I am a ravenous Pac-Man when it comes to education. Instead of gobbling up arcade dots, I devour community-college credits.
I earned my degrees years ago; what I need now is practical knowledge and skills. I learned how to use Photoshop at a community college. Recently I hunted for a video-editing class because I wanted to be able to understand and contribute to the postproduction work of a local television show I am hosting this fall. I could not find one anywhere near me, except at the University of California at Los Angeles, which was offering a four-day session that cost $999. But I could never learn that subject in four days, or even one month. Now, for $60, I am taking a film-production class at a community college that includes video editing, which will also qualify me to take the college’s intermediate video-editing class next semester. The campus is three minutes from my office and 20 minutes from my house.
Community colleges benefit society with their low costs and convenient locations. But as much as I value those qualities and take advantage of them, my experiences with community colleges punctuate a less-than-flattering stereotype. Instructors often have a “no goof-off left behind” philosophy in which they treat students like mental deadbeats regardless of their aptitudes or commitments to learning.
Community-college instructors tend to focus on grades and classroom conduct, and to issue rules that encourage uniformity. Those practices hamper mastery of subject matter, creativity, and personal responsibility, and groom students to be obedient workers and followers rather than executives and leaders. There may be maverick instructors who operate outside of this paradigm, but unfortunately my educational path has not yet crossed theirs.
I feel qualified to comment on these issues because I am an experienced student. I studied at six four-year universities, including the University of Southern California and Oxford University, and I have taken dozens of community-college courses in the Los Angeles area in statistics, real estate, screenwriting, typing, and philosophy, to name a few.
This semester the instructor of my film-production class has informed the camera-savvy students that they should lose some of their savvy to make it fair for the less advanced. Those who own quality cameras must toss them aside in favor of substandard ones, and lighting equipment is forbidden because it is not clear that all students have access to it. We were warned that our final project, a one-minute movie, should not be too professional.
Community-college instructors also tend to be obsessed with grades, tests, and attendance, rather than course content. My film teacher is such a repeat offender in this area that I have devised my own version of hangman to track the extent of her neurosis. Every time she mentions grades or exams, I add a body part to a pen-drawn hangman in my notebook. By my calculation, she has been noosed 42 times.
Class attendance is part of my film teacher’s obsession. All students are required to sign in twice: once at the start of her class and again at the end, and two absences means a failing grade for the semester. I suppose members of the proletariat need to learn how to comply with a time clock, to practice being tame and mindless workers, to experience what it feels like to receive a demerit or get fired. My teacher’s message is clear, whether she realizes it or not: We can’t have community-college students thinking they can be executives and control their own schedules.
Last semester I took a tennis class and encountered another attendance-related absurdity. The instructor required students to sit quietly in the gym for two hours on rainy days or suffer lower grades. My classmates did not seem too bothered; I flat-out refused.
In addition to lowest-common-denominator teaching and the flawed tendency to focus on grades, tests, and attendance, there is one final destructive trend I find at community colleges: Instructors often go overboard in trying to control students’ behavior in the classroom. I call this the “nun with the ruler” syndrome.
He didn’t look like a nun, but my instructor in basic computer skills would reprimand students who touched their computer keyboards before they were told to do so. If he’d owned a ruler, he’d surely be a serial whacker. He also exhibited paranoia about cheating. He thought every student was itching to glance at someone else’s paper, so he paced the room with an eagle eye.
Five years ago, I convinced my 62-year-old husband, Charles, to take this computer class with me. We sat side by side, and the “nun” got the impression Charles was cheating. Charles resented being treated like a child, so he defiantly refused to study and received low marks on tests. Whenever he got an answer right, the teacher assumed he’d stolen it from my paper. In addition, Charles kept touching his keyboard during class and getting admonished for it. This made him seem like a troublemaker.
What the instructor didn’t know was that Charles had a law degree from Oxford University and was an English barrister, California attorney, and judge pro tem. He had no reason to cheat in an entry-level computer class.
One day Charles said, “I need to leave class early. I have to be in court.”
The teacher shook his head condescendingly, assuming Charles to be a criminal in addition to an underperforming bum, and asked, “Now, what did you do, Charles?”
It was hilarious, but also disturbing to know that a brilliant man who had excelled at Oxford — where showing up for class was never required — could barely survive the oppressive regime of a community-college despot.
Research shows that community-college students are as much as 31 percent more likely than similar four-year college students to drop plans to obtain a bachelor’s degree after two years of higher education. The community-college students in the study initially had the same grades, abilities, and academic motivation as the four-year students and were similar with respect to race, class, gender, and age, and did not have greater responsibilities at work or home. The findings suggest to me that something inherent in the community-college experience might cause students to lose interest in education. Perhaps their treatment in the classroom is a factor.
Teachers should not coddle students, drown them in rules, or stifle creativity. They should not obsess over grades and attendance, but rather encourage initiative, trust, freedom, and personal responsibility. They should replace true-false tests with essays and focus on big-picture learning, assuming that their students will become managers, business owners, industry leaders, and high earners.
Forty-six percent of all undergraduates are enrolled in community colleges in the United States, so there’s a lot at stake. I suggest we relegate the community-college stereotype to the same fate as the stick-figure man in my film-production notebook.
Charlotte Laws has a doctorate, two master’s degrees, and two bachelor-of-art degrees. She is a real-estate agent and a member of the Greater Valley Glen Council in Southern California.
http://chronicle.com Section: Community Colleges Volume 54, Issue 9, Page B32