Reading Response #4

“I love to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point,” says Professor X. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” is were Professor X explains and tells of his perspectives while teaching. An instructor of English, who works part-time in the evenings in a small private college and at a community college, is the life of Professor X. Were he tells of the kind of things he sees as a professor in the teaching career. Professor X states that, “For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in.” He discusses how students in his class are just there to get a grade for the class, and how many of his students aren’t ready for high school, and some might not even be ready for college. As a Professor he faces himself on deciding which students are going to pass and which are not. Since, the professor is faced with students been admitted to college with out the high qualities of a college student should have. “The college and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces-social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students-that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty.”


Professor X is basically saying how many students are in school taking classes “not because they want to, but because they must.” I agree with Professor X, in school we are forced to take certain classes and only because we need them, and not because we are interested in learning more about it. Since most colleges require for students to take classes, without mattering what they are majoring in. As students, we don’t care about the lectures going on, the reading and writing it’s only a matter of fact of passing the class to move on. “Their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore how could you do this to me?” explains Professor X of what he observes in his classes. “Adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students-whatever you want to call it-is a substantial profit center for many colleges.” In these quote Professor tells how it doesn’t matter the students background before going back to school, that what they pay is more important to the college. As a student, I am personally taking English because I have to. English isn’t one of my strongest subjects and it’s hard for me to keep up. Senior English class in High School, I get bored with some of the material that I have to take as well as other students. In High School, they make you take requirements in order to graduate, which for the most part aren’t exciting classes for most students. I think our education system has to change in a way in order to motivate students to actually try in school.