This is a project that I’ve been running for the past few years. It’s based on the national essay project “This I Believe.” Students are encouraged in my version of the project to articulate as clearly as they can a core belief of theirs–something that is essential to who they are–and to tell us how they came to this belief. We do this in the spirit of listening to one another–not to proselytize.
Tags: assignments · audio · classes · student workNo Comments.
Dear Sir:
After reviewing what my son has been discussing in your class and viewing your website, I have advised him to drop your class. Maybe COM 101 has changed somewhat since I took the class in 1982 at [...], but I find your website way over a young adult’s comprehension. You are teaching at [...] in the south suburbs of Chicago. A junior college.
I also object that your website advertised via [...] faculty website is tied into personal info and pictures of your family. My son and I feel that your class is way over his head and that he is not learning the basic writing skills which is what COM 101 should be. Maybe you should teach at Berkley, Yale or Harvard.
Honestly, after reading this, I was offended on so many levels, I was without speech. In some ways, I was impressed that one could, in such a brief message, offend so many groups of people while simultaneously demonstrating such ignorance and gall. When my head stopped spinning, I had many choice words, but I resisted. After a few days my anger settled into a kind of aching sadness. What does one say to this? Education has failed this parent, and, I’m afraid, will fail her son.
I did not send a response e-mail. FERPA laws prevent me from doing so, as I can neither confirm nor deny that a student is even enrolled in my class, let alone discuss his or her progress, with anyone other than the student or an official of the College. I can, however, exercise my First Amendment right to free speech to respond publicly to this message (removing all identifying information, of course). So, here is my response to this parent and all others of similar ilk.
Dear Parents,
You love your children. Of this, I have no doubt. When you send them off to school–teetering under the weight of their first backpacks–you want only the best for them. I too am a parent. I know what it is like to stand with bated breath, holding yourself somewhere between protector and emancipator. We want to keep them safe, and we want to set them free–to watch them fly. To reconcile these contradictions we teeter ourselves on the precarious ledge of parenthood.
Your children are capable of amazing things, potential beyond what you might imagine–for yourself and for them. It is challenge that taps one’s potential, stretches the possibilities, and lets you grow. To put children (and 18-year-old young adults) in boxes, to load upon them baggage of your own creation is to pass on a legacy of limitation. Chicago South Side, junior college, young adult–these labels used as excuses for a lack of drive, ability, and achievement are offensive. To lower your expectations of what your children can do is to savagely clip their wings.
The Community College is a place of tremendous possibility–of great potential. People of all walks of life come to pursue an education here, to grow personally, professionally, and intellectually. To “dumb down” the curriculum would be to bow one’s head to all those who ever told you the life you want is impossible. A course like COM101 is a transfer-level college course. This means the credit for this course transfers to four-year institutions–even Berkley, Yale, and Harvard. The standards for such a course are not and should not be lower if you pay less in tuition, if you are young, or even if you are from the south side of Chicago.
Paying tuition and sitting in the classroom is not the same as gaining or earning an education. Contemporary consumer culture and acquisitive mindsets have students (and their parents) believing that one can buy an education and that teachers are agents of a business that serves customers. Teachers worth their salt are not agents of business. Rather, they are committed members of both the academic and the broader community; they have families–and some even have websites where they proudly post photos of their families, where they voice their politics, and where they vent their frustrations. They draw few lines between their work as a teacher and the rest of their lives. It is who they are. They sit, late into the night, reading their students’ words and planning lessons –in the hopes young minds will be challenged to engage eagerly, to think, and to grow–despite their parents’ best intentions.
Truly,
Michael S. McGuire
There is a bigotry of low expectations that is not soft but as fierce and as destructive as the worst kind of prejudice, as it cuts away at our vast human potential.
Tags: parenting · student work · teaching9 Comments
Mario Savio, 19651964 in protest to UC Berkely’s ban on campus-based political activity and fund-raising. Savio was attempting to raise money in support of the Civil Rights movement after returning from a summer in Mississippi where he was working to get African Americans registered to vote. Savio was sentenced to 120 days in jail for his involvement this day. He later told a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle that he would gladly do it all over again. He was a college student. He was 21. (See the video clip from his speech below.)
The other day one of my students was making some off-handed comment about how the readings for our class (or, more specifically, the writing prompts) are stupid because they’ve got nothing to do with what he’s interested in; he doesn’t care about the things he’s been asked to write about. I suspended my frustration with his utterly self-absorbed comment momentarily, to be fair, and asked him what it is that he does care about. He looked at me and gave some smart-ass comment. I stood resolutely and asked him again. I really wanted to know. I think in that moment he understand my sincere interest, but he looked at me–and then away–and said that he didn’t know.
Savio’s “Against the Wheels” Speech, 1964
Is this what it means to be a young college student today? I understand that these are formative years, where young men and women (or should I say children?) are trying to figure out exactly who they are and what they believe in. I get that. But it is also a time when you should be getting excited about your place in the world, not increasingly indifferent. What accounts for the army of apathetic students that steadily march through our classes? Certainly, these comments and observations do not apply to all–of course not. But the trend is overwhelming. More and more students shuffle in each year and sit there vapidly, quick to agree if it means getting their grade and moving on or quick to mutter complaints about too much work or their lack of interest. I’ve yet to meet more than a handful who are ready to have a serious conversation, to enter that grown-up world where, in fact, things do matter and there is plenty to care about.
Tags: activism · apathy · studentsNo Comments.
