Key Takeaways for review

1. Explain why regular class attendance and active class participation are important.
2. Make a list of effective strategies and actions to take in case you have to miss a class.
3. Identify some resources that will help you transition to college.
4. Make a list of WCC technology you feel confident using and another list of WCC technology you still need to master. Create a plan for learning one of those skills within the next week.

Chapter One Case Study: A WCC Tale

Jossie – Yosayra to her immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic – was nervous starting out at WCC. Why wouldn’t she be?

For one thing, she was the first in her family ever to go to college. She, her parents, and her older brother knew nothing about the experiences that awaited her. For another, she had grown up on a farm in the Dominican Republic, graduated from a small, rural high school, and moved to The Bronx shortly after graduation. While moving to The Bronx was a tremendous adjustment for Jossie, attending to WCC was like parachuting into a foreign country. The campus seemed like an immense puzzle packed with a dizzying diversity of people – people of every age, hue, culture and personality, people she assumed all knew more and were smarter than she was. “So, you’re from the ‘hood?”, as one of her classmates, from North Salem, put it.

But Jossie managed to survive those first couple of weeks. She grew quickly to like her classmates – even the one from North Salem. After a few missteps, she learned her way around campus and starting classes wasn’t nearly as traumatic as she had feared. Soon enough, she learned that the other students weren’t really all smarter than she was. Jossie also realized and the professors were pleasant enough.

Trouble was, here it was midway through her first semester and things weren’t turning out well. As a farm girl, she had risen early her whole life, so she had signed up for early-in-the-morning classes. But the time she was spending with her new friends and her work hours had caused her to sleep clear through two of her Bio classes. She arrived a few minutes late three other times, missing the professor’s introductory instruction. Her tardiness left her feeling lost for half the class, like she had stepped into the middle of a conversation.

She also thought that, just like high school, she could skim through assigned readings or skip them altogether. She figured the teacher would go over everything in class, so why bother? But after a few weeks, she realized that her prof assumed she was familiar with the material he had assigned for homework, so she was too unsure of herself to participate much in group work or to answer any of the questions the teacher asked in discussions. She felt lost and disconnected and found herself daydreaming during class rather than listening carefully.

The story in her French class was no better. Jossie is fluent in Spanish, a Romance language, just like French. She was confident that the vocabulary and grammar the teacher covered in class would just sort of stick to her. She again spent little to no time with the textbook drilling and memorizing before each class.

That was a poor plan. She was getting Cs and Ds, and not just in French, but in all her classes. Worse, an important writing assignment was due in her history class. She was struggling with her paper and needed help. But she had lost her syllabus and forgotten her professor’s name, so she couldn’t email her or rush to her office.

Time was running out. It was 2 p.m., and Jossie needed to upload the paper onto Blackboard by midnight, which presented another problem. She had no idea how to do that.

She could just hear her mother scolding her: “¡Qué pesadilla!” What a nightmare!

Jossie knew she had to do better – in all her classes. But how?

Activities:

1. Using the resources in this chapter, create a bulleted action plan for Jossie. What steps should she take to improve her performance in school? In each step, describe both what she should do, and why.
2. Create the same sort of action plan for yourself.