from VCCA Journal, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 1996, 53-56
© Copyright 1996 VCCA Journal
Six F's in my evening Comp 1 last term. Seven in my other Comp 1. Honors, mind you. Are the advancing hordes of younger students really as academically dicey, sketchy, flaky as some would have us believe? What's happening? What can I do about it?
Fall semester a year ago, faculty seemed to grumble more than ever, in my twenty-nine years of teaching, about students' inability and/or unwillingness to behave as college students. It's the younger ones, we said, just out of high school. They have no manners, no work ethic, no sense of academic purpose. They've never read a book, much less studied one, we groused. And of course we debated the causes and cures for the ills of our time. It's parents. Schools. TV. Drugs and violence. The microwave oven. Decline of the ozone layer. The ATM card. Nothing is real anymore.
Some of us got together and published a two-page sheet called "Tips for Student Success." It's a brief guide to academic manners and customs, you might say, designed especially for students who might not know that the teacher gets bummed when you arrive late, walk out during the demonstration on safety in the chem lab, return five minutes later sipping a frosty can of Dr. Pepper, mostly gaze at the clock instead of writing down the announced correction in the handout on what happens when sulfuric acid is dripped onto an artichoke, and zip up your backpack four minutes before the end of class.
The guide seemed useful, a contribution to our students' education about academia. We approached the next term and the next with newfound clarity and inspiration, determined to reach and transform every single academically-flaky young person sitting out there. We dug down to a new level of pedagogical possibility, except of course a few who continue to claim you can't lead students to the library, much less make them think. If they haven't learned basic academic manners and work habits by now, what makes us think they're going to learn them now?
I started off last term inspired to guide, cajole, entice, even drill, where needed, and help my students transform themselves into college writers. A goodly number did perform as writers. They did their research. They were always ready on schedule with a good working draft to present to their writing group. They gave and received responses to writing in progress with intelligence, determination, and diplomacy. They composed respectable college essays.
Meanwhile, try as I did, I just couldn't budge that handful of non-students in each class. They weren't all young, but most were just out of high school. Many were bright and capable. I know. I know. They acted just as I had when at seventeen I began flunking out of Duke. Higher education is always in danger of being wasted on the young. Who knows why I read the plays of Tennessee Williams and the short stories and novels of Ernest Hemingway, played frisbee, and drank pitchers of beer rather than struggling with my math homework. Although I attended my classes and took excellent notes, I was somehow pledged to squander time, money, and self-esteem.
A few years ago at an English conference the guest speaker was the novelist Reynolds Price, one of the finest writers of our time. I had so enjoyed his books and I was so looking forward to his talk. As he began to speak, I gasped to myself and probably to everyone around me. There at the podium stood a man I recognized vaguely. Years before, as a graduate student at Duke, he had tried to teach me freshman composition. Imagine, I've thought many times, if back then I had had a clue.
Recently area high school counselors gathered in our auditorium for a workshop on the community college. In preparing to speak to them, I thought especially about the growing numbers of college-bound students who are choosing the community college for the first two years. I urged them to help students brace for college work, no matter where they enroll. Even a good student from a demanding prep school will experience some academic jolt during the first college year.
Bright students in many public and private high schools, if they keep up a reasonable academic appearance and do minimal homework, can pretty much breeze through with good grades. I'm not faulting teachers for this. The problem is complex. Obviously many high school students work hard and develop themselves admirably as scholars, musicians, painters, athletes, and leaders. But many bright students do breeze through, and they develop a false sense of the requirements and expectations for success in college.
Couple that false sense with the pervasive misguided belief, especially in an area deeply influenced by Mr. Jefferson's university or the equivalent, that the local community college is just two more years of high school. Look who goes there, they quip: "kids" who in high school couldn't even write a sentence. And now there they are in "college."
So, many capable students show up in my comp classes expecting just more of the same. I tell them the course takes 12-15 hours a week, maybe more, but of course they don't understand yet, so they don't believe me. I tell them that to be a full-time, full-fledged college student probably requires 50-60 hours a week, a common workload for just about any young professional. Of course, they think I'm crazy. A week goes by without their doing much homework for any class. Then two weeks. Then three. Pretty soon they're overwhelmed with 300 pages of !@#$%^&* (Western civ?), 97 pages of !@#$%^&* (mathematics?), six chapters of !@#$%^&* (Spanish?), 70 miles to run on the treadmill for PE (!@#$%^&*?), and a huge !@#$%^&* project for composition which requires use of the library, the internet, and something called documentation.
In my comp class I urge them to do whatever it takes to have ready a good working draft to present on schedule to their writing group. Strong work up front usually results in a strong product later. I even threaten with the image of a guillotine smeared with blood. They laugh, those who recognize the word guillotine, but my sick humor doesn't seem to work either. And so it goes for that handful of non-students.
Although I rarely encourage dropping out, I explain that they can withdraw themselves before the ninth week if they think they need to. Many who got good grades in high school still can't seem to grasp the possibility--by now the probability--of there being real reality, like an F, at the end of the course. I`ve always pulled it out before, they seem to believe, and I'll pull it out again. In a colleague's history course, a student who'd just lost points for a late paper responded, "But you're so nice, I didn't think you meant it."
So here we are now in the second week of the spring term. Those F students are rethinking their lives. Some are re-enrolled, trying again. Others are waiting tables, wondering what happened and what will happen now. One is checking in with me every other day or so, although not enrolled in one of my classes, to ensure that he keeps up with his homework and develops a regular rhythm of study.
In my own case it took flunking out--after three years of just hanging on--and then as a busboy in a restaurant back home, serving butter to my high school teachers, stumbling through an answer to "So Dick, how's school going?" or "What are you doing back in Ft. Lauderdale?"
Duke, as many colleges and universities, believed that a college education requires the freedom and responsibility to succeed or fail on your own. If you seek help, you receive help. If you don't seek it, you receive none. Someone else can't grow you up. Often the lamp simply isn't ready to burn.
While it's true that I who teach in a transfer program must help students brace for transfer, help them brace for upper division college work in (as some students spell it) the "doggy-dog" world of the four-year institution, I must first engage and guide them, ease them thoughtfully from the breeze of high school to the rigors of college. It's relatively easy, if in one's nature, to smack people with a board, knock them senseless, and leave them to crawl away.
What's hard and ever so much more satisfying is to develop a working relationship with each individual flaky fledgling college non-student. It takes considerable intelligence, emotional intelligence, to develop for each the right mix of toughness, humor, understanding, cajoling, and love. As Marianne Williamson says, in all things there is either love or fear. Fear is the dark woods between me and my student. Love makes a clearing in which we work together.
When I think back to my three years at Duke, I wish someone wiser than I at seventeen had made such a clearing for me, seen something in me that I could not see, seen for instance that having been a lion in a small high school, I was now a mouse in a big dark university of lions. I was afraid. Only on the lacrosse field and, off season, in the beer hall did I truly roar.
At 53 I grasp something of my unconscious psychology back then. I didn't let myself try hard academically, although something in me longed to do better, because failing after not trying would offer no evidence of inability to succeed if I did try. Unconsciously, I feared my roar would occur as a mere squeak.
If only there had been community colleges and I had seen fit to go. There, I feel certain, I would have met a teacher who understood that love and teaching go hand in hand. The older and wiser I become, the more deeply I intend to be that teacher for each of my students. Will capable students continue to earn F's? Sure. But I will have done my damndest to hear each lion roar.
Dick Harrington who teaches English at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, served as the first president of the Virginia Community Colleges Association.