Early Sunday evening

Gack, the anxiety starts to mount as I face the first real week of classes. By that I mean it's the first week that I'll teach the whole week in the correct order--and the first in which the students will have done work of some substance in prep for class. And that means I have to actually do something with them other than noodle around. I feel terrible for my late T/Th comp kids: long stupid story (I don't think I told it, but not worth telling anyway), but the upshot is I got to class late and without the folder that contained all the handouts and work for the day. It's not a complete catastrophe, as the homework from the handouts isn't due until Thursday, so they'll still have time, but all the other classes got to look stuff over and try to figure it out on their own prior to their first class this week, and that group didn't.

I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the T/Th classes anyway, as I am trying to keep all the sections sort of in sync (as I've mentioned), but I ended up talking to them about how to read. (Did I talk about this already? God, I can't remember; my brain is just pancake batter, to borrow a phrase from Bonnie.) Anyway, I realized two things recently: one, they don't know how to skim something, and two, they also don't know how to read with attention to depth. I already knew that many of them don't like to read because "it takes too long" (extremely heavy sigh), but they also can't stand description. They were reading an amazing paragraph in Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful essay "Knowing Our Place" in which she describes the aftermath of a rainstorm in Appalachia, filled with rich, beautiful language and vivid imagery--and they thought it was "dry." Another extremely heavy sigh. But I keep fighting the good fight--and believing it is a good fight, one worth fighting.

I did work on those wretched study questions for Native American Lit (from now on I'm going to call it 229 to save myself some typing). Again, I face a dilemma: the essay I'm prepping for them right now is one that is valuable in part as they look at traditional stories/myths but will be even more valuable when they start looking at traditional "poems," some of which are actually portions of ceremonies (without the most sacred parts, of course, which are not to be shared with just anybody). But I know that they won't remember the essay well enough to be useful by the time we get to the poetry section, and--despite my best efforts--may not be able to keep the two threads of the essay's argument distinct in their heads. And that sort of fun continues: the week after that, they read an essay about humor, which is filled with reportage of Native jokes--and despite all I say, they always want to simply re-tell the jokes in their papers, instead of understanding what the author suggests is the purpose of the jokes. Argh.

This is the continual dilemma, of course: many of them genuinely are not ready for (or able to handle) college level work, but I cannot in good conscience "dumb down" assignments to the level of their actual competence. If I had more time with them, I could gradually work them from their level to where they need to be, but I don't. And interestingly enough, thinking about my rant about fixing public K-12 education, almost no one talks about that huge gap, between where most high schools leave students and where we expect them to be when they walk in the doors of college. I can't tell you how often students say to me, "Why didn't anyone teach us this in high school?" I don't know how to answer that. Because no one thought it was important? Because the people who make those decisions were focused on something else? Because a select few of the high school teachers are themselves not really ready for real academic work, despite having bachelors or masters degrees? (Another hobby horse I will refrain from riding around right now: the fact that degrees in education don't seem to prepare most graduates to effectively educate, in part because so many of those graduates don't know the actual field they're supposed to be teaching. I know this is a gross generalization--and in fact, I work with some spectacularly good teachers who have degrees in education and are more effective than some Ph.Ds I could mention. But I remember Sam Sandoe's mom--a junior high art teacher--talking about a student teacher who blanched at the thought of arranging the display cases, saying, "But Mrs. Sandoe, I haven't taken 'Bulletin Board' yet!" OK, that's an extreme case, and probably not at all typical--there are idiots in any degree program after all--but I could also tell some stories from my time at Beach Channel...)

And again argh. Followed by a few heavy sighs. And perhaps even a little grinding of teeth. But I care about this shit, I really do, so I keep slogging away, and bashing my head against numerous walls, hoping I'll be like that damned ram in the song "High Hopes." One has to be just a little nuts to take this on, as one must continually hope that this semester, somehow the experience and outcome will be different....

But to finish on a more positive note, at least I did re-read the essay, and all I have to do now is get the format for the study questions I already did (it's on the computer at work; silly me, forgot to transfer it to this one) and type it up. Piece of gluten-free cake.