Teaching those pesky early college kids

     An early college program, whereby groups of high school kids assemble, at their high school, to be taught college courses by instructors imported from the college down the road, is prima facie a bad idea. The atmosphere of a high school class, you’ll recall, is distinctly different than that of a college class. A typical high school kid’s default setting seems to be a kind of writhing accompanied by endless, happy, purposeless chatter—which adjusts, in a flash, to tacit forms, entailing eyes and smiles and pouts. That stuff can be stopped, on any given occasion, only through forceful and repeated intrusion with a rolled up newspaper. In college, meanwhile, business-like sobriety is the norm, and it will persist, yielding a communal seriousness, with very little encouragement from the instructor.

It’s a difference in culture, and it’s a difference that makes a difference. I don’t know why, but philosophy—to choose one college subject—just isn’t taught effectively in the course of the on-going party that prevails inside the high schooler’s merry head. Put a bunch of these party heads in one room and philosophy just ain’t gonna happen, brother.

As it happens, this morning, I had a chance to see the problem first hand. Last week, one of our history instructors found that he could not make the first session of spring semester’s History 2 course (World Civilizations Since 1500) at Beckman High in Irvine. I volunteered to fill in.

So, this morning, at 7:45, I arrived at Beckman, bleary eyed, ready to teach my first “early college” class. To make a long story short, I was led to our room, whereupon I saw the 40 or so kids of the class, waiting outside the door, beaming at me.

They’re tiny, they are, mostly. No one would confuse these kids with a class of college students.

I could tell that they were nice kids, good kids. They generally aimed to please. But they’re not used to someone really and truly staunching the flow of their customary writhing and blathering.

“If I could have everyone’s attention….”—that’s how I gave ‘em the cue to settle down and shut up. It didn’t work.

“I’m Roy Bauer, and I’m here today to….”—it still wasn’t working. They’re sweet kids, it seems, but it would take more than I was doing to break through. I gave ‘em a particularly subtle version of the old stink eye—the communication of glacial impassivity and icy ruthlessness, more or less.

Still nothing.

I tried a gesture of mild exasperation. That did it. Some of ‘em hushed the others, and then, for a moment, there was silence.

It didn’t last.

You know the rest. They’re kids, and so you’ve gotta stay on ‘em. You can’t let up. It’s like, if you let ‘em, they’d all just giggle and writhe at ever higher frequencies until the room roars and pulsates with a single, monstrous chuckle-spasm from hell.

The problem isn’t just the challenge to continuity from the never-ending periodic yuckitudinal outbreaks. Under these conditions—i.e., wall-to-wall teen-aged buzzage—there just isn’t the sort of mental gravity in the room for a sustained thought or thought cycle. I mean, getting a bunch of yappy kids to stop and think about the goddam Copernican Revolution is like getting a bunch of puppies to go to the corner and sit still. Ain't gonna happen.

I didn’t expect to like these kids as much as I did, but I am now more convinced than ever that this early college idea is a real stinker, at least for courses in the Humanities.

That elitist bastard is trying to send my kids to college!

Santorum Attacks Obama for Promoting Higher Ed for All (Inside Higher Ed)

Commie bastard

     Rick Santorum is accusing President Obama of "snobbery" for saying that all Americans need at least some higher education, The Wall Street Journal reported. "We are leaving so many children behind,” said Santorum, whose candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination has been gaining ground of late, in New Hampshire on Saturday. "They’re not ready to go to [college.] They don’t want to go to college. They don’t need to go to college. I was so outraged that the President of the United States [said] every student should go to college." Added Santorum: "I have seven kids. Maybe they’ll all go to college. But if one of my kids wants to go and be an auto mechanic, good for him! That’s a good-paying job." As the article in the Journal noted, it is increasingly rare for political leaders to express that view, given that some higher education is now becoming necessary for many manufacturing jobs that once would not have required it.