Pre-Collegiate Education: Correctly Preparing You for Failure
How “preparation” in high school can lead to the college failure
“You all have gone through the same struggles as everyone else here. You have overcome all of the challenges thrown at you and are all about to head out to a new adventure in your growing lives. The preparation that you were given here will help you with whatever you decide to do. Congratulations, class of 2014. I personally wish you all success in your futures. I can see you all moving great leaps and bounds in your lifetimes.”
These are the final few words that I heard as I was standing in the gym of my high school. My face was flushed and it felt as though I just took a dip in the pond next to the school. I felt bad for the sorry saps that were wearing dress clothes to impress all of the people, even though they couldn't be seen under all of our matching maroon gowns.
The man who was finishing up the speech was the principle of the school. He was a stout greying fellow who had a slight gleam on the crown of his head. Although throughout most of the students’ four years (more for some) at this school we enjoyed this man, we all started to really dislike the fact that he felt the need to keep speaking. I remember being severely annoyed by the closing speech that was given by this slim balding man. I still get the feeling that it was the fact that a majority of the words sliding from his lips were overzealous lies that made someone such as myself cringe. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the same speech has been given time and time again.
The preparation that you were given here will help you with whatever you decide to do.
It is this phrase that still causes me to chuckle once in a while when I think about it. Most of the speech was a warm and humid blur to me, but that single phrase stuck to me like our clothing did on that blistering day. Why do I find that phrase to be as ridiculous as it is? It’s the sheer fact that even back then I realized I received little to no preparation for any of my future endeavors, which in my case turned out to be college. Going through my four years in that two story, brick encasement these are the things that I learned about college:
- College will be an academic hellhole. That little social life you had back in high school? Yeah, you can kiss that sucker goodbye.
- The faculty is there to teach you and that is all. If you need to ask questions on things that confused you, there are tutors and peers for that.
- Ever felt like considering yourself a number? Well now you get the chance to. You and all the other mindless little puppets that get to have information jammed down your necks, while you continue to shovel out the money to have them do it.
- Sleep? Never heard of it. Why do you think you’re going to have time to sleep? You’re not going to college to sleep, but to study and to get a degree.
- All of the standardized tests that you took in high school will now pay off in the long run and you can reap its benefits.
So my little high school senior/ first week college freshman brain was utilizing what professor Ken Bain mentions in his book, What the Best College Students Do, as vividness bias, which he defines as when “a single vivid example can distract us from overwhelming statistics in favor of the opposite” (78). I can assure you that while I took what I learned from my high school with some caution, I decided that I would compare what I was told with what actually happened during my first month at my current college.
For starters, the first thing I noticed was a fairly drastic change in my social life. It was kind of strange and left me a little taken back. I was in shock and awe. I actually have a social life that consisted of meeting up with people in real life. Quite the opposite of what I was told would occur by the lovely faculty at my high school. Speaking of faculty there’s another thing that came as a surprise to me. The faculty at my current college is actually quite open to students coming in during their office hours, and actually recommend it. I wanted to see what all of the hubbub was about, so I decided to check it out myself to see if it was actually legitimate. I can honestly say I walked into that office skeptical, but came out oddly impressed with what I found out. I happened to be in one of my professor’s office for almost an hour. The first few minutes of our conversation started with me asking fairly basic questions just to see how he would react to them. As we started to go along with the questions he brought up how my test and quiz scores were going and asked if I was interested in minoring in mathematics. This being a common thing I’ve heard professors asking their students I didn’t think too much of it, but since it was just the two of us in a one on one conversation he proceeded to try and persuade me into doing it for the next 20 minutes. After which he found out that I am an undeclared major student, which ended with him trying to convince me for the next 30 minutes that mathematics was the way to go. We spent that time looking into different jobs that I could easily go into with a high starting pay and only four years of school. It was quite a learning experience and a surprise that a professor would take an hour out of his time to go over different fields and choices that I could make and how I could get into those kind of jobs. It was the most I ever talked to any sort of school figure about my future in any sense.
Which brings me to my next point. While I've been at my current college I have never felt like I am just a number to anyone, from the teaching staff to the cafeteria hands. Which is quite the turn around from the first 20 or so college encounters I’ve had here. We are assigned a personal record number that goes on everything, and when I say everything I mean it. It was honestly a slight fear of mine that, that number would become my new name. Luckily that thought put into my head by my wonderful high school educational system was quickly resolved over a short period of time. Ah, and now we have sleep. Now this is a thing that I can say is slightly sporadic and covers a decent little range. I will first preface this by saying sleep is something that has never come easy to me. Surprisingly enough though, I can say it has been fairly on par with what I normally get. Granted there is the occasional night where I stay up a little too late talking to someone on Skype or other people on the floor being loud. Although these cause me to not get the sleep I normally get once in a while, they are not caused by the terrible thing that is studying and homework. I can safely say that these two factors have never been an issue for me. Granted, I am a 3.3 GPA student, so while I am not completely up there, I’m also not an idiot. Even if I study more or go see tutors more often, I still would not have an issue with getting to sleep at a reasonable time.
Now to close up with my last point, standardized testing. This is what I consider the biggest joke in my public schooling career. All of my teachers had to give me a standardized test of some sort and almost all of them taught us as students how to “cheat the system” so we could “guess” the answer correctly. I stress the word guess very heavily because it got to a point where the faculty stopped referring to these sorts of tests and multiple choice, but multiple guess. The point of these tests were to put a placement on you, nothing more, nothing less. They did not focus on the strength or weaknesses of individuals. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post states that standardized testing has ended with,
“high school graduates who don’t think as analytically or as broadly as they should because so much emphasis has been placed on passing standardized tests” (Source).
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. For sometimes a full month at a time my teachers would take time out of our regular curriculum to teach us how to test, not what we should learn, but how we should take the test. We were not being taught for college at this point, but rather how to pass these standardized tests. Which I have yet to see since my time at college, strange isn’t it? High school prepares its students for a successful failure in college if students follow what they are taught in high school in preparation for college.
