Illiteracy After Four Years

I encountered a student several years ago who had a B average, listened in class, and actually seemed as though he wanted to learn. When he graduated, I was there to see him get his diploma. He applied to a college, was accepted, and now attends it. He has just started his second year.

From time to time he has called me and wanted to talk -- perhaps as much because he comes from a one-parent family that consists of himself, his mother and several sisters and wants some time with an older father figure as to enjoy a cup of coffee. We jokingly call the coffee house "the office."

In the course of perhaps a dozen meetings with him that last for perhaps two hours each, I have discovered a great deal about the education he received at high school. He knows who Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are and has read some of their work. But in a recent conversation he did not recognize the names of Socrates, Sophocles, Homer, Oedipus, or many others whom we would consider to be essential to the knowledge of any educated man.

The immediate reason for the meeting was that at college he had taken a course with about 200 other students, but was called aside by the professor at the end of the course and told that the professor would have failed him, but passed him only because he liked the student. The reason was that the young man's writing was just slightly above the level of that of an illiterate.

How can a young man graduate from high school with a B average and still not know how to write. Obviously, nobody at the school took the time to read and correct his writing -- or perhaps because students were not assigned enough writing to do. Since writing is a way of examining and clarifying one's thoughts, what can the quality of this young man's thinking be ?

When I look at the level of political discourse these days (I am writing this on the 16th of January, 2012), it seems to me that one reason candidates can believe some of the things they believe is simply that in the course of their education they never taught critical thinking. Isn't teaching one of the main functions of education ?

This can only be accomplished when the student-teacher ratio is much smaller than it presently is in most public high schools. What is required is minute attention to the grammar and logic in a student's writing, the correction of these errors, and the assignment of enough writing to enable the student to learn from mistakes. When a teacher has 30 or more students in a class and five or more classes a day, how can he or she find enough time to even devote to reading, much lass correcting an appreciable amount of each and every student's work ?

Look, Ma, I'm an Intervention Specialist

It has been quite some time since I last posted, and many things have happened in my life that have caused this. I shall chronicle these things eventually in future posts, but I need to report on a significant change in my teaching activities. After a lengthy hiatus since last May, I decided that I was weary of trying to babysit classes of high school students who had little interest in learning anything, but a major interest in trying to play games on their substitute teacher. I decided to become what is known as an "intervention specialist." What this means is that I wanted to follow just one or two students around all day and try to teach them their lessons, leaving classroom discipline and most administrative matters to a teacher-in-charge at whatever classroom I found myself in.

I had heard that the school district needed "intervention specialists," so I decided to apply for the job.

The application process itself reveals a lot about the central administration of our school department. For instance, I attended a job fair where people could apply to be an intervention specialist -- there were only about six of us interested. There I was interviewed. Following the interview, I was accompanied by the head of the department herself, a very capable and overworked woman who must put in about 14 hours a day at her job. She stated that she wanted me to set up an appointment to be fingerprinted.

Mind you, I had already been fingerprinted by this school department. Believe me, that's another saga, too. I must check to see if I have already described that early in this blog. If not, I will get to it.

At any rate, I spoke to a young lady sitting behind a table who was supposed to be making appointments for fingerprinting. Two feet from her face, as she told me the date and the time, I wrote this information down right in front of her, repeating it verbally. The appointment was for about five days later.

When I arrived five days later in the morning to be fingerprinted, the folks in that office seemed mystified. "Oh, no, we don't do fingerprinting today. We'll set you up with an appointment in about two weeks." OK, wasted trip. Typical of that office in the school department. (I had had to be fingerprinted three times when I first applied to be a substitute teacher because the first two times they lost my fingerprints.) So finally I went down on the new appointed date and time and got fingerprinted.

In this room there seem to be two piles of folders or perhaps two filing cabinets, one each for these two different uses. One is for substitute teachers. The other is for intervention specialists. You would think that when one's fingerprints have been taken for one job,m and since they know you very well by name when they see you, that the workers in this room could make a copy of the fingerprints they already have of you that sit in one filing cabinet and carry this copy across the room and place the copy in the other filing cabinet.

But this is not possible. Another set of fingerprints must be taken. And these in turn must be processed by whoever processes them in the department and in Sacramento. Need I say that the duplication of effort is pointless and wasteful of the school department's already limited funds ?

And so I was fingerprinted and all my paperwork was put into a folder to be "processed."

Almost two months to the day, nothing had happened. I had visited the office about five weeks into this time period and was told that there was a slowdown because many of the staff members had been out "on training" and that when they got back to the office this meant that they had time to work on only two or three people's files. Then came Christmas and New Years, probably a dead period in which nobody in their office did much anyway.

So two months after being fingerprinted, I stopped by their office again to inquire about the situation. I was recognized immediately the lady at the desk nearest the counter reached over immediately to a pile of about half a dozen file folders, found mine (I think she knew exactly where it was), and began looking at it. I had to wait around for perhaps three-quarters of an hour while she entered various information from the folder into her computer, but at the end of that time I was handed an official permission to work as an intervention specialist.

Suddenly, I had become one. But I bet it would have taken another month or two to happen had I not stopped by and by my presence forced the issue.