teaching – Unspoken Politics

Holding back the tide: English education here and now

One of my high school English teachers posted this article describing the struggle on the job, including ever-falling expectations and aspirations for students regarding the English language. My comment was as such:

English class is a battle between one person attempting to uphold a linguistic tradition and a couple dozen attempting to normalize their errors.

One of the examples given in the article is the abuse of “literally” in non-literal statements. Despite that being a gross misuse of vocabulary, I pointed out that Google in the past year has amended its definition of the word to acknowledge misuse.

Such is the ongoing journey of English, which is reminiscent of the Geocities-era Internet- unregulated (unlike many other languages which have some sort of academy overseeing things), fragmented across space, and full of contradicting opinions. At some future point I’d imagine a post facto classification change, where what is spoken now is called Later English or something, and its rules and idiosyncrasies frozen in time along with Middle and Old English. What English instruction boils down to is a defense of a particular hill- what grammar, usage, spelling, and pronunciation were in a particular place at a particular point in time. Those students who don’t want to learn or don’t take lessons to heart will over time dictate what is current and what becomes archaic.

I once played a game of pool in a Portland bar, teams of two. One member of the opposing duo was from the Continent. He had grown up playing a very strict, organized rule set. My friend Gavin and I learned pool incorrectly from other kids (during summer camp, in my case) and had never figured out a set way to play the game. Thus dubbed “American Rules”, technical questions were not answered with “yes” or “no”, but rather “sure go ahead” or “maybe not”. English is a great example of the American Rules mindset. And I have immense respect for those that attempt to corral all the that chaos and teach an interpretation of English that promotes clarity and precision. In my not-that-long life, slang and vocabulary has undergone a radical change in the digital age, that increasingly departs from a English curriculum that hasn’t changed nearly as much. Every teacher has to drag students out of that universe and make them write something totally different.

Tough work, because the English language marches on, in a different direction in each place and with each community.

A farewell to community college

As tomorrow is my first class at a four-year university, now is a good time to look back and order my memories of community college. In all, I attended two schools over the course of four years- from spring 2010 to spring 2014. There were some small gaps, usually due to my pre-stability mental health, but the path was long and sometimes filled with significant obstacles. Previously, I belonged the group that was able to weather school through raw ability, despite serious inconsistency of effort and poor attendance.

Community college not only set me on a different path, it created a new, better self. I am not a perfect person, a trait I share with everyone else. I am both too critical of myself and others, I use sarcasm as a weapon, there are times where my privilege goes blatantly unchecked. Despite these character flaws, a new worldview has been constructed in the last four years. Diversity is better understood, and appreciated. More time has been spent with people all over the socioeconomic spectrum, leading very different lives. I have more empathy, and am willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.

So, what is community college like, for the many people that never set foot on a campus? It is many things. When the sun is overhead, it is a place for young people to decide if college is right for them, or to put into place a plan for a future transfer. Or perhaps dick around, an attempt like many college students to postpone adulthood indefinitely. When all is dark, it becomes a place where non-traditional students start a new career from scratch. Office admins become case mangers. Baristas become radiology techs. Forty year old men and women from many distant countries learn the stupid, unfair rules of the English language.

Initially, I chose the obvious path for college prep kids- a path that ended at the gates of a liberal arts college. From one white-dominated institution to another. Where ethnic studies is a theory class, devoid of a real-world foundation. After a few months, I dropped out. Four-year college was not right for me. My mental health was inconsistent and not well-managed in the remote town the school was located in. I had no “study hygiene” as I dubbed it, an inability to deal with a demanding academic schedule. What the hell was I doing with my life?

Community college is an excellent place to wrestle with that question. Tuition is cheap, the system is built for those on an extended schedule. And totally unplanned, I fell into the public school system for the first time at nineteen. Failure, by one metric, had turned into valuable opportunity. Latinos comprised the plurality of students, only three in ten were white. Many came from poor backgrounds and a violent childhood. W., who sat next to me in public speaking class, told of the many fights he participated in, as different ethnic gangs brawled in a urban high school. A girl younger than me had to plan an honors seminar around her obligations to her six-year old daughter.

Those next to me in the sociology survey course struggled through language barriers, or had a reading level several grades behind what they needed. Some came to please their parents, others used class to treat an existential fear they had about the future. Every room was filled with (often unstated) chaos.

In popular culture, the junior college is a punchline, depicted as full of burnouts and those too dumb to get into a real school. That scene that introduces Robin Williams’ character in Good Will Hunting comes to mind. The nickname it has, “13th grade” is true in some sense. Attendance is taken fastidiously. In core classes, handholding is present and often expected by the students. Yet some of the most intelligent people I have ever met sat next to me. Many high school students who do not fit into the mould they are placed in participate in “middle college”, where they take college classes alongside their regular work. One girl was accepted to Stanford at 16, but chose junior college because of the poor treatment the school gave her as an underage student. Several went on to Berkeley or UCLA, having saved thousands of dollars by doing their general education here.

Lurking in the shadows is the hidden secret of community college- they provide superior teaching than a top university, at a fraction of the price. Most introductory classes are massive- my parents’ calculus class at Michigan State had over a thousand students. Yet that is impossible at the community college level. No building seats more than 200, and most classrooms sat around fifty or so. Combined with this more intimate learning environment, the professors are devoted solely to teaching. They are more accessible, more invested, and more dedicated than most university professors. An esteemed professor at Berkeley publishes papers and writes books. A community college professor is the one who translates that work and makes it understandable.

Of course, upper division courses are another story. One of the things I longed for were advanced, specific courses. But the comparison here is lower-division, general education. I have my pick of upper division courses, because everything else has been taking care of. There were only four sociology courses available, but they transferred to take care of the four lower-division major courses.

Community, ironically, is absent from a community college. Everyone commutes, many have full-time jobs or kids to deal with. For those with no friends going in, most of my connections were with the faculty. In some sense, community is what you are paying for at a four-year. Student organizations, traditions, spaces to just hang out and talk about the nature of the universe. The library system in a community college district is appalling; any detailed assignment required a trek to the colossal cave system of Green Library at Stanford. Research opportunities exist, but they are narrow in scope. Social sciences are ignored in favor of STEM programs, which have been the source of almost all new funding for the institutions. Few innovative speakers make their way to our theaters.

So both systems have their troubles. There is no school that has top-shelf infrastructure and bottom-barrel tuition costs. Typically there is a trade-off between research opportunities and professors with a focus on teaching. My university has a flat tuition cost per term- to take one class a quarter would be financial suicide. Yet a woman with a serious disability graduated alongside me this spring; both her and her service dog wore the cap. It had taken her seven years to finish.

In some sense, community college is where we start over. Whether you immigrated from Guatemala, or are looking to change careers in middle age, those that come look to build a new, better world.

Fifty-three months passed between my entrance and exit. I volunteered on political campaigns, I Occupied and shut down a port. Afternoons were spent tutoring poor kids. I spent a year serving on a disabilities commission. 2014 was the year I became a semi-professional lunatic, joining other people living with a mental illness to talk about our lives and help fight stigma. Community college was the catalyst. If you come from privilege and little diversity, you have an obligation to seek others with a different story. Diversity may not come to you, you may have to seek it and let its lessons seep in.

At my high school, which was Benedictine, most church services began with the saying- “always we begin again.” Junior college is a place where those words ring true.

Teaching for the present

Today I’m here to echo another blogger- Ed from Gin and Tacos. He teaches American politics, mostly to college freshman. Thus, he is an eyewitness to all the flaws of secondary education. Students often have issues following detailed directions, doing systematic research, and avoiding plagiarism. But besides those shortcomings, which we could call a lack of “study hygiene”, there are also the gaps in general knowledge. Ed’s point isn’t that American students don’t understand the past- they don’t understand the present.

In his April column “Out of Time” he asks a question that every history teacher must deal with at some level: why are most primary and secondary history classes taught in chronological order? As he writes

K-12 classes still overwhelmingly choose to teach history chronologically. This, in my experience and what I commonly hear from students, results in a seriously detrimental lack of emphasis on modern history. The academic year begins with ancient Greeks and Romans and ends sometime in May, usually having gotten no further than the Industrial Revolution or perhaps World War I.

In 9th grade world history, we started with the basic ancient civilizations- Rome, China, Egypt, Persia. 10th grade European history didn’t go all that far beyond the Five-Year Plan and vintage Stalin. 11th grade US history spent a couple months going from Columbus to Jamestown to the many reasons for the Revolutionary War.

These aspects of history are immensely important, but the world of 2013 is far more closely related to World War II than World War I, and both of those compared to the Civil War or the Revolutionary War. And what about even more recent history? Ed states that

I found a class of 25 honors students – excellent students – totally ignorant of the basic aspects of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent propaganda surge leading to the Iraq War. And why should they know? They were 8 when it happened, and it has never been taught to them.

I was born the year after the Berlin Wall fell. Incoming college freshmen now have no memory of 9/11. Unlike the high school history teachers I had, I was not around for the Cold War. Though for millions of Americans it is memory, everything from the Clinton Administration back is history for my generation.

Why is Barack Obama the president? Why is there a war in Afghanistan? Why did the world economy collapse? I know teaching history chronologically is very tidy and comprehensive for what it covers, but it also cuts out some of the most crucial parts if the class schedule falls behind. The Industrial Revolution is a world-defining process, but the deregulation of the late 1990s and early 2000s is one of the biggest reasons a student’s dad can’t find a job. The Civil War may have been the culmination of over a century of conflict and sectionalism, but modern politics also owes a lot to what happened in Vietnam.

Sitting in my college sociology class, I’m now five years older than the youngest student there. What do I remember that they don’t? And what does my professor remember that I don’t? Education is a continuum of memory, from the most senior teachers to the most junior students. The present needs to be tied to those important events in the past- going back centuries or millennia. But the focus has to be, in 2013, what is required to understand the world?