English homework roundup (incl. dropout essay)
I just got back that paper on high school dropout rates; the teacher had relatively little comment (disappointingly little, for me), which I guess means it's a good paper.
Success and Failure in Education
There is a shocking thing happening in Chicago’s high schools: 30% or more of our students do not graduate. This problem is urgent, and its magnitude is growing. I hope to bring attention to an underlying cause that may be generally overlooked.
People do what rewards them. Accepting delayed gratification is one of the hardest things we learn while “growing up.” Shortcuts and get-rich-quick schemes hold an undeniable attraction - if we can have it all without having to put in years of hard, boring, grinding work first, why shouldn’t we? Some of our failing children are actively choosing to end their educations without a degree. I am in no way blaming the children themselves for their non-success. On the contrary, I believe they are acting in their own best interests as they see them.
The reasons they choose to stop attending school are many, but chief among them is a profound and pervasive lack of faith that education will get them a better life. Many youths in troubled neighborhoods never learned, deep down in their hearts, that hard work and education are the best route to success in life. They hear authority figures with little street cred repeat endlessly that work, discipline, and self-denial will pay off, but we cannot blame them for concluding that those promises are just a big lie, meant to keep them in their place.
As soon as they are old enough, these teens decide to stop “wasting their time” in classrooms. To motivate them to finish their education, it is necessary to first learn what they think success in life is. Is success financial independence? Dropping out of school to start working, whether at a mainstream job or in the illegal economy, brings far more immediate monetary rewards than just studying hard. Money can buy the best clothes, the fastest cars, the right brands of accessories … or medicines your grandma needs. Either way, four years of high school followed by at least two years of college is a long time to wait for the good life.
Is success the acclaim and respect of your peers? Getting the best grades in your school is far from cool. Kids who genuinely put their all into learning are mocked as eggheads, or even told they’re ‘acting white’. Top-scoring students may get yelled at in the hall for making everyone else look bad. Instead of studying, some teens who prize respect focus on athletic skills and fashion sense, or hone their musical or verbal skills so they can be the next Kanye West.
Is success living better than others in your neighborhood, being looked up to as a force in the community? In some neighborhoods, kids have no neighbors or family members with college degrees. The folks living best are often in gangs; their money comes from stealing cars, selling drugs. A neighbor with a GED might be making good money as a security guard or office worker, but there are entire blocks of our poorer areas that have no residents with college degrees at all. If no one these kids know has ever made the mainstream “dream” work, how can they hope to be the exception?
School is hard, even if you value its results highly. Some Chicago kids feel its costs outweigh its benefits. Why accept the life of a social outcast, spend hours cooped up studying, and pass up easy bling because some grownup on a power trip claims that you could make $40-50K a year? The world really works that way, but not all our young people believe that it does.
We will not be able to convince our teens that there’s really a pot of gold at the end of the education rainbow until they see it at work in their daily lives. They will not believe our platitudes until they hear them from the lips of people they respect. They will not commit themselves willingly to all the work that graduation requires until they believe, deep down, that the rewards are rich and certain.
I got some good help from HWC's Writing Center (up on the very top floor, tucked away in a corner where nobody would ever find it -- unless you saw one of the flyers throughout the school exhorting you to visit), though I don't know how helpful the tutor there *thought* she was being. She spotted my real thesis statement (rather than the one I'd been using), and also was able to see that certain passages were really not necessary to the paper's meat. Removing them changed the whole wobble and balance of the thing, and got me thinking about it in different ways, which let me rewrite it more strongly.
Then I had to go through and take out all the bits where the paper was apologizing for itself -- for being too short to *really* answer the prompt, for my own limited understanding of the problem, etc. It's like doing a concert, that way -- never apologize, never surrender! As it were. :->
This weekend I'll be working on a comparison/contrast paper weighing the advantages and disadvantages of choosing to live with one's parents as an adult, or going out on one's own and getting an apartment; it will be brought into class on Wednesday for 'peer review' and editing, and turned in Thursday.
Monday, I get to take a practice exit exam -- zero to sixty, a 5-paragraph essay churned out between 8:30AM and 10:20AM, including all prewriting and editing. Oh, and it's longhand. *headdesk* Oh, well, at least I'm glad I worked on making my handwriting legible several years ago ...
Success and Failure in Education
There is a shocking thing happening in Chicago’s high schools: 30% or more of our students do not graduate. This problem is urgent, and its magnitude is growing. I hope to bring attention to an underlying cause that may be generally overlooked.
People do what rewards them. Accepting delayed gratification is one of the hardest things we learn while “growing up.” Shortcuts and get-rich-quick schemes hold an undeniable attraction - if we can have it all without having to put in years of hard, boring, grinding work first, why shouldn’t we? Some of our failing children are actively choosing to end their educations without a degree. I am in no way blaming the children themselves for their non-success. On the contrary, I believe they are acting in their own best interests as they see them.
The reasons they choose to stop attending school are many, but chief among them is a profound and pervasive lack of faith that education will get them a better life. Many youths in troubled neighborhoods never learned, deep down in their hearts, that hard work and education are the best route to success in life. They hear authority figures with little street cred repeat endlessly that work, discipline, and self-denial will pay off, but we cannot blame them for concluding that those promises are just a big lie, meant to keep them in their place.
As soon as they are old enough, these teens decide to stop “wasting their time” in classrooms. To motivate them to finish their education, it is necessary to first learn what they think success in life is. Is success financial independence? Dropping out of school to start working, whether at a mainstream job or in the illegal economy, brings far more immediate monetary rewards than just studying hard. Money can buy the best clothes, the fastest cars, the right brands of accessories … or medicines your grandma needs. Either way, four years of high school followed by at least two years of college is a long time to wait for the good life.
Is success the acclaim and respect of your peers? Getting the best grades in your school is far from cool. Kids who genuinely put their all into learning are mocked as eggheads, or even told they’re ‘acting white’. Top-scoring students may get yelled at in the hall for making everyone else look bad. Instead of studying, some teens who prize respect focus on athletic skills and fashion sense, or hone their musical or verbal skills so they can be the next Kanye West.
Is success living better than others in your neighborhood, being looked up to as a force in the community? In some neighborhoods, kids have no neighbors or family members with college degrees. The folks living best are often in gangs; their money comes from stealing cars, selling drugs. A neighbor with a GED might be making good money as a security guard or office worker, but there are entire blocks of our poorer areas that have no residents with college degrees at all. If no one these kids know has ever made the mainstream “dream” work, how can they hope to be the exception?
School is hard, even if you value its results highly. Some Chicago kids feel its costs outweigh its benefits. Why accept the life of a social outcast, spend hours cooped up studying, and pass up easy bling because some grownup on a power trip claims that you could make $40-50K a year? The world really works that way, but not all our young people believe that it does.
We will not be able to convince our teens that there’s really a pot of gold at the end of the education rainbow until they see it at work in their daily lives. They will not believe our platitudes until they hear them from the lips of people they respect. They will not commit themselves willingly to all the work that graduation requires until they believe, deep down, that the rewards are rich and certain.
I got some good help from HWC's Writing Center (up on the very top floor, tucked away in a corner where nobody would ever find it -- unless you saw one of the flyers throughout the school exhorting you to visit), though I don't know how helpful the tutor there *thought* she was being. She spotted my real thesis statement (rather than the one I'd been using), and also was able to see that certain passages were really not necessary to the paper's meat. Removing them changed the whole wobble and balance of the thing, and got me thinking about it in different ways, which let me rewrite it more strongly.
Then I had to go through and take out all the bits where the paper was apologizing for itself -- for being too short to *really* answer the prompt, for my own limited understanding of the problem, etc. It's like doing a concert, that way -- never apologize, never surrender! As it were. :->
This weekend I'll be working on a comparison/contrast paper weighing the advantages and disadvantages of choosing to live with one's parents as an adult, or going out on one's own and getting an apartment; it will be brought into class on Wednesday for 'peer review' and editing, and turned in Thursday.
Monday, I get to take a practice exit exam -- zero to sixty, a 5-paragraph essay churned out between 8:30AM and 10:20AM, including all prewriting and editing. Oh, and it's longhand. *headdesk* Oh, well, at least I'm glad I worked on making my handwriting legible several years ago ...