Teacher Evaluation of the Program
School: Westmoor High School
Teacher: Michael Kramer
School Year: 2001–2002
Overview
I have always felt a serious disconnect between the high school experience and the reality of going to college. For too many of my students at Westmoor High School, high school is primarily a social experience and not an academic experience. Many of my high school students do not take school seriously, they cut classes with impunity, and lying and cheating do not require a second thought, much less a serious discussion. And yet, when I ask my seniors how many are going to college next year, everyone raises their hands, except those few going into the armed forces.
I have attempted to change these attitudes by showing my students newspaper articles and statistics which show that year after year, more than 50% of entering freshmen cannot pass either the basic math exam or the basic English placement test, and therefore have to take remedial math and/or English. And other statistics show that the dropout rate at CSU campuses and two-year colleges ranges from 30%–50%. These facts and studies make a lasting, permanent impression of approximately ten minutes and then it’s back to “Where’s the party tonight?”
In conclusion, for me this has been a very valuable program. It has helped me to better understand the transition from high school to college, and given me strategies and techniques for better preparing my students. The battle is far from won, however. I cannot emphasize enough the difference between high school culture (party now, and I’ll deal with college when I get there) and college (3 absences and you’re out of the class). I want to support and encourage much more circulation between high school and college-level teachers—the more dialogue, discussion, sharing, interaction and problem solving amongst us, the better. The CAPI program is an enormous stride in the right direction.
Do you think your students have benefited from your collaborations in the CAPI project?
I was enormously delighted when Jenna Palmer from San Francisco State University arrived in my classroom last September. Jenna provided the living, breathing, teaching link between the high school experience and college. She teaches these very same students reading and writing in their freshmen year of college.
And Jenna knows a wide variety of strategies for teaching writing, for example, to students who neither know how to write well, nor consider it something important to learn. With her guidance I was able to implement lesson plans on prepositions that actually worked, as well as others with respect to conjunctions and subject/verb agreement, to give two other examples.
More importantly, after each reading assignment (e.g., Love Story, The Color of Water, The Things They Carried), we crafted an essay related to the reading. The essay assignments were generally more complex and more sophisticated than what I had previously required of them.
Which, if any, of your teaching practices have changed or been influenced by working with your SFSU collaborator? What was the most useful/valuable practice you implemented in your classroom?
Here is one example. We read in class four essays about television and its influence on young viewers. Two essays argued that television programming containing violence DOES affect subsequent behavior of young viewers, and two essays argued that there is no plausible connection between television and subsequent aggressive or violent behavior by young viewers. Each essay contained facts and summaries of various studies on this subject. After reading the essays each student had to choose one of these thesis statements:
- Violent television programming does affect the behavior of young viewers.
- Television programming containing violence does not affect young viewers.
The students had to write a 5 page essay supporting either one of these theses or points of view and substantiate their arguments with details and facts from the essays they read. furthermore—and this is something I had never attempted in a regular English class—they had to write a rebuttal paragraph. They had to write one paragraph in which they anticipated at least one of the opposing arguments, stated that argument, and rebutted it.
Results were mixed or course. Some students wrote the essay very well, including the rebuttal paragraph. Some students did satisfactorily, and some students did not include the rebuttal at all.
What can you suggest as further methods of improving student proficiency for entering the CSU campuses?
Not answered.
Did the Diagnostic Writing Service (DWS) help you or your students? Why or why not?
I’m not sure what you mean by the Diagnostic Writing Service. If you mean the reading comprehension test I gave my students before and after, no it did not help in any way. Firstly, most regular English students dislike tests like this and tend to ignore them. The only way I got them to take the test seriously was to tell them that it was part of their final grade, which in fact was not true. I do not even know how they did the second time they took the test.
What other assistance or involvement would you like to have from San Francisco State University?
Here's the assistance I would like from S.F. State. Jenna Palmer spent many hours in my classroom, sometimes actively teaching or assisting, and other times passively observing. A lot of observation was unnecessary and, I think, a waste of her time and energy. What I need is a teacher from S.F. State who teaches entering freshman to come to my class approximately four times during the school year to talk to my students about what is expected of them at the college level, model a few exercises or examples of essays, and explain the consequences to students who are unable or unwilling to meet these standards. In other words, I want my students to take preparation for college seriously while they are still in high school. Otherwise nothing will have changed and we will have the same low performances and low achievements as always.
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