Exploratory Essay Second Draft

If you have the right tools and preparation, then you can make it in this society. The authors in the following texts: “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”, and “Working Class Chicas” all believe that if you decide to pursue post-secondary education that you should be well prepared for what is to come and if you are not prepared then it will be hard for you to succeed.

In these stories, the authors put emphasis on the college preparation and the lack thereof. In “Working Class Chicas”, Julie Bettie illustrates that the counselors have failed the minority females by assigning them the easy classes they need to pass to graduate but not enrolling them in classes that may challenge them past high school like the college prep courses. One of the girls responds to why she was not prepared for college, “The counselor told me to take all the non-required classes. Now I’m way behind in English and math, so that is why I can’t go to a state school.”(Bettie, 77) How can you expect to get into college and the people who are supposed to be helping you are not doing their job? Bettie shows that some minority students need assistance in preparing for college. She also stated that most students are pressured in to attend college because it leads to success, “But given that school culture equates success with college is readily understood as an individual failure, las chicas were often left with no one to blame but themselves.” (Bettie, 79) How can you blame the students for not being prepared for college, if the teachers are a key role in preparing students for the next level? It is understood that if a student is not taking any initiative in to bettering themselves as far as education and getting into college, but it is also with the help of the instructor to give some guidance.

Similar to, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”, the woman in her 40s was not capable of comprehending the processes of modern society. She was enrolled in a college course but was not able to keep up with the requirements of the class, “She simply was not qualified for college…For I, … am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; they are in some cases barely literate;…They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.” (Professor X, 3-4) The professor tries to help her with her paper but she is incapable of understanding the concepts. Since she is an older student, she may not be up-to-date and current on the ways of modern society or she may have forgotten how to write a paper correctly. The author suggests that if you are going to go to college, you need to able to keep up with the classes or take classes as prerequisites to refresh your memory.

 However, in “The Basement of the Ivory Tower”, the professor unlike some other teachers agrees to work with the student on their deficits, “I had responsibilities to the rest of my students, so only when the class ended could I sit with her and work on some of the basics. It didn’t go well. She wasn’t absorbing anything. The wall had gone up, the wall known to every teacher at every level: the wall of defeat and hopelessness and humiliation, the wall that is an impenetrable barrier to learning.” (Professor X, 1) Not all teachers allow their students to fail, so actually some teachers care about the success of their students. Now since, the emphasis on college prep if so apparent it takes responsibility from the teacher as a means of resource and from the student as an output, whether you are in college or not. In the article, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, the author implies that based on what social class you are associated with, the education you receive and how you receive it plays a role in how prepared you are for college or post-secondary education. The author discusses the differences in the education by social class, “The foregoing analysis of differences in schoolwork in contrasting social class contexts suggests the following conclusion: the “hidden curriculum” of school work is tacit preparation for relating to the process of production in a particular way.”(Anyon, 10) Jean Anyon argues that the way the students are taught influences how well they are prepared for future college plans or careers. The students of the middle class are taught by the book, they engage in work by doing things step-by-step. They are not required to express a lot of creativity. With this teaching style in mind, they are being prepared for schools and/or jobs that deal with problem solving which requires a basic background in the core subjects. In contrast, not every job requires these skills and some require more skills which require more education meaning more time in college. Bettie supports this claim, “But no one actually speaks to the fact of changing labor and declining wages that await this generation of students, a problem that neither schools, parents, nor girls can solve.” (Bettie, 82) She claims that in society the demands for education and to get jobs are becoming harder and that there is no real solution for all of these issues.

 The authors of these three texts all illustrate how you must be prepared for college in order to succeed and they also showed if you don’t have the background knowledge, then you are going to struggle. The woman who was in her 40s in, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” was struggling even when she didn’t think she was. She had a lack of preparation which caused her to be behind in her studies just like the girls in “Working Class Chicas” who were not prepared for school or careers beyond high school.