Open Admissions

This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features a column by Brian P. Hall bemoaning the difficulties of teaching developmental English. Hall teaches at a community college in Cleveland. The article may be behind the pay wall, but here is the opening:

In my developmental English class recently, a student raised her hand and said, after a brief discussion of the caste system in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, “I’ve felt like an Epsilon all my life.” Epsilons made up the lowest caste of Huxley’s dystopian civilization. They were conditioned from birth to accept their place, to never even dream of upward mobility. I told this class, made up of mostly low-income students, that unlike Huxley’s Epsilons, they had the ability to move upward; they could achieve their dreams. The class moaned, and one student sarcastically said, “Yeah, right.”

That “yeah, right” mind-set is the greatest obstacle I face as a metropolitan-community-college instructor. Many students enter my developmental English classes knowing that they are deficient in the basic skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking because many times the public schools passed them from one grade to the next without caring if they knew the material or even if they ever attended classes. The result of that treatment goes beyond underpreparation for college. The public schools reinforced for these young people that there are no consequences for their actions.

In the rest of the article he describes his classroom management problems, with particular emphasis on students who miss class because they are in jail. Hall emphasizes his “heartbreak” and dismay over failing to “engage” these students. Overall, it is a self-portrait of a professor as a developmental education martyr.

I teach developmental English as part of my course load at Nassau Community College, but his angst seems alien to me. My students — many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, most of them low-income students — feel certain of their upward mobility. About half of them do not believe they have academic deficiencies because they did well in the local high schools: a few passed honors classes in English at the local high schools. Their high school grades were inflated because we have now had a decade of No Child Left Behind. My students speak the language of assessment tests and multiple-choice drills: what they struggle with is critical thinking. It’s not that the high schools didn’t care and socially promoted: the high schools taught exactly what they are now required to teach, which is how to take a standardized test. That’s why when students are given an essay test and told to express an opinion, they fail. They are all too aware of the possible consequences for any action: they constantly worry about whether I will count an absence against them, or whether they can revise a essay, or what if their handwriting is messy or they didn’t pull all the little hanging chads from the edges of their notebook paper? What they don’t worry about is the content of their essays on any subject not directly related to getting a job. They are upwardly mobile to a fault, concerned to make a good impression and be employable. Whenever they get boisterous and distracted, all I need do to refocus the class is remind them that they have paid money for it, and that if they don’t pass they will have to pay to take it again. When I say that, they will shush each other and face front, intent again on the day’s grammar lesson or discussion of thesis sentences.

For all of Hall’s heartbreak, he seems not to grasp the real economic situation of the human beings he is teaching. He feels that he must enforce the classroom rules about late work and absences even when students are detained in jail. I have faced this situation, and I just let the students come back to class. People don’t go to jail to get out of their English assignment. When I think about a student who is in his early 20s, and only partially literate, now with a criminal record, I think that barring him from an education is a kind of violence. The fact that such a student is motivated to return to class even after the trauma of incarceration says more about his willingness to learn than his unavoidable absences. If you know anything about prison statistics, you know that college-age men of color are arrested at a greatly disproportionate rate. I’m sure that in some instances, my students have committed crimes; but I’m also sure that some were arrested on frivolous charges — and in any case, I’m their English teacher, not their judge and jury. I know that not everyone sees it this way. Today a colleague remarked to me, as a “joke,” that he wished we were allowed to cane students, because that would solve his classroom management problems. I think a lot of people — both students and teachers — see educational institutions as a kind of soft jail, and I find that heartbreaking.

I am boggled that anyone would teach Brave New World in a developmental English class. First of all, it’s a hard book. But mostly, I would want to avoid the subtext of rank and hierarchy; if they are educational Epsilons, there’s no need to rub it in. It’s interesting that Hall never makes the connection between his argument and Huxley’s; the future society Huxley described was the product of deliberate social engineering. The failure of Hall’s students and mine is only incidentally the fault of individual students’ lack of motivation; it is mostly the fault of the failure of the public education system. And that system was socially engineered to fail by decades of budget cuts and politicization. We need to ameliorate the contemporary damage to individuals, not fetishize the classroom traditions of the past.