Football English

I dined yesterday evening at the ever-elegant Buehler's Mill (It's a restaurant in a supermarket—you can picture it.) with a couple of fellow faculty members. As you might expect, we talked shop, and some interesting thoughts boiled to the surface. Something like 20% of this year's freshman class is in Developmental English. I can't remember whether it was 60 or 90, but there were a lot of football players recruited this year, so many that a lot of freshman players never get to play.

All of this had a pretty strong impact on our teaching.

Attitude—student
It's late in the first semester, and many of my freshman guys are obviously disgusted. They slouch into class late and make every effort to show me that they neither want nor need to be here. Ashland football wasn't fun. The Ashland party scene isn't quite like either Animal House or Van Wilder. They can't stay awake and they can't wait to get home. Many won't return.

Attitude—mine
I'm only made of flesh, and when I face a group who obviously has better things to do, I rarely give it my best. I've been known to say some unfortunate things, for example when students absolutely refuse to stop playing with the computer and listen. And yet, some of my students are really working hard and improving. I need to remember that and to remember that no matter what I do, the average attrition rate will be something like 50%. It's not me. It's the system.

Just what are we trying to do here?
Lots of possibilities, depending on who you listen to:

• Turn great high school writers into great college writers. Sorry. I know that's the fiction, but our guys aren't up to the level of either the University of Akron or (in some cases) the local community two-year college.
• Save everyone. Sorry again. I've only got about 12 weeks (because of the Qualifying Essay). I can't undo twelve years of poor teaching or 18 years of being in a culture whose English isn't at all like college English.
• Show them how stupid they are. That's the usual effect of pitching too high with curriculum. The Longman Reader tends to do that. They simply cannot figure it out, so they assume they can't write.

I think I'm going to shift gears

I know this goes against a lot of what I learned in graduate school, but I think it might work. There's something to be said in favor of both the five-paragraph essay and the seven rhetorical modes. At the community college, I learned to teach them as if they were holy writ, and they aren't, but for students who have never seen academic English in print, have never written anything longer than 250 words (that's why they don't own staplers), and have never composed any text that didn't depend on their personal feelings, it might be a good approach.