Reeling and Writhing and Fainting in Coils

Just in case our “Not Doing the Math” posting left our faithful readers with the impression that Ontario high school graduates are poorly prepared in math but okay in reading and writing, School for Thought would like to draw this Parent Central article to your attention. In corroboration of this article, there is a host of indications that the average literacy ability of incoming university students is just as worrisome, if not more so, as their math ability. One example is this excerpt from Ivory Tower Blues (pp. 22-23), by Professors James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar of the University of Western Ontario.

“A useful voice to add to this analysis comes from a Western professor, Thomas Collins, who spent twenty-one years as an administrator, first as chair of the English Department, then as dean of Arts, and finally as provost and vice-president academic of Western (the second-highest position in the university). These posts took him out of the classroom entirely from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Thus, we have a rare case study in which someone’s institutional memory is untainted by the experience of having to adjust his teaching year after year to increasingly unprepared and disengaged students, as appears to be the case for many professors, as we shall see in chapter 2. In a paper written for the Council of Ministers of Education, Collins admitted to some naivety when he returned to the classroom in the mid-1990s, and considerable shock at how standards had slipped in twenty years and how ill-prepared students were for the English courses he taught, especially his first-year courses. From his experiences in the trenches during his first year back, he concluded that he could not ‘assume even a moderate level of literacy from [these students] ... presumably because they think, or have been led to believe, that they are at least proficient in’ English.”

We thus can have confidence that university freshmen are weak in reeling and writhing, but we have no information regarding fainting in coils. Can anyone help?

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