by Shant Shahoian
Glendale College

Want to start a riot in the faculty lounge? Tell the Academic Senate the English Department is toying with the idea of making Freshman English a four-unit course. Just whisper it, under your breath. After a long moan, you’ll hear, in the distance, the hooves of the four horsemen—any collection of administrators and faculty in other departments—and the shrill cry of the apocalypse, the end of days. You’ll run from the swinging pens, dripping with red ink, and the sharpened pencils hurled at your face.

Okay, maybe this is an exaggeration. But I’ve taught at five different colleges in Southern California, and this one topic has always struck a nerve with colleagues. Scantron forms in hand, they protest, “You only teach twenty-five students in each class!” Remembering the single research paper they assign every term, they argue, “We all have papers to grade.” Upset that they had to stay up late one night last semester to grade papers, they counter, “We’re all overworked.” Convinced they’ve thought this all through, they scream, “You have it made.”

That’s the first reaction: Workload. Money.

Our Google-dependent students need more than a cursory introduction to information competency. Many of our students are so confident in their web-surfing skills that the very process of deconstructing their notions of competent information retrieval is a monumental task. Then, we must teach them how to use and access different types of information, evaluate sources, avoid plagiarism, document these sources, and, most importantly, integrate all of this information into a seamlessly organized and supported research paper. And, of course, we must assess that students have learned all this.

But, research aside, it also seems to me, especially with the buzz of basic skills grants still lingering in the air, that helping students in transfer-level classes is vital to our shared mission to help students. Yes, freshman composition is a transfer-level class. But none of us who have actually taught this course can deny that our students, many of whom were in developmental composition courses just weeks prior to enrolling in our courses, need more time to work with instructors, to write in-class essays, or to digest what is increasingly becoming an onerous course.

Even without all the new material that needs to be covered, the course demands more time than other three-unit courses. “We’ve been teaching it as a three-unit class for years, so why change now?” This argument, as we all know, is not an argument at all. That we have been teaching the course as a four-unit course does not prove that this format is the most effective.

Certainly, the respite from teaching five courses a semester is also an important justification for moving to a four-unit English 1A course—because it will help students. We all know that we could cut corners. We all, in our own ways, do. We do because we must. We cut some corners because there are only so many hours in the day, because we can’t grade until midnight seven nights a week, because our children already don’t recognize us two seasons out of the year. But I know I’d be able to do a lot more for my students if I only taught four classes a semester instead of five. (I know this because, due to a strange series of unrepeatable events, I am only teaching four classes this semester, and I can’t help feeling like I’ve cheated my former students.) And I’d be able to help my students if I wasn’t always playing catch-up in my Freshman English courses, if I had some time in class to help them.

In the end, this is the element people remember: Workload. And the importance of kedging our workloads toward the standards set forth by the NCTE is immeasurable. But that’s another article entirely—at least, it should be even if it can’t be.

For now, I’ll keep fighting for this change on my campus because it’s what our students need. I don’t know if or how I’ll ever convince my colleagues in other departments to support us.

I’ll keep reading Revelations for clues.