It breaks my heart to have to pen this blog.
Over the past two semesters I’ve been forced to rethink the skill level of the students I see on a daily basis. At first I thought it was me. Admittedly my teaching has been up and down as of late. Some of the ideas and plans I throw out there fall completely flat or are not supported with enough structure/scaffolding to be effective to the student. Some of that is me, but as I ask around and assess not only what I do but what others do as well, I am learning that it isn’t just me. Students aren’t coming in with basic critical thinking skills and even less creativity than critical thinking. It is as if we are being sent unprogrammed robots and being asked to program them without knowing what to program them for.
There are five stages of composition at the Community College level. Stage 1 focuses on sentence-level understanding and the basics of grammar. Stages two and three move the writer through elementary essay formats and the discovery of the ‘writing voice’. All of these are labeled as developmental English, which is my current field of specialization. Stages four and five are collectively known across academia as First Year Composition. Less known is the fact that FYC originally began at Harvard as a developmental program to address the fact that most students entering Harvard were not prepared for the level of writing instructors expected. This continues to be the case across academia. A student who hasn’t taken research writing (last course in the sequence) is usually not familiar enough with the resources or stylistic demands of academic writing to be successful in upper level courses. Unfortunately, we’ve hit a point where those who are taking that last class in the sequence are not entering the class with the skills necessary to even understand what it will take to pass. This is true of every class in the sequence. In short, students are coming to college extremely unprepared and unmotivated for the challenge of even developmental writing.
The credo of developmental education is ‘meet students where they are at and take them as far as they can go’ but what if where they are at is a place where their expectations are so clouded by disengagement and a lack of understanding that all they think is going to happen is you are going to present them with a formula and praise them for writing what amounts to little more than a mad lib of the sample you gave them? What sort of writers are we building up then? Critical thinking remains a key tenet of the modern age. A recent Jobs report noted that 96% of future jobs will require a high degree of critical thinking, a fact that is bolstered by the recent national switch to a Common Core that praises critical thinking ability and downplays skill and drill. Perhaps thats the reasoning behind my present predicament. Maybe what we are getting is the end of the AIMS (standardized testing largely based on skill and drill) crowd who spent their entire high school career learning how to be over-tested drones and not learning how to think for themselves.
It is a challenge I don’t think I was ready for; a punch that landed flush on my chin. Now it is time to get back up and figure out how to win this fight.