Recommendation: Text Set on Life after Graduation

One of the units I have been teaching has been adapted from the CSU Expository Reading and Writing Course Curriculum. This course was originally intended to help produce students who are able to place into English 101 and to be otherwise ready for the heavy reading and writing demands that college places on matriculating students.

This unit is all about what comes after graduation. I won't talk about everything, but I do want to point out two long-form texts I teach and one short piece, as well as some other places to pull some interesting information.

If you are looking to get juniors and seniors to contemplate what makes college students successful, I'd highly recommend what Karen Lopez, a teacher in the William S. Hart Senior High School in Valencia recommended to us. Karen is a trainer for ERWC. She recommended the wonderful introduction of Jim Burke's School Smarts. Burke is a renowned and award-winning teacher, but in this introduction, he writes about his confusion and bafflement in school, where he grappled with understanding not only the purpose of learning, but the "culture, language, and customs of this strange new country called School." The voice in the piece is wonderful and there are couple of beautiful syntactical moves (including this great conditional sentence that starts with "I'd like to be able to tell you....") and students, or at least mine, immediately identify with it.

This piece is quite wonderful when paired with a New York Times article titled, Who Gets to Graduate? This lengthy but engaging article predominantly focuses on a program at University of Texas that works on retaining and supporting first-generation college students. One reason I find the article and the intro so interesting is that both deal with the idea that there are bigger reasons than just economics that make it difficult for kids from lower income families to graduate. It's not just college tuition, but there are some things that are not taught in the classroom the directly translate into school success in college. Leaning to navigate higher ed, in other words, is daunting and more difficult than learning to navigate kindergarten or middle school or high school. There is an entire culture of school that might look different than anything else you have experienced so far and you are expected to do it alone.

The charts in the New York Times piece are worth spending time on too. I spent several moments discussing what the first chart about SAT score and grad rates by income level really said and then we looked at the shorter text, which is an the October 2013 issue of Postsecondary Opportunities. I'm not sure where I found the original citation to this (perhaps the College Board's "Education Pays?" report?), but the chart on the front is striking. Only 8% of students from families in the lowest income quartile will graduate with a bachelor's degree before age 24, while over 80% of students from the highest income quartile will. Wonder about one of the roots of income inequality. BAM. There it is.

These are not the only articles I teach in this unit, but they are ones that I am interested in, sometimes for the quality of writing or the interesting ideas. I'll post more in the Faculty Lounge with ideas on what I do with all of this.

What do you all read about college that you find interesting?