J.Randolph Radney's List: Study Skills

• Fifteen years later I was in graduate school and teaching my first section of composition at a large public university in the Midwest, and I was wondering how to get my students to participate in class discussions.

   

  I empathized with their reluctance to speak up. In my own undergraduate years, I had managed to get away with remaining silent in nearly every course, avoiding my professor's eye while writing down words like "hegemony" and "liminal" and scurrying home later to look up their definitions. I had learned that being a good student meant being quiet and deferential, and I found encouragement to speak up in class confusing and a little scary. Wasn't the teacher the teacher? What did I have to say? I now suspected that my students, who were mostly from rural, working-class backgrounds similar to my own, might be feeling the same way.
• The most interesting resource I came across was Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, in which the author observes that "discussions between parents and children are a hallmark of middle-class child rearing ... middle-class children learn to question adults and address them as relative equals." Children of blue-collar families, on the other hand, learn to accept authority and to consider the line between adults and children as firm. Since the cultures of institutions (like universities) often align with middle-class modes of behavior, Lareau suggests that working-class children can be erroneously perceived as deficient.
• The campus had a support system for students with disabilities, international students, and English-language learners, but little attention was given to the needs of the first-generation, working-class/working-poor, or rural students who made up a sizable part of the campus. When I asked my students about their ideas for improvement, they had many suggestions: Make professors aware of the costs of the books and materials they assign, offer cheaper and more-flexible meal plans, promote more teachers from backgrounds similar to the students' own. I would add to that list: Offer workshops on classroom participation and self-advocacy, and educate students about fields with which they may have had little contact, such as law or academe.

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• A 2007 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles found that nearly 17 percent of entering freshmen were first-generation college students. At the time, higher education celebrated their inclusion, as well as our ability to provide need-blind admissions and financial aid. These students were our success stories; we all pointed to those who, with our help, had pulled themselves up and out. They became part of the story we told about our missions.

• We need to see first-generation students as the pioneers they are. In the 1990s, I wrote an essay that called the experiences of blue-collar academics "border crossing," with a foot in each camp or class. First-generation students not only cross the class border but can translate cultures, too. We shouldn't expect them to choose between their past and the promise of the future, or make them ashamed of where they come from.

   

  I remember looking scornfully at my parents (a unionized communications worker and a receptionist) as they had a conversation with my undergraduate mentor at graduation. I was afraid they would embarrass me. I still can see the look on my father's face go from pure pride to sadness, and the shame of that moment is still fresh.

• I wanted to transcend being blue collar, and college opened that door—but it also taught me to be ashamed of where I came from. The working class was a good subject of study, but not a living, respectable population. I was taught to transcend my past, to leave it behind. But you can't leave it behind. I was who I was, and my past and my family inform who I am now.

   

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• Infographic: Get More Out Of Google

•   Whether you're just applying to school or a college senior starting the job hunt,  Google is here every step of the way with tips, products and services to help make life  easier (minus an extra hand to help clean your dorm room). 

   

• Ellen Goodman is one of the formidable journalists of the past thirty years.  A leading sydicated columnist and Pulitzer winner, Goodman spends more of her time writing about social change in America. Intriguingly, she refuses to call herself a pundit.  The following was from a recent lecture at the Milton Academy in Massachusetts.

   

  Life is not a straight line; you will continually be changing while you prepare yourself at the same time.  We need to remember the way real life works.  You make plans, you have accidents; you move straight ahead, you take a detour; you screw up, you recover; you try hard, you get lucky; you carefully make a five-year plan, you succeed because you improvise.  You keep on proposing and recomposing your life.