Second Semester Crunch Time

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Academic Preparation, Affirmative Action, Challenge Scholarship, College Board, College Retention, Coursework, ETS, Friendships, Internalized Racism, Internalized Sexism, Perseverance, Pitt, Predictability, Righteous Indignation, SAT, Self-Determination, Self-Discovery, Single-Minded

Maybe not a HOF, but a great crunch time catch (literal and figurative) by Terrell Owens, San Francisco 49ers vs. Green Bay Packers, Wildcard Game, Candlestick Park, January 3, 1999. (http://sfgate.com).

As this spring semester begins for me at UMUC — a cruel euphemism in January with a windchill around -10°C and a major winter storm approaching the Mid-Atlantic — I’ve reminded myself of the same calendar twenty-eight years ago. As I’ve already noted through my blog and through Boy @ The Window, this was to be a make-or-break semester for me. I had to step up my game at the University of Pittsburgh or go home. And by home, I mean to 616, a place in Mount Vernon, New York that might as well been my burial plot if I had managed to lose my Challenge Scholarship after that Winter Term 1988.

As I wrote in my book

Despite my advisor, I decided to take a full load of classes, balancing two math courses with two history ones, with “rocks for jocks” Geology being the fifth one. The others were Western Civ II, Roman History, Calculus II (the regular one, not Honors), and Logic.

It was to be a sixteen-credit semester. My advisor, a one-time PhD candidate in the History Department at Pitt (talk about life have no coincidences, past, present or future), thought that after my 2.63 first semester, that I had no business making my college schedule more difficult. But after four years of Sylvia Fasulo at Mount Vernon High School, I decided I was through taking advice about taking it easy. I might’ve not known much about my inner self in January ’88, but I knew this much. I was never the guy to take the easy, path-of-least-resistance road in my education. Fact is, I never had the choice of an easy road at any point in my life.

The only obviously easy course of the five I took was Geology 89, and it was only easy because it was a lecture hall course with three multiple choice exams and one textbook. Calc II — with its focus on integrals, volumes, spheres, and other pre-differential calculations — I figured would be easier than Honors Calc I, partly because I excelled on this part of the AP Calculus course the year before (I probably earned my 3 on the AP Calc BC exam on the strength of that work), and partly because this wasn’t an Honors course.

Advanced logic equations, January 20, 2016. (http://www.galilean-library.org).

Then there was Logic. An ironic choice of a title, since the course didn’t make sense to me from day one. Inductive and deductive reasoning, so the British-born professor told us the first day. With so many symbols and few numbers, how could I consistently deduce an answer to any logic equation? And, what the heck did any of this have to do with being a Computer Science major, anyway?

As for Western Civ II and Roman History, I was surprised how easy I found both courses by the third week, especially after my debacle in East Asian History the month before. But then again, I didn’t miss a single class, I stayed ahead on my readings — and though I knew nearly half of the material going in — and studied as if I’d never been an A student in a history course before.

I had taken the shame of the first semester, the embarrassment of my internalized -isms and imperfections, the anger I directed toward myself, my family, and my idiot dorm mates and let it fuel me. I was on a righteous path of academic vengeance. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

A Planters Peanut Bar, April 25, 2011. (Evan-Amos via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

That sober, almost single-minded focus got me noticed, even though it was my attempt at trying to lay low. I made quite a few friends that semester, most of whom I still call friend today. All of them anywhere between one and twenty years older than me. Call it a sense of maturity, my angered march toward my future, or the sense that I needed to be around folks whose lives had taken at least half as many twists and turns as my own. Whatever it was, I ended up on a path where having a social life would play as much a role in saving my educational future as showing up to all but four lectures in a sixteen-week semester.

I finished that second semester on the Dean’s List with a 3.33 GPA, and a first-year GPA of 3.02. Two A’s (my history classes), an A- in Geology, a B in Calc II, and a C+ in Logic (I did learn a few things even in that course). By the end of April, I was already thinking about switching majors to History. Of more immediate importance was my saving my scholarship for year number two. Not to mention, having friends of any significance for the first time since elementary school.

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Affirmative action opponents from Supreme Court Justices Antonio Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts — as well as Allan Bakke, Jennifer Gratz, Barbara Gruttinger, and Abigail Fisher — all claim that efforts to use the admissions process to bring racial (and gender and socioeconomic) diversity to college campuses is discriminatory. The College Board and ETS cite their statistics to show that the SAT is especially predictive of a student’s performance in the first semester or first year. Anyone working on college retention — especially for underrepresented students — recognizes that nearly half of all students who drop out of college do so after the first two semesters.

Orange Crush can crushed, June 8, 2012. (Susan Murtaugh via Flickr.com).

I knew none of this my second semester at Pitt. No one could’ve predicted my first semester’s depression or the single-minded channeling of anger and intellectual resources my second, least of all me. And no, Justice Scalia, college at a school of the stature of the University of Pittsburgh wasn’t too hard for me. It wouldn’t have been too hard for me at any other university for that matter. Life was. And yes, Ms. Gratz and Ms. Fisher, race played a significant role in where I was, where I wanted to be, and how I got there. Just not to your entitled, narcissistic disadvantage.

As for ETS and the College Board, your predictions of my struggles and triumphs based on my 65th percentile 1120 score from October ’86 were more than a bit premature. And not just mine. Fact is, the vast majority of people like me attending predominantly White institutions graduate, whether the campus climate is welcoming or not. However, having a welcoming climate, just as the one I began to discover my second semester, really helps. I guess you couldn’t predict that.

One Good Job, On Real Education Reform

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Politics, race

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bipolar Disorder, College Access, College Retention, Corporate Education Reform, FHI 360, Honesty, Hostile Work Environment, Hostile Workplace, Ken, Lumina Foundation for Education, Mentoring, New Voices Fellowship Program, Partnership Development, Partnerships for College Access and Success, PCAS, Racism, Sandra, Sandy, Student Success

PCAS Visual Model, AED, June 14, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins and Lynda Barbour).

Yesterday marked ten years since I accepted the position of deputy director for a brand-new, embryonic initiative known as Partnerships for College Access and Success (PCAS). Who knew that, given the circumstances, this would turn out to be the best full-time work of my nonprofit sector years, with a good boss, a large measure of autonomy to make decisions and to brainstorm new ideas? And to put together a plan that, in the end, was about getting more low-income/first-generation students and students of color into and then through college? Looking at where corporate education reform has moved since, it’s a wonder that this initiative got off the ground at all.

There were two problems with this new position, neither of which were related to the job itself. One was that it kept me at the Academy for Educational Development (AED – now FHI 360), an organization that had screwed me in terms of pay and had left me in a hostile work environment with my then immediate supervisor at New Voices. I was a bit burned out from having to work in this environment of cynicism, distrust and bipolar disorder by the end of January ’04. Two was that my new boss, Sandy, would be more than 200 miles away from me for most of the time that we were to work together, since the job didn’t pay enough for me to consider a move to the New York City area.

A week into January ’04, I interviewed with Sandy for the first time. After weeks of interviews with two other organizations — not to mention three years with AED — I actually had low expectations as my Amtrak train arrived at Penn Station. Somehow, though, being in the city again, riding the 1 down to 14th Street and walking over to Fifth Avenue did take me out of my metro DC malaise.

Union Square, Manhattan (about two blocks from NY office on Fifth Avenue), November 14, 2005. (Postdlf via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons 3.0.

I went up to the eighth floor and realized that I already knew two people at the NY office, one whom had overlapped with me during my Pitt/Carnegie Mellon grad school days. More importantly, though, I met Sandy. After three years of working for duplicitous people, at least Sandy was honest, maybe too honest, about the job and about her thinking regarding the people around her. For me, this was definitely refreshing. Maybe this was the Mount Vernonite/New Yorker in me that yearned for old-style New York honesty. It caused me to relax and to talk passionately about my writing and education, about what reform really should look like, about my disdain for data as the answer to everything, about the need to reach students and then help build the skills necessary for college.

After two hours, I learned a few things. Sandy could be a bit scattered, sometimes even sound a bit paternalistic, like a good, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ’60s-era liberal can. Meaning she could rub folks outside of New York the wrong way, like the potential funders for this initiative. But Sandy wasn’t stuck in that moment, either, and the fact that her ideas for this new initiative were wide-open was wonderful for me. PCAS was so new that the grant money wasn’t quite in yet, and the folks at Lumina Foundation for Education wanted more clarity as to what we meant when we said partnerships.

So when I was offered the position three weeks later, I wasn’t actually surprised. I came pretty cheap, didn’t need to learn how AED worked, and had experience with providing technical assistance and in higher education (particularly in teaching teachers about the history of K-16 education and education reform). Still, how was working in DC with my boss in NY with a team of technical assistance folks scattered throughout AED (not to mention consultants, Lumina Foundation, the eventual grantees, the independent third-party evaluator in Philly) going to work successfully?

Ultimately, it was about having a foundation that was open, at least initially, to trying out new ideas. It was because we selected grantees with a variety of nonprofit organizational experiences around college access, youth development, workforce development, grassroots organizing and high school reform. We entrusted them to know their local context, their school district and college/university connections better than we could operating in DC or NY. We worked as hard as we could to help these organizations build real partnerships with their local high schools, school districts and colleges, because we and they wanted to reach students and encourage their pursuit of a college degree. And I had a good boss in Sandy who trusted me to do my job and to grow the work.

Current Lumina Foundation logo (at least 3rd change in eight years), January 31, 2014. (http://luminafoundation.org).

It was a good four-year run, one that ended in no small part because neither AED as a whole nor Lumina were interested in increasing college access and retention for underrepresented students. They were both interested in finding out where the dollars were or in leveraging those dollars to remake K-16 education. In AED’s case, it became about data and data systems, because of course, that’s where a lot of the Gates Foundation money for education has been since ’06. For Lumina, a change in leadership at the beginning of ’07 meant a shift away from a diversity of initiatives to a big focus on research grants into making college more affordable through student loans.

My last day at AED as a full-time staffer will be six years ago tomorrow. The grant funding from Lumina was almost done, and after seven total years, I needed to build a future beyond AED for myself. I learned a lot working for and with Sandy and did a lot working on PCAS. The sad truth is, though, that an initiative like the one we were able to put together, make work and grow wouldn’t happen in today’s corporate reform environment. And where does that leave someone like me?

Lies We Tell Each Other When In College

04 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Big Lies, Campus Climate, College Culture, College Retention, College Success, Dishonesty, Disidentification Hypothesis, Grade Inflation, Higher Education, Lying, Stereotype Threat

Every lie is two lies quote, Robert Brauilt, January 4, 2014. (http://izquote.com).

Every lie is two lies quote, Robert Brauit, January 4, 2014. (http://izquotes.com).

I thought about posting this at the beginning of this week, but decided against it, figuring that I should end ’13 on a more positive tip. But it must be said that one of the critical issues that we in higher education face in terms of college retention and success is the sheer lack of honesty surrounding student performance, especially in the first year or two of any student’s enrollment. No, I’m not talking about grade inflation — for students doing okay, especially at elite colleges, that’s another rampant issue. It’s about the lies students tell themselves, each other and their loved ones about their performance prior to either being caught in a web of them or, worse still, dropping out altogether.

As a college student and as a professor, I found and find it fascinating and disheartening when I’ve learned of the fantasy life of a student’s alleged good grades being shattered by reality. I fell into this trap myself during my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh. I only tell part of this story in Boy @ The Window. Yeah, I was nowhere near dropping out after a 2.63 GPA first semester (A in Astronomy, B- in Pascal, C in Honors Calc I, and a C in East Asian History), but I relied on an annual GPA of a 3.0 or higher to maintain my academic scholarship.

Yet from about the second week in December ’87 until I received my grades from Pitt on this date twenty-six years ago, I maintained the lie that my GPA was “around a 3.2.” The main difference — I gave myself a C+ in Honors Calc and a B in East Asian History. Mind you, I hardly showed up for either class most of the month of November! I was homesick, heartbroken, and unhealthily horny (and on two occasions hung over) most of the last six weeks of that semester.

The lies we tell ourselves (self-deception), Scientific America, February 4, 2012. (Richard Mia).

So I told my former classmates like Laurell and Erika that my GPA was a 3.2. I told my dorm mates Samir and Chuck the same. It was a mild lie, I realized even at the time, and I knew that if I buckled down, that I could overcome my own lie, especially since I could lose my scholarship if I didn’t. And with a 3.33 second semester in Winter ’88, I did pull my GPA over the 3.0 mark, and in the process, decided not to tell any lies that big ever again.

But over the years, I’ve learned that I was hardly alone in the lying-about-my-college-experience category. The first time I figured this out was at the end of ’88, twenty-five years ago this week. It was a lunch outing with Laurell, her friend Maria and former classmates JD and Joshua at a pizza shop in the Fleetwood section of Mount Vernon. After the previous sixteen months of the Phyllis obsession, rage and grade-raising campaign, homelessness and financial struggles, I was finally fully on track for graduation and potentially, grad school. With this group of former classmates, though, almost all White, all but Laurell with upper middle class resources, I realized too that their struggles, or blues, weren’t exactly like mine.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

There was a lot of “everything’s goin’ well” type of discussion going. Yet I got the sense that things weren’t all that great. Then JD admitted that he was a semester away from academic probation at Berkeley. His engineering classes were kicking his butt. From the looks of things, he was doing much better athletically than anywhere else, having bulked up to 190 with twenty extra pounds of muscle. Josh then admitted that his academic and social life wasn’t exactly going as planned. “I don’t know which one is worse,” he told us. He’d grown four or five inches since MVHS, good enough to put him around five-five or five-six. Laurell, of course, had a killer GPA at Johns Hopkins…and just loved things there. What she didn’t mention, between home and school, was that she was on the verge of burnout, 3.6 average or not…As for me, I talked a bit about some of my new friends and a couple of my classes. Nothing, though, about the drama of the previous year.

Umm, New York style pizza, Vesuvius Pizza, Brooklyn, NY, January 4, 2014. (http://yelp.com).

Given how they had reacted to my previous revelations of tiny nuggets from my life while we were in high school, I knew that they would have nothing to say about overcoming homelessness and my Phyllis obsession, much less my now 3.2 GPA overall. At the same time, though, I thought it better to say nothing at all than to tell half-truths and bald-faced lies about my college performance and experiences.

I’ve seen so many students do what I and my former classmates did during our first semesters of college over the years. They lie to me about their issues with my courses, they lie to themselves about their performance and preparation. Mostly, they lie to their friends and family to protect themselves from embarrassment. They lie until the truth of their performance shows up, in their grades, in academic probation, in suspensions and expulsions, in dropping out, in other myriad and dangerous ways.

And we in higher education encourage these lies, as if the money and grade trail won’t expose the reality of struggle and failure for so many. This is where we as educators and administrators need to be much more proactive, to encourage students to seek help, to tell the truth and not bury themselves in a coffin of lies.

Humanities: 26 Years On

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Academic Competition, College Access and Success, College Retention, Gifted, Graduating, High-Stakes Testing, Humanities, Humanities Program, Talented, Well-Rounded Students

Leonardo di Vinci's Human Body sketch, June 18, 2013. (Wikipedia).

Leonardo di Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (human body sketch, 1485-90), June 18, 2013. (Flickr.com).

Today marks anniversary number twenty-six since the Class of ’87 spent two hours sweating in our polyester caps and gowns on a triple-H summer evening at Memorial Field in Mount Vernon, New York. Oh yeah – and graduated from Mount Vernon High School. Not a big year to mark an anniversary, for sure. But still important for me to remember. After all, I’ve just published a book in which I spend a significant amount of time talking about myself and my former classmates whom help comprise this Class of ’87.

Today I want to say a few positive things about this class, particularly the Humanities Program members of this class. Not that this isn’t in Boy @ The Window as well. But it does help me to reiterate both the obvious and the hidden. Without Humanities, I wouldn’t have taken the path that led me to become the writer, historian, thinker or man that I am today, good, bad and occasionally even ugly. Period.

Not that every high-achieving student in A.B. Davis Middle School or Mount Vernon High School was in Humanities. Some of the more creative and musically-talented folks I’d either met or knew of were in what what I call “gen pop” and not in Humanities. But being someone who on his best days can barely hold a baritone tune (in the same way that an experimental fusion reactor produces energy for only a few seconds), Humanities gave me a chance to do some of what I did best on a platform that could occasionally allow me to maximize my academic gifts.

After ten years of undergrad and grad school at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, and years of teaching at places as different as Pitt, CMU, Duquesne University School of Education and George Washington University GSEHD, my former classmates remain among the highest academic achievers I’ve ever met. As a group, that is. I’ve met many super-talented and highly creative individuals since ’87. Some of whom were literal geniuses as musicians, actors, studio artists or writers. Students whose academic and athletic prowess would’ve made their peers think about how unfair life can be.

But the one boon (and one criticism too) of Humanities for me was the competition it inadvertently sanctioned. That competition made me a better student, one who could actually focus on the long-term implications for any course I took and how it would apply to what I’d need to do in college. Some of my classes I realized were bullshit (see Andy Butler’s eleventh grade “Higher Math” as prima facie evidence), but I found something useful in most of my courses for my years at Carnegie Mellon, if not at Pitt.

Mount Vernon High School graduation ceremony, June 24, 2009. (http//education.lohudblogs.com).

Mount Vernon High School graduation ceremony, June 24, 2009. (Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News; http//education.lohudblogs.com).

I think that this competition made us all better students, even as it often didn’t make us better human beings. After all, out of my immediate circle of the top twenty students in the Class of ’87, three of us have doctorates (history, psychology and mathematics education), two have medical degrees, and seventeen of us have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. I’m sure that some of us would’ve done well in college, grad school and our careers even without Humanities. But I’m also sure that the poorest among us – yours truly included – would’ve struggled mightily in college (even if we found a way to graduate) without such a focus on the academic in the first place.

I’ve taught high school students whose skills readily approached my own and those of my classmates from a quarter-century ago, particularly in versions of the AP US History course I taught at Princeton in ’08 and ’09. I’ve also served on the curriculum committee at my son’s school here in Montgomery County, Maryland for the past three years. These students – some more talented than anyone I knew in Humanities – have one thing in common. For the most part, they aren’t challenged by their schools, teachers or curriculum to be competitive, to be well-rounded academically, to strive to be both better students and develop creative talent simultaneously.

Many of these students already feel a sense of academic fatigue, partly because of constant yet meaningless testing, and partly because of a concentration on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. Both have led to the near-total exclusion of extensive work on reading and writing skills (even though picking apart STEM field problems requires good reading and analysis skills). Not to mention the slashing of budgets for physical education and art, music and chorus, theater and so many other things that would push them to be better students, to be competitive – in a healthy way, that is.

There are nearly 120,000 words in Boy @ The Window, about 60,000 of them dedicated to my years between the end of sixth grade and the beginning of my junior year at Pitt. Many of them describe all that I remember about being in Humanities. It’s not a pretty picture overall. Despite this, without the likes of Laurell and Sam, Brandie and Bobby, Alex and Allison, Dahlia and Dara, Phyllis and Wendy and JD, Joe and Danny, Suzanne and Denise and Mandume and Rhonda and Kim and so many others, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon right now. I’d be lucky to have a minimum-wage job and a one-room flat in someone’s dilapidated house on the South Side. It’s just that simple.