7 ms·

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

170 points by crocus 18y ago

Ardit20 18y ago
It is utterly interesting how many people do not even bother nor desire to simply think for thoughts sake. I am starting to wonder whether people who value knowledge for its own sake is a counter evolution to the majority. A bit like right-handed people with left-handed people. The left-handed people are a minority hence have some advantages when say playing sports as most people are used to playing against other right handed people. Maybe same can be said for those people who value knowledge for its own sake as most people (the majority) do not, hence the minority who does has an inherent maybe gentical advantage.
Retric 18y ago
At my old school they tested incoming freshmen and sent many of them to a pass / fail English 050 class. It seems odd that most schools don't have such programs.
- tphyahoo 18y ago
  Agree. I, too, taught "literature" to people that could barely read. It sucked. If you can't read, you should learn the mechanics of how to read before dealing with things like "foreshadowing" "theme" "denouement." Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous. That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Not raping them in their vulnerability, naivete, and ability to get a loan.
  - hugh 18y ago
    Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous. That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. No, that's what high schools should be doing. No wait, actually, that's what primary schools should be doing.
    - pi3832 18y ago
      A vice president of a state university once said to me during an interview: "I wonder when the state legislature is going to notice that they are giving us money to teach to students the same things they gave high schools money to teach to the same students?"
    - s3graham 18y ago
      Unfortunately, at least where I live, it is almost entirely not allowed to fail students in primary or early high school. So, graduating effectively means "I didn't die before age N". And of course, it's a downward spiral: if you can't multiply and divide, you sure as hell can't factor an equation, and you're definitely not going to get anywhere trying to understand the graph of a parabola.
      - DougBTX 18y ago
        In my old school, if you fail a year (average below 60%) you repeat that year, if you fail three times, you're kicked out.
  - hugh 18y ago
    That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Oh, and also... if you're going to be claiming to be an English lecturer and complaining about illiteracy, you should probably master the rules of apostrophe placement first.
    - weebob 18y ago
      Two contractions and one possessive; what's your problem?
      - khill 18y ago
        I'm guessing he/she thinks it should be plural possessive - students' instead of student's
      - deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
    - tphyahoo 18y ago
      1) I was a high school teacher, not an english lecturer, and I did try to teach the basics how to write a complete sentence. However, the curiculum I was forced to teach was all this foreshadowing/theme/theory crap. 2) I quit to write software. 3) I would have been overjoyed had my students made the kind of grammar mistake (student's) I made in my off the cuff remark. In fact, my experience doing this has made me incredibly forgiving for this kind of thing, I guess in my own writing as well as that of others. Basically, if the meaning is clear and obvious I don't really consider it a mistake, just being a pedantic snob. The problem you get with people who really don't know how to write is the meaning isn't clear, I mean really not clear. You get, like, word salad, metaphors so brutally mixed that who knows what point was trying to be made, a level of incoherence that truly impedes what is trying to be communicated -- it can range from severe annoyance to total incomprehension. Grammar is for pedeants, get your point across and I'm your friend. Unfortunately many people can't.
tom_rath 18y ago
The most helpful grade I ever received on an essay was an 'F'. It was in my first year of university. I knew the course and knew the material but couldn't have been arsed to put together a paper which adequately addressed the subject. The comments the professor wrote were scathing and it was a wonderful full slap on the face that I'd better get my act together and actually deliver what was expected of me if I ever wanted to accomplish something of value. I did. Thanks for that 'F'.
- josefresco 18y ago
  I never had a professor shoot down any paper I turned in no matter how half assed it was. I guess I was that good ... Now, it was the papers I never turned in that hurt me the most :)
  - cdr 18y ago
    Hah. You must not have been that good - the ones I never turned in didn't really hurt me either.
- pi3832 18y ago
  Did you go to university in the '70s pr something? All that's "expected" of students anymore is a pulse, AFAICT.
  - helveticaman 18y ago
    Depends where you go.
- edw519 18y ago
  I went to college to be an English major. My first paper freshman year came back with a "D" on it and the remark, "Sophomoric Ramblings". It didn't seem logical, a bad grade and a compliment. (Since I was a freshman, I thought "sophomoric" meant "advanced".) One week later, I became a math major and I've never looked back.
  - 18y ago
mynameishere 18y ago
Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The author seems to think one aspect of education is to propagandize a certain political view, and that the success of the same would validate forcing education on people. If it makes him feel better, then...yes, of course reading such things will have an effect. Where did you get your ideas from? Obviously, a brain not so capable of absorbing information tends to stick to its instincts. That's why not every human quality is curable. I do wonder if the author realizes that many police officers come from a poor background, probably much unlike his own. Maybe they don't need Steinbeck to learn about the subject.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
  - sofal 18y ago
    Perhaps a police officer works with a somewhat skewed sample of the poor population in the same way that a TA for a class tends to deal personally with a non-representative sample of students from the class. They would both do well to remember the context of their occupation. Not that it would necessarily come from novels, but it's an argument for a general education.
daveambrose 18y ago
"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." We tend to never look at the underbelly of academia, particularly those who are well served post-college in a world of newly minted bonus checks and corporate perks. Discussion exists as to where the process went wrong, a process that favors the inevitable elite and rich, but I have yet to see one solid and compelling reason why education (on average) fails compared to our European counterparts. Excellent article.
- hugh 18y ago
  Interestingly, most coal miners make a whole lot more money than, say, an adjunct lecturer in English. There's nothing wrong with being a coal miner. Arts degrees are a luxury for children of rich families, not a good way to get ahead in life.
  - scott_s 18y ago
    Coal miners make more than an adjunct English lecturer because there is something "wrong" with being a coal miner: it's a dangerous and exhausting job.
- william42 18y ago
  The solution is to stop showing college as a pinnacle. While "everyone has a special gift" is a bit simplistic, the theory of comparative advantage still holds, and more people need to realize that.
babul 18y ago
Thanks crocus for posting this. When I made the parent submission to HN ~2hr ago which contained this article, I was going to post to the original source shortly but good to see you do it. That is what it is all about, helping each other :) (I deleted the submission as it linked to this article in reference rather than the original, and did not follow the “Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter” in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) Anyway, if you find the article interesting you may enjoy some of the other ones I was reading at the time (also with good links) that were useful... Which Universities Have No Chance at Entrepreneurship?: http://campusentrepreneurship.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/which-universities-have-no-chance-at-entrepreneurship/ http://campusentrepreneurship.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/which... As Textbooks Go 'Custom,' Students Pay: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121565135185141235.html?mod=2_1567_leftbox http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121565135185141235.ht... The latest National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship newsletter shares a great new paper by Block and Keller called “Where do Innovations Come from?: http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/news/2008/enews-08-07-14.htm http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/news/2008/enews-08-0...
sspencer 18y ago
Excellent submission. That was an extremely well-written and particularly trenchant piece of writing. It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion. I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.
- maximilian 18y ago
  It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people. SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone calls with my mom trying to "get her document back". She had just clicked another window and her word doc was behind it. 2 hours later she accidently clicked the word doc again and it came forward. Teaching the computer illiterate is a can of worms I wouldn't open without some serious friends and some serious beer.
  - jbenz 18y ago
    My Mom always wants the screen to "return to the way it was". Me: You mean the desktop? Mom: I don't know. The way it was. Me: Is it this? (shows her the desktop) Mom: No. It was all black. Me: You mean off? (shuts computer down) Mom: Yes. Thank you. My Mom's a preschool teacher, and I will rely heavily on her wisdom when I have kids, seeing as I don't know jack about 3 year olds. Me in 7 years: Mom, my kid won't eat his dinner. I think I got a broken one. We all have our own useful areas of knowledge.
    - michaelneale 18y ago
      Having kids myself, yes I can relate to that. I complain to my folks about what I see as major character problems in my little one, only to have my parents smile knowingly (I think they think its justice of some sort). The mention something about that being "familiar" behavior they saw once upon a time ;)
micah63 18y ago
Very insightful view into the mind of an essay marker. I've always loathed the subjectiveness of English courses, that's why I took computer science :) I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving English literature is usually destroyed by some kind of forced book dissection or compare and contrast garbage.
- orib 18y ago
  The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead. While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book. Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes (at least in high school) tend towards empty, meaningless "classics" about empty, meaningless people. Reading this sort of book really ends up sucking the joy out of an English class.
  - davidw 18y ago
    My favorite 'English' class in high school was a journalism class, which was centered around learning to write well and communicate something effectively, with none of the BS about "hidden symbolism". I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, if the author wanted to tell me something, he ought to have come out and said it directly instead of beating around the bush with "symbolism" that to me was as clear as mud, and that in the process he would have saved us all a great deal of time because his message wasn't really all that difficult to summarize in a paragraph or two.
    - jimbokun 18y ago
      "I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest," I think I've already used this story once on HN, but what the heck. The assignment was to address Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra. I pointed out several instances of Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra, then as a conclusion, said that I actually didn't think there was really any Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra at all, but "found" some to fulfill the assignment. When I got my paper back, it had positive remarks in the margins, until the remark at the end saying "Jim, we need to talk about this." I got an A in that class.
pragmatic 18y ago
I taught basic computer classes (Microsoft Office) and the lower level computer science courses as a similar institution. This article is so spot on, it's a little eerie. Do all adjuncts feel the same way?
- aggieben 18y ago
  Yup. I just had a class in which 15 of 18 I caught cheating, with 6 of those committing blatant acts of plagiarism. When you try to talk to those kids, it's totally like a Pinter play. I also completely empathize with the high-lows he described. Teaching is a high, especially if you allow yourself to be deluded into thinking your students are interested and learning; that makes the lows of having your delusions shattered at grading time that much lower.
weiser 18y ago
I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about. Maybe if we start from the premise that most individuals have something they are really good at, we might be able to move beyond the educational system of As and Fs and take advantage of people's abilities to the fullest.
- joeter 18y ago
  as an economics guy, I can tell you the fundamental flaw is with the signal models higher education systems currently use. It follows even on through to the wall street ibanks. "Ivyleague type with above 3.7 GPA." look at the mess they are in now.
  - maximilian 18y ago
    The mess they are in now isn't because of Ivyleague type dudes with good grades who are actually dumb. Its just ridiculous decisions all along the way. Who came up with the ridiculous idea that Fannie-Mae could buy its own securities? That still amazes me.
- hugh 18y ago
  But what if that premise isn't true? What if some people just suck at everything? I can't see any reason why everybody must be good at something. There's nothing about genetics which says that random genes will combine in such a way as to give them at least one useful skill. How would we go about testing your hypothesis?
  - weiser 18y ago
    Yes, thats true, some people might suck at everything. But that can be managed as long as thats a small enough minority. (we have government welfare for a reason, right? :)) The hypothesis I proposed is too broad to prove easily. Maybe, we can start with a narrower premise. We can disprove "if you suck in English class, you are no good for college". A friend of mine, a maths genius, got a D in History class in college (without deliberately trying to fail) He had straight A's in all technical courses (CS, maths etc).
aggieben 18y ago
This really was a great submission. I also am an adjunct instructor (albeit at a 4-year university), and I can attest to this guy's experiences. The line that really lit me up was this: Our dialogue had turned oblique, as though we now inhabited a Pinter play. This is golden. If anyone here has ever seen a Pinter play acted out, you know exactly what this means, and it is totally spot on. It's when you totally have begun to talk beyond each other, each sentence containing only enough of the subject continuum to keep you in the conversation, but apart enough to make it clear that nothing is being exchanged at all.
te_platt 18y ago
It is interesting how the author is so cautious about saying "College is not for everyone". Maybe we hear "It should be hard to get a college education - especially if you are poor". I'm a big believer in getting all the education you can. That is not the same thing as believing you should get as many college degrees as possible. There comes a point when it is time to get out and do something with your life. For some people that means a PhD. For others a B.S. For some an apprenticeship with a skilled craftsman. Don't confuse a degree with an education.
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
  I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. -- Mark Twain
- maxharris 18y ago
  Colleges should do whatever they can to reverse the trend of declining academic standards, or they will lose the money and prestige they presently have and command. Those running the schools may feel otherwise, but the outside world is pretty objective (if you can't hack it at your job, you're fired.)
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Perspicacious and lyrical. Nicely done. Having said that, I found the author a bit whiny. I can almost hear his supervisor at his "night job" "Old Professor X seems like a nice enough sort," they'd say, whispering among themselves, "but he'll never be ready for a job a at a major university. Sure -- he might get published in some rag like The Atlantic, but serious work? Not likely. He's just not cut out for it." It's all in your perspective. You could take a guy with the same students and the same success ratio and he could write a story about how rewarding it was to help people at night school! I think that's why I liked it so much: it was so artfully done that I couldn't help but think that the same experiences could be written to drive home a completely opposite conclusion.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  You are right, but then one would have to focus on your success stories, which might just a few percent of the students. By the time people are college aged, they are pretty set in their ways. Educational miracles where whole classes are swept up into success generally happen with younger students.
marvin 18y ago
This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them. Or put in other words; I didn't think there were enough jobs available that didn't require a minimum of college-level skills. A checkout clerk could obviously make do, but I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts. And other questions arise: Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large after all? You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys. At one level or the other, there is a major problem here - either the educational system is a massive failure, or the rest of us are stupid to assume that everybody has to be particularly intelligent.
- hugh 18y ago
  Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them. Try reading the comments on youtube. I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts. A car mechanic has enough brains to grasp some pretty complicated mechanical concepts, but for whatever reason he can quite easily fail to grasp a simple literary concept no matter how well it's explained. In the same way, I'm sure I can find you plenty of professors of English who are incapable of grasping how an engine works. In both cases, I'm not sure whether they're genuinely incapable, or whether they just have psychological barricades set up which lead them to think that this kind of knowledge is "beneath" them. You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys. Most people out there probably just don't think that commenting intelligently on The Wizard of Oz is a worthwhile thing to do.
aspirant 18y ago
Thoreau said, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root." Here is my attempt. Shortly after we're born, we begin to perceive a certain amount of value in everything we encounter. We assign value to food, attention, comfort, safety, pleasure, affection, entertainment, possessions, virtue, appearance, and a million other things. We assign value to a thousand instances of a hundred types of those things - particular tv shows, certain cars, particular kinds of attention, certain types of pleasure, even one virtue over another. Automatically, they line up along a spectrum of desire and the sorting continues each moment till we die. Some people value books more than people. Books have never hit them. Some people value an infomercial on tv more than any book imaginable. They still remember all those years ago how the class laughed when they had to read aloud. They don't feel stupid watching tv. They don't feel poor, inferior, or much of anything while it's on. A superficial man can see a woman and in a tenth of a second assign a value to her. We call him superficial in hopes that he will start valuing her other qualities more. A child of six in a bad neighborhood somewhere has never seen any of their friends or family open a book for fun. With perfect logic the child's mind takes note of what seems valued and what does not, by people like him. A very reasonable, and very wrong valuing ensues. And there is something out there that each person on this website ought to value but doesn't for the very same reasons: We haven't yet encountered it, or we didn't understand it when we did, or the people around us didn't seem to value it, etc. High school art class comes to mind. You are on this website right now because at this very moment you value it more than everything else that can at this moment be had. Not because of your DNA or inherent intellect, but because at some point you began to value time on this website, and before that websites in general, and before that time on computers, and before that a million other things that compose rungs on a ladder to somewhere. And by my simply saying that, many of you will suddenly call into question the value of being on this site right now. That questioning is the combination of your own ability to reason, imagine, and introspect as well as your environment of which my words are now a part. And those four ingredients more than anything else are what have formed your beliefs, including your beliefs about what is to be valued. Scholastically, life works out better for people who value books more than television. And better still for people who value knowledge more than almost everything else. Things work out better when we value things of value.
- 18y ago
adrianwaj 18y ago
The author repeats themselves: Page 2 top: "I can’t believe it," she said when she received her F. "I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper." Page 2 middle: "I can’t believe it," she said when she received her F. "I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper."
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- neodude 18y ago
  Perhaps he repeated himself for effect? I certainly found the repetition effective.
hermaphrobyte 18y ago
Interesting. Entering college as a computer agnostic and hs dropout in the late 80's I was dismayed by my curriculum and it's focus on word processing, dos, floppy disks, etc.. It seemed that the computer medium was dross and doldrum. Previously, in HS, I was terribly bored with most subject matter presentation and irritated by authority in general. I had been an avid reader since 5 or 6 and had read science fiction/fantasy and classic literature during these formative years. I did not do well in the college environment. I dropped all my classes. Years later, I returned to college: emphasis had once again turned to the printed word, symbolism, and other recognizable concepts rather than any ability to use a computer. 4.0 average for two semesters was the result. At the third semester I found myself in honors courses which irritated me with opinions I was too immature to discard gracefully and once again dropped out. Provided as counterpoint to this article.

170 points by crocus 18y ago

It is utterly interesting how many people do not even bother nor desire to simply think for thoughts sake. I am starting to wonder whether people who value knowledge for its own sake is a counter evolution to the majority. A bit like right-handed people with left-handed people. The left-handed people are a minority hence have some advantages when say playing sports as most people are used to playing against other right handed people. Maybe same can be said for those people who value knowledge for its own sake as most people (the majority) do not, hence the minority who does has an inherent maybe gentical advantage.

Retric 18y ago

At my old school they tested incoming freshmen and sent many of them to a pass / fail English 050 class. It seems odd that most schools don't have such programs.

tphyahoo 18y ago
Agree. I, too, taught "literature" to people that could barely read. It sucked. If you can't read, you should learn the mechanics of how to read before dealing with things like "foreshadowing" "theme" "denouement." Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous. That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Not raping them in their vulnerability, naivete, and ability to get a loan.
- hugh 18y ago
  Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous. That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. No, that's what high schools should be doing. No wait, actually, that's what primary schools should be doing.
  - pi3832 18y ago
    A vice president of a state university once said to me during an interview: "I wonder when the state legislature is going to notice that they are giving us money to teach to students the same things they gave high schools money to teach to the same students?"
  - s3graham 18y ago
    Unfortunately, at least where I live, it is almost entirely not allowed to fail students in primary or early high school. So, graduating effectively means "I didn't die before age N". And of course, it's a downward spiral: if you can't multiply and divide, you sure as hell can't factor an equation, and you're definitely not going to get anywhere trying to understand the graph of a parabola.
    - DougBTX 18y ago
      In my old school, if you fail a year (average below 60%) you repeat that year, if you fail three times, you're kicked out.
- hugh 18y ago
  That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Oh, and also... if you're going to be claiming to be an English lecturer and complaining about illiteracy, you should probably master the rules of apostrophe placement first.
  - weebob 18y ago
    Two contractions and one possessive; what's your problem?
    - khill 18y ago
      I'm guessing he/she thinks it should be plural possessive - students' instead of student's
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
  - tphyahoo 18y ago
    1) I was a high school teacher, not an english lecturer, and I did try to teach the basics how to write a complete sentence. However, the curiculum I was forced to teach was all this foreshadowing/theme/theory crap. 2) I quit to write software. 3) I would have been overjoyed had my students made the kind of grammar mistake (student's) I made in my off the cuff remark. In fact, my experience doing this has made me incredibly forgiving for this kind of thing, I guess in my own writing as well as that of others. Basically, if the meaning is clear and obvious I don't really consider it a mistake, just being a pedantic snob. The problem you get with people who really don't know how to write is the meaning isn't clear, I mean really not clear. You get, like, word salad, metaphors so brutally mixed that who knows what point was trying to be made, a level of incoherence that truly impedes what is trying to be communicated -- it can range from severe annoyance to total incomprehension. Grammar is for pedeants, get your point across and I'm your friend. Unfortunately many people can't.

tom_rath 18y ago

The most helpful grade I ever received on an essay was an 'F'. It was in my first year of university. I knew the course and knew the material but couldn't have been arsed to put together a paper which adequately addressed the subject. The comments the professor wrote were scathing and it was a wonderful full slap on the face that I'd better get my act together and actually deliver what was expected of me if I ever wanted to accomplish something of value. I did. Thanks for that 'F'.

josefresco 18y ago
I never had a professor shoot down any paper I turned in no matter how half assed it was. I guess I was that good ... Now, it was the papers I never turned in that hurt me the most :)
- cdr 18y ago
  Hah. You must not have been that good - the ones I never turned in didn't really hurt me either.
pi3832 18y ago
Did you go to university in the '70s pr something? All that's "expected" of students anymore is a pulse, AFAICT.
- helveticaman 18y ago
  Depends where you go.
edw519 18y ago
I went to college to be an English major. My first paper freshman year came back with a "D" on it and the remark, "Sophomoric Ramblings". It didn't seem logical, a bad grade and a compliment. (Since I was a freshman, I thought "sophomoric" meant "advanced".) One week later, I became a math major and I've never looked back.
- 18y ago

mynameishere 18y ago

Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The author seems to think one aspect of education is to propagandize a certain political view, and that the success of the same would validate forcing education on people. If it makes him feel better, then...yes, of course reading such things will have an effect. Where did you get your ideas from? Obviously, a brain not so capable of absorbing information tends to stick to its instincts. That's why not every human quality is curable. I do wonder if the author realizes that many police officers come from a poor background, probably much unlike his own. Maybe they don't need Steinbeck to learn about the subject.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
- sofal 18y ago
  Perhaps a police officer works with a somewhat skewed sample of the poor population in the same way that a TA for a class tends to deal personally with a non-representative sample of students from the class. They would both do well to remember the context of their occupation. Not that it would necessarily come from novels, but it's an argument for a general education.

daveambrose 18y ago

"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." We tend to never look at the underbelly of academia, particularly those who are well served post-college in a world of newly minted bonus checks and corporate perks. Discussion exists as to where the process went wrong, a process that favors the inevitable elite and rich, but I have yet to see one solid and compelling reason why education (on average) fails compared to our European counterparts. Excellent article.

hugh 18y ago
Interestingly, most coal miners make a whole lot more money than, say, an adjunct lecturer in English. There's nothing wrong with being a coal miner. Arts degrees are a luxury for children of rich families, not a good way to get ahead in life.
- scott_s 18y ago
  Coal miners make more than an adjunct English lecturer because there is something "wrong" with being a coal miner: it's a dangerous and exhausting job.
william42 18y ago
The solution is to stop showing college as a pinnacle. While "everyone has a special gift" is a bit simplistic, the theory of comparative advantage still holds, and more people need to realize that.

babul 18y ago

Thanks crocus for posting this. When I made the parent submission to HN ~2hr ago which contained this article, I was going to post to the original source shortly but good to see you do it. That is what it is all about, helping each other :) (I deleted the submission as it linked to this article in reference rather than the original, and did not follow the “Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter” in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) Anyway, if you find the article interesting you may enjoy some of the other ones I was reading at the time (also with good links) that were useful... Which Universities Have No Chance at Entrepreneurship?: http://campusentrepreneurship.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/which-universities-have-no-chance-at-entrepreneurship/ http://campusentrepreneurship.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/which... As Textbooks Go 'Custom,' Students Pay: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121565135185141235.html?mod=2_1567_leftbox http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121565135185141235.ht... The latest National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship newsletter shares a great new paper by Block and Keller called “Where do Innovations Come from?: http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/news/2008/enews-08-07-14.htm http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/news/2008/enews-08-0...

sspencer 18y ago

Excellent submission. That was an extremely well-written and particularly trenchant piece of writing. It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion. I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.

maximilian 18y ago
It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people. SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone calls with my mom trying to "get her document back". She had just clicked another window and her word doc was behind it. 2 hours later she accidently clicked the word doc again and it came forward. Teaching the computer illiterate is a can of worms I wouldn't open without some serious friends and some serious beer.
- jbenz 18y ago
  My Mom always wants the screen to "return to the way it was". Me: You mean the desktop? Mom: I don't know. The way it was. Me: Is it this? (shows her the desktop) Mom: No. It was all black. Me: You mean off? (shuts computer down) Mom: Yes. Thank you. My Mom's a preschool teacher, and I will rely heavily on her wisdom when I have kids, seeing as I don't know jack about 3 year olds. Me in 7 years: Mom, my kid won't eat his dinner. I think I got a broken one. We all have our own useful areas of knowledge.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    Having kids myself, yes I can relate to that. I complain to my folks about what I see as major character problems in my little one, only to have my parents smile knowingly (I think they think its justice of some sort). The mention something about that being "familiar" behavior they saw once upon a time ;)

micah63 18y ago

Very insightful view into the mind of an essay marker. I've always loathed the subjectiveness of English courses, that's why I took computer science :) I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving English literature is usually destroyed by some kind of forced book dissection or compare and contrast garbage.

orib 18y ago
The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead. While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book. Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes (at least in high school) tend towards empty, meaningless "classics" about empty, meaningless people. Reading this sort of book really ends up sucking the joy out of an English class.
- davidw 18y ago
  My favorite 'English' class in high school was a journalism class, which was centered around learning to write well and communicate something effectively, with none of the BS about "hidden symbolism". I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, if the author wanted to tell me something, he ought to have come out and said it directly instead of beating around the bush with "symbolism" that to me was as clear as mud, and that in the process he would have saved us all a great deal of time because his message wasn't really all that difficult to summarize in a paragraph or two.
  - jimbokun 18y ago
    "I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest," I think I've already used this story once on HN, but what the heck. The assignment was to address Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra. I pointed out several instances of Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra, then as a conclusion, said that I actually didn't think there was really any Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra at all, but "found" some to fulfill the assignment. When I got my paper back, it had positive remarks in the margins, until the remark at the end saying "Jim, we need to talk about this." I got an A in that class.

pragmatic 18y ago

I taught basic computer classes (Microsoft Office) and the lower level computer science courses as a similar institution. This article is so spot on, it's a little eerie. Do all adjuncts feel the same way?

aggieben 18y ago
Yup. I just had a class in which 15 of 18 I caught cheating, with 6 of those committing blatant acts of plagiarism. When you try to talk to those kids, it's totally like a Pinter play. I also completely empathize with the high-lows he described. Teaching is a high, especially if you allow yourself to be deluded into thinking your students are interested and learning; that makes the lows of having your delusions shattered at grading time that much lower.

weiser 18y ago

I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about. Maybe if we start from the premise that most individuals have something they are really good at, we might be able to move beyond the educational system of As and Fs and take advantage of people's abilities to the fullest.

joeter 18y ago
as an economics guy, I can tell you the fundamental flaw is with the signal models higher education systems currently use. It follows even on through to the wall street ibanks. "Ivyleague type with above 3.7 GPA." look at the mess they are in now.
- maximilian 18y ago
  The mess they are in now isn't because of Ivyleague type dudes with good grades who are actually dumb. Its just ridiculous decisions all along the way. Who came up with the ridiculous idea that Fannie-Mae could buy its own securities? That still amazes me.
hugh 18y ago
But what if that premise isn't true? What if some people just suck at everything? I can't see any reason why everybody must be good at something. There's nothing about genetics which says that random genes will combine in such a way as to give them at least one useful skill. How would we go about testing your hypothesis?
- weiser 18y ago
  Yes, thats true, some people might suck at everything. But that can be managed as long as thats a small enough minority. (we have government welfare for a reason, right? :)) The hypothesis I proposed is too broad to prove easily. Maybe, we can start with a narrower premise. We can disprove "if you suck in English class, you are no good for college". A friend of mine, a maths genius, got a D in History class in college (without deliberately trying to fail) He had straight A's in all technical courses (CS, maths etc).

aggieben 18y ago

This really was a great submission. I also am an adjunct instructor (albeit at a 4-year university), and I can attest to this guy's experiences. The line that really lit me up was this: Our dialogue had turned oblique, as though we now inhabited a Pinter play. This is golden. If anyone here has ever seen a Pinter play acted out, you know exactly what this means, and it is totally spot on. It's when you totally have begun to talk beyond each other, each sentence containing only enough of the subject continuum to keep you in the conversation, but apart enough to make it clear that nothing is being exchanged at all.

te_platt 18y ago

It is interesting how the author is so cautious about saying "College is not for everyone". Maybe we hear "It should be hard to get a college education - especially if you are poor". I'm a big believer in getting all the education you can. That is not the same thing as believing you should get as many college degrees as possible. There comes a point when it is time to get out and do something with your life. For some people that means a PhD. For others a B.S. For some an apprenticeship with a skilled craftsman. Don't confuse a degree with an education.

LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. -- Mark Twain
maxharris 18y ago
Colleges should do whatever they can to reverse the trend of declining academic standards, or they will lose the money and prestige they presently have and command. Those running the schools may feel otherwise, but the outside world is pretty objective (if you can't hack it at your job, you're fired.)

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

Perspicacious and lyrical. Nicely done. Having said that, I found the author a bit whiny. I can almost hear his supervisor at his "night job" "Old Professor X seems like a nice enough sort," they'd say, whispering among themselves, "but he'll never be ready for a job a at a major university. Sure -- he might get published in some rag like The Atlantic, but serious work? Not likely. He's just not cut out for it." It's all in your perspective. You could take a guy with the same students and the same success ratio and he could write a story about how rewarding it was to help people at night school! I think that's why I liked it so much: it was so artfully done that I couldn't help but think that the same experiences could be written to drive home a completely opposite conclusion.

stcredzero 18y ago
You are right, but then one would have to focus on your success stories, which might just a few percent of the students. By the time people are college aged, they are pretty set in their ways. Educational miracles where whole classes are swept up into success generally happen with younger students.

marvin 18y ago

This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them. Or put in other words; I didn't think there were enough jobs available that didn't require a minimum of college-level skills. A checkout clerk could obviously make do, but I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts. And other questions arise: Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large after all? You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys. At one level or the other, there is a major problem here - either the educational system is a massive failure, or the rest of us are stupid to assume that everybody has to be particularly intelligent.

hugh 18y ago
Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them. Try reading the comments on youtube. I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts. A car mechanic has enough brains to grasp some pretty complicated mechanical concepts, but for whatever reason he can quite easily fail to grasp a simple literary concept no matter how well it's explained. In the same way, I'm sure I can find you plenty of professors of English who are incapable of grasping how an engine works. In both cases, I'm not sure whether they're genuinely incapable, or whether they just have psychological barricades set up which lead them to think that this kind of knowledge is "beneath" them. You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys. Most people out there probably just don't think that commenting intelligently on The Wizard of Oz is a worthwhile thing to do.

aspirant 18y ago

Thoreau said, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root." Here is my attempt. Shortly after we're born, we begin to perceive a certain amount of value in everything we encounter. We assign value to food, attention, comfort, safety, pleasure, affection, entertainment, possessions, virtue, appearance, and a million other things. We assign value to a thousand instances of a hundred types of those things - particular tv shows, certain cars, particular kinds of attention, certain types of pleasure, even one virtue over another. Automatically, they line up along a spectrum of desire and the sorting continues each moment till we die. Some people value books more than people. Books have never hit them. Some people value an infomercial on tv more than any book imaginable. They still remember all those years ago how the class laughed when they had to read aloud. They don't feel stupid watching tv. They don't feel poor, inferior, or much of anything while it's on. A superficial man can see a woman and in a tenth of a second assign a value to her. We call him superficial in hopes that he will start valuing her other qualities more. A child of six in a bad neighborhood somewhere has never seen any of their friends or family open a book for fun. With perfect logic the child's mind takes note of what seems valued and what does not, by people like him. A very reasonable, and very wrong valuing ensues. And there is something out there that each person on this website ought to value but doesn't for the very same reasons: We haven't yet encountered it, or we didn't understand it when we did, or the people around us didn't seem to value it, etc. High school art class comes to mind. You are on this website right now because at this very moment you value it more than everything else that can at this moment be had. Not because of your DNA or inherent intellect, but because at some point you began to value time on this website, and before that websites in general, and before that time on computers, and before that a million other things that compose rungs on a ladder to somewhere. And by my simply saying that, many of you will suddenly call into question the value of being on this site right now. That questioning is the combination of your own ability to reason, imagine, and introspect as well as your environment of which my words are now a part. And those four ingredients more than anything else are what have formed your beliefs, including your beliefs about what is to be valued. Scholastically, life works out better for people who value books more than television. And better still for people who value knowledge more than almost everything else. Things work out better when we value things of value.

18y ago

adrianwaj 18y ago

The author repeats themselves: Page 2 top: "I can’t believe it," she said when she received her F. "I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper." Page 2 middle: "I can’t believe it," she said when she received her F. "I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper."

deleted 18y ago
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neodude 18y ago
Perhaps he repeated himself for effect? I certainly found the repetition effective.

hermaphrobyte 18y ago

Interesting. Entering college as a computer agnostic and hs dropout in the late 80's I was dismayed by my curriculum and it's focus on word processing, dos, floppy disks, etc.. It seemed that the computer medium was dross and doldrum. Previously, in HS, I was terribly bored with most subject matter presentation and irritated by authority in general. I had been an avid reader since 5 or 6 and had read science fiction/fantasy and classic literature during these formative years. I did not do well in the college environment. I dropped all my classes. Years later, I returned to college: emphasis had once again turned to the printed word, symbolism, and other recognizable concepts rather than any ability to use a computer. 4.0 average for two semesters was the result. At the third semester I found myself in honors courses which irritated me with opinions I was too immature to discard gracefully and once again dropped out. Provided as counterpoint to this article.