A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The following column was first published in the Opinions page of  Catalyst  on March 6, 1986, the day after my 23rd birthday:   It's cold outside and darkness is setting in as I fidget on a hard concrete bench at the bus stop. I have done everything that I had to do today -- wrote my column, studied for tomorrow's test, called a few contacts for stories and all the other jobs on my list. Now I'm free.  Out there, somewhere, a bus is making its way through heavy traffic, depositing people here, picking up people there. Its course is not a straight line from point A to point B; it zig-zags all over the place. It will take 20 or 30 minutes to reach campus. If the traffic is heavy, perhaps longer.  I look around. There are 15, maybe 20, people sitting, standing, pacing back and forth. On a bench to my left, a pair of basketball players concentrates on their textbooks.  A wizened old woman, obviously neither student nor faculty -- her clothes seem almost as old ...

When I was the managing editor of my college campus' student newspaper back in the late 1980s, we ran a story about how many incoming freshmen - most of them recent graduates from local high schools - were having to take remedial classes in such courses as writing, reading and basic math skills. Most of us on the staff - myself included - either knew someone who had been a "great" student in elementary, junior high (what we used to school middle school back then) and high school but had failed at least one part of the Basic Skills Test required of all credit-course student applicants.  (Full disclosure: I passed the basic math part - by a miracle - but found Algebra 1 so intimidating that I tried to take remedial math...twice...and failed.) I no longer have the 1989-era issue, so I can't quote from it, but this recent article published in the Miami Herald this week covers the same topic. 13th grade: Many freshmen unprepared at community and state colleges As th...