In this month's Atlantic, Professor X writes of the misery of teaching in the basement of the Ivory Tower.
I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.
He teaches English 101 to students who are required to pass the course in order to graduate, but are completely unprepared for college instruction. They are unable to write an essay, never read books, and in some cases, don't even know how to use the Internet. He's forced to fail a good number of students, because no matter how hard they work, they just can't do college level work.
He writes eloquently about adjunct life at a community college.
But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.
And he questions the American belief that everyone should have a college education.
America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
I haven't taught at a school like the one that Professor X describes. I have had smug middle class kids in one school. Lazy, but smart middle class kids in another school. One school had a wide admission policy that had some of the unprepared kids, but they were balanced out by some wildly smart, but poor kids. Grades in that third school had the Twin Peaks phenomenon of lots of As and lots of Cs and Ds, but few Bs.
My husband adjuncted at a community college for several years. He taught Geography 101 to urban kids who were shockingly ignorant about the world. After several weeks in the class, he distributed a map of the world and had the kids identify major countries and bodies of water. A good number of the kids were unable to identify where they were on the map. They didn't know where the Hudson River was, even though they could see it outside their window. They couldn't identify major continents. A few sad creatures couldn't tell the difference between land mass and water on the map, and they thought the Pacific Ocean was near Kiev.
These unprepared students are the product of a shoddy public education system. Community colleges are picking up the pieces for that failure. And only the invisible adjuncts know the truth.