Incoming College Freshmen

Is This the End of Reading is this week’s article summary and it focuses on how academically ill prepared many incoming college freshmen are.

It may seem odd to start our school year – we’re an elementary school after all --  with an article on college students, yet when I read this article over the summer, I thought about how good teaching is good teaching regardless of the grade.

As I discussed in preplanning, students will rise to the occasion when their teachers provide:

• Kindness: fair, understanding, compassionate, perspective-taking
• Optimism: high expectations, encouraging, believe in them
• Inclusion: individuality and diversity celebrated
• Calmness: maintain equanimity (regulate emotions) even in stressful times
• Clearness: consistent classroom structure/routine, clear instructions/explanations

Or our mission in a nutshell: we cherish the childhood of our students as we simultaneously prepare them for the future by developing in them a strong academic and character foundation.

The article states that all students from early childhood through graduate school learn more when they are challenged with meaningful school work, are held to high expectations, and have strong, trusting relationships with teachers and peers.

I so enjoy working in an elementary school because we get to shape our students, so they can eventually enter college poised to learn and thrive.

Thank you all for such a smooth first full week of school!

Joe

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Students are coming to college less able and less willing to read. If you design a freshman class based on the assumption that students will do the readings, you’ll get nowhere. If you make it easier, and go over what they should have read in class, students will participate. But the are you really helping them, develop the skills and habits needed for college.

What has caused this? The symptoms are students’ weak vocabularies and background knowledge; limited reading stamina and ability to synthesize, summarize, and write; fragmented and distracted thinking; freezing when given challenging assignments (a 750-word essay feels long); and not seeing the point of doing much work outside of class.

Why do so many students have these deficiencies? Was it having smartphones in their pockets since middle school, endless drivel on social media, reduced academic expectations during the pandemic, and facing a deeply troubling future?

We shouldn’t put all the blame on Covid-19. Before that, observers noticed an increasingly transactional approach to schoolwork, with students assigned short passages rather than books, social studies and science downgraded as students prepared for high-stakes math and ELA standardized tests.

“There was no room for my creative side at all in high school,” said a student who studied hard and got good grades at a top-tier school. “Reading has to be work. It has to have a grade assigned to it. I was largely deterred from reading for entertainment. I almost never read any books for fun.”

And there was a watering down of academic demands and loosening of deadlines, with many students getting good grades for mediocre work and heading to college unprepared for its demands – especially writing research papers.

Running parallel to this has been an increase in social isolation, loneliness, and anxiety, with many young people almost constantly on their cellphones, worrying about how their online profiles look to others, skimping on in-person interactions. When kids encounter stress and difficulty, they lack skills and a support system.

Students say that was does make a difference in lifting their motivation point to the same thing: having someone who is invested in their success.

That means rigorous and meaningful work, high expectations, and relationships – in K-12 schools and college.

“Students will read,” said Chris Hakala, a psychology professor at Springfield College, “if they know why they are doing it and time is taken to help them begin to develop an approach that is effective.”