agree that rhetoric should not become another word for using language. Nor should it, as it has to some extent, be used to identify specific types of constructions. (Rhetorical questions?)

And I agree with him as well that rhetoric is not wide enough to cover all the beauty in writing.

BUT to me the implication is that rhetoric and its study does not add enough to writing instruction to warrant its inclusion. This, I feel, is a serious error.

While it is true that students speak to their parents differently than they speak to their friends, many students do not yet understand the different audiences of work and academia when they come to our classes.

Yes, probably the students Kugelmass teaches at prep school do. That is part of their home life.

But many students who are struggling in college are struggling because their home life did not prepare them for the different culture, the different expectations, and the different rhetorics used outside their home. This is where English teachers, rhetoricians in particular, can offer a significant value-add.

Looking at logos, pathos, and ethos and how it operates across different cultures could be very helpful for many of our students. Discussing when and where to use them specifically could make a difference to them as well. And identifying what establishes credibility for different audiences would also be helpful.

For instance, in some cultures relationship is the main point of credibility. Students from those cultures attempt to develop a relationship within the writing that moves them away from the typically logical and external writing that academia prefers. They don’t understand why they have lost points, why “you” and “I” are unacceptable, and how they are not meeting the expectations for the composition.

Or can we be friends?

Core Knowledge Blog has a post on the issue of students and facebooking. I was thinking earlier today about that very question.

I give students my home number, but not my cell. I have office hours. I have met students at restaurants to study and talk.

But I have not friended them on facebook. And I don’t intend to.

One issue that students sometimes have with teachers is that they know too much of their private life. If they’re my friends on fb, they will know too much about my private life.

Also, some students don’t understand that being my “friend” doesn’t mean the grades improve.

So I don’t facebook my students.

I have, in the past, been friendly with students. I was actually friends for years with a student who had been in my composition class. I used to have all my classes over to my house for dinner together. It was fun, but some of the students didn’t get that I was still the teacher. So I don’t do that anymore. And I think that I am carrying the wisdom from that experience over to facebook.

I would love to facebook past students. I’d like to keep up with their lives and encourage them.

But I won’t friend my present students because the line between appropriate and inappropriate is just too blurry. I’d rather keep the gap bigger, just in case someone disagrees on where that line actually is.

Berkeley has a new study that shows that “the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.”

“Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult,” said Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. “We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response.”

Previous studies have shown a possible link between frontal lobe function and behavioral differences in children from low and high socioeconomic levels, but according to cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, first author of the new paper, “those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity.”

The Washington Post has an interesting article on whether or not people should ignore poverty’s impact. Or at least that’s what the title says.

Should teachers ignore poverty and teach and be held responsible if the students don’t learn? Or should teachers teach and know that poverty is going to have an impact on their students?

One writer said:

Of course, there are teachers who give up far too easily and make excuses. I think of myself as a reasonably hard worker and someone who gives every child my best effort.

But there are fantastic doctors who have patients that die. Is it always the doctor’s fault? Certainly there are patients who will not survive despite a great doctor’s heroic efforts.

Another agrees with that idea, but has a different metaphor:

Imagine a football coach who designs his plays with no regard to the talents of his players, half of whom are on crutches, deaf or blind. And even if they are not so handicapped, if they have no ability to catch or throw a ball, running a pass-oriented West Coast style offense will not work.

Someone else had a very different view:

Full personal responsibility for student achievement and refusing to blame other factors does NOT mean we ignore the other factors; it simply means we view other factors as challenges and problems that require solutions, and we view the possibility of solutions as fitting inside our personal sphere of influences vs. shrugging our shoulders and giving up.

I think that there can be a middle ground. Don’t give up just because they are in poverty. Those students can learn. But don’t hold the teachers responsible for teaching them everything their parents should have been teaching them for the first six years of their lives either.

Question:
Is it possible that the issue of the brain isn’t poverty so much as it is low stimulation?

I would like to see the study replicated and split the poverty kids into two groups. Have one group where the parents are attending college or clearly doing something to move themselves out of poverty. In the other group they can have whomever. Does that change the picture?

Could it be that the damage is not poverty but the lack of intellectual involvement?

Just a thought.

It comes from the fact that my family was desperately poor when I was younger. Until I was about 10 we often went to bed hungry. But I doubt sincerely that my brain shows any dysfunctions.

The US News had Top 10 Signs you’ve been cutting too many classes. Some of them are outrageously unrealistic. Some of them are so realistic it is heartbreaking.

An example of the latter:
#10 You show up Wednesday at 9 only to find the class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 4.

This happened in my eight a.m class this year. A student showed up at twenty after and wanted to know where her class had been moved to. She insisted that she was in the right classroom at the right time. I finally got a look at her schedule, which she had in her notebook. She had the class in that room. But it was at 7:50 on Tues/Thurs. So she was thirty minutes late on the wrong day for a class.

An example of the former:
#3 The hottie you were trying to hook up with is now married to the guy at the end of the row.

Living together, yes. They could be doing that inside a week. But married? Not happening. At least not anywhere I teach.

This type of student belongs in the snowflake compendium.

#8 Your classmates roll their eyes when you do show up and “contribute” to the discussion.

#7 You ask when the midterm is going to be only to find out it was held three weeks ago.

#6 It’s the 10th week of the semester and the prof mistakes you for a prospective student.

Core Knowledge Blog is discussing posts that compare two 7th grade papers, one a nuanced character analysis of Anne Frank and one an essay on a chore the student hates. Robert Pondiscio had this to say:

You can’t ask kids to do “self-directed” writing about their family, their friends and their personal experiences throughout elementary school to the exclusion of nearly all else, then expect them to dazzle you with their insights into literature in middle school.

Exactly.

And it becomes even worse when they have written this way through high school and show up in college unaware of academic writing. It is one of the reasons I created my “Use of the Familiar to Introduce Literature” unit. Students had never, or rarely, written on literature and they didn’t understand what a literary analysis was or should be. (To read a presentation over the unit, keep reading the blog. I will be posting it here.)

I posted on “How to Create a Character Analysis” and that has become my top hit. I am fairly sure students are looking for the information they need to write a class assignment.

It is not because students don’t want to do the work we ask of them. They don’t know how.

John at Discriminations has a wonderful post on a NYTimes OpEd that says that the SAT predicts graduation rates better than high school GPA. He wrote the author about a possible objection and the author wrote back an answer!

The OpEd starts off:

FOR some years now, many elite American colleges have been downgrading the role of standardized tests like the SAT in deciding which applicants are admitted, or have even discarded their use altogether. While some institutions justify this move primarily as a way to enroll a more diverse group of students, an increasing number claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages….
So, here is the question: do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages?

Go read the NYTimes article, then head over to
Discriminations to read the rest. It’s a very good discussion.

As a homeschooling mother of a son presently applying to multiple colleges across the country, I am pleased to hear that the SAT is such a good predictor. My son’s grades are high, but that is partially a feature of our early homeschooling rules. For the first eight years of education, the boys had to get a perfect score. If they didn’t get something correct, they had to keep working on it till it was all correct. This was a built-in motivator for getting their work done correctly to start with. This (mostly) carried over into high school.

My son’s GPA for dual credit courses at the CC are also reasonably high. (He is on the President’s honor roll and is a member of Phi Theta Kappa.) So in his case I don’t know that they don’t both indicate how well he will do. In fact, as a worried mum, rather than a college professor, I am relieved to know that something outside my grading says he will do well.

It’s also a good thing for homeschoolers in general because some of the universities presently require that homeschoolers take the GED. (None of the ones E is applying to, though. That was one of the requirements to start. That and top 100 ranked schools and his program.) With this as an argument, there should be more maneuverability in getting that changed.

Community College Survey of Engagement says:

For example, 49% of students said they often or very often worked harder than they thought they would need to meet an instructor’s standards, and 68% described their exams as more than moderately challenging.

Yet 67% of full-time students said they spent 10 or fewer hours preparing for class in an average week, and 24% said they always came to class prepared. Among full-time students, 29% said they had written four or fewer papers of any length during the current school year.

“Students aren’t going to learn to write well at that rate,” survey director Kay McClenney says.

Let’s see. My students have written a narrative (oops, no, Ike killed that.), a descriptive, a compare/contrast with research, a research paper, and they are presently writing their definition/illustration paper. They had to write a revision of the c/c, which many schools now count as an additional paper. And they have written a minimum of four blog posts.

I guess I don’t feel too badly about the students not writing a lot of research papers in their other classes. But I do wonder how soon in the school year they asked these students and what percentage actually will go on to a four-year school.

Some of the CCs around here have two-year programs that put the students into the job market. Do they need to know how to write an essay per class to go to work? They need to know how to write and they need to have practice, but there are some courses (like cosmetology and air conditioning repair) which just do not require writing.

Have we gotten out of the habit of thinking of CCs as two year schools? Are we back to “junior colleges” again? Just a thought.

… Btw, I do think that we are too easy. But so are the four year schools. My freshman comp I class has to write a five page research paper with five sources. The SLAC where I teach doesn’t require that till freshman comp II. In freshman comp II at my CC, they are required to write a 5-7 page literary criticism paper with six sources. The SLAC says students aren’t able to write literary criticism papers and those are only required of literature majors.

You should ask for these things on the first day of class.  And do not think you have them just because they are on some handout the school gave you.  Phone numbers change and people move and accounts get deleted or are unread.

Phone number
Because?

• You might need to call them.
• They might call you but not give a phone number.
• They might call and you can’t understand the number.

Email address

• You might need to get in touch with them at an inconvenient time to call.
• Writing gives you time to review your communication.
• Handouts and exercises for missed assignments may need to be sent.

Preferred name

Because there is not a lot more annoying than being called “Sharon” when you go by “Elizabeth” or “John” when you go by “Mike.”

I know I don’t like it and you would not either.  So make sure you ask students what they want to be called.

As an aside, I tell the story of a high school student who told the sub he wanted to be called Fred.  I knew the sub and she told me, so I called the student Fred in class until he finally admitted he had just been causing problems for the sub and agreed to not do so again.  …It took two weeks of being Fred.