Who Needs A Thesis?

One day I was commenting on a set of drafts and I noticed a couple of the students were confusing "our" for "are." Since I was teaching a college class in writing, this shook me up pretty badly. I had grown used to the students who had no clue between "their," "there," and "they're" and would, in fact, use them interchangeably. And I won't even venture down the road of the comma. It was one of those times I went outside and smoked a bunch of cigarettes because I had three sections of 23 students and the drafts were six pages. For those inclined to shun math, that's 414 pages of mostly horrid writing to read and comment on in three days.

As a teacher, I spent most of my time reading and commenting on drafts because it never does a lick of good to comment on something that's been graded. I gave each student a typed, single-spaced critique that was between one-half and a full page. If for no other reason than to model writing for them. I know they read them, but few applied the suggestions I made because it would "be hard," as they often told me. My comments asked them to become engaged in their writing by thinking about it; I didn't state that directly by the way. They would tell me, "but Mr. Avery, to do what you're suggesting we'd have to think and that would be hard." Thinking is hard for those who have never been asked to do it on a regular basis. 

The "essay" these students were working on was an argument backed by research. Okay, it was supposed to be an argument backed by research, but in reality they were struggling to communicate a cogent summary of what they perceived as " the problem."  And, for good measure, they chucked in a quote from something they found on the internet which, most of the time, had nothing to do with anything else. 

The first two weeks of the ten week course had been focused on defining a problem and very few survived. I remember one student who wanted to "write on" homeschooling, but all she could come up with for a problem concerning homeschooling was that "there wasn't one." In my mind, I looked at her and said "Clearly." In real life I tried to engage her in a discussion about her interests and current affairs and it was a dismal exercise. The overwhelming majority of students have absolutely no interests they can discuss with anyone other than a peer. Although a few hardy souls did think that writing about being stoned while stoned would be clever until they received the grade. Then the grade reflected my anti-drug stance. Again, in my mind, "Clearly." I said that silently, a lot, back then.

Most of the first two weeks were spent telling students they would not write about abortion, the death penalty, teen pregnancy, teen obesity, animal rights, or any other topic that is really a moral debate and has no real solution other than imposing your will onto a group of people. We wanted them to work through a problem by researching it and presenting a viable solution. A much more useful skill in adult life don't you think? Besides any fool with a modem can go onto the internet and buy an essay on the aforementioned topics. Which, sadly, more than a few did thinking that whatever they turned in would be gratefully received and given their usual "good" grade. Few understood that "good" translates into "C," and plagiarism is not tolerated at all.

The other big hurdle was to get the student to quickly learn the difference between summary and analysis. A largely insurmountable task. They had never been asked to think. Not even in the A.P. classes. Or the kids who bragged about being in A.P. were lying to me. Or, more likely, the A.P. kids who had stumbled into thinking were off at Yale or Northwestern, or some other top-tier school. Honestly the only difference I saw between the A.P. kids and the rest were the A.P. kids understood the comma and the rest were far more interesting and easier to get thinking outside the box. The A.P. kids were prima donnas who were set up to take a huge fall once they walked into a classroom with real academic standards.

By the way, I taught at the University of California, Irvine and these are your kids I'm writing about.

I taught for 18 years in this area and I only saw the problem get worse, especially after Bush passed the "No Child Left Behind" gag. As a society we are as clueless about education as Mr. Bush and the men who came before him. We are as clueless as our children. So we standardized it, which meant giving multiple choice exams that measure nothing more than how well a child has memorized, or, even more scary, how well they can guess. While I was a student at the University of Minnesota I took a course in urban problems. There were two text books. One by a former Nixon advisor and the other by a liberal. The professor was a socialist. I never opened a book. When the test came and the question said "According to Banfield," I chose the conservative answer. "According to Ryan" got the liberal answer, and, well...you can guess the last one I hope.

I dropped out of the University of Minnesota because I wasn't getting an education. I was just getting a degree there. Getting a degree is insanely easy. And that previous sentence holds the key to improving education. We tend to see it as a product, the degree, that will help us get a better job. Consider this, I quit teaching six years ago and the technology level of the classroom was chalk.

Education never had anything to do with getting a "job." And until we realize that, we are just going to keep dumbing down society. Our overly simplistic view of education is the single biggest reason we have fallen behind China, Japan, and all of Europe.