DATE: Monday, November 10, 1997             TAG: 9711100057

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  121 lines

REMEDIAL CLASSES GIVE STUDENTS A 2ND CHANCE ENGLISH, MATH BASICS IMPROVE COLLEGE SUCCESS.

``My ideal mate have to conversate with my son and I. He don't forget to tell us that he got fried from his job or other things about hisself.'' - A student's response in an essay question on a college placement test at Tidewater Community College.

When Pat Haley read those words she didn't hesitate. The student was promptly assigned to a remedial class.

It's something Haley, assistant division chairwoman for English at Tidewater Community College in Portsmouth, must do frequently.

The essay featured a pack of problems - misspellings, wrong verb tenses, made-up words, for starters - but the author's shortcomings are not that unusual.

A report last month found that 24 percent of Virginia high school graduates - and 30 percent in South Hampton Roads - require remedial math or English classes when they enter state-supported two- or four-year colleges.

Ten college professors and administrators who supervise remedial - also known as developmental - classes said last week that many students come to college with a load of deficiencies large enough to sink any SAT score.

In English, students are particularly weak in grammar.

``Subject-verb agreement, sentence construction and punctuation are probably the biggest skills-based errors,'' Haley said. Old Dominion University instructor Shirley Blow sees too many sentence fragments and comma splices (such as ``John went to the store, he bought milk'').

In terms of reading, ``they have trouble making connections,'' said Clarence Hundley, assistant professor of English at Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton. ``When I have my students read essays and I ask them, `What's the main idea?' I'll have a host of answers.''

Martha Kello, associate professor of developmental reading and English at Paul D. Camp Community College in Franklin, said it's part of a larger problem: ``The students don't know how to think.''

``If they're reading a passage,'' she said, ``they just take it for the literal presence of what it says, instead of thinking about the implications of what it says or the relationship of what the statement says to the other statements preceding it and following it. . . . They want to memorize the definition of a word instead of knowing how to use it.''

In math, fractions seem to be a big problem. ``I see people who can solve algebraic equations but don't know what three-fourths means,'' said Linda Morrison, a lecturer in developmental math at ODU. ``If I give them 2x+3(EQ)8, they can handle it. But if I put a fraction in that equation, they act like they've never seen it before.''

David J. French, a math instructor at TCC's Chesapeake campus, said it's not always a question of aptitude. ``The last time they took math was two or three years ago,'' early in high school. ``Math is one of those subjects where a break in time can cause you to forget things.''

The good news, most of the professors said, is that a semester or two of intensive work in English or math prepares many of the students for college-level classes.

``I've had students in developmental courses who go on to calculus and are now in engineering courses at ODU and Virginia Tech,'' French said.

Susan Boland, a lecturer in ODU's English Language Center, recalls a remedial student she taught five years ago at TCC. That woman, Boland recently discovered, is now in ODU's master's program in writing.

But they're not all happy endings.

``We have wonderful students like that,'' Haley said, ``but we have a lot that don't make it. . . . For some of them, it is such a struggle that when we give them an R - that means to repeat the course - many students do give up at that point.''

Yet even if some remedial students don't end up with college degrees, she said, ``I do think they are improved, even if it simply means they can write a business letter, which they couldn't do before.''

How do the professors whip students into shape? It's practice, practice, practice - with daily writing assignments and journal entries.

Many use analogies to sports. ``If you're an athlete and don't practice two, three hours every day, you're not going to be very good,'' said Dana D. Burnett, vice president for student services at Old Dominion University.

What doesn't work well, some say, is going over worksheets, such as ``find the fragments in the following 10 sentences.''

So English instructors usually focus on the deficiencies in the students' own essays. Blow will isolate a specific problem, for instance, asking students to identify all the fragments in an essay.

To get her students to improve their thinking skills, Kello sometimes gives them a short paragraph and asks them to highlight ``the main idea and supporting details.'' Then she takes away the paragraph and asks them to rewrite it in their own words.

In math, Morrison uses visual aids to ensure that students get the concepts behind fractions. ``I take a lot of paper and scissors, and do a lot of cutting,'' she said.

Though the professors say there will inevitably be students who need to catch up, they have plenty of ideas to reduce the number:

More writing in class. Both in college and public schools, English teachers shouldn't be the only ones requiring - and scrutinizing - writing assignments.

``If history teachers and geography teachers and science teachers required writing, it wouldn't just be up to the English teacher,'' Burnett said. Then, Haley said, ``students wouldn't think it's just an old fuddy-duddy English teacher who expects me to write this way.''

More attention to grammar. ``My analogy is if you're going to build a beautiful piece of furniture and you don't know how to use the tools, you're not going to end up with a pretty piece of furniture,'' Haley said. ``If you know how to use the tools, it doesn't guarantee you'll get a pretty piece of furniture. But you've sure got a better chance.''

The trouble, said Haley, a former high school teacher, is that many teachers have problems getting students interested in grammar. ``They find it boring or difficult. So what happens is that many teachers, not all, give up and say, `Let's go with the literature.' ''

Smaller class sizes. Haley said college and public school class sizes of 25 to 30 should be cut in half. With 12 to 15 students, ``you could get around and talk to people. Until classes are truly small, where individual help can be given, it's never going to improve.''

More school/college partnerships. Nellie Boyd, director of Norfolk State University's remedial program, suggested that middle school, high school and college teachers share their observations about their students' needs. ``They all have the students' interests at heart, but sometimes each is not aware of what the other is doing.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

RICHARD L. DUNSTON/The Virginian-Pilot

TCC Chesapeake campus teacherDavid J. French says aptitude is not

always the problem. KEYWORDS: REMEDIAL CLASSES

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