Term Papers

They are in, at least the ones that are in on time, in a heap that will dominate my life for the next week. The students are (theoretically) advanced English language learners who can take the freshman comp transfer course next semester if they pass mine.

This moment at the end of the semester always reveals my teaching mission in its full array, sublime to ridiculous. I teach immigrant kids who have spent a few years in Oakland high schools, learning very little except how to text, how to highlight, copy and paste from the Internet, and how to be rude to teachers. Also rich kids who have washed up in the academic systems of their native countries, whose parents send them to America with the idea that if at least they can learn English, they will be employable at something. ("I call home, my father ask me how is your English?" wrote one, poignantly, in the first paper of the year, the personal experience assignment. "I say, good enough get a job in China, can I come home now?") Some of these actually turn out to be late bloomers or kids with learning disabilities who blossom in the more flexible and forgiving environment of an American community college.

I also teach people who will be in graduate school at UC five years from now, Japanese journalists seeking out a gritty, authentic American setting in which to hone their English, Tibetan monks so they can minister to California Buddhists, and the people who may one day be running Burma, if the democratic change of government they hope for allows them to return.

One of the lows this semester is the kid who turned up for his student-teacher conference with a "draft" of his final paper that I could see at first glance was copied from somewhere, and Googling the first sentence found to be from the Huffington Post. We talked about what he might have enough interest in to write his own paper about, and came up with basketball. My office mate, overhearing us and moved with sympathy, found and printed out an interesting article about how cultural differences affect basketball and the U.S. in China. My student and I agreed that he could find some more information and write a paper about that. At a second conference a week later, he hadn't been able to find anything. Setting our sights lower, since time was getting short, I suggested just finding out about the Chinese players in the NBA. This morning, the due date of the paper, I clicked open my email at 7:25 to find an email from this student, sent at 12:20 a.m.; since he hasn't been able to find any information about Chinese players in the NBA, he proposes to write his paper about "Animosity between China and Taiwan." It wasn't one of the papers that came in today, but the title was copied and pasted from somewhere, retaining its original font, so I am not very optimistic.

But then I have the student from (former Soviet) Georgia who connects current American approaches to education to their philosphical roots, Hirsch and his Core Knowledge curriculum to Locke's empiricism, the intentional learning movement to Plato's dialogues, in prose that is all the more charming for its occasional quaintness of word order. And a paper dear to my heart, I didn't tell this student my opinions on the matter, honest and truly, about how high-stakes standardized testing encourages dishonesty at all levels of an educational system, arguments backed up by research and some entertaining Chinese anecdotes.

So now, to work.