Notes
NOTES, STATEMENTS & MEMOS ON SEEK, BASIC WRITING & THE INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM (1969–1972)
[1969–1970?]
Introductory: What we are part of
Classroom as cell—unit—enclosed & enclosing space in which teacher & students are alone together
Can be prison cell commune trap junction—place of coming-together torture chamber
But also part of much bigger nationwide cultural revolution: “Compensatory” education increasingly important aspect of “higher” education
movement for social change—break down false barriers of class & color to make all education truly open to all people who want it
movement for educational reform—such programs are surely going to effect changes in nature of teaching at all levels
At present, we are involved in the key area of university teaching new territory—few if any proven “methods”
Many inherited prejudices & rigidities stand in our way
in the educational hierarchy which has vested interest in old methods
in students who have been taught that the classroom is something apart from “life” except that it will eventually either help you or prevent you from getting paycheck—are unaccustomed to relating classroom experience to larger whole
Most crucial—in ourselves: our own blind spots, insecurities, reliance on the familiar, fear of “wasting time” if we try unproven approaches. We are goal-orientated, desperate for visible results. So are many of our students. So is the system around us.
Sense of burden of proof—in SEEK, in Open Admissions. Can the new student population succeed at what has been a white middle- class monopoly? Do we have to prove that they can? Is this really an issue any more?
Do we really believe that tide is going to be reversed & the BHE is going to dare to announce that Blacks & Puerto Ricans and Asians and constructions workers’ kids and Polish immigrant kids “can’t learn,” are dumb, hopeless, not good enough for higher educational opportunities?
Given the temper of the times this is a legitimate question. But also given state of economy & fact that class of ’71 graduates at all levels are hard put to it to find jobs, we cannot even promise our students that, if they “make it” in the existing academic system they will find white-collar jobs. We therefore have to consider much more deeply—
our sense of responsibility to students—We don’t want to fuck them over any further. BUT it may be to their far greater advantage for us to reexamine all that we’ve been doing, try untested things, put ourselves on the line, be willing to take risks. These risks will be as much with ourselves as with them.
How we see ourselves in relation to students
what is our actual degree of confidence in their potential?
What do we really think we can learn from them?
This is an attempt to describe what a two-course teaching load in English 1.8 actually involves in terms of classroom teaching, conferences with students, preparation, and correcting of student writing. It is intended to justify the 3-course load as a fulltime commitment, and to explain what we think—and hope—we are committed to when we take on two, or three, Pre-Baccalaureate classes.
At its best, and its most successful, SEEK teaching involves a kind of commitment to the individual student and his unique development which is rarely found outside of small elite colleges. When a student enters my class, I need to inform myself about his position in the program (is this his first semester of English? has he taken the course before and received an incomplete? is there information on his special writing problems which is obtainable from his last semester’s teacher?) Some of this information is funneled through the Pre-Bac English office; some will come from the student himself. I ask all students at the beginning of the semester to give me a sheet with their name, birthdate, address and phone number, counselor’s name, and to let me know of any particular needs they think a writing course might help them with, or anything else that they think relevant. Some are very concretely conscious of special problems: “punctuation and spelling”; “organizing my ideas”; others state “I must learn to write better” or “I wish I could learn to write but I’m not sure I can.”
Initially, especially for new students, there are certain things which have to be undone before they can “learn to write”. These are damages—partly from past classrooms, partly from the ways literacy and language have been misused against the student—which are certainly not irremediable but which may at the outset appear extremely daunting, both to the student and to an inexperienced instructor. One form of damage shows as mistrust of the written word as a genuine article—in the papers of students who simply fill-up a page without really believing that their words can and should convey anything they are really thinking and feeling. Words or whole phrases may be omitted, words which closely approximate other words in sound or spelling may be incorrectly thrown around, and beyond concrete problems of grammar or English as a second language one senses the despair, anger and frustration that the necessity for writing has provoked in the writer. Some of this is sheer lack of confidence; some of it is deeply rooted, I believe, in the miseducation that has been perpetrated where language is concerned. To undo this damage may be the work of half a semester, in some cases, longer.
Other initially visible problems will include: translation from Spanish into English; translation from inner-city dialect into English; with Chinese students certain verb tense problems which seem peculiar to them. A general problem is the diffidence about using a vocabulary which the student is afraid he cannot spell, so that he limits himself to what he himself will admit is “baby-talk” in writing.
Some students write expressively and freely, if ungrammatically, and seem to have discovered for themselves the release and liberation of writing as an activity. The problem of teaching a minimal necessary “correctness” without impeding this self-initiated process is a serious one.
The very first batch of papers a teacher assigns, then, will turn up a multiplicity of kinds of needs, strengths and weaknesses. The problem for the teacher is to make the term’s work supportive and relevant for each and every student: to help dislocate ‘blocks’, to open possibilities of expression, to help each student as much as possible to become the kind of writer he is meant to be. It is not simply to turn out 15 people who can pass the English proficiency examination, although we hope that that will inevitably result.
It can be seen from the above that the work of reading 15 papers twice a week (I try to give one in-class essay and one paper written at home each week; sometimes also a grammar exercise) is not simply an automatic checking of mechanics, or even an appreciative response to the student’s ideas. The teacher needs to be aware of the student’s past problems and whether they are showing signs of remediation; also of strengths gained and the possibility of demanding more of him in future. Sometimes it will be necessary to refer a student to a tutor with special remediation skills—such as proficiency in Spanish—or simply to arrange extra work with him outside of class. Sometimes a student shows so much competence that it is important to give him extra assignments or to modify regular assignments so they will challenge him. Whatever the individual case, the task of reading papers is a major part of the teacher’s concern, and it cannot be done in perfunctory fashion. I demand a great deal of revision and rewriting of papers and these revisions stream in at irregular pace along with the regular assignments.
In English 1.8 we have 4 classroom hours a week; I use one of these hours in each class for individual conferences. Since a conference of less than 1/2 an hour is rarely useful, this would mean seeing only 2 students a week. Therefore I add another couple of hours outside of class time for further conferences, or open office hours. I try to see each student at least twice a semester; some want more time; the final sum of hours is impossible to calculate but it is certainly a good more than one hour a week per class.
It is essential that the classroom hours be thoroughly prepared. This means relying, not on one’s natural inspiration, charm and intellect, but on well-thought-out lessons which have some logical sequence and which give the students—who are severe critics—a sense that there is some substance in what is going on—Every Pre-Bac English teacher is constantly inventing and improvising his teaching materials—ditto’d or mimeo’d handouts, exercises, examples of different forms of writing, summaries of certain prevalent grammatical and mechanical problems. We poach off each other’s materials, we search anthologies, grammar books and our own libraries, we try one approach and see it fail, try another and discover that it works. At every point our awareness of and experience with the students proves to be our most valuable asset; but this awareness is never as perfect as we would like it to be, and to some extent we are always learning from them. In this sense a class of 15 SEEK students is as serious and demanding a term’s work as a class of 150 conventional students being lectured or taught by conventional methods. (I put in an average of 3 hours preparation for the 3 classroom days weekly; try to refresh my memory of the past work of each student I am going to see on conference day.)
Beyond actual teaching there are certain aspects of our commitment to our students which we have come to take for granted. We communicate with the SEEK counselor when a student has missed more than 3 classes, when he is failing to turn in assignments, when we feel there is something in his progress or lack thereof which ought to be brought to the counselor’s attention. We write mid-semester reports on each student. We try to continue to be available to former students who may be running into writing problems after matriculation and who come back to us now and then. Most of us write our phone number on the board on the first day of class and are prepared to receive calls at home from students who have been absent, requesting assignments, or for other reasons. All of these take time—often in small quantities—time which we feel to be well spent and an integral part of our educational function.
Most of us feel the need to continue with our own education—not in terms of doctoral credits, but in terms of relevant reading—whether in linguistics, Black or Latin literature, history, current events, criticism. Our ability to meet the needs of our students, depends to some extent on the remediation of our own education, which in most cases was patchy or inadequate in the above areas.
What I have described above, though it is an accurate description of our intentions and efforts, is not, unfortunately, a description of our actual achievements. Too often teachers fail—through inexperience, blind spots, human fragility, personal fatigue, the pressure of public stresses. The experimentation we do needs much more shared coherence—we need much more time in which to thrash out our methods and aims to each learn what is being done in other pilot programs, connect with our colleagues teaching SEEK students in other fields. The program, if it is to serve future students better and not worse, ought to be viewed as one of the most serious commitments a teacher can make in this institution and the teaching ‘load’ ought to be arranged accordingly. Many teachers feel that a 2-course ‘load’ (in terms of classroom hours) entailing as it does so much more in-depth preparation and attention than a regular English literature 2-course load, is in fact already a fulltime commitment.
To raise the course load for SEEK English teachers will be to dilute and reduce whatever has been accomplished during the early years of SEEK; it will also practically eliminate the kinds of evaluation and critical revision of our work which we feel will continuously be necessary in programs such as this. It will eventually guarantee a kind of tokenism which will admit large numbers of students only to betray and cheat them. It would be possible, given the support and determination of the English department, to create in the Pre-Baccalaureate English program a genuine force for the improvement of teaching at all levels, and for the preparation of students who could be a credit to the department. Given the numbers of students expected in the fall of 1970, and the necessity for additional teachers, it still seems clear that increasing the course load for each teacher is a sure way to undermine and devalue the quality which now exists. What is needed is the will to increase and encourage that quality—for the sake of the College as a whole and for the sake of the students we are purporting to serve.
STATEMENT TO C.C.N.Y FACULTY MEETING, WEDNESDAY APRIL 23
[1969?]
As a member of the SEEK faculty, I want to make one or two things clear.
During Wednesday’s meeting, time and time again, the Fourth Demand was cited as a serious threat to the educational standards, the academic excellence, of the College. Open admissions, or admission of a larger non-white population, were seen as perhaps necessary social measures, but as potentially disastrous educational policy.
It must go on record, and I wish to put it on record as a teacher of SEEK students, that in admitting ghetto students we are not admitting simply a collection of social and educational problems, remedial problems. We are admitting a wealth of intelligence, toughmindedness, and motivation. We are admitting minds which, because they have lived, in LeRoi Jones’ phrase, as ‘suffering intelligences’, have a concern for justice, truth and freedom which many of our better-prepared students unfortunately do not. We must not confuse spoon-fed ‘preparedness’ with basic intellectual ability. Let’s not sell our ghetto students short by imagining that they have everything to gain from the College, and little to give. There is a whole resource of brains, talent and courage which we have hitherto excluded from the American educational system; if we can begin to admit and absorb these gifts, the educational process for both whites and non-whites, teachers and students, will become, in my opinion, vastly more meaningful.
Adrienne Rich
Lecturer—SEEK English program
[No date; Evans-Novak piece referred to below dated December 4, 1970]
We deplore and are deeply disturbed by the incidence of such articles as the Evans-Novak piece (“The Wrecking of A College”) in the N.Y. POST and the anonymous letter printed several weeks ago in the Sunday TIMES magazine section. These irresponsible and destructive attacks, which accuse Open Admissions students of illiteracy, terrorism and Hitlerian tactics, come from some of the very teachers who will be teaching the new student population in years to come. Quite apart from the contempt for truth and accuracy displayed by these alleged scholars, the atmosphere of hostility and paranoia thus created can only make it more difficult for any educational process to go on.
We also deplore the fact that the City College public relations apparatus seems to have no continuous and effective policy for handling the first stages on Open Admissions. The article answering Evans and Novak makes some claims for the program which cannot be substantiated (as that there is highly individualized follow-through on each student during the semester). Instead of reacting to dishonest attacks on the program by making inflated claims, we feel it would be more useful to maintain a flow of information which would enable people to understand the background rationale for the policy, which would educate the public to the now well-established fact that I.Q. tests and school grades are not an index of intellectual capacity, and which would point to the success of the SEEK program as an indicator of what may be hoped for as the Open Admissions program gains in stability and coherence. It should be emphasized that instant evaluation is meaningless, that the City University is embarked on a process of educational experimentation and creativity which may become a beacon for other urban institutions, but that a program which is only 4 months old cannot be assessed intelligently on any score.
We would further like to point out that the success of the SEEK program has been indissoluble from the fact of individual counseling and the provision of stipends and book money. To expect the Open Admissions student to transcend more obstacles than the SEEK student in order to prove his right to be in college is grossly unfair and irrational.
The College owes it to these students, who have been so ill-served by the educational system and who come to us with so much hope and motivation, to help them make up their deficits under optimal conditions. Then and only then can their “fitness” for higher education be discussed. One way in which optimal conditions can be created, apart from the practical assistance mentioned above, is for the Administration to take a clear and affirmative stand on behalf of Open Admissions and to show itself clearly and articulately in support of the students’ presence here.
[No date]
STUDENT PASSES—EDUCATION FAILS
WHEN YOU COME OUT OF HERE, WHO WILL YOU BE?
—a brainwashed, passive, obedient object, to be fed into the machine that has produced the ghettoes, Viet Nam, drug addiction, unemployment, spiraling prices, brutalization of men in mass society, the spoilage of the earth and ocean?
—an unemployable B. A. or B. S. whose diploma cannot guarantee him a job and who has learned little except how to pass exams?
—a powerless person, ignorant of the ways in which you might survive, and help your brothers and sisters survive, the rest of this century?
Will you know how to analyze your situation, criticize the way things are being run, articulate your needs, demand your human rights, frame meaningful questions, recognize bullshit answers?
WHO DECIDES WHAT YOU ARE ALLOWED TO LEARN?
(in 1969, a faculty-student committee worked together to produce a comprehensive and well-thought-out plan for a School of Black and Puerto Rican Studies. The plan was disregarded by the Board of Higher Education and a token “School of Urban & Ethnic Studies” set up in its place, headed by an outsider chosen without consultation with the faculty and students who had dedicatedly worked on the original program.)
WHAT DETERMINES THE COURSES YOU TAKE EACH SEMESTER?
Is it really your decision? Is it the mechanical brain of a computer dividing up students as bodies into the always-dwindling available space? Is it an administrative decision? Do you know? Do you care if two-thirds of your time is spent in courses that you would not have chosen, simply to acquire “credits”?
WHERE IS THE POWER THAT CONTROLS YOUR LIFE HERE?
If you have never asked yourself any of these questions—
if you are afraid to ask them—
if you are afraid of what the answers may be—
then your education is already failing you.
“Learning to read and write ought to be an opportunity for men to know what speaking the word really means: an act implying reflection and action. AS SUCH IT IS A PRIMORDIAL HUMAN RIGHT AND NOT THE PRIVILEGE OF A FEW. Speaking the word is not a true act if it is not at the same time associated with the right of self-expression and world-expression, of creating and re-creating, of deciding and choosing and ultimately participating in society’s historical process.”
“In the culture of silence the masses are ‘mute’—that is, they are prohibited from creatively taking part in the transformation of their society and therefore prohibited from being.”
—Paulo Freire, “Adult Literacy Process”
WHAT DOES QUALITY EDUCATION MEAN?
WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY?
Many students have come to C.C.N.Y. at financial sacrifice to themselves and their families, believing that the A. B. degree will lead them to better jobs, more interesting work, higher pay. IS THIS NECESSARILY TRUE? Graduate electronics engineers are being laid off; Ph.D.’s are having trouble finding teaching jobs. IN AN UNPLANNED, FLOUNDERING, WAR-DISTORTED ECONOMY, ARE YOU SURE THERE WILL BE A PLACE FOR YOU AS A PROFESSIONAL?
Many students also come believing that the University is what it has always claimed to be—a place in which free thought and speech are nourished, in which the individual can develop his own unique mind, in an atmosphere of intellectual excitement and comradeship. IS THIS TRUE OF CITY COLLEGE? With students forced to take courses they don’t want because of archaic requirements or overloading of sections, with falling attendance at many courses, with overcrowding so intense that you can’t find a place to sit and talk with a friend or a teacher, with a bookstore ill-stocked, run as a concession to a captive audience, with old-fashioned, public-school-like classrooms in which informal dialogue and discussion are impossible, with creative, active teachers being fired, the protests, students—CAN A QUALITY EDUCATION TAKE PLACE UNDER THESE CONDITIONS?
C.C.N.Y. is supposed to be a FREE INSTITUTION FOR THE PEOPLE OF NEW YORK. Some people can afford to come here while their parents support them for four years. MANY OTHERS COME HERE WHILE TRYING TO SUPPORT THEIR OWN FAMILIES. There is a disparity between the education you can receive free of financial anxiety and hassles, with leisure for homework and supplementary reading, time to think and engage in extra-curricular life, and the education you can receive while holding down a part or fulltime job, caring for children, worrying about baby-sitters, having to choose between buying food or buying books. WITHOUT STIPENDS FOR LOW-INCOME STUDENTS, AND A DAY CARE CENTER ADEQUATE TO THE NEEDS OF ALL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS WITH CHILDREN, A QUALITY EDUCATION IS STILL NOT BEING PROVIDED FOR ALL STUDENTS.
Whether you are a middle-class student living with your family in the suburbs, or a young man or woman with children, other dependents, no outside source of income, no place to study at home—whether you are male or female, Asian, Black, Hispanic, White—WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS HERE AND WHAT DO YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO EXPECT?
AND WHO MAKES THE DECISIONS THAT ARE EVEN NOW SHAPING YOUR FUTURE LIFE???
BASIC WRITING MEMO & PROGRAM NOTES
MEMO: 9/3/71
To: Mina Shaughnessy
From: Adrienne Rich
I have been thinking about some of the assumptions that seem to underlie the ways we have been trying to teach Basic Writing. Many of us (and I certainly include you in that ‘us’) have been questioning these assumptions all along, and often discarding them; however, to some extent they have influenced all of us in the program.
Some main assumptions appear to be:
That students learn to write as they learn math or carpentry: by a systematic progression from one skill or unit to the next, e.g. from the sentence to the paragraph to the short essay to the long research paper.
That the ability to write a long research paper is an end itself for a program of this kind.
That competent writing is a technique which one person can transfer to another without much or any reciprocal activity.
That an expanded vocabulary will expand the student’s con- trol of language regardless of his present relationship to the words he is already using.
That the basic skills of Standard English can be taught before the student has any fundamental awareness of his existing relationship to language.
Departing from these assumptions, I would like to raise the following possibilities:
Whether we hope that our students will come into possession of language as a powerful imaginative and social weapon, or whether we simply set our sights on developing coherence and clear organization of words, we need to give far more attention than this program has ever given to the way we (teachers and students) think. Ultimately no piece of writing is going to be better than the quality of thinking and feeling that had led to its writing. This is as true for prison letters as for literary criticism.
A person’s relationship to language has to do with his relationship to his world, to his identity, to his sense of time and space, his trust in and suspicion of others, his ways of identifying others. Both we as teachers and our students need to become more conscious of the elemental assumptions we engage in with regard to words, inside the classroom and out. Because of the pressure of short-term goals—(the passing of grammar tests, the proficiency exam) we fail to give enough time and energy to reflecting with our students on the nature of language, how and why they are using the words they use.
Most of us, I think, feel trapped by the brevity of a semester in which we set ourselves the kind of short-term goals mentioned above, I have been wondering whether we are not prisoners of the English 1, 2, 3 cycle, the artificial time— and goal— divisions it sets up, and the notions of measurable “success” and “failure” it creates in the minds of students.
Much writing in the field of compensatory education emphasizes the quality of relation between—not only teacher and student—but among students in a class engaged in the activity of language. The excerpts I have appended to this memo (from Paolo Freire’s The Adult Literacy Process, from the I. S. E. Thirteen College Curriculum Program, and from the Berkeley English-as-second-language program) corroborate each other suggestively. But this relation, and its continuing value and effectiveness, are—it seems to me—destructively splintered by the present structure of our program.
I would like to suggest, and offer for modification and criticism, the following proposal:
Instead of three semesters labeled English 1, 2, and 3, suppose we thought of the entire period as a long-term project, in which a teacher might discover who his students are, what their needs are, and in which mutual trust and familiarity—even some degree of community—might gradually develop in a class, among the students and with the instructor.
For instance, the first semester might begin with a preliminary period of classroom situations, leading to written work, but emphasizing discussion of language and its uses, which would enable the instructor, in a non-test situation, to see how the students might best be grouped and which students might help others, what kind of help each student really needed. (It is usually true that the early weeks if English 1 are spent in this kind of diagnosis, since the preliminary essay tells us only in the crudest way what kind of writing a student can do under pressure.) Then, let the teacher carry a section for at least two semesters learning to know the students and be known by them, grouping the class in different projects according to their needs, trying different methods with different students, with the advantage of being able to work together as a class for a full year. Let the third semester be optional, on the basis of agreement and discussion between the student, his counselor if any, and the teacher, as to whether he would benefit by further experience in the class.
The third semester class, presumably smaller than the original class, would consist of a teacher and a group who had become familiar, and might involve a long-term group writing project such as the preparation of a proposal, a study, a set of interviews or a newspaper. The project might well arise out of concerns the group had previously generated in the earlier semesters.
I realize that there are arguments for having the students encounter different teachers rather than work with one during their entire period in the program. However, I would be interested to see what the gains might be if students continued with a teacher who could gradually, rather than in the hecticity of a single autumn or spring, become responsive to their needs, and with whom a relationship (as with each other) could be strengthened by trust and familiarity. Many of us feel at the end of January or May that we have just begun to “know” our students; that students have just begun to trust themselves with the group. In the fragmented, compartmentalized, often depersonalizing environs of City College, it’s possible a long-term approach to the Writing Program would by its very nature become a source of orientation and personal strength for the student. And such a result could only make him a better writer.
FINAL COMMENTS ON THE INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM
Spring 1972
—Adrienne Rich—
My own sense of the workings of the “Q” program is a dual one—I spent many hours sitting-in on lectures and group discussions in the core courses, and I taught two sections of Basic Writing. The experience of listening to college lectures again after many years was educative for me in many ways. I learned much about teaching styles, about the lucid presentation of difficult concepts, and about the advantages and disadvantages of the lecture as an art form and a social situation. I also began to develop a dual consciousness as to the ways in which I was relating to the ideas and theories being presented, simply because of my own prior education and reading and experience, and the ways in which youth, inexperience, the lack of vocabulary or of self-confidence or training in critical thinking made the lecture experience a very different one for many students.
First there was the primary fact that they were expecting to be tested and graded on their grasp of the material, and I was not. The anxiety aroused on this score translated itself into such reactions as a tense, dogged attempt to get the words of the lecturer down on paper, to snatch from the flow of his language something—anything—that could be memorized or deciphered later in studying for a test—this effort precluding active participation or critical thinking or dissent or even the asking of questions. The other anxiety-response was a resistance to the whole process, appearing as “boredom”—detachment of the self from a threatening or unfamiliar situation—or as chatting, giggling, day-dreaming, creating a little world within the classroom which could serve temporarily to blot out the larger scene and act as a protection against the educational process. Both reactions seemed to me the most obvious interferences with learning, both seemed to derive directly from the students’ earlier experience of schooling: either you try to be a “good” student and desperately memorize, fake or assimilate masses of undigested information, or you define yourself as bored or as “bad” (dumb, lazy, inferior) and disassociate yourself from the entire process. Either way, fear is undoubtedly an underlying emotion.
It seems to me that one of the basic concerns of any program under Open Admissions must be to try to help entering students discover a new relationship to learning. The most thoughtfully prepared, witty or provocative lecture cannot do this (and I heard some of all three during the semester—Duchacek, Nechin and Watts being three very gifted teachers.) As I listened, and as I observed students’ ways of listening or non-listening, and as I talked later with students in my own classroom and heard questions raised that had gone unspoken in the lectures, I became more and more convinced that although the lecture as art form and social event may still have a place in the university, the first needs of our freshmen are for something else—for a kind of classroom in which students find themselves having to learn for themselves, and to teach each other, more than they have ever been asked to do. The value of this is not merely to “increase participation” but to break, once and for all, the modes and patterns which 12 years of public or parochial education have left as their legacy. When he/she can get rid of that legacy, the student can approach the lecture or the textbook or any other medium with an entirely different relationship. He will no longer accept it passively as an agent acting upon his mind, but as one of many materials on which his mind can act.
In view of large numbers of students and inadequate funding, I realize that the lecture format is probably inescapable in the freshman year. The problem then is how to combine it with forms of learning which demand self-involvement from every student. Small-group discussions have typically been a way of trying to do this. Some of us have talked of experimenting more with team-learning, with assignments which are worked-on in groups of at most 4 or 5, in which at first each student is given definite responsibilities by the instructor, but gradually the responsibilities are decided on by the students themselves. Attempting this at a subway college has its own difficulties: students rush to jobs or home after class, there is little time or space for informal meetings of students; they are just not used to regarding the College as a place where they might hang out or linger for study and discussion. For this reason we have to lean heavily on regular class periods in which the instructor is available simply as a resource person: in which one group of students might be working in the classroom independently, others going to the library, another consulting with the instructor in his office.
The assignments for such groups might include anything from a written report to a group-study of the ideas presented in a lecture—i.e. students pooling their notes, discussing together what the major issues were, writing up questions they would like to have brought up in the next lecture period. A group of students could be given a reading list with a list of questions to be reflected-on with the help of the reading, and a brief essay written by each student or as a collective effort. In relation to all this, Herb Nechin’s suggestion about integrating some kind of work-study into the curriculum seems valuable.
These reflections lead me to wonder if a freshman-sophomore year could be devised which would have as an initial aim the undoing of what has been done educationally to most of our students: a de-toxification program which might open up on a much broader basis the kinds of discoveries about thinking and learning which come to a few students anyway, to most not soon enough, if ever. I’m thinking now of a freshman-sophomore curriculum on interdisciplinary lines, but also a kind of learning center, a place, with lounges, offices, reading-room, snack bar, classrooms, counseling staff, tutorial center, typewriters—a place where some kinds of informal extra-curricular relationships might develop among students and staff; and where educational experimentation might happen under less grinding and negative physical conditions. (We were lucky to get the Rap Room for our program, with its proximity to the Writing Center and its relative flexibility of seating; but the Rap Room was also a place in spite of which we managed to work—either foul air or bitter cold, students crowded elbow to elbow, poor acoustics, etc.) The fact is that the environment of education matters. The University recognizes this in providing elegantly furnished and carpeted classrooms and lounges for its Ph.D. students; but it sees nothing amiss in having freshmen go through the testing and trauma and acclimation of their first contact with higher education under conditions often close to those of the subway in which many of them spend two hours daily.
Along with a place, of course, is needed a plan—an evolving, flexible, thoughtful design for returning the students to their right relationship to the content of a college education, for giving them basic tools they have been denied, and for making available some of the aspects of college education which we took for granted—learning from one’s peers being the first. Such a plan might begin with a freshman program such as we are now experimenting with, and continue into the sophomore year with facilities such as the Writing Center, the Reading Lab, counseling, opportunities for team-teaching and small-group learning. (It’s ironic that we reserve the seminar and tutorial situation for upperclassmen who have already shown their ability to “get through”, when the advantages of these situations for freshmen would seem to be enormous and hardly explored.)
So much for the idea of small groups, and the freshman year in general. As a Basic Writing teacher I found the simple fact of knowing what my students were reading and discussing in their other classes enormously useful. A writing teacher has the chance to be (and by nature must be) truly interdisciplinary in a program like this. I found myself able to remind students of parallels or contradictions in what they were hearing and reading in their other course—to try to make connections, not as a specialist, but as a human being. Our work with language was able to center on words used and defined (and sometimes left undefined) in lectures—and to show how words get used in specialized contexts and also more loosely. I wish that more use could have been made of the fiction assigned for Political Science and Psychology in those classes; we talked about them a good deal in the writing classes, and writing assignments were based on them; but I’m not sure how the students really connected Solzhenitsyn or Orwell with the content of the Political Science lectures and text; this ought to be easily remedied in the History-Literature section next semester.
The visits of core course teachers to the skills classes seems to have been a success from the students’ point of view. I know that Ivo Duchacek’s visits to Jean Wiles’ College Skills class were noted by many students as a valuable aspect of the program for them. I was very glad to have Herb Nechin come to my classes after we had discussed I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and give a psychologist’s answers to the questions about fantasy, madness and the difference between the two which were troubling many students.
Thus I would feel that group or team teaching might best be done across skills-content lines. However, there were moments when during the 9-11 (core course) hours students got a glimpse—anxiety-producing to some—of one of the things we tend to take for granted: that professors can disagree, that argument is possible between mutually respecting peers, that no one “discipline” is “right”. The student who criticized the staff for tolerating dissent among themselves but not being really open to argument from students had a point. We are still caught in the hierarchical vision of the university; we do know more (about certain things) than the students; but we all, I believe, need to listen much more carefully to both answers and questions from students. (My situation in the lecture-room made me aware of how much I, in my own classroom, and most teachers, even the best, need to listen better, to pause perhaps longer after throwing out a question, to look more carefully for the less obviously hand-waving student who may be gathering courage to voice her/his thoughts in public.)
I think we all felt that a major gap in the program was the lack of a clearly-defined counselor-student-teacher relationship. Until halfway through the semester students were unclear as to which of the three counselors they “belonged” to since all three had been present at group sessions; teachers were unsure which counselor to contact if a student was in trouble; two of the counselors felt, with some justice, that they had not been sufficiently involved with the planning of the program; one counselor had an unduly high ratio of students in his caseload. It’s worth noting that some students may have been encouraged to hang on in and keep struggling by the very nature of the program; by the fact that Herb Nechin made himself available as a psychologist, that Jim Watts and Ivo Duchacek both made it their business to know students personally, lend them books, and give them individual attention, that we as a staff could compare notes on certain students and see them “in the round”. Still, I doubt that teachers, however concerned and humane, can substitute for a trained person who exists beyond the academic framework as the student’s advocate and mediator in his relationship with the college and with his personal problems.
Finally, two major impressions. One is that the increased ethnic and social diversity of the students in our basic skills courses makes wider and wider demands on our strategies as teachers. The highly-motivated but ill-prepared black student, the Asian student channeled toward the sciences and with severe English-language deficiencies, the alienated 2d or 3d generation white student from parochial school, may all be the first of their families to enter college, may all have problems with writing and with college-level reading; but their relationship to almost everything has been different—to America, to family, to the educational system, to the police, to the Standard English dialect. Openness and emotional accessibility differ, ways of surviving in a classroom differ, responses to stimuli differ. And of course the three examples above are crude thumbnail sketches which fail to suggest the variety of individuals, the multiplicity beneath the stereotype. They are useful only in suggesting that as teachers trying to reach these young men and women we have many lifestyles and assumptions to consider. When we speak the word “childhood” in a C.C.N.Y. classroom in 1972 we may unconsciously be evoking a period that took place in Puerto Rico, North Carolina, Israel, Cyprus, Hongkong, Queens, Haiti, Germany or 125th Street. The richness of this variety is staggering, the problems it presents complex. I remember when we used to talk, in SEEK, of the problems of being a white teacher in almost all-black classroom; now we are all teachers of whatever race in classrooms where “identity” is kaleidoscopic. Some of our students have problems of motivation; others have suffered the put-downs of racist classrooms; others rated as “good” (read passive, non-provocative, sedulous) students in not-very-good schools find it difficult to trust us when we ask them to write of their real feelings or to risk wrong answers. How we work with these and many more strands to design a writing course that can liberate these diversified groups into control of the American language and genuine articulation of their needs, becomes a more and more challenging question.
My second impression is of having worked with a remarkable group of people—committed, open to criticism, self-critical, caring and intellectually rigorous. I do not think that anyone on the staff was prepared to see the quality of his/her intellectual domain sold short, nor was anyone prepared to sacrifice students by letting them “get by” or passing them cynically into courses they could not really cope with. It seems to me that with all our self-doubts, our sense of at best partial success, the mistakes we made, we did implicitly work for and achieve this balance between concern for the students and concern for the material (which is of course ultimately concern for the students as well.) It is this kind of commitment to standards that is needed—teachers who are prepared to re-examine old and cherished methods, to abandon familiar approaches, to forego ego-trips, in a new and untested situation such as Open Admissions—in other words, the standards of the College will be most rigorously maintained in future by teachers who really teach. The very fact of working in a group such as this was for us all, I think, a source of morale and stimulation, and is a strong argument for the development of more group-teaching situations.
I want finally to express the gratitude of all of us to the Writing Center Staff; in particular, Myrtle Bates, the Director, and Bill Mitchell, the technical assistant for audio-visual aids. Both contributed time, energy and a quality of cooperation which helped us survive the early weeks of logistical confusion. Myrtle Bates generously opened the Rap Room to us for lectures and staff meetings and graciously bore with the heavy traffic we created in the Writing Center. Bill Mitchell made possible the taping of sessions, the showing of films and transparencies, the collating of Xeroxed materials, and the running-off of ditto copies. Both of them did far more than cooperate with us—they were the practical backbone of the program.
Adrienne Rich, Co-ordinator
July 1972