Yesterday one of my students was taken back when I introduced a short writing prompt for their novels.
You see in College Comp - in addition to writing 8-9 essays - students spend first quarter reading one novel from a class list of 'classics' and then they take a short answer and essay test on it (the test this quarter is set for March 22). Students spend the second quarter reading a second book and then taking another short answer and essay test on it. Ultimately, they will research at least four other sources and write an 8-12 page research paper in which they analyze how the novels address three common themes.
Yesterday's short essay called for them to list three themes from their first novel and then select one theme and then using an example of plot or character to analyze how the film is addressed so far.
Most had no problem. However, a few struggled.
One problem was simple: she hadn't read enough of her novel yet (procrastination).
But for the others who struggled, what concerns me is that they just aren't used to reading difficult material.
"But no one talks like this today," someone said about Pride and Prejudice.
"When am I ever going to have to read anything else like this?" complained another about Sense and Sensibility.
"The Scarlett Letter is really difficult. I don't know half of the words," another added.
All legitimate concerns. And I think this all highlights something I tried to address at the beginning of the course: students will have to work.
They will have to read like they have rarely read before. They will have to write in ways not often asked of them. They will have learn and grow. And that isn't easy.
This reminds me of a reading our principal gave us prior to our Ramp Up to Readiness program this year. It talked about two ways to view intelligence: either you have it and you're blessed because of it or your intelligence is based on how hard you are willing to work and how much you are willing to learn and grow.
I'm a living example of the latter. But I fear many students are just content to shrug their shoulders and think well, I'm just not smart. I'll just settle.
In fact, Diane Ravitch hit upon this same problem in an interview with John Merrow. She said in America we put too much emphasis on talent. If you get into Harvard or the NLF, it's mostly based on your God given talent. That view, though, is not shared by the rest of the world. Our arch nemesis in education, China, for instance, has a different view. Ravitch said, any Chinese parent (and think of Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" here) will tell their kids, talent doesn't matter . . . it's all about how hard you are willing to work.
This is the great wake up call that is called college level work.
One of the brightest students I've ever had, Michael, will now tell you that he didn't work all that hard in high school. He was just that bright. But now that he's a math major at Concordia, he has to work and he's there with people smarter than him!
That's an awakening.
So my message to my students was that they have to work and learn differently. What's the other option? To give up and not understand?
I told them of my struggles when I transferred to BSU. I was in a Victorian England history class. One of our texts was Stanley Weintraub's Victoria: An Intimate Biography. The kicker was that the text was out of print. The bookstore was only able to get a few copies. That left a dozen or so of us, without a text.
Our teacher, Jerry Schnabel, did put a few of his personal copies on reserve in the AC Clark library for us. But we could only reserve it for 2 hours at a time. Twelve students competing for 2 copies of a 2,000 page book.
That meant a lot of odd hours of reading. Good luck finding the book available at 1 in the afternoon or 7 at night.
One thing I realized right away while reading this was that my vocabulary was miniscule compared to the author's. So I remember something my uncle Jim, an English professor, told me: keep a word list. It didn't take long before I had a five page list of words I didn't know - facetious, myriad, plethora, ubiquitous, obsequious, indefatigable . . . I can still remember those words. I just wish I had the original list.
I credit that class and Schnabel for teaching me really what it meant to be a scholar. I know I never had to work that hard in a class before. It not only pushed me far outside of my comfort zone, but it also taught me that there was so much out there that I didn't know (and that I still don't know).
If I want to know it, I better be ready to put the work in to it. That has nothing to do with God given ability or talent. It comes down to being curious and an active learner.
I need to constantly remind my students of that.
A great way of doing this is to reference some of my best thinkers and writers from the past. Just last semester in College Comp 2 I had some of the best student I've ever had. I recall one student reading her Sticky-Note book, Mind Wide Open, the very first night I gave it to her. This is the same student who, to refute Mark Bauerlein's thesis in The Dumbest Generation, wrote an 8 page handwritten paper (to illustrate how much easier and more effective it would have been to actually use technology to type it) about how cameras in classes and apps such as Skype, could greatly improve education. I recall another student who, while waiting in line for the final Twilight film, spent his down time working on braiding his 25 page multi-genre essay. I recall others who if they had 15 minutes of spare class time, they would tutor each other in Calculus.
The point is simple: the best students also happen to work the hardest.
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