I had my first student visit during office hours last week. They had just gotten back their first batch of work and their first exam. The usual bell curve was in full effect. A few did good work, a few were horrible and most were somewhere in between. And since this is the third institution I have taught at, I am ready to say with a degree of confidence that all our college age students in America have minimal writing skills. At best. It's the sort of thing that makes me think we are in the middle of some sort of shift in American culture. We certainly have some new skills, but we are rapidly losing others. I am beginning to think that humanities teachers who stress the careful reading and writing of texts are now preservationists.
Anyway, my student visitor was an older student. Older in the context of this class anyway. She's about my age. Which sets her apart from the 19 yr olds who make up most of the class. She had been out of school for a number of years, then got laid off from the corporate world. The exam I'd just given her back had been the first she'd taken in quite some time. She was very earnest in explaining her difficulties with the class. Like most people, she considers herself to be an intelligent and capable person. But...reading Plato and Aristotle and Descartes had challenged those self-perceptions. I think she mostly needed reassurance that she wasn't dumb. I reiterated to her a number of points I make in class on a regular basis: learning to read these kinds of texts is a skill that develops over time. And just like any other skill, be it cooking, playing the piano or speaking Spanish, it requires consistent effort to improve. You cannot read Descartes like you would read a Stephen King novel. You cannot approach these texts passively. You must get down in there and dig around, take the text apart and put it back together again. And once you've learned to read in this way, actively and constructively, and practiced this skill diligently, you're effort will be rewarded. In the meantime, it's perfectly reasonable to feel like you're struggling. I tell her, I promise her even, that if she is working in this way, week in and week out, that it will get easier.
As an older student, she is far less apathetic than most of her classmates. They are tougher nuts to crack. If nothing else, teaching is an exercise in balancing your ideals against social realities.
On a personal note, seems folks have been dying lately. I wish I had words to help in some way but I find myself at a loss. I am thinking about you.
