Via Lauren, this stunningly depressing article by Professor X about life in the basement of the ivory tower. X adjuncts a night class at a community college — which is what I did for one year (1993-94) before I had the great good fortune to get a tenure-track job at the tender age of 26. X teaches English, and he or she is grim about it:
Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest.
Okay, right off the bat, that describes only half of my students at Pasadena City College. Professor X doesn’t get in his night classes the students I’ve been getting in mine for fifteen years — which include not only the academically indifferent but those of exceptional potential whose family circumstances prevent them from attending a four-year college right away. I transfer students to Berkeley, UCLA, Occidental, and USC every year, students who have figured out that taking two years at $20 a unit makes good sense.
The thing about the community college is that I get such an astonishingly wide range of students. In a typical night class of nearly fifty, I will have a few very bright high school kids of perhaps 16 or 17 years of age. I will also have retirees in their 60s and 70s, 30-ish single moms returning to school, and quite a few students between the standard ages of 18-24. Some are very bright, with the skills but not the financial wherewithal to do well at competitive universities; others struggle with learning disabilities or barely average intellectual ability. That breadth of ability is a challenge, but it is also a joy — and anyone who doesn’t find it such should be elsewhere.
X bemoans the poor preparation of his night students:
A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught.
Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.
In each of my courses, we discuss thesis statements and topic sentences, the need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desirable, what constitutes a compelling subject. I explain, I give examples, I cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening, when the class is over and I come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task, as I’m sure my students do. I envision the lot of us driving home, solitary scholars in our cars, growing sadder by the mile.
First off, I do know how deceiving student faces can be. The very first quarter I ever TAed a section (at UCLA in 1991), I learned not to put too much stock in “nods.” The student who nods agreeably at everything I say, often complete with facial expressions indicating great attentiveness, is rarely among the best in the class. A lot of faking goes on, and I can assure Professor X it is common at every level of academia. (I did it myself as an undergraduate at Cal.) I do empathize with the shock a rookie teacher experiences when he or she collects the first batch of papers and realizes how little the students have grasped.
But there’s a difference between that near-universal frustration and the total despair Professor X conveys. I don’t fail as many students as Professor X does: I’m a notoriously tough “A” but a relatively easy “C”. And I’ve learned that many of the students who barely passed my class — and in some cases, those who didn’t — often enjoyed the course more than those who did comparatively better. One woman failed my History 1A class twice before passing the third time with a C. She was a server at a restaurant I visited regularly, and even after the second time she had failed, she was cheerfully upbeat. “Gosh, those essays are tough”, she’d say; “I’ll get it one of these days.” She told me she went home and repeated things she had learned in my class about Homer or Gilgamesh or St. Paul to her family. I am not sure she repeated them accurately, but there was no doubting her enthusiasm. Pass or fail, she learned something. As far as I know, she never drove home sad. I sure as hell never drove home depressed at the poor quality of my students.
I love teaching, and I love my students. But I learned a long time ago that their successes were just that: theirs, not mine. I open a door, and they either walk through it or they don’t. Though they often thank me profusely, too often they confuse their own achievement with my efforts. I’m a good lecturer and a decent inspirer, and I care about what happens to my students. But I don’t “make it happen” for them; they do. And their As are earned and their Fs are earned. I do sometimes leave campus excited about one of my especially promising students. I do sometimes leave campus sad because of a tragedy that has occurred in the life of a student of whom I am fond. But I never, ever, ever lose faith in the task of teaching. And someone who has ought to get out of the business sooner rather than later.
This paragraph of X’s rings half true:
But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.
Okay, so the bit about the exhaustion and candy wrappers is right on. And while I drink a lot of coffee, I haven’t reeked of tuna in years. (Perhaps the privilege of the tenured vegan professor with a campus office is to generally arrive smelling more of Fragonard than of food.) But this line is so indefensible as to poison the whole piece: our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up.
Please. I wanted a community college job because I believed in the community college, despite never having attended one myself. The world doesn’t owe you a tenure-track job at Haverford, Professor X; your students deserve not only your time but they deserve your faith in them — and your faith in yourself. (Now, I suppose a Calvinist pastor convinced of the total depravity of the race could say to his or her congregation: “we are all here because we’ve screwed up”, and it might not offend the listener. But such a pastor — or the speaker at an AA meeting — is in a different role than a college professor. The latter ought to evince more optimism and pride.)
As someone who has taught some 10,000 community college students over the past fifteen years, I reject the mischaracterization of the talents, abilities, and attitudes of those who enroll in two-year institutions. And as someone who delights in his job, as someone who falls in love with students all over again every semester, as someone who considers himself blessed to be paid to do what he might well do for free, I’d like to assure all those disillusioned by the “Professor X piece” that despite the myriad challenges, most of us who do this love what we do with our hearts, our souls, and our minds. And unless I’m badly informed, most of us do not regularly drive home in despair.
In the end, I still believe that those who can barely write a sentence, and those who will never rise above minimum wage jobs, still can benefit from learning about arete and agape, about eros and episkopoi. Knowledge is not merely a tool for social and economic advancement; it is a source of fulfillment and a wellspring of virtue for everyone. And that’s true for those who can remember 90% of the material, and those who can remember 3%. Because as I’ve learned in conversations with former students in many walks of life, sometimes that 3% can mean so very much.
our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up.
Ouch. What a slap in the face. I have never, for a moment, regretted going to a community college. And I didn’t go there because I was a “screw up,” or a dumbass who flunked out of high school (I could have gone to a UC but I didn’t want to graduate college with $60,000 in student loans.) Professor X needs to get over him/herself.
I’ve been TAing for a writing course at a pretty reputable UC for a couple years now, and while I do still have faith in what I do and fall in love with my students every time a new group of them floods in, I also related to X’s article. My students are generally not there trying to pass; they are there to get an A, to move on to grad school, to get a brand spanking new, prestigious job. Many of them are engineers or computer scientists and think writing is useless and/or that they are bad at it. When they struggle and turn in D or C essays, I rejoice for them, but they despair. When I get A papers, it’s usually because they are already decent or good writers, not because of anything amazing that I did. But every one of them who doesn’t get an A (and that’s about 99% because I too am a tough A but an easier C) take it very hard. They have been taught that only an A is success, and in that frame, I can’t help but feel that we are setting up many of them to fail.
Great post, Hugo. Thanks for sticking up for all of us (you included). As a high school senior, I got into UCSD, UCSC, Cal Poly SLO, CSULB, and CSUMB, but went to PCC instead. Now I’m at UCLA, 100% happy with my decision. I am more well-rounded, more communicative, more open to diversity than many of my peers who have gone here since they were bright-eyed freshmen. Also, I must admit that I had some better professors at PCC than I’ve had at UCLA. I’ve noticed that much time and money here are spent towards research and publishing, not specifically and solely on education. Further, I’ve found the same bunch of students here at UCLA who don’t know how to write a coherent sentence. I’ve also found several single moms and working adults who have worked their asses off to get where they are. Students are students, whether they’re sitting in a community college classroom or a prestigious university lecture hall.
I will say that I had a wonderful, challenging English teacher at PCC who whispered to me, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at a four-year?” I’d like to see her now to tell her I am so incredibly thankful for what she taught me, and for the literary doors she opened for me. I feel the same way about the doors you’ve opened and continue to open for me.
I’ve been there–exactly where Professor X finds herself right now: In a pile of shattered illusions, which were built throughout years of graduate program placement promises, and as adjunct in various community or vocational college classrooms, where I was stunned by students’ inability to compose a grammatically correct sentence. Angry at the academic job market and at myself for believing that, if Princeton grads can get tenure-track jobs at four-year-schools, so could I (with a UC degree), I looked down on my own teaching work as “remedial high school English” rather than the “Advanced Critical Thinking” classes as which they were advertised. That changed one day, when one of my students approached me before class, in tears, saying that her son just had been arrested and she would have to drop out because she simply couldn’t think about continuing her education when her baby was in jail. Since she was in no shape to drive herself home (and one of my better students), I asked her to have a seat and breathe for a moment, letting her know that it was okay for her to leave whenever she felt she was ready. She stayed for the entire class and participated. Afterwards, she approached me again and said “Thank you so much, professor. For those three hours, I was able to put my mind to rest and think about something else.” She didn’t drop the class. And I realized at that moment that the academic career with all its research and its fifty thousand peer-refereed articles in prestigious journals wouldn’t be worth diddly squat if I couldn’t give students moments like this.
Which means, in the end, that I said goodbye to academia as a full-time career, but ended up teaching part-time, for the love of teaching.
You’re very fortunate to have the opportunity to be teaching at a community college where it is commonplace for students to transfer to Ivy League-level schools, and Ivy League is not at all out of the question if students were willing to leave the Pacific coast. PCC is a place where high school seniors who know what they want in life, or don’t know what they want in life can go and be confident that as long as they do well, they can transfer to an incredible four-year school and save a lot of money by doing so. If I had stayed at my parents’ house and gone to my local community college in Virginia (which is not one of the worst systems), I honestly do not think I would have had any chance of getting into Berkeley, and I would have been lucky to get into UVA.
I’m very curious as to where Professor X is teaching.
Is college a fulfilling experience? Sure. There is, however, a lot of pressure to get a college degree in jobs where it simply isn’t necessary. I think it’s probably the case that almost everyone would benefit from taking college classes, if for nothing other than being surrounded by different perspectives and forced to cope with ideas that don’t match one’s own, but it is not realistic or reasonable to expect even most people to get a college degree - which is what a lot of people feel pressured to do. I imagine most of those students in Professor X’s evening class are not there because they thought they’d take an English class for enrichment or because it sounded like an interesting class, they’re there because they won’t get a raise if they don’t finish their AA degree, or their children have pressured them to go back to school and get a degree, and a few of them are there because they didn’t have the chance to go to college after high school and now they have the money, and a little more time - though probably never enough of either.
Professor X reminds me of a teacher I had in high school. Some people just aren’t cut out for the job — which is perfectly fine, just choose another. People who insist on teaching despite their passionate misery in the classroom do a terrible disservice to themselves, their families, and their innocent students. (Same goes for any job, I suppose, especially any other job in which some fifty people are completely at one’s mercy.)
Daisy, I agree with you that some people aren’t cut out for the job, but I also think that a string of really bad students can seriously wear you out. My fiancé’s mom is a teacher, and she’s a pretty great one from what I can gather (many of his friends had her in middle school) — really cares about the kids, takes a lot of time to set up her curriculum, etc. But for the last five or ten years, her kids have gotten progressively worse, and she struggles with that. She still brings most of her A game to the classroom, but when you have to go over fractions and multiplication tables with 12 year olds who should know that stuff by now, it can get really frustrating.
I’ve mentioned this before on other posts, but I think it is VERY important to the story to know where X is teaching. PCC sounds fantastic, but I just do not believe you can compare a school like PCC to certain types of community colleges in other, usually more rural, usually poorer parts of the country. The problem he talks about, of people not cut out for college, this doesn’t start at college. This starts at severely underfunded public school systems that dumb classes down in order to pass students through quickly because they don’t want their drop out rates to get out of control (my state already has the third highest drop out rate in the country).
The majority of science tests I took in high school were open book. I was required to read 4 books on my own in my entire high school English experience. Everything else we studied was played aloud to us on a tape because they couldn’t make most students read a short story from the book at home. I never wrote a paper more than 3 pages long. Is this an education that prepares one for Ivy League? The community college system here with tiny campuses tucked into mountainous areas exists in large part to give students a place to get college credit that is a reasonable step up from their high school educations. I spent one semester at the CC in my area waiting to transfer to the state university and all of the tests were taken online, at home, with your book (someone else could take them for you and no one would ever know). I took abnormal psychology as a night class and most of the other students were nurses. I assume it filled some requirement for their jobs. It was 3 hours once a week. He didn’t keep attendance. Every other week he lectured for about an hour out of the DSM-IV and let us go. Every other week we watched a film like A Beautiful Mind, Dead Poets Society or Grizzly Man because it had “something” to do with psychology. It was like film studies in psychology but without discussions, tests or writing anything. I never put pen to paper in that class, no one did. I learned precisely nothing I didn’t know before from that class.
I was at the top of my class in high school and when I transferred to the state university as a sophomore it was the hardest challenge I had ever experienced academically to bring myself up to that level. I had freshman friends who grew up in big cities tell me how easy they thought the classes were. It felt very unfair that they had been preped for college and I had been preped to make it to graduation. How many students from my community college system transfer to Ivy League schools? They’d be eaten alive.
I have sympathy for X. However, I think A LOT more blame needs to be put on the public school systems when people show up in comp classes unable to string together a coherent sentence. As for adult students coming back to school, I just don’t know about that.
Yikes, jennyfields… that is depressing. All the more reason to be infuriated by the “we’ve all screwed up” remark from Professor X. Blaming those who have no other options is perverse and unjustifiable.
Yikes, jennyfields… that is depressing.
Yes, it is. Jennyfields’ comment mentions rural areas, but the situation is similar in predominantly African-American inner cities. I heard stories from classmates in college about their high school science classes that mainly consisted of word search puzzles, partly due to a frequent turnover rate of teachers who moved to suburban schools as soon as they could. You’re right that it makes Professor X’s comment all the worse. All kids don’t come out of high school on an equal footing, so they’re not utilizing community colleges in equal ways.
To be fair, the vast majority of my students are first-generation college students, and over 75% are non-white. It’s not as if Pasadena City College is a bastion of privilege.
The presumption that every kid should go to college is absurd.
After all the nonsense about differing learning styles and differing intelligences, schools think all grads should go to one place–college. And college is still a matter of accumulating knowledge by reading and listening to lectures.
Something wrong with this picture?
Do some remodeling on your home, just to make one example, and see what a good person in the building trades has to know, and what he makes. You know what he makes, because you pay him. You know what he knows because he knows about a million percent more than you do about practically everything.
And they aren’t outsourcing concrete laying, masonry, plumbing, and finish carpentry to China. Big source of conversation at grown-ups parties…where can I find a good contractor. They don’t even bother to advertise. The two I know best interview the customer–not explicitly–to see if they even want the job.
CCs need to be able to repair K12 shortfalls, and have available courses in such things as business math, bookkeeping, business law, and so forth.
My wife taught at a business college. Taught English. The school had discovered that employers wanted employees who’d had English LIT! Imagine that. Nothing big. “To Kill a Mockingbird”, say, or “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”.
The everybodygoestocollege model is dangerous to our economic and social health.
“To be fair, the vast majority of my students are first-generation college students, and over 75% are non-white. It’s not as if Pasadena City College is a bastion of privilege.”
It seems like PCC holds higher standards in education and students come out of there more educated than in the schools B and I were talking about. People than came from bad K-12 are probably coming into PCC (or other schools) at a different level and thus have to work significantly harder to achieve than people who came from better school systems. With CCs that keep low standards, you’re not even given the chance to rise to a higher level.
Though, just the fact that what public school system you were raised in determines how prepared you could POSSIBLY be for college is a grossly unfair class condition (which often translates into race or even gender). It’s difficult to know how to repair it because you can’t just expect one cog down the line to raise its standards; it needs to happen from kindergarten on.
It sounds like PCC gives students something to rise to where they’ll be more prepared to go onto a better college or adequately learn the skills they’re paying to learn. It’s a cheat when the poor are unable to get access to an education that will challenge them and actually prepare them for jobs or enrich them personally.
“CCs need to be able to repair K12 shortfalls”
I would say that’s unlikely to happen—too late for most people—an unrealistic goal.
“It seems like PCC holds higher standards in education and students come out of there more educated…” “It sounds like PCC gives students something to rise to where they’ll be more prepared to go onto a better college or adequately learn the skills they’re paying to learn.”
I have been going there for an embarrassingly long time (four years before Hugo arrived). The only thing their standards have been doing is dropping. Look at all the remedial math and English courses offered there, see the ESL classes—they have only been expanding. These classes should be taught at adult education centers; however, PCC couldn’t pass up the expanding market, see also their community education center. If I remember correctly many of the social science classes used to have a writing requirement, either way they don’t now. All these remedial students guess what other classes they are taking. Now look at courses where one has to know a little something to get by: biological sciences, chemistry, calculus, and physics not too many of those for 29,000 students. Curriculums have been dumb down so far it is hysterical, but what isn’t drop dead hilarious is the addition of grading curves (104% on my economics exam, 10% increase. Oops, I just remembered the chemistry class I dropped five years ago, an A started at 86%, what’s it now?) So what’s a good college when all their enrollments are rising/ shifting by way of the community colleges?
Probably tangential, but maybe some of what professor x is lamenting. I don’t think he’s been fooled by deceiving glares and seeing how the trickle up effect has taken good hold at the PhD level for sometime, I’m sure he’s seen the knuckleheads in the upper echelons.
“our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up”
I guess every step forward could be looked at as progress. But then maybe one should look at where they are stepping, and occasionally hold their head up and look around and see. So yes, I am one of those screwed up, but then PCC really isn’t college—adult ed. with some flare perhaps, but then the adult ed. center I became a LVN at was superior to the RN program I finished at PCC.
Paul, two notes: in social sciences, we give substantially fewer As now than when I arrived: we had some notorious “grade inflators” in our department who have since retired. “A”s have gone from 35% of all grades given to about 25%. Whether this reflects tougher standards or poorer student work is difficult to discern, I admit!
Secondly, the demographics of PCC have changed dramatically; of COURSE we’re going to offer more ESL classes — because the percentage of students for whom English isn’t their first language has doubled since I came in 1993. And while I honor your experience, I resent the notion that PCC isn’t college — if that’s true, neither was my alma mater, because the students I have taught at PCC are often as good and as bright, and the quality of the papers as impressive, as those I encountered as a teaching assistant at UCLA and an undergrad at Cal.
“Whether this reflects tougher standards or poorer student work is difficult to discern, I admit!”
Well if you want the opinion of one who has set through some of the same courses over time it is poorer students, easier curriculum, and poorer instructors. Not difficult to discern just seeing.
I always thought of English as a foreign language being taught in another country. ESL has no place in a college, and just because folks like yourself might think so…
Remember the trickle up effect.
Take your complaint up with Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efs/ and Caltech: http://pr.caltech.edu/catalog/courses/listing/esl.html
They both offer ESL. Perhaps they aren’t “colleges” either.
Come on Hugo, there is a world of difference here. I shouldn’t have to explain this. If these colleges want to coddle the ego of brilliant folks from foreign countries by offering them courses to improve their English so they don’t have to hang around the lowly educated at PCC and various adult ed. centers, so be it—the can be considered a college. Address the real issue.
The real issue, Paul, seems to be your own xenophobia.
FYI, most of the enrollment in PCC’s ESL courses is by foreign nationals from Asia, not Latin America. Our Latino population is dropping every year, our Asian population skyrocketing, as more Latinos move East towards the Inland Empire and PCC actively recruits foreign East Asian students, who pay international tuition rates. We recruit from Hong Kong, the PRC, Taiwan, South Korea, and so forth — and these students are paying hundreds of dollars per unit, which is why we are happy to offer them ESL slots. Sounds exactly like what you say about Stanford and Cal Tech!
Here’s one of the agencies we use, for more info: http://icef.com/
actually i was really implying that they should go and take these classes at adult ed. centers, hence the ego comment. It is a waste of resources to teach them at the college, but i guess folks getting into these institutions are on the higher end of the learning curve. i don’t think most of those at the community college are, and would require empirical evidence to think otherwise.
i’m at a lost for your clarification on latinos and asians.
ESL isn’t for uneducated people, Paul. It’s for people (often in the younger age range) who weren’t raised with English as their primary language. If you moved to another country right now and you were looking to pursue an education at a community college or university, I would hope that they offered classes for learning their native language so the material and lectures would be less challenging. Rather than chastising the expansion of ESL departments in community colleges, we ought to admire the students enrolled in the classes for challenging themselves to learn a second, third, or fourth language.
I was over at Russell’s blog and noticed he had some interesting comments on the professor x article. I felt moved to actually read the article this morning.
“adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students—whatever you want to call it—is a substantial profit center for many colleges”
That hit the nail at the head of exactly what PCC is doing.
“To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish.”
He knew such criticism was coming.
“But what’s missing in this piece is the sense that even the woefully unprepared can learn to delight in a new idea, a story, a vision of a world unlike the one they’ve lived in all their lives”
I would suggest a visit to the bookstore or library would be in accord. What this doesn’t account for are some standards or the level at which one should enter college. Professor X’s argument is that many aren’t there and he isn’t the only one to think so.
“Grading ought to take account of the reality of the background from which a student has emerged.”
To me this sounds like grade inflation and lowering standards. Classes taught at college level don’t require college level proficiency in writing and math as prerequisites. I see a majority of students in many of my courses struggling with the basics. I have noticed that courses over time have dramatically adjusted to accommodate these issues. So I have to wonder, is my A really an A, am I really doing college level work, and finally is this want college is about?
Paul, the master plan for community colleges in California has always been “open admission” — no academic qualifications required. That’s true of CCs in almost every other state, which is why we call them “community” colleges. High school diplomas are not now nor have they ever been mandatory, going back to the earliest JCs in the second decade of the last century. City or community colleges have always been filled with the children of immigrants, going back to at least the ’20s…
Hey Paul,
Sorry you didn’t enjoy your stay at PCC. I and many others have. I’m fairly confident that I’ll do just fine at university when I transfer next year. I think PCC is a real college. The [private] university seems to think so too; they’ve accepted 99% of my classes as transfer units.
And for the record I had to take a remedial math class. I also took mostly afternoon and night classes, because 1. I hate waking up early 2. I preferred the company of adult returning students.