aK ott College Thinking How To Get the Best Out of College Jack W. Meiland, Ph.D. Copyright 1981 Published by Penguin Books Reprinted with permission of Mrs. J. MeilandCHAPTER 1: Introduction re (4) MANY COLLEGE STUDENTS and college graduates—including some very bright and serious people—have told me that it took them several years of college before they finally realized what kind of work was expected of them \/ 5 and what faculty was trying to teach them. Perhaps if someone had taken these _ students aside and iy? tried to explain the nature of college work to them— even had merel¥ giveh them a few hints—they would not have felt so confused, so much at'sea, and they might have used their college years more effectively. yp dat tna! what 10 10 _. spot estoy: yooms wr euniee— AF Orientation at even the best colleges concentrates on céurse selection, tours 10 of the campus and of the athleti¢ facilities’ placement examinations, and social events—and little orAdthing is said to explain what is now expected of you as a 0 college student. College teachers are usually pre-occupied with teaching their oven specialty, be it politica! Scfence, English’ or chemistry, and do not give & ‘explicit and sustairied attention to intellectual skills and goals. Instructors seem “15 to believe that if they teach their own special subject matter as well as they can, they have done their job, and so they spend little, if any, time explaining the basic skills and techniques needed for doing the work. Perhaps they assume \\\ that since students who made it to college were successful in high school, they ust know. what todo to be successful in college too. But this assumption is 4 tet FBR Taha : a : 200 pia High school work is not ae for college work te (except in a few of the very best high schools), partly Because college work is (and should be) a very different kind of work. [Part 1)of this book begins with a discussion of the difference between high school and college work. (Chapter 2 contrasts college work with high school 25 work, in order to help you understand college work better. This chapter should give you a framework that will enable you to understand the specific intellectual skills discussed later. Because college work heavily involves argumentation, the next several chapters give instructions on how to write an argumentative paper. Chapter 3 prepares the way for this by introducing some 30 basic concepts of argumentation. Chapter 4\gives specific directions for writing — | argumentative papers. Chapter 5\makes these directions even more eonereté by analyzing actual examples from student papers. Each of these directions, steps, and recommendations is explicitly justified by reference to the asic purposes, of college work explained in chapter 2. Chapter 6]stress¢s the ided of active t 35 reading-and_relates_active.reading to the argumentative format ‘explained Why eattia Ne wrote ¢ To tell s30 35 {fhe core of part Jis training in argumentative writing. The reason for this is that argumentative criting is inking is thinking on. pa thinking is what college is all about. although you willbe i several, types of papers in your college coursed’ expbsitory, 2 analytical, interpretive, comparative, and so on—the argumentative paper is by far the most important, and, in many colleges, the most common. puilhermere, pers of other types will often necessarily contain argumentative For example, if you write an interpretive paper, you will want to spend part of your paper arguing that_your interpretation is superior to other possible interpretations. (Chapter 4)laysout for you in great detail a format for an argumentative paper. This format lacks elegance and beautiful literary style, but it has some great advantages which more than offeet these You should seriously consider adopting this format or some variation of it for your argumentative papers. Professors at many colleges have been complaining that their students do not know how to write; a few teachers have even stopped / assigning papers to their students because the results are so L'Séme of these complaints are abgut mechanics, such as writing complete sentences, making the subject arid énb of a sentence agree in number, and spelling words correctly. But even when students get the grammatical mechanics right, professors still often find student papers very disappointing. And what these professors mean is that students do not know how to construc! sustained and Yogicaily organized piece of writing. The format explained in/chap\ er 4, aims at ing this. prove / remove be ind ud lage topics as the purpose of education to concrete problems connected with the most eubof your professors. (Chapter 7 will help you take a more active part in your education while at the same time giving you a viewpoint on college that should make your studies and time in class more satisfying. Following this is a chapter on the structure of the university and the activities of professors, to try to give you a basis for understanding the institution within which you will be spending the next four years. It is incredible, but true, that the material in this chapter is almost never taught to students, thus making the university and higher education itself one of those subjects most iniedessible to students. If you do not know the difference between an assistant professor and a teaching t, many aspects of daily life in college will be a mystery. pegin (start 4 In part 3] we Mthret® the three divisions f knowledge over which many college faculties require students to distribute their courses: the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Chapters 9, 10, and 11) discuss 4 leo year listen fins {Part 3 covers theoretical and_ practical matters ranging from such 7 —*