Monday, April 13, 2009
Overwhelming Tasks
I am constantly overwhelmed by the struggles faced by my students. They seem blithely unaware of their problems. If you cannot understand even slightly complicated vocabulary, then you can not understand the ideas expressed in them. I can not even begin to think about how time consuming it would be for them to look up evry word they do not know the meaning of. However, they also seem, by and large, to not have the coping skills to latch onto big ideas and work to underdstand those. Of course, without any understanding of the big ideas or the finer points, it is impossible for them to make that information their own. So they end up coupling ignorance with plagiarism. Maybe you veteran teachers are saying, "Well, duh!" right about now, but sometimes I need to be hit in the head with the brick to realize it.
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If my english teacher could take a red pen to that post, she'd chop off just about everything in front of a comma. You also double-negatived and contradicted yourself in a couple of places. Despite the challenges of the paragraph, I get your gist, and I'm amazed at how many of these kids end up in college. I'm also shocked at how much tolerance and forbearance my friends who are grad students and professors have. If they fail a student, that student has EARNED it.
What -might- be shocking is that it's never really the kids from the ghetto who fail out once they reach college though -- it's always the rich kids who've never hit a challenge that are challenging grades and making the graduate assistants lives hell.
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