By Professor Doom
A new year
begins, and that means a new semester begins. As always an avalanche of new
students comes onto campus, and is funneled into remedial courses. So, again,
I’ll write an essay, hoping against hope that the one pebble I toss will
actually affect the avalanche.
Now, I’ve
already addressed that remedial students should just leave college. More than
that, I’ve said that such students should just read the books and study on
their own, rather than pay full college price for sub-college material.
“But that’s
not fair to the students that had sucky schools and sucky teachers!” cries
those in defense of remedial students. There’s truth to this, but, alas, the
current situation isn’t fair, and it won’t be fair any time soon.
For thousands of years, the primary, best, way
for a human being to learn a skill has been to stand next to a knowledgeable
human being and pay attention while the knowledgeable demonstrate the skill.
Personal attention is the best way to learn something new. It would be fair for
those in bad situations to get the best possible choice for education.
The best
choice is just not an option in higher education. I wish it were, because when
I tutor 1 on 1, I often make real progress with a student (for much less than college
tuition, and for more money for myself; it’s a real sign how broken the system
is that both student and teacher are better off if there’s no school involved).
A distant, but still viable, second to learning from another human being is to
learn from a book. I know, it’s hard to learn from a book, but ultimately in
higher education, learning from books is how it’s done.
Is it unfair
for our weakest students to learn the second-best way? Absolutely. Nevertheless, this is the only way that makes
sense right now. Here are some numbers to reinforce why in higher education
today, the best choice for a remedial student is to open up the book on his own
time, and study:
“0”
This number
represents the typical amount of experience your remedial teacher will have, if
you go to university. See, administrators have figured out the easy way to
increase their own salaries is to cut costs by forcing incoming graduate
students to teach these courses. English is often not the first language of new
graduate students, and they have little experience teaching the material they
haven’t seen in ten years, anyway. You might as well read the book.
“0”
This number
represents the amount of actual mathematics knowledge your teacher will have, if
you go to community college. See, in community college, administrators hire
Education majors to teach; even a Math Education major might not have taken a
math course since the 10th grade. The only thing these guys know how
to do is go very, very, slow, and eliminate as much course material as possible.
You won’t be prepared for college courses this way, and if you don’t read the
book and learn on your own, you’ll be destroyed when you get to any real
college courses.
“3”
This is the
number of hours you might be forced to spend alone at the computer every week. The
most successful program for teaching remedial students makes them go and sit in
front of a computer, which tracks how much time the student spends studying
like this. To pass the course, the student must spend three hours a week
practicing, to the satisfaction of the computer. You’re paying real money to
have a computer stare at you while you study? Just read the book, honest,
there’s no reason to shovel thousands of bucks into tuition for this.
“200”
This is the
enrollment for an entry-level mathematics course, one section, at a nearby
university. Yes, 200 students in a class. Hey, you can only cut pay so much,
past that you double the class size…then double it again…then double it again. If
each student requires 5 minutes a week of effort by the teacher, that’s about
16 hours a week. That doesn’t sound bad? Well, faculty teach four courses at a
time, and there’s more to it than just answering questions…you may as well read
the book on your own time, because there’s just no reason to expect even 5
minutes a week of personal attention.
“$2000”
This is very
high end pay that an adjunct might receive for teaching an entry level course.
Isn’t it bizarre that tuition skyrockets every year when overhead is so minimal? An adjunct could literally be in a course
with two hundred students, representing a quarter of a million dollars of
tuition, and only get a couple thousand bucks for it, no benefits or anything
else. In much the way that people should avoid buying products from those
brutal Asian clothing mills, a remedial student really should just crack open
the book instead of support borderline slave labor.
10%
This is the
chance a remedial student will manage to get a 2 year degree, even if he’s allowed
3 years to get it. Sure, it happens, but ultimately the very few who succeed
are those that are able to read a book all alone. Why wait 3 years to figure
that out? Find out now if you can read a book all by yourself…if you can’t,
college isn’t for you.
“…a
course whose purpose was to teach teachers how to teach mathematics using
teaching kits that made it possible to teach math without actually knowing it.
My suggestion that they should teach the prospective teachers math was voted
down,…”
Another faculty member trying to slow down what’s going on in education. Seriously, why would anyone pay for this?
For the most
part, I’m preaching to the choir with these essays. The bulk of college
students are remedial students, and will never come here and read the truth of
what’s going on in higher education, will never realize how screwed they are
until they’re deep in debt. All they know is what the college administrators
tell them—“take our courses and then you’ll get piles of moolah for a magic
rainbow job.”
That’s a
shame, because the numbers make it very clear that, at the bare minimum, a
remedial student would do himself far more good by reading the course textbook
on his own time, rather than signing up for stupid expensive oversize classes
led by an inexperienced teacher, possibly one with very limited knowledge.