-
The Impossible Dream
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
- Additional Information
38 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p theimpossibledream I went to an all-boys prep school, where the assumption was that all its graduates would go on to college. There was no vocational or technical track. When I entered as a fourteen-year-old freshman in 1968 (two years before the Beatles broke up, alas), the teachers wasted no time in orienting us to our objective: in fewer than fifteen hundred days we would be shoving off for a college or university, where we would excel, making our family, friends, and alma mater proud, and then we would go on to fulfilling and prosperous careers, which would enable us to remit checks to the school’s alumni association as gestures of gratitude for the superb secondary education we had received. By senior year I was equivocal about going to college, but there was that presumption of its being the next logical step; and besides, all my friends were doing it. Like them, I was superbly prepared for higher education: four years of math, four of Spanish, four of English, four of history, plus biology, chemistry , and physics. I applied to five colleges and was accepted by all of them. I enrolled as a chemistry major. Then I saw something in the newspaper about chemists and brain cancer, so I moderated my major to biochemistry, feeling I could thereby escape contact with some of the more toxic organic compounds. But then, just as I was poised to leave for college, I changed my major again, to marine biology, when I discovered that the curriculum required a semester’s sojourn at the school’s marine lab in the Virgin Islands. I had a rough start in college, perhaps because I presumed it would be easy. So, after a mediocre first semester, I doubled down, putting in twenty hours of study for my chemistry tests and a few hours less for biology, which came easier to me. The Impossible Dream p 39 Through it all I worked evenings in a funeral home, doing my homework in the casket showroom when business was slow. I pushed myself so hard that I wound up at the doctor’s office, where he told me I was suffering from stress. At the tender age of eighteen! But still I pushed on, year after year, and finished with a flourish: a 4.0 gpa my last three semesters. Now, I tell this story not to extol myself as a model student (I wasn’t: I got a D in my first college physics course. I also once fed a Big Mac to an immense sea anemone that lived in one of the bio labs), but rather to describe the experience of someone who was well prepared for college, understood what was involved, was able to improve when his grades flagged, and who availed himself of extra help when he needed it. So what does one do with the opposite type of student: one who is not prepared for college, does not understand the work, cannot extricate himself from the mire of failing or near-failing grades, and doesn’t go for extra help because he doesn’t know what questions he wants to ask? It wasn’t long after I began teaching college that I was finally confronted with such a student. I tried every trick, repeatedly spoke to the student to get at the root of the problem, and consulted counselors for their insights. Dustin was a conundrum. What’s more, he was a conundrum who had almost no interpersonal skills: rail-thin and gangly, whenever I spoke to him he’d look down at the floor, his large brown eyes laden with a one-two whammy of haplessness and palpable sadness. When he replied, in short bursts of non sequiturs, he’d continue to stare down at the floor. I wanted to take him by the shoulders, give a good shake, and say, “Dustin, look at me.” But I didn’t. I was afraid I might shake him to pieces. My school has an open admissions policy. For a college teacher, this is the ultimate double-edged sword. On the one hand, everybody gets a chance to show that he or she can do college-level work, no matter the complications of their life’s road. On the other, clearly unprepared and marginally capable [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:50...