Housebreaking the Students

In Socrates Wake directed me to this article, which has a wonderful line about teaching:

“My view is that you really fall into a trap when you start allowing what you believe about your students to dictate how you teach your discipline,” he answered. “Too often these days we end up setting up our courses in light of what we believe about our students and we end up not teaching them. At best, we end up housebreaking them.”

I'm not sure I agree with the sentiment, although the principle is sound. In general, we cannot say that a student has successfully learned, for example, how to write, unless he attains an absolute level of proficiency. This measure must ignore what level they started at. While our students arrive in the class with a variety of backgrounds, skills and talent, they should leave the classroom with some uniformity of proficiency.

It is derelict in the extreme to excuse poor students because "they started off too weak".

That being said, we must first meet our students where they are, not where we would like them to be. I may have a goal for the end of the semester, but I cannot begin the semester losing half the class because I speak in ways incomprehensible to them or use terms that they don't understand.

I, however, would love to explore ways to avoid housebreaking my students.