Acceleration

I've spent the last three days at a conference on "acceleration," our new community college buzz-word. There is some research indicating that under-prepared community college students can do as well or better with less remediation rather than more. There is a push to apply this principle to ESL, my field, which I find counter-intuitive.

Achieving academic proficiency in a second language is not really remediation, for one thing. Thinking of it as such might even be regarded as a subtle form of imperialism, since it is most often required of people from less powerful countries or communities who must establish squatters' rights in a dominant culture in order to improve their prospects. Certainly I couldn't do college-level work in any language but English, and neither could most other Americans. And plenty of long-established research suggests that it takes a number of years to get there.

My French, for instance, is probably more or less equivalent to my intermediate students' English. Suppose that I were a bit younger, found myself in a French-speaking country and wanted to get a university education there. I would have at least a few years of hard work to get ready for that, and would not be in any way served by an attempt to "accelerate" the process from a few years to one.

Anyway, after three days of sometimes inspirational and sometimes annoying pep talks, my conclusion is that, probably unbeknownst to the people actually running this conference, "acceleration" is a characteristically Californian spin on all the devastating budget cuts.

You see, it's actually good for the students to spend less time in school and reach their goals faster, and we can make this happen for them by working really, really hard and teaching really, really well, and oh, yes, spending less of the taxpayers' money, so it's a win-win all around.

People there were boasting about how teaching is their whole life, they need no other.

I tried this "teaching is my life" thing for a few years in the early '80's, during which time I drank a lot (something that was also in evidence after-hours at this conference). Then, throwing up on the compost heap in the back yard one night, I was blessed with a moment of realization that I stood poised in a window of opportunity between heavy drinking and truly addicted alcoholism, a good time to quit.

Without that hazy cloud of alcohol at the end of the day, "teaching is my life" no longer seemed quite so fulfilling, and I was forced to diversify my portfolio.