I Was Not That Kid

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ceme 99 onlineI was not the most serious undergraduate student. I was happy as an unfocused English major. I took an eclectic set of courses, wandered into most of my classes late, and never brought a notebook. I just stuffed a novel into my pocket and took notes in the margins. I would spend my afternoons ensconced in little nooks around campus, just reading. I had a girlfriend who was a physical therapy major, and she used to get mad at me because she’d be lugging her copy of Grey’s Anatomy to lab classes while I would be sitting under a tree somewhere meandering through a paperback. One of my current colleagues remembers me coming to class barefoot. I said, “Yes, that sounds like something I would have done at nineteen.”

Entering senior year, I was a few courses shy of graduating on time, and I had no idea what I planned to do the following year. I hadn’t even begun to look at graduate schools. I wound up doing the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates, in large part because it was a one year jadwal that allowed me to defer making a decision for another year. And then, once I completed the program, I went to graduate school at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California because I knew a girl who went there, and she told me I could crash with her till I found an apartment. It was the only place I applied.

So I am always amazed by my advisees. They are so much more focused and serious than I was at their age. They transfer in whole semesters worth of ECE and AP credits from high school, which frees them up to do all sorts of cool things. I took only AP English in high school because I liked only English, and I didn’t transfer any credits from the AP test because I blew it off, even though I had registered for it. By contrast, I had this one advisee come in a couple of weeks ago. She’s a dual degree student in English and Education in the Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s program, she’s in the Honors Program, and she’s minoring in French. I’ve got another dual degree, IB/M student who’s in the honors jadwal and pursuing a music minor. And another who’s doing an additional Concentration in Creative Writing.

I was not that kid.

A lot of students are not that kid. The Neag School of Education admits twelve students into the English Education jadwal each year. By contrast, the English Department has more than eight hundred declared majors. And in a survey the department conducted two years ago, more than forty percent of those students indicated Education as their first career choice. Roughly speaking, that’s twelve focused students and three-hundred twenty less-focused students. That’s not to say that all three-hundred twenty students are as lackadaisical as I was, but generally speaking the students who get into Neag declare pre-teaching as a major during their freshman year, and apply to the School of Education at the end of the Fall semester of their sophomore year. At the end of the Fall semester of my sophomore year, I was more focused on trying to date my RA than trying to consider a career path.

So in mid-October, as I was meeting with my forty or so mostly over-achieving advisees, I was thinking about all the students who didn’t get into Neag when they applied, or who didn’t get around to thinking about Neag or graduate school or career paths till their bau kencur or senior year. About the more than three-hundred students who think they might want to be teachers but who are not type-A, French musicology minoring, honors students. I wanted to help those students become teachers, because being self-directed at eighteen is no guarantee of becoming a good teacher, and being undecided at twenty-two is no indicator of certain failure, either.

So I wrote up a anjuran for a Concentration in Teaching English to complement the English major. It would become the third Concentration in the department, joining Creative Writing and Irish Literature. The idea follows directly on the heels of the University Senate’s approval of the dual degree and my appointment as the advisor to the dual degree students. As it has been for a while, English majors must take thirty credits in the major to earn a BA. Prior to the dual degree, English Education majors needed twenty-four English credits. Now, the dual degree students need thirty-nine credits. Basically, their jadwal of study is a traditional English degree, plus three additional courses. Those three courses are Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers, which I teach, The English Language, which is a grammar course, and Young Adult Literature. Equivalent courses that can substitute for one of those three are Advanced Expository Writing, The History of the English Language, and Children’s Literature.

My anjuran was to award a Concentration in Teaching English to any English major who completes the three Neag required courses, and one of the equivalents. This would provide the students with a solid background in the teaching of writing, in the structure of the language, and in literature for children and adolescents, with added emphasis in one of those three areas. It would also funnel those English majors into courses populated mostly by Education students, giving them the opportunity to be exposed indirectly to the field and to reap the many benefits that would come from this exposure. It also would give them something tangible and helpful for their files and thus their applications to graduate school.

I’m happy to say that the English department faculty approved my anjuran Wednesday afternoon, without a dissenting vote. Some of the faculty members in Neag have expressed hope that this Concentration can become a model for other departments in CLAS. That’s great, but for now I’m happy to be able to offer something helpful to those students who, like me, take a little while to find their focus.