Fraud and Other College Opportunities

I read a blog today that is connected to a newsletter I receive about higher education. The woman was commenting students unprepared for college and she hit a nerve for (in?) me. Here is the comment I sent.
There are so many inherent problems in the school systems in the U.S. that I find it hard to focus on just one. First, when we talk about preparing high school students for college, we assume correctly that their earning potential will be severely limited without at least a two year degree. What good then is a high school diploma? If human resource people were honest, they might admit that the college requirement attached to some jobs is just a filtering agent rather than a true necessity for that level of employment. On the other hand, the high school diploma means so little today that employers want to know that a college experience has brought prospective employees to the point of at least being able to write complete sentences and to tie their own shoes. Second, as an adjunct and tutor at a community college, I have witnessed the repetition of courses in an attempt to remedy twelve years of bad schooling or else alleviate cultural and mental limitations often to no avail. I do not think I am exaggerating to call the developmental (read remedial) course load for some of the students a thinly disguised fraud. They are actively recruited and offered promises of being able to transfer to a four year school and complete a bachelor’s degree. All along, the community college willingly eats up the Pell Grants and other credit hour limited financial aid so that if a transfer ever does occur, there will be little monetary assistance left. It is not unusual for a student to have to pass five remedial courses, the two developmental composition classes and three levels of mathematics. That is a full semester of nontransferable credits (15 hours), and that number assumes none of the courses need be repeated. I am not even considering the returning students who take GED classes through the college and eat up some of the financial aid before ever being regarded as a college student. When the powers that be are confronted with the problem of the student who can not pass the developmental classes, the suggested panacea is either increased bandwidth or workshops to address learning styles. (I sat in on the process of sacrificing a new full time faculty position to buy the next best bandwidth package. At least the students will be able to check their hotmail accounts so the composition course will not be a total loss.) We even offer a freshman seminar that teaches students something about being in college, but the administration refuses to require the two hour class fearing the developmental students will complain about more nontransferable credit hours. Complaints=drop in retention numbers. So students already on the fringe of academic life are left to struggle on their own while some of us try to offer helpful hints about college life and responsibility during precious class time. Some who would have flourished or at least passed if exposed to the study skills and time management exercises in the freshman seminar class flail about for a semester or more failing two or more courses. Let’s see, two hours of preparation versus six or nine hours of repeated classes. It’s quite a system. Third (yes, I was enumerating issues), instead of a cell phone, get a library card, and instead of investing time and money in a bigger, flat screen television, read a book to a child. This is the toughest issue to address. We have full book cases in half the rooms in our home, so it is difficult to imagine a child who has no books to hold, no pictures to see, no text to hear so often it becomes rote. I cannot go into other people’s houses and force them to enjoy reading. I have some ideas, but I have rambled long enough. I just wanted to attest to the fact that at least some ill prepared college students were once blank slates upon which little was written by parents or by teachers in inadequate schools.
Boy, did you hit a nerve. . .

metaphor

Sitting in church this previous Sunday, it occurred to me that to be a Catholic, a person has to buy into metaphor. Think about how many gospel stories are just steeped in metaphor. Sunday's readings included a letter from Paul that spoke of the bread and wine being the Body and Blood of Christ but that also the participants in the Mass form the Body of Christ. so I was sitting there musing about how I am very willing to believe the Body and Blood of Christ is real in the Mass--no representation here but the actual physical reality. Then I started to question myself a bit. My take on the Mystical Body of Christ on earth in the physical reality of the Church is more to the metaphor side. And metaphor is representational. Some man says a woman is a fox and he means she has qualities of a fox. He knows she is not really the animal. So is Paul telling us that we are the Body, that as a group we do not just have qualities of Christness? If I say I am Christ to the world, I do not think of myself as God. We are trying to become divine. That is humanity's evolutionary path, but aren't we approaching that state rather than being in it? I think; therefore, I am confused.

I viewed some very conservative Catholic writing yesterday and was sharing something with my husband last night. One of the articles referenced some canon law and basically said that women should still be covering their heads in church. Through a series of illogical connections, the author asserted that the priest could be considered an angel in his role at Mass. So 1) out of respect, women should cover their hair, and 2) the covering serves to steer the priest away from concupiscence. My husband suggested we then need to cover the children. It took me a minute before pedophilia crossed my mind. I had to admit that was a pretty good observation.

It is maybe odd that I have never been angry at the Catholic Church over that scandal. I have reserved my ire for the specific fools involved in the illicit activity and then the cover-up. I even know the family of a young man who was eventually driven to suicide years after unresolved abuse. It saddens me and I think we, the Church, need to do everything we can to ease the suffering and correct the injustices. We have much penance to perform and prayers for healing. But I wonder if I am just not very surprised by portions of a hierarchy I have come to distrust in general.

There have been some particular nuns, priests, and bishops I have known who have been inspiring to me, but in the case of the bureaucracy as a whole, I have been unimpressed. Deaf and out-of-touch are two terms that come to mind. Do I sound arrogant? I don't know. But somewhere in my education in Catholic schools and a Catholic family, I concluded that each member is as much the Church as the next member. There are absolutes when it comes to morality, and I need an institution or at least a community to which to cling and in which to flourish. So being Catholic is woven into my life in a way that I would find leaving the Church almost impossible. However, bureaucratic corruption is also a reality. If pointing out that flaw in the Church makes me arrogant, so be it. Of course, I have a problem with authority in general. I'll save that issue for another post.

priorities

I just read my daughter Bridgett's blog entry http://south-city-musings.blogspot.com/and others' comments about Mt.Carmel High School's closing. It is a Catholic school in South Houston that Bridgett, her brother Ian, and I shared for a few years. They attended; I taught. It is one of those special bubbles in my life when I learned so much about myself. Bridgett caught the spirit of the place, as did a couple of her commentors: safe, diverse, imperfect. It was a wonderful incubator in so many ways for me and, I believe, for my children. It was the kind of place where lives could be nurtured and grown. Now that I have written that last statement, I wonder at how trite it sounds. I think the commentor who said he was left alone, not being ignored but in the sense of being allowed to stumble and find his way, was more on target. What a sad reflection of our church's priorities that such a place would not be worth saving.

Being Catholic

Although I have not been a faithful blogger, which has led to almost no comments, I wanted to share the following info in case anyone might be interested. I responded to a request by Speaking of Faith (NPR) for reflections on Catholicism. They have chosen to use some part of my interview on their program to be aired via broadcasting and podcasting beginning on May 1st.
My written comments from 1 April follow.
Today is my 57th birthday, and I am what some refer to as a cradle Catholic. So I have been through almost silent Masses, meatless Fridays, Latin readings, Communion by mouth only, Latin responses, to vernacular and guitar Masses with home baked unleavened bread and a shared cup of consecrated wine, the latter of which I believe to be Christ’s body and blood. One of the issues facing this church is whether I, as laity and woman, have the right to be even peripherally involved in our primary rite of Eucharist. I know I do, whether or not the male hierarchy has the grace yet to understand that. This issue, however, is only symptomatic of a centuries old conflict between legalism and love. Of course that is an over simplification, but there are those who go by the letter of the law, be it Biblical or church-made, and there are those who depend more on God’s mercy. We all call ourselves Catholic. My belief is in the mercy camp, and I envision God’s being puzzled over some of our squabbles about who can do what or whether sexual orientation or lack of Catholic Baptism might preclude holiness.
The reason I am still churched within the Catholic faith is community. Although individually we are imperfect, yes even the hierarchy, as a group we can be so much more and sometimes are. Today at Mass, the priest offered his thoughts about how each of us can be backed by community. That connected so well with what I had been considering for this reflection. He offered an example of a selfless act he had witnessed but would probably not have performed. Yet the attempt at the ideal happened and touched him. Maybe each of us cannot achieve ongoing perfection, but there may be an occasional ideal moment. I am not doing his homily justice, but I want to somehow explain what it means to be part of this group. The rotten apple analogy comes to mind—one spoils the bushel. But in the case of the Church community, the apple of a selfless act, a positive impetus, perfects the bushel, an imperfect group. So this sense of my community, one that is always becoming better than we defective members are, allows me to travel to a strange city and find some out of the way Catholic Church, and be at home. It does not matter if the priest preaches well or even if the congregants are friendly. I still belong and I know that deep in my bones.
I have seen beautiful cathedrals, representations of God’s Kingdom on earth, where wonderful choirs have filled the archways and resounded off the mosaics. My favorite image, however, of celebrating Catholic Mass is one my father shared with me. He was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II where accommodations were canvas rather than brick and mortar. He described acting as an altar server for a priest chaplain who celebrated the Eucharist on what was probably a mess tent table. Here was my shy dad thousands of miles from home, under threat of air attack, with men he hadn’t known at all just months before. Yet he was able to comfortably share in the rite. I find comfort in that same rite, the Eucharist, which makes me at home in some remote town, and in the community that is more than the sum of its parts. Thus I am assured that my being Catholic makes me Church, with a capital “C,” as much as any other member. Nor can I be very discouraged by any particular Catholic, no matter how egregious his sins or flawed thinking. My hope is that we continue perfecting. Although I am not well versed in the thought of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, my understanding is that he believed we humans are evolving toward the divine. Now that’s Hope.

Energizers

Things that energize me:

• rainy days


• unexpected snow


• real conversations


• tear-wringing movies


• a child's belly laugh


• discovery of a connection


• some poetry
  
• crocus

Photo is by Ori Fragman Sapir and can be seen on www.treknature.com

Almost Two Months

Life just is not what one expects. Allow me to be more specific: life is seldom what I expect. Saturday will be three full months since I worked as a tutor 30 hours a week, taught a freshman writing class 3 hours a week and added the necessary hours of prep and essay critiques, and devoted every other Saturday morning to a job with no future and no chance for advancement. I wonder if I have recovered. The voice in this entry still sounds lost.