Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Literacy Among College Students Sorely Lacking

Rodney · 01-20-2006, 03:15 PM

I'm in a pretty good position to compare upper-division college literacy skills today against the skills of previous generations: I just went through a teaching credential program last year at the local UC, but got my bachelor's almost 30 years ago.

As a journalism major in the 70s, I made spare change by typing up and copy-editing term term papers for my fellow dormies. Even back then, I had to deal with papers from seniors who said things like "I never got the hang of paragraphs." There were plenty of misspellings, too. I worked mostly for upper division students, mainly science and engineering majors.

As an Ed student and teacher program participant in 2003-2004, I found the writing of most of my early-20-something classmates to be at about the same level of literacy I'd seen in college back in the '70s. Many of them weren't real good at stating and expanding a theme through a ten- or 15-page paper, but neither were the people I worked with 'way back when.

Now the delta: back in the '70s the public state college I went to was very blue-collar, but the public university I attended last year was very upper class. So I could say that a more-or-less privileged student in the '00s writes about as well as the blue-collar kids from the '70s, for what that's worth.

And they don't know the parts of speech anymore. In the credential program, our instructors kept encouraging us to take a class in linguistics after we graduated so we'd better understand the structure of language, and I thought, WTF? I know the structure of language just fine. Well, it turns out that the state of California stopped mandating instruction in the parts of speech in the '80s and '90s, so a bunch of students grew up knowing nothing about the technical aspects of grammar: no sentence diagramming, no discussion of dependent and independent clauses, the tenses, conjunctions, and so on. They were just supposed to pick everything up instinctually. Bad idea, and they've reinstated instruction in the parts of speech in recent years. But a lot of highly educated college grads -- some going off to the wonderful world of teaching -- never learned this stuff formally.

01-20-2006, 03:15 PM	#26 (permalink)
Rodney Observant Ruminant Location: Rich Wannabe Hippie Town	I'm in a pretty good position to compare upper-division college literacy skills today against the skills of previous generations: I just went through a teaching credential program last year at the local UC, but got my bachelor's almost 30 years ago. As a journalism major in the 70s, I made spare change by typing up and copy-editing term term papers for my fellow dormies. Even back then, I had to deal with papers from seniors who said things like "I never got the hang of paragraphs." There were plenty of misspellings, too. I worked mostly for upper division students, mainly science and engineering majors. As an Ed student and teacher program participant in 2003-2004, I found the writing of most of my early-20-something classmates to be at about the same level of literacy I'd seen in college back in the '70s. Many of them weren't real good at stating and expanding a theme through a ten- or 15-page paper, but neither were the people I worked with 'way back when. Now the delta: back in the '70s the public state college I went to was very blue-collar, but the public university I attended last year was very upper class. So I could say that a more-or-less privileged student in the '00s writes about as well as the blue-collar kids from the '70s, for what that's worth. And they don't know the parts of speech anymore. In the credential program, our instructors kept encouraging us to take a class in linguistics after we graduated so we'd better understand the structure of language, and I thought, WTF? I know the structure of language just fine. Well, it turns out that the state of California stopped mandating instruction in the parts of speech in the '80s and '90s, so a bunch of students grew up knowing nothing about the technical aspects of grammar: no sentence diagramming, no discussion of dependent and independent clauses, the tenses, conjunctions, and so on. They were just supposed to pick everything up instinctually. Bad idea, and they've reinstated instruction in the parts of speech in recent years. But a lot of highly educated college grads -- some going off to the wonderful world of teaching -- never learned this stuff formally.