Former Memphis DE Dasmine Cathey took a four-week mass communication course in the summer of 2010.
For one assignment, he had to look at the covers of 10 magazines he had never read and describe their target markets. "Ladies if you looking for a maganize thats is tagering just you and all about you. Then this one is for you," he said aboutWoman's World. "Telling the ladies how to eat. What diet to be no for your body, and more."
In addition to the grammatical problems, he misspelled "magazine" 13 times, but the professor didn't mark him down for it. In fact, she praised him for his conversational style.
Cathey passed the class with a D. (He also got As that summer in beginning tennis, and a class examining "the role of leisure and recreation for persons with special needs.") He graduated last winter, after attending classes over 14 separate semesters.
I'm mad at colleges for wasting resources on a student just because he can play football. On the other hand, he's certainly benefiting from the experience, or at least staying out of jail or the morgue.
ReplyDeleteI can't express how I feel about this statement from his teacher, "If this had been a writing class, I'm sure he wouldn't have passed because spelling and words are so much more important there."
Words, even misspelled words, fail me.
And we wonder where stereotypes of English professors come from. Sheesh. He shouldn't be passing ANY class with that level of illiteracy, but the notion of wasting resources is one I second.
DeleteMuch of what he wrote sound like psychobabble to me.
ReplyDeleteThis is sad. He sounds like a decent young man who has tried to make the best of a series of bad situations (well, give or take getting two different women pregnant at once; if he wants to break a cycle of parental abandonment, that was not a good start. He also seems to have a problem with making academics a priority, but it also sounds like that's partly his relatives' and friends' fault. Of course, it's also his fault for not learning how to say "no." Put the oxygen mask on yourself first, dude; there will be time enough to help others). But it also sounds like, over the course of a very long, very disjointed, college career, he has managed to attain a c. 8th-grade level of reading and writing skills (and that may be generous). I suspect his reasoning skills are at a higher level than that (and also suspect that there may be a learning disability involved; he doesn't sound dumb, or lazy, which is often what people with disabilities suspect they are. Or maybe he just fell behind early in his school career, and put his energy into hiding his problems rather than solving them; it happens). Overall, and taking into account the fact that he's still pretty young, he sounds like he has the makings of a responsible citizen. But he shouldn't have a college degree. I'm not even sure he should have a high school diploma. Either sends a message to the him, and to the rest of the world, that just isn't accurate.
ReplyDeleteVery much on board with what you said here. He shouldn't be in college. However, I think perhaps being in college is what helped him see that being illiterate was not an option and made him start teaching himself how to read.
DeleteI tip my hat to him for that. He appears to be trying very hard to do the right thing though all this. It's definitely a system-wide failure at many levels that let him get to college in the first place, though.
One of the photos had him with one of the babies, so I don't think he's going to go the parental abandonment route, at least.
But, what about his own role in his difficulties: the speeding ticket that wraps up the story, for instance?
DeleteHe took a step to address his reading problems -- and full credit to him for that -- but he didn't approach school with the same discipline that he uses for football. (BTW, I had a football player this year claim that he missed class so often because of his busy early morning routine -- including walking his dog. It was an 11:30 class.)
You are correct there, Lucy.
DeleteI do think that if I had waited until I was 19 to learn to read that my approach to my own education would have been found lacking in many ways as a consequence. He appears to have made some steps in the correct direction, which is good, but I'm not sure it's truly possible that he could make the full change he needed.
We have similar students on my campus who aren't even in an athletic programs. And we pull out all the stops (wake-up calls, visits to their dorms if they don't show up to class, one-on-one tutors to help with BASIC things like making sure they read a two-page assignment), but all of these measure simply cannot make up for missing 12 years of education.
ReplyDeleteCC, me too, and I don't even teach the remedial classes.
ReplyDeleteWhile I DO teach remedial classes, many of these students are NOT in the remedial sequence (sigh).
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