How General Education Courses Became “Weed-Out” Classes
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Standardized-testing, stripped down high school curricula, and all-around disrespect for the Humanities have made general education classes overly-difficult for college freshmen.
Okay, let’s face it: the first two years of college are generally the worst two years. EVERYWHERE! For me, it was nothing like my dream of getting to college and living out episodes of A Different World!
The first two years of college are for general education courses. Students take courses that may have absolutely nothing to do with their majors. I was an English major. Did I really need chemistry? Not really, but I like being able to pick up a bottle of household cleaner and make my decision to buy or leave it in the store, because I actually understand the ingredients list. Did I really need college algebra to understand Shakespeare? Of course not, but I like being able to calculate how much interest my savings account accrues each year. Did I really need that biology course where we grew that soul-destroying, funky anaerobic bacteria? No, but I like knowing that a tonsil stone smells worse than it actually is, and while my throats is raw and irritated from it, it will not kill me. Okay, that last example was gross, but it’s real.
The first two years of college give students a foundation for the last two years when we are all FINALLY taking the classes that we want. This is also when we all learn that college knowledge is often interdisciplinary and transferable from class-to-class. In fact, I found it so interdisciplinary, that I obtained a psychology degree on the side. All of modern fiction has been cycled through psychology. I took extra psychology classes in order to understand some of the novels and short stories that we were reading in literature class. I was also premed, because like many students, English was calling me but I figured it was a pretty useless major. Why not do something sure? Before I knew it, I had enough classes for a completely different degree!
I digress.
It has been a long time since I tramped around a college campus as a freshman. It has been so long that I’m not going to give you the year. Let’s just say that once I was the student: now, I am the teacher. And while my students’ absolute refusal to put away their cell phones bugs me to no end, something else is just hurting me to the marrow: classes like mine are becoming “weed-out” classes for college freshmen. Each semester, I have several students to drop out of college or withdraw before the semester ends, because they cannot stand the rigor of a general education class.
It hurts. And it was not always this way. While I can rant and rave about students and their cell phones and blame this new state on them, this would be dishonest of me. Students are failing my courses because they simply do not have the historical background or the reading comprehension skills to pass that first composition course. When they do comprehend what they read, they cannot understand the historical references. Over in history class, the students cannot read well enough or do not have enough historical knowledge to prepare a simple comparison-contrast paper (a favorite of all history professors!).
At first, the English department absorbed the blame. Many of my colleagues swore that we were useless, we were not teaching anything, and that student writing was just as bad when they became seniors as it was when they were freshmen. English professors, who became combative, basically said that we cannot run papers through a Scantron machine, writing takes time and skill, and we are ALWAYS overworked and underpaid due to the large use of adjuncts by the administration, who simply see too many full-time composition professors as an increase in the over-stretched budget (oddly enough, no one talks about the new vice-dean or the three secretaries one administrator feels entitled to).
We yelled, we fought, and we hurt one another’s feelings — until students began to show up for freshman year with an inability to do simple multiplication if they did not have a Texas Instrument calculator. They had not memorized the Periodic Table of Elements. They did not know of any American wars past World War II. Many of them could not name scripted television shows that they routinely watch, and any music that was older than five years ago was laughable to them.
Because of stripped-down high school curricula and a drive for districts to do well on tests, college freshmen are failing general education courses such as English and Algebra. Due to lack of exposure, over-consumption of media and stripped-down high school curricula, students are failing classes like history, western civilization, art/theatre/music appreciation.
It sounds sad. But for me (I cannot speak for anybody else), I use these moments to teach about American culture. I actually enjoy introducing students to the bad old days before cell phones when 227 was the hottest show on NBC. I enjoy talking to African American students about how civil rights, even in popular culture, really was a LOOOOONNNNNNNNG uphill battle. I show them Lena Horne, who had no makeup for African American women. Max Factor was the only company to make something for her skin, and even then the powder was called, “Egyptian.”
I think I stopped breathing only once when the students asked me if Lena Horne were a white woman. Since this has become a routine question, my respiration remains steady now.
I even enjoy snitching on old folk. Yes, I let the students hear Pigmeat Markham, Lawanda Page, and Redd Foxx. Once, I had a grandmother to call me. She said that she hadn’t listened to Pigmeat since she got “saved,” and boy did she enjoy dusting off those old records. I thoroughly enjoy showing the Anita Hill trial, Jessie Jackson’s Democratic Convention Speeches, and Ronald Reagan’s Greenville, Mississippi kickoff to his winning presidential campaign.
Not all of my references are toward African American Studies (It’s me. So even Comp I and Comp II lead to African American Studies). We do women’s history. We read essays about women who were in dismal marriages, but could not get divorced because of strict divorce laws. When we read “The Story of an Hour,” the discussion always leads to science not always being objective. I mean, if more women were used as subjects to study heart diseases, maybe some lives would have been saved. Some student always uses a plethora of profanity when we read “The Yellow Wallpaper.” That’s my opportunity to explain that the husband and brother were simply going by the medical opinions of the day. They meant no harm! And, they were being typical Victorian men. We even look at Victorian-era furniture together, and talk about how a particular sex toy today was a real medical advice then.
But all of this fun and zaniness are for students who stay. It is with regret that I must tell you that many of my students simply become overwhelmed with the information thrown at them by myself and my colleagues. There’s crying in algebra, drinking in history, and terror in theater appreciation. One student cried all the way through Waiting for Godot, because he didn’t understand how that sparse set and dialogue were linked to philosophy. Moreover, he did not think philosophical thought useful at all, since his father told him that he would never make money on something as stupid as philosophy. This student is no longer enrolled in school.
For each student lost to information overload, I keep wondering what we could do differently. With test-taking and school billboards advertising that new families should consider the “A-rated” district and the media ignoring the faculty body in the middle of a cheating scandal, what can we do?
This does not come from class today, folks. It’s straight from my sad and breaking heart.
