Linda White

Comments -

• [Apologies to those on the ACE listserv for the cross posting of this message.]
• I want to respond to the concern about remediation that has been raised in several comments on this page. I question the idea that we have entered a remedial era in which colleges are now accepting students who belong elsewhere. Several researchers have noted that complaints about the declining abilities of college students are a regular feature of college life. Gerald Graff, in Beyond the Culture Wars, quotes Charles Grandgent's complaint that his Harvard students (in 1911) placed Charlemagne in the 18th century and had great difficulty reading their texts because they did not know the meaning of common English words.
• If these declines are perennial problems, perhaps they are signs of transition rather than decay. What we read as decline may be a consequence of new demands on higher education: we expect more sophisticated learning from a more diverse group of people than we once did.
• I don't think we can conclude that remediation fails because students can't learn. There are too many problems in the way we handle remediation for us to be sure that we are even helping students by assigning them to remediation. Here's how one of my remedial students described why remedial classes often fail:
• "My freshman year in high school my counselor told me that I needed to take a special ed class for English because my grades were very low. At first, I was very angry. I felt that I was being labeled stupid, and in a way I was. I had no motivation or support of any kind from my teachers or anyone else. My mom and dad tried to convinced me it was the best thing to do, and I thought it might give me a chance to catch up. But no matter how hard I tried, my thoughts were saturated with the fear that I had failed, so I did.
• I started going to class, but before long I realized that it was a joke. The teachers did not seem to care if the class did any work in class or not. They sat around all class long and gossiped about whatever teachers gossip about and did not pay much attention to the class. When class was over, they would say that if we did not finish our work, we could finish it the next day. The funny thing was, they never checked to see if we had done anything to begin with. At first it was not bad, but after a while I got tired of not doing anything."
• Unfortunately, this analysis describes what goes on in many remedial classes, both in high school and in college. Even teachers who take their responsibilities seriously often conceive of remedial course in reductive ways and try to teach "skills"--with the justification that remedial students can't handle more sophisticated material.
• I am not denying that students can behave in "remedial" rather than "college level" ways. But I see that behavior as a product of the interaction bewteen the student and the situation, not something inherent in the student. Too often, especially in remedial classes, we try to deliver instruction as if it were building blocks or bricks. We need to engage students in problems that both they and we find meaningful. We shouldn't save that kind of learning for our honors students.
• Linda White
• Department of English and Philosophy