The above is the fourth email I had from a student who decided attending the great national convention of one party was more important than the second week of school. The fourth email. I have to give him extra time due to his accommodations, but I also had to tell him once in person, and four times by email that it was okay.The above is in response to my third email, which tells him for the third time that he may turn in his assignment when he return to class.
Miserians, this is the result of open admissions, where the institute of higher education does not even require submitting a HS transcripts. Honor system. This one has a 'special' diploma, which is not accepted by a 4 year college but is accepted by my institute. Apparently.
I have one or two special diploma awardees every term. Lovely students. Nice, warm, and friendly. But.
Open Admissions is a lovely democratic idea, but it is also fosters a lie: that we are all college material. There are times ( today) when this ideal totally discourages me.
The above is no lie.
Indeed!!! Well said, Nanoog.
ReplyDeleteThis student is clearly a Democrat. He's doing something worthwhile, marketing it poorly and annoying his chief stakeholders in the process. His ultimate attendance at the convention will probably be marked by a disappointing lack of actual benefit relative to promises and yet he will spend the rest of his career labeled as "the student who missed class for a major political convention."
ReplyDelete(Attending a major political convention does seem like an educational opportunity worth disrupting one week in four years for, but I'm sorry he's annoying you!)
Disgruntled with the current administration much? But consider the alternative of living inside The Handmaid's Tale.
DeleteI'd make the kiddo turn in all the missed work BEFORE he leaves.
Oh please, Kate, obviously a home schooled Republican child.
DeleteWhat F&T said -- if a flake knows s/he's leaving, and s/he could get hold of assignments in advance, there is NO REASON why time couldn't be budgeted to complete assignments in advance and thereby avoid late penalties. I am very strict on this point.
DeleteIt is not about politics, Kate, or missing class, F & T.
DeleteIt is about the fact that the concept of open admissions is a failure. It fails the student. It fails the teacher. It fails the culture.
The student can't understand or follow simple directions. Can't follow them after 5 iterations of the same email. That failure is not due to laziness. The student is a not 'flake." The student has accommondations which mean late work is to be accepted. The student has a long list of accommondations, but that does not mean they can actually perform the work, even if they are given extra time to complete it. Some work at the college level cannot be done if you cannot recall information, if all you can do is recognize it. Is it fair?
"Open Admissions is a lovely democratic idea, but it is also fosters a lie: that we are all college material. There are times ( today) when this ideal totally discourages me" -I feel your pain. I had an advisee in the other day who has been going to school for YEARS and still hadn't completed the degree and didn't have a GPA high enough to transfer anywhere and had maxed out on her financial aid. She was a white girl who spoke like an uneducated hoodlum. I felt bad trying to help her spend more money she likely would not be able to pay back to get her grades up to transfer to another school where she would then owe more money. And how do you go to school for four years and not learn to speak even slightly correct English? At what point do we have an obligation to sit these students down and have a reality check- even if it means some hurt feelings and a drop in student retention?
ReplyDeleteSo, how many are college material? My experience says 15-20% max.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that even open admissions schools could/should require a regular high school diploma or the equivalent (the GED, I'd guess, which presumably someone with a special diploma who felt it didn't fully represent their abilities could take, whenever they were ready). It also seems to me that an open admissions doesn't/shouldn't necessarily mean stay as long as you want/need, even if you keep flunking. In plenty of regular-admissions schools, if you have an unsatisfactory GPA for a certain period (usually two semesters, with the second on probation), you have to leave for a semester or a year, and show some proof that you've been working on the underlying problems in the interim in order to return. In short, there's a difference between providing an opportunity to succeed and providing unlimited opportunities to fail. I'm leery of the "college material" label, since it was used in the past to exclude people based on race, economic background, and the like, and since some people really are ready, in various ways, for college at 25 or 30 or 40 even if they aren't at 18, but wasting students' time and money and our limited resources on students who aren't ready (and in some cases may, indeed, never be ready) doesn't make sense).
ReplyDeleteThe student Nanoog describes sounds very un-snowflakey in some ways: eager to please, accepting of the teacher's authority, probably hard-working to his level of ability. But it seems that he doesn't understand written language all that well, and needs a lot of reassurance. That suggests he might be best off in a physical job with close supervision (and a supervisor willing to offer regular reassurance/praise): stocking shelves, cleaning, etc. No, it's not high-paid or glamorous work, but it's necessary, respectable work (and perhaps the fact that it isn't high-paid is a fault of the larger society, not the workers; really, I wouldn't being paid the same as a janitor as long as we were both adequately paid. That's probably a good thing, since our church building superintendent -- who did much more than cleaning -- made about the same amount as I when he retired a few years ago. To my mind, we were/are both underpaid).
I wonder how much this student's presence in college has to do with his parents' failure to imagine realistic futures for him, and help him find ways to pursue them? Admittedly it's a really hard job market out there, and doubly so for anyone with a learning disability/mental handicap. But it sounds like the energy expended giving him opportunities like going to the convention (which is a great one; I'm all for it,and for his understanding politics well enough to vote responsibly) might have been better expended (or also expended) elsewhere. Going straight from high school to college is the path of least resistance for many children of the middle-to-upper class (and may be becoming so for less-privileged students as well), but that doesn't mean it's the right choice for everybody.
I worked at an open admissions school that did not require a high school diploma and actually liked the students (the administrators were crazy though).
ReplyDeleteWhere they failed was not in letting students in, but in trying to keep them. Being held to the same retention standards as a top-ranked state university if we wanted to keep our state funding was simply unfair. Because we were trying to do that, students who attempted college and failed were encouraged to stay and we were supposed to try and help them graduate.
Look, some of the best students I've ever worked with were people who had no high school degree, were middle or later aged, and were really damned smart. They had dropped out of high school because they had to help their families, because of violence, because of any number of things that made working more important than schooling. They returned to school, took a developmental class, and by the time they graduated were knock-your-socks-off fan-fucking-nominal. I miss them.
But there were people there who were never going to succeed as well. But because of our rapidly decreasing state aid we had to try to help them learn and stay even if they would never work successfully in their field. It wasn't fair to them and I have moved on to greenish-er pastures.
I'm not sure if there is a way to do this "right," but I think offering these students financial aid before we know if they can be successful or not is unfair (scholarships? fine, but loans? Hell no.). No one should go into debt for a degree they might never be able to earn. I also think it is unfair of the state for punishing us for losing these students at the same time they give us accolades for letting them in the first place. *sigh* If our overall goal was helping those that could be helped, then some different strategy for measuring our success should have been in place other than retention and time to degree.
I'll go you one further and say that I'm not sure loans should be termed "financial aid." I know, I know; they're administered by the financial aid office, and offer a rate lower than a commercial one (and the ability for someone with no credit history to get a loan, which may or may not be a good thing), but lumping them into the same category as Pell grants or scholarships seems to me to obscure an important difference -- the students have to pay them back. A mortgage, even a government-backed one, isn't called "home buying aid," it's called, correctly, a loan.
DeleteLike like like CC.
DeleteIt's a tough job market and I wonder if that has something to do with marketing this idea that everyone is college material? A college degree is no assurance of becoming gainfully employed, but not having one means even worse job prospects. For example, here's a job listing for bathroom attendants for which a college degree is required. Employers know that people are desperate for work, so they can be more demanding in their requirements, even for jobs that were formerly been held by high school graduates or even high school dropouts. I've noticed adults working in jobs that were once held by teenagers. I can't remember the last time I even saw a teenager working in a retail store or fast food restaurant. Even "some college" may lead to better job prospects for Nanoog's student. He probably knows he's not just like an average college student; he must be aware of his difficulties since he has the accommodations. If open-enrollment college is telling him he can be just like any college student, that's a bit rough, like setting him to fail constantly. On the other hand, without any college whatsoever, will he ever be able to earn even a meagre living? I can understand why Nanoog's student would try, even if if knows that he's not cut out for it. I can't help but feel sorry for him (and Nanoog, of course). Less than half of my high school class went directly to college after graduation; nowadays its nearly 70%. I don't know if the economy has anything to do with this notion that anyone can succeed in college, but I understand why it'd drive many students to try even if they know they are not cut out for it.
ReplyDeleteThat bathroom attendant ad made me want to go lie down with the smelling salts. But my theory is that they say "college degree required" because they need basic literacy and information processing skills. If my beginning college students are any indication, a high school diploma no longer guarantees that.
ReplyDeleteThat's a very strange job ad. I wonder what "PA" means -- Personal Assistant? And what, exactly, does one do to "assist executives" in a bathroom? That plus the "good personality" part makes me think that, in addition to the skills F&T mentions, they're looking for someone who can converse intelligently with the executives. I'm still a bit puzzled about what else they'll be doing -- assisting with wardrobe emergencies? But really, how many of those can even the most hard-charging, accident-prone executive have? And if (s)he does have them on a regular basis, wouldn't (s)he, perchance, keep a change of clothes in hir executive office, or call hir personal shopper, or something? It's 9-5, so I assume that the job doesn't involve peeling drunken executives off the floor, but maybe I missed a Mad Men-inspired return to the 3-martini lunch. And I don't think that many executives suddenly need spare parts for their breast pumps (and almost certainly not in the men's room). But maybe things are more complicated in the restrooms of a "major network" (television network?) than I realize.
ReplyDeleteStill, the basic point does hold: the high rate of unemployment, combined with all the studies showing that college degrees do lead to higher salaries (and, to some extent, insulate their holders against job loss), probably are having an effect. Also, various job training programs, counseling programs at unemployment offices, etc., etc. are probably pushing people toward college as a catchall solution (and between government cutbacks and the burgeoning unemployment rate, job counselors are undoubtedly overwhelmed at the moment, which leads to the pushing of catchall solutions).
To be blunt, what do you do when faced with a student, in your college class, who has Down Syndrome? Seriously.
ReplyDeleteI have one every term. (I teach a subject perceived by some as not requiring much in the way of writing, reading skills. Wrong.) I can't "diagnose" but only follow the disabilities office requirements. Still, Down Syndrome is hard to not see. These student require special teaching techniques, which I discovered by researching and experiencing. One student was being tracked to go to a 4 year college. Some colleges have special programs, but this student and the others are placed in regular college classes.
Equal opportunity, equal access. Unless the office of disabled students tells you to do something specific, treat him exactly as another student. If he -- predictably -- ends flunking you'll have made him a great service.
DeleteI used to have student like that. I failed him and, when my chair twisted my arm about it -- he was majoring in French lit, for Pierre's sake -- I stood my ground (I didn't have tenure then). So, the student took later the same class with another instructor, passed and eventually graduated.
Happy ending but... . Months later he applied to the "transition into teaching" program, he had to take a French exam and was told that he was not qualified. His parents sued the department for our having given their spawn a useless degree.
I never gloated about it, but whenever the name of this student comes up you can smell a "Told you so" aroma in the room.
I know that the degree of mental disability associated with Down's Syndrome varies, but, from everything I've heard and seen, a significant degree of disability/impairment is part of the picture. We have some young adults with Down's and other mental disabilities attending a program on our campus, but it appears to be a practical/life skills one, not a regular college one. I end up riding the shuttle bus with them sometimes; they seem like nice young people, if perhaps a bit lacking in discretion and indoor voices. It's basically like ending up in a bus full of somewhat-nicer-than-average middle-schoolers (with apparently very complicated dating lives).
DeleteI think French Professeur describes the only possible approach: be scrupulously fair, extend any accommodations to which the student is entitled, and provide the same amount of help you would to any student, but no more. It's not fair to your other students if the disabled student gets the lion's share of your (undoubtedly already stretched-thin) attention. And it's not fair to the disabled student him/herself to encourage unrealistic expectations. At some point, with or without a degree, the student is going to come up against the employment market, which offers far fewer accommodations than academia does. There are definitely jobs that people with mental disabilities can do, and do well (and that, in a better economy, would be open to them). But it seems highly unlikely that jobs that genuinely require a college degree are among them.
I wonder if part of the problem is that there have been cutbacks in programs that are specifically tailored for mentally disabled young adults in your area? Or are their parents just in denial?