What I’m Reading: Rebekah Nathan

My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, by Rebekah Nathan

Read in December 2012

Three Stars

I picked this book up from the lending bookcase in a faculty lounge at the community college where I teach writing. It confirmed with research what I had observed and concluded anecdotaly: Students attending public colleges today are more often focused on education as a career path rather than education for its own sake. Although my students get a great bargain on tuition — though they mostly don’t know that — they are hammered by ridiculous prices for textbooks and student loans that carry interest charges that are twice as high as the rates they’re paying for a mortgage and more than four times as high as what they’re earning in their savings accounts. They have jobs, they have kids, they have spouses — and they’re happy to know that they ONLY have five more years to get that BA or BS, especially when they spent their first two years taking remedial classes in reading, writing and arithmetic. The prof who wrote this book teaches at a big state university, where one would imagine there are more likely to be students pursuing education for education’s sake — the old humanities path aimed at becoming a more well-rounded person well-grounded in the liberal arts — but she didn’t find many who fit that mode. I never expected to find many in a community college, and I’m saddened to learn that there are few at public universities. But time — and our lifeways — have changed very dramatically in the last 100 years. For college teachers longing for the old days, I recommend this book highly: These are your students and the lives they actually live.