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For about 18 months, I have been asking students in my Composition courses to fill out a short questionnaire on the first day of class. Among the questions I ask is this: “How often do you read for pleasure?” It is a strong predictor of how well they will do in the course. Many to most of my students answer that they do not read for pleasure and cannot remember the last book they read, or they cite a required text from high school English.  This is irrespective of location: I teach at a community college where some of the most affluent and educated members of society send their kids as a prelude to a more expensive (and far-flung) four year college, and I teach at a community college where the literacy rate is among the lowest in the nation. I ask the same question, and I tend to get the same answer. Books? Reading? Not so much. At least, not in the students I’m contacting, most of whom come from pretty varied backgrounds.

So, my job is to get their writing up to college level. Most of them begin at a skill level somewhere around 9th grade or lower. In 17 weeks, I can get the ones with grit and determination (the ones who do not flee) to write at least one reasonably good (supported, scholarly, evidence-based, coherent, logical, considered) essay at college level. To do this, I assign five essays over the course of the semester, although many of my colleagues think I am a masochist to inflict that much grading on myself. I make them read rather more than is currently fashionable (guidance at both of my schools is that fiction is out, novel-length works are out, and that articles on current events will do just fine. Here I posit that the discipline of English has lost faith in itself, but this is a digression). In any event, those students whose internal structures are sufficient to withstand the pressure that good writing and careful reading demand succeed in my classes and go on.  It is the work of a semester, and it is difficult. More than one student has informed me that he learned more in my classroom in one semester than he did in all of high school English. More than one student has told me their English teacher in high school gave up, and they sat in silence filling out worksheets or reading newspapers instead of learning how to read and write in preparation for college.

Students already enculturated to the digital, fragmented, icon and gif and photo-centric world of Internet interactions, already unused to the sustained meditation on a subject that is long form reading (and discouraged from such by the vagaries of fashion in the English Department), and whose basic education has fundamentally failed to prepare them for college are already operating at a deficit when it comes to writing well. By writing well, I mean simply that one is able to transmit one’s thoughts clearly in writing with minimal slippage between what is meant and what is understood. These students coming to me do not write well, and they have not read much good writing, nor is it a habit of mind for them to note language as readers and writers do.  This is not their fault. This is what they have grown up in.

All that just to say this: because of the deep deficits in student readiness where English skills are concerned, it often takes a full semester of regular attendance and attention for underprepared students (a majority) to produce an effective piece of writing. And yet, a summer session “class” of six weeks that confers the same number of credits and professes to do the same work is offered at nearly every college in the world.  Such courses cannot possibly do the same work. Six week courses cannot adequately equip most students to deploy a skill they are not habitually or culturally set up to intuitively grasp. I tell my students what they are getting is a “crash course.” I can’t have them write as much, nor read as much, nor do they have as much time to digest what they are learning, nor do they have as much opportunity to reflect on their mistakes so as to learn from them. Six weeks is not enough time for most of them to make much progress, in my experience.

This seems obvious to me, but colleges continue to offer summer courses and have been doing so for time out of mind. It brings in revenue. It helps with funding (FTES, CTE, etc.). It looks good on paper. It gets students through their studies and on to matriculation more quickly than would be the case otherwise. It’s a paycheck for me during the summer months. And yet, while all that is sure to make Administrators (and maybe faculty) happy and keep things humming along, I think the people who suffer most are students who are ill-prepared for the demands of serious study, and all too many fall away when they encounter academic rigor because they are not inured to it.

I think it is best done away with, or, failing that, lengthened to a quarter. That’s not perfect, but it’s a reasonable compromise.  As things stand, it feels like a scam to give students so little practice at something they need more practice in and tell them they’ve done the equivalent of a semester-length course. Rubbish. They haven’t, and that lack of practice will tell sooner or later, and may even lead to that student quitting when they find their skills aren’t up to snuff, or it may lead to grade inflation when teachers recognize they’ll have to fail nearly everyone (and gain the wrath of the Administration) or wink at student deficiencies.

Education is not something to rush through, checking boxes so you can say you “passed” to “get paper.” It is unacceptable to me that the prevailing attitude is “Cs get degrees.” It’s a serious business. Education is a forge where people can be tempered for the challenges, demands, and tragedies of their lives to come. Are we as educators preparing them? Or are we cashing in on a bubble doomed to pop?