Preface Higher Learning provides students and teachers a vehicle
to explore, reflect on, and perhaps even discover issues
about ethnic, class, age, gender, and sexual diversity.
Imagine entering a foreign country where you understand just enough of the language to communicate but cannot quite grasp the customs or the etiquette of the land. Imagine you had to learn the culture of that country without anyone showing or telling you how. This is what going to college is like for many first-year students.
Higher Learning: Reading and Writing about College presents imaginative literature—fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—that appeals to students and teachers because it is written from their point of view. It is literature that allows them to see how their individual experience fits into the culturally and historically diverse traditions and perspectives of university life.
Avid readers—students, teachers, and lifelong learners—know literature is the one place a person is never alone. This collection allows readers to discover people just like them, as well as people sometimes so different from them to be almost, at least at first, unimaginable. Students can watch these people struggle with problems and challenges, most of which never appear in any college catalogue or on any class syllabus. Though universities provide an array of student support systems, there are some aspects of university life that new students must work through mostly on their own. Character, maturity, and experience will be as essential to success as high school class rank or SAT scores. Alienation, isolation, and loneliness will be as much of a challenge as English Composition or Calculus.
Many college texts for first-year students focus on time management, critical thinking, active reading, and lecture and text note taking. These survival skills are the nuts and bolts of college success. This collection, written by people who have "been there and done that," displays the whole machine chugging along in all its imperfect glory. These readings provide good and bad examples, some broader views and alternative takes of individual experiences, parables of the admirable, cautionary tales, and funny stories.
College students, especially first-year students, often feel isolated on campuses. The degree to which students feel a "connectedness" to a university, a sense of place and a way of fitting in that many teachers and administrators by now take too much for granted, leads to how well the students perform, in fact whether or not they complete a degree. Higher Learning offers some of the "inside" stories of college life, addressing the difficult issues that students face in their transition to college. It also provides students and teachers a vehicle to explore, reflect on, and perhaps even discover issues about ethnic, class, age, gender, and sexual diversity. How to Use This Book
Reading and writing questions are provided as a part of the text and should be read before and after reading each piece of literature, as a way to get readers involved in the kind of close and active reading done at the college level. In addition to 'providing prompts for class discussion, Critical Thinking Points, offered before and after each piece under the categories of As You Read, After You've Read, and Some Possibilities for Writing, accomplish the following objectives:
provide a focus for each reading help readers formulate their own questions while they read provide a historical and/or cultural context for the reading create a forum for reader response, analysis, and critical reflection promote creative writing and expository responses that connect readings to students' personal lives provide prompts for informal and formal writing assignments, such as journal entries, class presentations, collaborative group writing projects, and research papers make connections between readings and other classic pieces of literature that are easily found in most college libraries
Each chapter of Higher Learning focuses on a particular stage of college life.
Chapter One, "Where We're Coming From: Leaving Other Lives," explores the aftermath of surviving 12 years of formal education, the personal and cultural influences that affect making the decision to go to college, the possibility of teaching oneself, and how to find and follow the future that awaits us.
Chapter Two, "School Daze: Life in the First Year," delves into personal examples of coping with such dilemmas as roommates, failing grades, balancing home and school, applying course work to real lives, meeting professors' expectations, and sifting through advice and models to find the most appropriate and valuable ones.
Chapter Three, "Student Affairs: Friends and Lovers," looks at issues of first love, virginity, rape, AIDS, sexual discovery, homosexuality, romantic breakups, and platonic friendships. These pieces demonstrate just how difficult it is to try to establish equal respect between and among the sexes given the various roles that social expectations play in gender relationships.
Chapter Four, "Teacher, Teacher: Will This Be on the Test?" probes the always complex relationship between students and teachers, as well as between professors themselves and the university system. This section helps students see teachers as people with many of the same ongoing concerns and challenges that the students face every day.
Chapter Five, "Been There, Done That: Looking Forward, Looking Back," shows it is never too late to look ahead, offering pieces that explore life after graduation and the advantage of hindsight when offered by people who have survived what today's students are trying to get through.
"Some Films for College Lives" are listed at the end of each chapter to complement the sections with a popular culture perspective that explores the depiction of college in cinema since 1927. An appendix offers critical thinking points about the films.
There are many larger college issues that require additional reflection and analysis, perhaps in the form of extended research. Further Suggestions for Writing, a list of prompts at the end of each chapter, accomplishes the following objectives:
creates a forum for analysis of academic and social issues at college synthesizes topics from chapter readings provides prompts for traditional rhetorical strategies in persuasion /argumentation, comparison/contrast, cause/effect, and classification.
Our goal in providing this book is that students will not only be motivated to read, but they will be moved to reflect and write about their own experiences, their campus, their college life in general, and the world around them. Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the Network for Excellence in Teaching and the Office of University Research at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire for their grant support throughout researching and writing this book, as well as the Academic Skills Center and the Department of English for their clerical support.
Thank you to our reviewers who saw our book in various stages: Lee Rademacher, Purdue, Calumet; Bob Nelson, Rutgers University; Margaret Pobywajlo, University of New Hampshire at Manchester; Jan Norton, Missouri Western State College; Karan Hancock Gier, University of Alaska-Anchorage; Rodney Keller, Ricks Community College; Kathryn Lowe, University of Evansville; Anne Lundquist, Guilford College; Karen L. Reinhart, Spokane Community College; Adrian R. Levitt, Seton Hall University; and Alison Valerian, Seton Hall University.
We are indebted to Meredith Weber for her thorough research as a graduate assistant. Special thanks to Jim Thornton and Karen Taylor for typing, proofing, and making suggestions. This book would not be possible without Frank Smoot. Finally, thanks to the students in UW-Eau Claire's Collegiate Bridge Program and College Writing Courses who were our first audience.
