Students Who Can’t Alphabetize: Students Who Were Killed

Students Who Can’t Alphabetize: Students Who Were Killed

A university alumni administrator in upstate New York mentioned, a few years ago, that the students sent to her as volunteers couldn’t alphabetize a list of names for an alumni mailing project. It may be, as someone associated with that university as an alumnus said, that the Internet often uses first names, so not being able to complete a first/second grade reading/writing skill makes more sense. I understand that line of reasoning, but a person at the university level needs to be able to infer the next step in a volunteer assignment and alphabetize by a person’s last name. I don’t care how pervasive some of the dumbing down the Internet has created. Figure it out!

An interesting aside to this issue is the fact that the university in question was once one of the flagship schools of that state’s university system. As an alumnus of that school said, “Everyone was smart here.” Indeed, the reputation of the school was such that it ranked at the top of ranking systems no matter how prejudiced a particular ranking system may have been. Readers are left to draw conclusions from the writing above.

I taught part time at a nearby community college to that state school for a number of years. I taught two classes, with most classes dealing with remedial reading. Incoming students had to take three entrance tests that measured competence in reading, writing, and mathematics: The three “Rs.” Someone observed that students who can’t perform basic reading tasks need not be in a college setting and there is more than passing truth to that observation. While some students may have learning difficulties, that is much different from students who don’t have the intellectual capacity to perform at the college level.

Out of the hundreds of students I taught over the years at that community college, there were many who could not perform at a basic college level. A good way of determining who could and could not perform was to present a class with an article and then examine that article from many different angles. What are the basic facts of the article… what is the major or main idea of the piece… what conclusions can be drawn from the piece… what ideas can be inferred from the reading selection… how can the ideas in the article be extended in a class discussion and what writing exercise could follow after the class discussion of the article?

As an example of a particular article, students almost universally liked an article I presented on Erik Erikson’s discussion of the developmental stages in life. A catch in the piece that caught on was how Erickson viewed those people who couldn’t master a particular developmental stage of life and were stuck having to deal with the issues of that failure in subsequent stages of life. Always, having to “grab” students’ attention and interest in articles and selections from texts was not always possible. Reading material is not universally entertaining, if entertainment is the actual objective of learning.

Mark was unusual in students who were in my community college classes. He sat in the front row of a classroom and raised his hand to answer the majority of questions I posed to the class. He was also an athlete whose home was in New York City, an anomaly for a community college student attending school upstate.

During a Saturday evening at the end of October of the year I had Mark in class, he and his best friend answered a text message at Mark’s home, went outside at the front door of Mark’s home, and were shot. Mark’s friend died almost immediately, and Mark died the following Wednesday in a nearby hospital.

I finally learned of Mark’s death several days later after a query to his department chairperson. I spoke next to the school’s security director with whom I had a good relationship. The security director had spoken to a detective from the NYPD, who told him that Mark and his friend were selling small quantities of marijuana, a drug that was illegal at that time in New York, and had likely been killed as a result of that dealing. The case is still unsolved.

I don’t know the exact reasons for Mark’s alleged involvement in marijuana sales, but it may have been a way for him to make some extra money. Mark’s death left many with a profound sense of grief. It was also ironic that a student with Mark’s ability would have died under these circumstances.