Opinion time...

The following 'Open Letter to Ninth Graders" is currently circulating on a listserv I read. What do you all think?

An Open Letter to Ninth Graders

Patrick Sullivan

Preparing our students, long before they become our students.
Dear First-Year High School Students,

I am one of the co-editors of What Is "College-Level" Writing?-a
2006 collection of essays that focuses on the difference between
high school writing and college-level writing. Because of my work
on that book, I've spent a great deal of time in the last five
years thinking about what students need to make the transition from
high school to college.

Many studies and reports in recent years have argued that there's
an important "expectations gap" between the skills students
are typically bringing to college and what college teachers like me
think students should be bringing with them to college. This letter
is an attempt to state those expectations clearly, at least from my
perspective.

I offer you my advice and encouragement as you embark on your high
school career because I think there's a lot that you can do on your
own to get ready for college. A good place to start is with some
advice from Stephen Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People: "Begin with the end in mind." I am advising you
to set clear and specific long-term goals for yourself and then
work incrementally over a period of time to meet them. I would like
to provide you here with a number of specific goals that you can
work toward over the next four years.

Let's begin with perhaps the most fundamental of all college-
readiness skills- reading.

Reading

Reading comprehension, as measured by standardized tests like the
SAT and the ACT, is certainly an essential college-level skill.
Students in college are required to read an enormous amount of
material across a formidable range of disciplines, and college
students must be able to understand and engage with this material
thoughtfully. Reading is a foundational skill that makes success
possible in virtually all areas of your college education.

Strong reading comprehension skills, though, do not in themselves
guarantee that you are ready for college. The best college students
I've worked with over the years have had a number of other reading-
related strengths in addition to strong comprehension skills, and I
would like to briefly outline them for you here. Remember, you have
four years to work on these.

* Students who are ready for college like to read. If you don't
like to read, you are going to find college very difficult.

* Students who are ready for college have read some good books as
well as some important books while they were in high school. I'm
not suggesting that you need to follow any particular or
prescriptive reading list, like the one that literary critic E. D.
Hirsch includes, for example, in Cultural Literacy. But a high
school student who is ready for college should have some sense of
our shared intellectual and cultural history, as well as at least
some exposure to work outside the Western cultural tradition. A
high school student who is ready for college should be able to
recognize and respond in some thoughtful way to, say, a reference
in a lecture toKing Lear. Ideally, a student ready for college
would have some visceral sense of what Lear feels like as a
dramatic experience and as a point of reference in our common
heritage. The same can be said about the book of Job, Toni
Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Willa Cather's
My Antonia, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,
and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, among others.

* Students who are ready for college read for pleasure. Reading is
not something that a student who is ready for college always
associates with "work," "discomfort," "inconvenience," or "pain."
Students who are ready for college enjoy reading.

Being able to enjoy reading is often the result of a long
engagement with books and the written word that cannot be replaced
by "cramming" or taking special college preparatory classes. The
students whom I have found to be most ready for college have loved
books and loved to read. If you don't love to read, you will
probably be confused and frustrated while at college. Reading is
perhaps the most paradigmatic activity of a liberal arts education.
It is where learning begins at college. You have four years to
learn to love to read.

Writing

Strong writing skills are, of course, essential to college success.
As a longtime composition instructor, I know that there are many
things that high school students can do to become strong writers.

First of all, you should expect any piece of serious writing to
require considerable effort. Students who are ready for college
routinely plan to produce multiple drafts of essays; expect to read
and reread assigned texts; expect to think and rethink key ideas
they are exploring in their essays; and routinely ask friends,
family members, tutors, and professors for feedback about their
work. High school students who are ready for college know that good
writing does not get produced without considerable effort, and they
are willing to make that effort. Most of the time they do such work
enthusiastically.

Students who are ready for college come to college interested in
learning how to become better writers. Many of the most problematic
students I've encountered in my teaching career come to college
unable or unwilling to believe that they have anything left to
learn as writers. (I've been writing seriously now for about thirty
years, and I'm still actively looking for ways to become a better
writer.) Students should come to college with the understanding
that they have a great deal to gain from listening to their
professors as they discuss and evaluate their written work. In
fact, students who are ready for college understand that this is
where much of the most important learning in college takes place.

A whole range of behavioral and attitudinal qualities are also
essential to anyone who hopes to be a successful college-level
writer. English professor Kathleen McCormick described these
qualities memorably in an online exchange among contributors to
What Is "College-Level" Writing? Commenting on an essay by Kim
Nelson-a student whose contribution to the volume described the
process of completing a college-level essay on J. R. R. Tolkien-
McCormick wrote,

Let's begin by listing many of the skills with which Kim entered
college. I think they should be divided into two types: behavior
skills and writing skills. Behavioral skills are not exclusive to
college-level writing, but without them, it is hard to achieve
anything, and they are skills that few of us articulate as
explicitly as Kim does, so I think they deserve to be underscored:

* Work through "panic" and refuse to procrastinate.
* Pace yourself to work on assignments for an extended period of
time.
* Find others to help you (parents, teachers, friends at dinner,
tutors at the writing center).
* Recognize that a critique by a professor, while initially
disheartening, is helpful.
* Initiate repeated visits to the professor.
* Value intellectual work and collaboration and validation more
than the grade.
* Brainstorm in note form.
* "Bang out" an outline and critique it.
* Choose quotations.
* Develop a thesis.
* Transfer writing skills learned in high school to the college
situation.
* Maintain sensitivity to language use.
* Reread texts you plan to write about; underline.
* Do library research.
* Listen to multiple levels of textual analysis.
* Rewrite and revise your thesis and writing.

Thinking

I would advise you to seek out classes and learning experiences
that challenge you. Research is beginning to show us that the brain
responds in very powerful and positive ways to cognitive
challenges. Don't limit yourself to subjects or activities that are
familiar or easy.

Students who are ready for college bring with them a curiosity
about ideas and an interest in encountering new ways of looking at
the world. In fact, one of the reasons they come to college in the
first place is to expand their minds, to encounter new ideas and
perspectives, and to grow. High school students who are ready for
college have genuine curiosity about the world and the people in
it. Do you?

Listening

Listening is a vastly undervalued and underappreciated skill in our
culture. Strong listening skills (and the patience and empathy that
make listening possible) will be enormously valuable to you in all
areas of your life, in college and beyond. Listening skills will
certainly help you move toward a more open and welcoming engagement
with the world and with others.

Strong listening skills also make possible healthy, positive,
respectful human relationships. Much of college success depends on
establishing strong working relationships with professors, college
staff, and fellow students. Such relationships are built, of
course, with strong listening skills. Students who are unable to
listen are typically unable to learn, for all the obvious reasons.

Good listeners bring to any interaction with others a number of
important qualities, including patience, empathy, personal
generosity, emotional intelligence, and respect for others. Good
listeners are also able to suspend an interest in themselves and
focus instead in respectful ways on what others think and feel.
Students who are ready for college have done some of the important
personal work that makes this possible. Listening is a skill, like
many others, that improves with practice, and one can become a
better listener simply by endeavoring to be one.

"Grit"
"Grit" is another quality that is vitally important for college
readiness. Researchers who use this term suggest that it includes
self-discipline, perseverance, and passion. As psychologists Angela
Duckworth and Martin Seligman note in their recent essay "Self-
Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of
Adolescents," grit appears to be at least as important to academic
success as IQ or "smarts." In fact, all high school students should
hear what Duckworth and Seligman have to say about self-discipline:

Underachievement among American youth is often blamed on inadequate
teachers, boring textbooks, and large class sizes. We suggest
another reason for students falling short of their intellectual
potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline. . . . We
believe that many of America's children have trouble making choices
that require them to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term
gain, and that programs that build self-discipline may be the royal
road to building academic achievement.

Any student is capable of bringing a quality of joyfulness to their
work at college, and the same can be said for the qualities of
selfdiscipline, perseverance, and passion. Without these qualities,
students can only be considered ready to be bored, lost, angry, or
confused at college.

Attitude Toward College

Drinking, socializing, and taking reckless advantage of "freedom"
on campus lead many students to squander their time at college.
I've seen many young men and women trapped in a protracted
adolescence that often lasts well into their late teens, early
twenties, and beyond. As teachers, we want students to have a
youthful spirit (however old they may be), but we also want them to
bring maturity to the college enterprise.

Some students, usually as a result of difficult life experience,
arrive at college with such maturity. But many do not. In my
experience, mature students are often able to engage with college
in very productive ways. Those who do not bring such maturity,
however, typically cannot. Such students often find themselves
confused or angry or without any real direction.

You also need to understand that the chance to attend college is an
opportunity of incalculable value. Because many students take this
opportunity for granted, I recommend that community service be a
required part of every high school student's preparation for
college. Community service is an excellent way for you to begin
building a balanced and mature perspective on life. Such a
perspective will be invaluable to you when you attend college.

Determining Readiness

I have developed a checklist of the college-readiness skills
described in this article. You can use this practical document to
track your progress in high school and ensure that you are ready
for college by the time you graduate. Visit http://www.aaup.org/
AAUP/pubsres/academe/ to view and print the checklist.

Remember: you have four years to develop the skills that you will
need to succeed in college.