The Ones We Can Save.
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It was probably early into my first semester as a teacher that I came across a student essay written, from beginning to end, in sentence fragments. It was so dense with grammatical confusion that I didn’t even know where to begin my corrections– nor did I know how to help my student to engage at the college level when he so clearly lacked the skills he needed to do so. Every semester I can count on getting at least one essay that is almost indecipherable. And the numbers are going up. I’ve received multiple incomprehensible essays that were endorsed and signed by student tutors from the tutoring center at my college. That speaks to a systemic problem, in my opinion. Kids are reading fewer books that are built out of stable grammar and are doing more texting, tweeting, and thinking in images and icons, which are often without punctuation, spelling, or traditional grammar.
Here’s my question: How do you teach a college English course to students whose literacy and composition skills are situated on a spectrum that ranges from almost totally illiterate to college freshman level? Many to most of my students have trouble with basic grammar, but how much time can I devote to grammar in a class that is supposed to be about college-level reading, analysis, and writing?
I generally provide a block of instruction early in each course that touches on common grammatical errors, and then I refer them to websites like OWL Purdue and Scribendi’s Grammar Guide that cover the rules of grammar. There’s just not much time to cover what we need to cover to prepare them to write at the college level and also to do remedial work in class. I urge them to take advantage of the tutoring services on campus and via NetTutor (through our online component). I highlight grammatical mistakes in the feedback I provide for each student’s essay. Generally, students whose writing has grammar issues improve very slightly over the course of the five essays that I assign in a semester. Should a college course devote more time to this crucial (but remedial) piece? There are trade-offs– the more time we spend on elementary rules of English, the less time we have to talk about research strategies, vetting sources, logical fallacies, proper argumentation, modes of persuasion, etc. After all, classes meet generally for about 3 hours a week. That’s very little time, indeed.
I don’t have a good answer, but I think community colleges need one. Increasingly, students come into class with extremely limited English skills. A transfer-level class should be engaging students at a college level, by definition. But if multiple students per class aren’t capable of functioning at that level because they need remediation, how should instructors proceed? The students who are ready for college need to be challenged, and the students who aren’t ready deserve the opportunity to grow. How do you accomplish both?
I think community college is increasingly doing the traditional work of high schools. This will affect the entire higher education model as students spend more time in college classrooms remediating instead of doing college-level work, and the result will be a loss of quality. Degrees will be less impressive and less desirable to employers, and more importantly, students will have spent more time working on basic skills or simply failing to understand what they’re being exposed to because of that skills deficit than grappling with great ideas, experiencing new ways of looking at the world, and stocking their inner shelves with substantial, humanizing, soul-sustaining material.
One possible solution might be simply to set standards for entry into community college, and to refer adult students who lack basic skills to adult schools to work on whatever gaps there are in their fundamental education. Another solution might be to identify students who are not operating at level and set them up with both a tutor and a personal instructor/mentor to bring them up to level through additional instruction. And, of course, the truth is that some students are not necessarily going to be able to function at the college level for whatever reason. For my part, I advise students who have trouble with basic writing and reading skills to read as much quality fiction and nonfiction as they can get their hands on, to get a grammar book and work through the exercises they find there, to read their writing out loud and see if it sounds correct to their ears, and to bring tutors and additional knowledgeable eyes (including my own) to bear on their written work. That works better for some people than others– generally, student success is a matter of time and dedication on the student’s part. Teachers can provide direction, guidance, support, inspiration, and advice the livelong day, but learning to write, read, and think comes down to the student; student grit, dedication, and ability will determine all outcomes (provided the teacher doesn’t actually get in the way).
In my average community college class of 31-32 students, about 12-14 will drop, and of those that remain 2-3 will fail, 1-3 will do exceptionally well and earn an “A,” and the rest are in the “B” to “C” range. This is on average, of course. I would like to identify more of the students that will drop or fail and help them be successful, but I can’t impart grit, nor change life situations, nor make up for 12 years of either ignoring English teachers or learning the wrong things. For now, like all teachers, I swim for the ones I can save.
