Back to School

As I sit down to prepare for the spring semester, I wonder, once again, what is enough for students in English Composition at a community college to learn? The master course outline states that they should learn to “write complete, correct, serviceable sentences that exhibit a reasonable degree of structural variety…; write effective, serviceable paragraphs;” and of course write some good essays as well. They should learn that writing is a process of pre-writing, drafting, revision, and editing. They should learn to do academic research, write an 8- to 10-page paper using at least five reputable sources to support a thesis, and document it all in MLA style. This is more than enough for 15 weeks with 2 ½ hours per week of class time. But wait, there’s more… Because of course in order to do this, they need to know how to read difficult pieces of nonfiction, and comprehend them, and use them to make inferences relating to their topics.

The students who do well in English 101 tend to be the students who already know how to do most of this stuff. But what about the others – those who come in as almost blank slates, having never read any more than was absolutely necessary to scrape by. (And don’t fool yourself into thinking that included all the books assigned in high school. There is no need to buy Cliff’s Notes anymore. Just Google the title to get a complete short synopsis.) These are students who string endless clauses together in their writing, put apostrophes where they don’t belong and not where they do, and either don’t use commas at all or spill boxes of them all over the page.

But before I can even hope to correct any of these issues, I first have to try to get them to care because half the students sitting in front of me are only there because someone told them they needed to be. They don’t know what they want to do in life. They are trying to get their basic classes “out of the way.” But not knowing what “the way” is, they once again do the bare minimum, or what they think is the bare minimum, not realizing that the standard for just barely not failing is higher in college. These are the students who complain about college being “13^th grade” when they are the ones who make it that way. I don’t wish to suggest that all my students are like this, but they are ones I worry about. They take other classes in which they do scrape by, and someday – perhaps – they may actually graduate from this college. In that eventuality, given that in 15 weeks there is no way they can learn what should essentially have been the entire K-12 curriculum (taken to a higher level, of course, because this is college), what do they need to know and be able to do that it is actually possible for me to teach them in this amount of time?

Well, what do average people need to know how to do in “the real world”? For one thing, it would be nice if they could send a clear email that could be recognized as English. (There’s your drafting, revising, and editing.) But of course they laugh when I tell them that I will sometimes go over an email 10 times before I send it. I do it because I want to make sure the message will be received as I intended. Then again, I have had lots of experience with badly received emails, both as the sender and the recipient. Sending a well-written email is an essential life skill.

Imagine reading this from a college student:
hi I dont know when I’ll be back in class but what did imiss last week ….

Students also laugh at me when I tell them that when I find a typo in my work I feel like I’m standing in front of the world in my underwear. Considering what we see on TV and on YouTube (and in emails like the above), they probably think that’s a good thing!

The academic research papers are a part of the curriculum I wonder about. The pieces of the process are important – being able to find good information, read it with understanding, and use it to make an argument – but does it have to be 8 to 10 pages? Does it have to have five sources? Does it have to be documented in MLA style? Is MLA style (or APA or any of the specialized documentation systems) even relevant anymore when almost all the sources students use are electronic and can be Googled in the time it takes to flip to their works cited page?

And then there’s course content. English 101 is a skill class, with almost no inherent content. We are not after all, going to write about writing. So I want to use content that opens their eyes to the world they’re preparing to enter – things like income inequality, consumer manipulation by media, wars around the world, and their chances of getting a decent job when they graduate. I also want to fill them with the beauty of the world – of nature and art and human beings (sometimes) and great writing. And most of all I want them to care about all this. In fact if they do end up caring, that might almost be enough to make up for all the other stuff. Almost.

The problem is that the fun stuff, the stuff that helps make them care, is not the same stuff that teaches them how to write good emails or read a scientific article that might help them weigh the pros and cons of different treatments for their husband’s cancer or their MS or their child’s epilepsy. But those things can be easily learned if one wants to learn. If there were just one thing that I could teach, even at the expense of everything else, it would be a desire to learn. If I got two things, the second would be persistence. If my students got both those things from my class, that would be enough.

Right on cue, as I am writing this, my husband walks in, and our daughter asks why he was watching a documentary about Emma Goldman for the second time. His answer: “Because I want to learn something.”

The desire to learn, once ignited, is not easily quenched. I have exhausted myself this past year. I was so grateful to turn 46 in November because I felt like I had been 45 for 10 years. I was – still am – so tired that sometimes I just sit and stare at nothing. And yet as soon as I pick up a book, suddenly I want to know something. Sitting down to start planning English 101 for the spring, which was a chore I’ve been putting off for weeks, was what triggered me to write this post, when I’ve had no desire to write anything in months. Suddenly I’m asking questions and looking for answers – in the textbooks and websites I went through this afternoon and now in the web of my own words. And I have found my answer. What is enough to teach? A desire to learn and the persistence to do what it takes to learn. Now I just have to learn how to teach those things. I suspect it will be harder than teaching where the apostrophe goes or how to document a source in MLA style. I hope I can be a good enough teacher to do it.