What Students Don't Know is a Lot

One of my favorite movie lines comes from Moonstruck. It’s when Olympia Dukakis listens to John Mahoney talking about his romantic problems. She sighs, looks at him wearily, and says, ‘What you don’t know about women is a lot.’
     What high school students don’t know about almost everything is a lot. A couple of weeks ago, when I was trying to save time on the postcards I planned to send to students’ parents, I passed them out to my freshmen and asked them to write their parents’ names and addresses on the front. My colleague, Ann Moller, had warned me about the challenge this presented to students -- she’d tried it the year before -- so I carefully drew a diagram of a postcard on the board, showing where the address belonged.
     When I collected the postcards, one third of my students had written the addresses in the upper left-hand corner of the cards, where the return address goes. ‘Freshmen!’ I said to myself as I handed out fresh postcards.
     Later that day, I gave the same assignment to the juniors and seniors in my Modern Literature course. One third of them put the addresses in the upper left-hand corner. One of my juniors looked at the postcard I gave her and asked, ‘What is this thing?’
     She’d probably never seen a postcard that didn’t have a picture of the Grand Canyon on it. Why should she? When she wants to communicate with her friends, she uses the phone or e-mail or instant messaging (which is why I also have an epidemic of students who think the word ‘you’ is spelled ‘u’).
     This is a lesson I have to keep relearning. In my first year, I was shocked when only five out of 25 freshmen had ever heard of the Garden of Eden. When my American Literature class read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I casually mentioned that this was the source of the term ‘Uncle Tom’ for a subservient black person. They’d never heard it.
     Upon reflection, I realized that I hadn’t heard it in the last 30 years, either. There’s a college professor who has a website he updates every year to remind other teachers which cultural and historical events occurred before their students were born. Most of the kids at ConVal now were born after Christa McAuliffe died in the Challenger disaster, for example.
     I can usually find more recent equivalents when I need a historical reference -- 9/11 was this generation’s Pearl Harbor or Kennedy assassination. A more serious problem is that this is a generation that has absorbed most of its knowledge of the world through electronic media rather than print. Another of my colleagues recently asked her freshmen to fill out a ‘literary history’ of books they read that made an impact on them. She found that many of them didn’t know what ‘literary’ meant -- or ‘history.’
    It’s also becoming clear that even students who faithfully do the assigned reading don’t retain much of it. Last week, I asked my freshmen to read silently for 30 seconds and raise their hands when they felt their attention wandering. After 30 seconds, half my students had their hands up.
     The practical effect of all this on my daily teaching is that I have to slow way down. If I assign 20 pages of reading per night in Modern Literature, as I have in the past, I can be sure a substantial number of my students won’t keep up. Those who do won’t remember much. Their eyes pass over the words, but the meaning eludes them.
     These are college-bound juniors and seniors. God help them if they ever get there.