reading, writing & 'rithmetic

I read a blogger's response to a Globe and Mail article about Canadian universities' responses to incoming students who lacked basic English and Math skills.

The 'doctor' writes:
The "then" "than" issue is mentioned, as are concerns about organisation. I would add that students often fail at basic comprehension. Summarise? That they can often do. But assess importance of content? Mmmm, not so much.

Further examples drawn from my own students over the last 4 years. Even though they all had 80's in maths, and I flunked out of grade 11 algebra 3 times... they cannot understand how the following is true:

(.5x + x) = y Therefore: x = (2/3y). Alternately 1.5x = y Therefore x = (2/3y)

This is a fundamental point that they just can't get, and it only gets worse from there.

The blog entry ends with a call for some kind of testing to ensure students are prepared for the rigors of academia, but not for a universal SAT or GRE type of test.

Then I had the Globe and Mail's version of the same story forwarded to me, and found the differences between the two perspectives interesting.

The Globe and Mail focuses on the effect this phenomena has on schools - how the number of students accessing writing centres are up and how some schools are targeting students who lack skills with intervention to keep them succeeding in school. This sounds a lot like what we're doing here. We have an early warning system to target students in trouble in core Math and English courses, and our department has been bending over backwards trying to find ways of supporting students who are in danger of flunking out.

As a teacher, I see this all the time. There's a huge difference in some of my classes between student skill levels, and here I think the problem is exacerbated by the difference between public and private school educations.

As a parent though, I also have serious doubts about my own children's preparation for post-secondary education. The Globe & Mail article notes: "I have seen students present high school English grades in the 90s, who have not passed our simple English test. And I don't know why," said Ann Barrett, managing director of the University of Waterloo's English language proficiency program. I can attest that good grades in English (even if all my children were attaining them) are not necessarily indicators of skills in writing, let alone reading, comprehension, ability to analyze, and all the other skills that you need to develop in order to write coherent prose.

The topic seems oh-so-relevant today, as I work my way through the first batch of writing my students have probably ever done at the post-secondary level, and I generate comments like, "The assignment requires you to do something you haven't done here" or "Quotations are dropped into the essay without any connection to your own words" and so on. These are those basic skills that I assumed students would have, and I was very shocked the first term that I taught to find out that I needed to teach all these things because many of them didn't know how to do these things.

And now I have to teach my kids to do this, 'cause their teachers aren't.