A Certain Uncertainty

As week eight of the semester comes to a close, bringing us past the halfway point, I find myself counting down my time left at the university. Seven weeks, or fourteen days of showing up plus 91 hours of online tutoring, encompass the entirety of my remaining commitment to this institution.

Quantified like that, I am not at all certain I will be able to do it.

And even though I have some anxiety about launching myself into the uncertain realm of freelancing, every day that I tutor makes me more certain that I do not want to tutor anymore. The futility of it is overwhelming me.

Here is one example:

A student came to me last week for help on her Basic Writing essay. Basic Writing is a developmental class, meaning it is designed to help students who did not score high enough to be technically eligible for college level courses gain the writing (or math) skills they need to take English Composition 1 (or a first-year level math course). The majority of students in Basic Writing courses fall into two categories: older students who have been out of school for a substantial amount of time and are rusty in their writing skills but can quickly refresh them, and younger students who had piss-poor high school experiences wherein they must have been simply passed forward because teachers did not know what to do with them despite their lack of some of the most basic writing skills.

The student I will discuss fell into the latter group. She could not have been more than 18 or 19 years old, and she was black—though that, I believe, was not the biggest factor in her lack of writing skills. Her two-page essay contained only a handful of punctuation marks: a few periods and a couple of misplaced commas. Whole paragraphs were formed from lengthy run-on sentences, and some passages were entirely unintelligible.

If you’re thinking that this student’s work was some kind of anomaly, you are wrong. Every semester, I see several essays in this shape. In my first semester tutoring, I saw an essay that was one long paragraph with no punctuation at all, continuing on for a page and a half.

I had the student read her paper aloud, as is my usual procedure for these appointments. Reading aloud is an excellent self-editing tool that helps a writer “hear” what is on the page and find missing words, awkward phrasing, and other small mistakes. She read in a monotone with barely a pause where sentences would normally end or begin or between paragraphs. Unlike most of my students, she never once paused where words were missing or extra or awkward.

When she finished reading, I asked her about the first sentence of her paper—which was actually three sentences run together with no defining punctuation. “Is this one sentence or more than one?”

She began to answer, tentatively, and looked at me for a reaction. “Yes?” Pause. “No?”

Now I understood how she had managed to graduate high school. She was not stupid; she tried to give the answer that I was looking for; she tried to read my face and reaction for clues to the right answer, regardless of whether she knew the substance of the answer. Very smart.

We spent our half hour session sussing out what constitutes a complete sentence, narrowing down the correct ways to define a sentence with punctuation, and identifying the full sentences in her first paragraph. I also briefed her on the difference between there/their/they’re and to/too/two, which she had used incorrectly in her paper. This last lesson she seemed genuinely grateful for. The words ‘their’ and ‘too’ were completely foreign to her; she said she had never seen either of them written down before.

This is a first-year college student who is paying (or whose parents are paying, more likely) for tuition, and who is expecting to eventually graduate with a diploma and some lucrative employment prospects. I believe I helped her a little last week, but she still has some very steep learning curves to deal with if she expects to continue her collegiate journey.

I used to think that everyone is capable of college-level learning. A long time ago, before I returned to college after dropping out in my first semester after high school, before I fully realized the almost impossibility of earning a paycheck that I could actually live on without a college degree, before I knew much about the churning bureaucracy intrinsic to institutions of higher learning, I thought everyone could and should pursue a college degree.

Now that I have been associated with this university for 12 years, from undergraduate studies to my current faculty position, I no longer hold that belief. Now I truly think that some people need a different path, some other trajectory for their life. And I think it is immoral for the university to continue to admit students with subpar skill levels just to take their money.

So I count down my last few weeks here, teach what I can to those who will listen, and try not to let the endless wave of struggling students pull me into a riptide of hopelessness. Perhaps one or two of them will remember something I’ve told them about comma use or homonyms or not relying blindly on Spell Check, and theirs will be a success story. I am certain, though, that my success story requires a different path.