My bilingual economics students are doing a budget project. The project assumes they have graduated from college with a degree of their choice. One line item needed for their final paper is student loan payments. I told the community college grads to put $150/month and the four-year grads to put $250/month. We broke down the details a little, discussing how you can pay for longer and pay less each month but will then pay more overall, for example.

At first, they were all saying, “oh, no, I won’t have loans. I am going to get financial aid.” These are all seniors with one exception. They just expected to be handed the money, no doubt in many cases because they will be the first member of their family to attend college. They don’t know how it works. Loans are an expected part of financial aid, I explained, and I had picked an average amount, assuming around $20,000 being paid over 10 years.

The loan put one kid into the red and may do the same for other kids in class. This is a paper exercise. The exercise reflects real life, though, and this push, push, push for college seems a pretty cruel thing to do to a kid who can’t write an intelligible English paragraph. U.S. test scores suggest we have a lot of these kids, not all of them in bilingual classes. We need to create more realistic options or at least bridge programs for these kids.

Banks try not to loan money to people who will be unable to make their house payments. (Or should try!) They ought to extend the same courtesy to young adults whose education loans are highly unlikely to end in a degree.

This year, I taught two bilingual classes in a public high school. I’ve written bits about this before. These kids are all planning to go to college. Many are poor. Most lack the language skills necessary to write an English-language essay. Few are ready to hold an English-language discussion with a professor. A number would struggle with a five-minute conversation about the weather.

We need to stop pretending that these kids are just like their middle-class counterparts. High schools and colleges need to provide them with realistic information. I tell my students to try to take just one or two courses the first semester until they get a feel for college coursework, knowing a full load is likely to sink almost all my bilingual students. I tell them that they don’t have to finish in two years since they may need to work on English while they take their courses.

A few of these bilingual students will do fine in college. Students who learned English in Syria before their families fled may be ready to tackle a four-year institution. But others are about to be sent to drown. I think of one high-school graduate who failed to get through a law enforcement program, ending up with college-loan debt totaling around $25,000.

College costs so much money, time and effort. We push college because the pay-off from that time, money and effort may be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more over a lifetime. But realism is required. The mantra “go to college” needs to be accompanied by a solid assessment of student skills and prospects.

Alana has edged into her thirties now, I think. Her eldest child attends a middle school where I once worked.  The family’s first language is Polish which is the language mostly spoken in the home, though I’m sure the kids lapse into English. Alana has been taking community college courses for a few years. She intended to be an ultrasound technician but needed various remedial courses such as algebra first. She also took the ultrasound prerequisites. Unfortunately, there are limited slots in the ultrasound program and those slots are first allocated to residents of the county. She lives in a northern county without an ultrasound program and has been driving an hour south to school. Alana can’t get into the program she wants, despite her remedial and preparatory work.

She’s studying medical coding now. Thanks to an Obama initiative, all medical records are supposed to go online and her work prospects are very good. Coding won’t pay nearly as well as her original goal, though, and she had to take about a year of now-unnecessary coursework while raising three children and managing her household. Her husband’s a trucker and a great guy, but trucker’s wives often steer the ship alone.

She should have been warned about her prospects for getting into that ultrasound program. She should have had more help in making her choices. We are telling all these students they need to go to college, but who is helping them when they take our advice? Colleges too often do a poor job of helping 1st generation college-attendees to negotiate the path to college success.

In the recent past, I have taught bilingual students and regular students. Bilingual students have not yet passed a test of English literacy necessary to enter regular classes. I observe that it seems much easier to motivate my bilingual students. No doubt many factors are in play.

Did Albus Dumbledore do reviews?

Here is what I think: in the public schools, Snape would be clobbered. His classes do not create an environment of respect and rapport, he uses dubious questioning and discussion techniques, allows limited student participation, and discourages discussion. Students are intellectually engaged only partially and assessment is often unkind and unexpected. He does not demonstrate flexibility and responsiveness to students. Response to student misbehavior is repressive, or disrespectful of student dignity. Classroom interactions are characterized by sarcasm, put-downs, or conflict.

I took those phrases from a framework for teaching rubric.

I’m certainly not recommending sarcasm, putting students on the spot, or repressive classroom atmospheres. Classrooms should be safe places to take intellectual risks. Snape was no model to be used by any aspiring teacher.

But I bet those Hogwart’s students all knew their potions at the end of the school year.

In the high school where I am teaching, I doubt most students would know their potions at year’s end. While a minority would have have mastered the material, and many would know a fair number of potions, a few would know almost nothing. They might be unable to tell a mandrake root from a Riddikulus Boggart. Almost everybody would pass anyway.

Food for thought.

School improvement happened today, complete with free coffee and doughnuts. I enjoyed my breakout session on cultural sensitivity. I’m sort of cultural senstitivitied to death by now, as any recent teacher with a bilingual certification might be. We do a lot of coursework that revolves around that topic. But the discussion was invigorating.

What did I learn? America needs more boxes for one thing. The multiracial often feel lost when they have to check the box on all those official forms. The melting pot’s contents are pretty liquid by now. We are often unclear on the difference between race and ethnicity, too, as demonstrated by the very pale fellow from Spain who was told when he first entered the U.S. that checking the “Hispanic” box had been a mistake, he should check caucasian instead. The next time, though, another customs agent told him firmly that caucasian was the wrong box to check since people from Spain are Hispanic. Other teachers talked about the identity struggles of their own children, students with Hispanic mothers and Polish fathers. One teacher pointed out that many of those statistics used to show that certain racial groups are outperforming others are probably flawed by the number of participants picking “white” instead of other options that might also fit.

A musing I never discussed: Another possibility is that America needs fewer boxes. I’m not sure we need our racial boxes. We are using them to provide social remediation for groups that have historically struggled, but we might be better off with educational boxes. The fact that a student’s parents never finished high school is far more important that the ethnicity of those parents. My children are likely to have much more in common with an African-American financial analyst’s kids than they do with a white fast food worker’s kids.

(That last sentence makes me uncomfortable. I am getting sick of all the digs against people who did not enter or finish college. We need to respect the people who fix the sink and deliver our packages. Not everyone belongs in college and some people prefer physical work.)

I understand why we want those boxes. The information’s not useless. But I wonder if the boxes perpetuate the idea that race somehow matters. After all, why would we keep asking people to check the box if race was unimportant? If we ever hope to be a truly racially colorblind society, I believe the boxes will have to go.

My last post talked about the resentment created by having to actually memorize new vocabulary for Spanish class. I want to write a defense of those students later, but for now I’d like to relate a short vignette:

A musing related to yesterday’s Jeopardy post:

Teachers are told to stimulate higher-order, critical thinking, to ask “high-level” questions. It’s in a rubric for teachers that I have here. Students are to be participating and demonstrating “true discussion.” I’ll say upfront that when this discussion happens, teaching’s the best profession in the world. Nothing is more fun than watching students make connections.

Here’s the fact that seems to get lost lately: Students can only do this when they have a body of knowledge to draw upon.

We are not allowing enough time for learning facts. We are even discouraging learning facts, as we teach retrieval skills. Various educational texts now emphasize the need to shift from traditional memorization to fact retrieval. Teaching Spanish this year brought home to me the flaw in that retrieval approach. Retrieval has its uses, but you can’t learn anything without storing it in memory somewhere. Some of our students have reached the point, though, where they don’t expect to have to retain new knowledge. When you send them home with twenty-some words to learn over the weekend, they view that as some incredibly unreasonable burden.

They then say things like, “Maybe I’ll just get Rosetta Stone over the summer,” pretty sure that the magic Rosetta stone thing will make learning Spanish easy. They are looking for the fast fix, the easy out. Only you can’t learn a language without memorizing thousands of words and a great number of concepts as well. But that’s work and many are relatively unfamiliar with academic effort.

Unfortunately, nowadays you can write a paper filled with facts that you never learned and never will learn, all taken from the internet and quoted or rephrased, It’s easy. I wish I could add that many students have become masters at rephrasing internet information, but I can’t. Most don’t have the necessary vocabulary.

How much vocabulary is actually learned by playing Jeopardy? I’m not sure but I do know that kids work for candy. I was flinging sugar all over the place today. The blue and pink chewy Jolly Ranchers are the clear favorites, but Jolly Ranchers are a general win.