I've been enjoying my last year and a half teaching at Brooks College. It's been very rewarding getting back into the classroom. The students are incredible. They stimulate me to think about the world around me and my place in it. I started teaching English Composition. I quickly became dismayed over the lack of writing skills of freshman and sophomore college students. These are not dumb kids, on the contrary, they're very, very bright. But they were dumbed down by a public education system. Los Angeles Unified School System had failed them by passing them along and not making sure they had learned certain basic skills. My heart broke for kids who didn't know the difference between there, their and they're. And the fact that I only had eleven weeks made it worse. I realized that I could not make up for the lack of their high school education. So, instead of focusing on their grammatical deficiencies, I focused on the content.

My students call Brooks College, "ghetto college," because most are from lower income families, a lot of them bilingual, whose parents don't speak English... if their parents are still around. It made me realize how important I am to my own children and made me come down on them even harder in regards to their studies. They hate having a father who is a teacher.

I was reading Jack Kerouac and Martin Luther King and Hemingway to my students, like I was sitting in a reading circle with elementary school kids, trying to show them what good writing is. The results were eye-opening. They spoke of incarceration, shop lifting, drive-by shootings, divorce, abuse, unwanted pregnancies... that was good enough for me. They ended up writing about what they knew.

To be continued...

©2005 Robert Hegyes - All Rights Reserved