WIC Essay 2 Draft I

WIC Final Essay D.1

Cameron Beaudreault

4/29/13

Although it is well established that there is a 'problem' with public education in America, there is consensus as to where the root of the problem lies: is it due to a lack of funding for various programs? Is it because American mothers aren't as good as 'tiger mothers'? Or worse; is it because the curriculum itself is either too hard, or too boring, for students to understand? Erica Goldson, who graduated Coxsackie-Athens High School in 2010, argues in her valedictorian speech that the current emphasis on standardized testing effectively discourages learning. "We are so focused on a goal, whether it be passing a test, or graduating as first in the class. However, in this way, we do not really learn. We do whatever it takes to achieve our original objective." (cite) To become valedictorian, Ms. Goldson had to give up learning for the sake of her objective; the almighty 'A'. Non-valedictorians must also do 'whatever it takes' if they want to achieve their original objective, which, according to Ms. Goldson, is usually "to get out [of school] as soon as possible." Peg Tyre, author of "The Writing Revolution", argues that the main problem is that students are often unable to write analytically. Backing her claim is the success of New Dorp High School, a former failing public school on Long Island that managed to improve its graduation rate from 63% to 80% between the academic years of 2009 and 2011. Based on the observation that the worst students were usually the least capable of expository writing, New Dorp's program made analytic writing a central component of every academic subject, from science and mathematics to history and english. Children were taught "how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts - but, because and so." (cite) Once they had mastered the basic mechanics of sentence construction, they were taught "how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own." (cite) Although the program is ostensibly a "rigid, unswerving, formula", it worked: in the same time period between 2009 and 2011, New Dorp's passing rates on the English Regents exams jumped from 69% to 80%, and its passing rates on the Global History Regents shot from 64% to 75% (cite).  Although Peg Tyre has statistics to back her claim that poor writing makes for a poor education, Erica Goldson has the personal experience - and her grades - to back her claim that an overemphasis on testing makes for a bad education. Regarding the question of where, exactly, are students disenfranchised from the learning experience, perhaps the answer lies somewhere between the two.

In the great education debate, there is often a common thread of seeking to place the blame of failure upon one party or another, most commonly either on the teachers or the students themselves. Paolo Freire, a writer best known for his work teaching Brazilian peasants how to heighten their critical consciousness, argues that the blame lies with the teacher-student relationship, which suffers from "narration sickness". By fault of its lecture-oriented style, the teacher turns reality into something that is "motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable." (368) Instead of immersing students in the world they are supposed to be learning about, the imperatives of the lecture "leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content." People, places, and events, become discrete facts embedded in the matrix of the test they are taught with in mind, and students' minds become "receptacles to be "filled" by the teacher." (368) Because of this, the very mission statement of public school changes from encouraging intellectual inquiry and self-empowerment (as its creators intended) to reducing education to a series of transactions:

Education thus becomes an action of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

(368-9)

Like Erica Goldson, Freire believes that the education process provides negative feedback upon a student's willingness and ability to learn, which is inherently dehumanizing; if the best that students can aspire to do with the information they receive is collecting and cataloguing it, they have been gravely underserved. The daily transactions of lessons to be received, memorized, and repeated, serve to wear down the primal urge that all humans share to discover everything they can about the world around them. If what Freire asserts holds true, then we cannot fix our education system without levelling the playing field: students must be allowed to be the teachers from time to time, and teachers in turn must become the students. In order for this to take place, it is implied, a greater level of communication must be enabled between the two parties - both in and out of the classroom.

There is one instance, in my mind, where this exact level of communication takes place, which is between Ian Downing, a high school senior at Humanities Prep, and myself. For the past several weeks, I have tutored Ian on writing his PBAT, an essay that is prerequisite to his graduation, and we have often talked together on Skype before and after our Thursday afternoon tutoring sessions. Halfway through the month of April, Ian had not yet written the introduction to his paper, when the final draft was due the first week of May. When we sat down together that Thursday, I held my breath. How are we going to get this done in time? If we didn't do any writing that day, there would be no way he would finish his work by the deadline. I scribbled down a skeleton outline for the introductory paragraph, before sliding the paper over to him and explaining the process step by step. "Your first sentence is the hook; the statement, as outlandish and controversial as you can make it, that will get your readers interested. In the second and third sentences, you expand the idea in question and give the readers a taste of why the issue is complicated - opposing sides of the 'debate', and so on. Your last sentence is the 'thesis' - the platform on which the rest of your paper will stand." I looked him in the eye and asked: "Are you up for it?" Ian nodded his head. "Sure, I can do it."

Ten, fifteen, then twenty minutes passed. I kept trying to surrepititiously glance over at his work, but he kept turning the computer screen away from me. When he finally turned the computer around, what I read was even more than I'd dared hope for: he used analogy to introduce his topic ("Our current economy is like an outfield in baseball. There is such a large area to cover and only three people available to do so.") Building on the analogy, he made the argument that a lack of economic diversity in the U.S. poses a significant risk to the middle and lower classes. He pointed out that the government bailouts of the banking and auto industries were largely ineffective in stimulating economic growth, and argued that greater economic strength would come from the encouragement of small businesses:

"Because the government does not prioritize these [small] businesses, they are not only taking a gamble with little industries, but are not motivating small business owners to grow enough to become major sources of income."

Everything I would expect of a college-level paper, I found in this first draft of the introduction. It did need editing, but it showed me that my student had a firm grasp on the fundamentals of good writing. Although I would need to continue to push him to write more, and to expand and challenge his ideas, I did not need to pretend that this was a remedial English class. When I recently asked Ian via Skype what he thought the most helpful things I'd done with him in tutoring were, he listed my helping him with his intro as number one; "since I didn't know what to write for it exactly." Moreover, the second most helpful thing was "seeing your reaction to my paper each week, it kept me really motivated to write more." It seems to me that, if students and their regular teachers were to use similar routes of communication (either via skype or elsewhere online), the rapport would both help motivate students to do the work assigned them, as it helped Ian, and it would encourage students to take their intellectual inquiry above and beyond the scope of their classes.