Follow up to the unwanted kids

I have always enjoyed reading Thomas Sowell. He is one of the reasons I chose teaching when I needed to redefine what I did for a living.

I am reading A Personal Odyssey and realized that he would qualify as one of my bad boys. He had an attitude. He was very bright. He thought he knew it all (at times) but also had a vision of what he wanted and did whatever it took to get there.

He did not have an easy childhood (or early adulthood) – a family that did not value or understand education, emotionally abusive mother, poverty. He mentions that he never told anyone at the school what he was dealing with at home, so the school interpreted his behavior according to their own bias (he was difficult or lazy).

He entered college with a GED and managed to graduate from Harvard magna cum laude. So, he had the potential, the work ethic, the cajones to get there.

[Would he have accomplished as much if he had had a really good teacher in elementary or secondary school?]

When he began to teach (college) he was asked to dumb it down to reach the kids who couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work.

Page 127: Students are often in no position to judge “relevance” until long after the fact.

Page 149 - 150 (at Douglass College, late 1962, early 1963)

Within each class, there seemed to be growing differences – almost polarization – between those who were responding well to my teaching and those who were becoming progressively more alienated. The latter began going to the department chairman (a sociologist) with their unhappiness. Toward the end of the first semester, he and I had a talk about this in his office. Inside the door of his office was a chart showing enrolments in economics declining over the past several years, a trend which he was anxious to reverse.

“Tom,” he said, “the feeling I get from talking to a number of students is that you aim your course at the A and B students – and let the C and D students go to hell. We know the students exaggerate, so I wanted to get the real story from you.”

“No, I think that’s a pretty fair summary of my approach.”

“Well, the A and B students can pretty much get it without our help. It’s the people further down who need us.”

“That depends on how you conceive of education,” I said. “If education is just an accumulation of information, then of course the A and B students can read as well as we can. But if education is learning to systematize your thinking, then the A and B students need someone to help them as much as anyone else.”

"But you’ve got to ‘scoop lower’ and bring the C and D students up there. If the others get restless, give them some extra work to do to keep them quiet.”

“Look, we’re talking about C and D students as if they are born into the world with those letters on their foreheads. Anybody who can get into Douglass College can make a B in my course. The students you want me to concentrate on are those who don’t want to get an education. As for giving the good students something to keep them quiet, that would be treating those who come here for an education as a special problem!”

“Well, we’re a state university and we can’t just serve the elite. I think you ought to see Joe Talerico – maybe have several sessions on teaching with him – and get some pointers on teaching here. He’s been a very successful teacher.”

“I respect Joe as a teacher and as a person,” I said, “but I can no more adopt his methods than he could mine.”

“Well, what do you intend to do?”

“I don’t know.”

A few days later, I left my resignation in his mailbox. The next time I saw him, he seemed neither surprised nor dismayed.

Thomas Sowell had the courage to walk away from jobs at Douglass, Cornell, UCLA because they wanted him to lower his standards, dumb it down. I think I cave too often and should stand up to the administration and fail more. But I don’t.

I tell myself that the kids I teach have given up and I need to have them learn even a small amount so that they will try. I tell myself that part of it is to get them to do ANYTHING. But I look at the kids who were failing last semester but I got them to pass – and now they are doing the same NOTHING and have I accomplished anything?

Would it be different if I had A and B students in my classes?

Hard questions.