Reading Response #6 CP

After graduating high school or achieving a G.E.D., everyone has their own reasons for attending college. Some people continue their education straight out of high school on their parent’s dime, while others work and raise a family for fifteen years and are just now returning back to college to try and raise their “work value” for means of more profit. Whatever walk of life, Professor X who is an introductory English teacher to college writing, suggests in his/her article “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” which was published in The Atlantic online newspaper, that there are people “unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate”. I agree with Professor X’s theory that some people may be unfit for college, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people believe is that even though some individuals do lack the fundamental skills of college, it is not necessarily that a student is incapable of learning a new concept or learning how to use the textbooks boiled down series of steps, but rather the teacher or college provide better ground work to help improve their skill level to an appropriate level.
In Professor X’s article he describes a situation between him/her self and another student to whom he/her refers to as Ms. L., who is a 40 year old woman with no experience with computers and apparently is a little rusty on her English, in which he/her has to give Ms. L a failing grade because she “lacked the fundamental skills”. Needless to say Professor X knowingly gives the assignment to the Ms.L, requiring skills that she has yet to even try to grasp; such as using the internet or even using a keyboard for that matter. Professor X sitting down after class with Ms. L to briefly go over concepts of “how to use a computer” seemed like a rather ludicrous proposal because if Ms. L is obviously lacking the basic computer skills let alone the basic fundamental skills to write a proper college level English paper. There are several different ways to go about adjusting this situation so that something productive is accomplished; in the situation of Ms.L it may have been beneficial to start with ways to develop ideas for her writing and rather than making her use a tool such as a computer, I propose that Ms. L would been better off sticking to the very basic skills of writing that she already had a grasp on. Any student in a similar situation to this would greater benefit from such systems as “placement test”. Using placement test to evaluate a student’s current thinking level would eliminate such situations where a student is displaced into a class that is requires fundamental skills beyond that of the student, but through the evaluation would put students into classes that are equivalent to the students’ abilities. Such systems like this have already taken place at certain colleges around the country.