The Many Worlds of Madison Sowell

This blog begins the tale of lessons learned and satisfaction gained over the past decade from teaching, mentoring, and supervising less-prepared college students, meaning those who entered college having received on standardized college admission tests anywhere from the 30^th percentile (an ACT score of 16 or 17) to the 45^th percentile (an ACT score of 19 or 20).

First, what do I need to confess right off the bat?

Well, to be honest, for the first thirty years of my teaching career I took great delight in teaching (almost exclusively) the so-called “cream of the crop.” Beginning when I was a graduate assistant teaching Harvard undergrads, I taught students who came from the nation’s top prep schools, who were roommates with the likes of Caroline Kennedy, and whose parents and grandparents were barons of industry and finance, and (in at least one case) the president of a South American country.  I continued (as a professor) with Brigham Young University honors students who scored mainly in the 95^th to 99^th percentile on standardized tests or with undergraduates who on the whole were mature, disciplined, and fluent in at least two languages.[1] Ten years ago I resigned from the easy life of teaching consistently well-prepared and privileged students and accepted the invitation to become provost (the chief academic officer) at the first of two small liberal arts colleges that often accepted students who scored as low as the 30^th percentile on standardized college admission tests scores.[2] The bottom line of this blog, for those who prefer to skip the stories, is this: while my satisfaction in teaching honors and honors-level students and helping them continue to perform at the top percentiles was great, it has paled in comparison to seeing a student move from the low-to-mid-range percentiles up forty or more percentile points after four years of small-classroom interaction and one-on-one, face-to-face mentoring.

Second, what is my own background and why do I now emphasize the value of laser-focused hard work over admission test scores? In my formative years I did not come from what anyone would consider a privileged educational background. My early education, however, frankly began earlier than most due to the financially challenging situation in which my family found itself.

When my mother started teaching fifth-grade, it was in the late 1950s and she was in her mid-forties. She had been trained as a dental hygienist but had given up that career when she married my father, a farmer, and moved from Tennessee to Arkansas.  She began teaching to supplement Dad’s up-and-down farm income. The teaching took place at a split-term country school in a rural area of Clay County, Arkansas. A gravel road led to the single-level yellow-brick elementary school, which was surrounded for miles on every side by farm land. Children took classes during the summer time while the crops were growing and then experienced a six-week recess during the fall to help with the harvest, which consisted largely of picking cotton by hand for ten hours a day. Because I was to attend a city school that was on a regular September-to-May schedule, my mother convinced the country school’s principal to allow me to sit in on her fifth-grade class one summer, even though I was only six years old and had not yet started first grade. One benefit was that I got an early start on my education, learning the names of states and their capitals, memorizing lyrics to songs and mastering simple multiplication tables. Mother made learning fun. She put seeds in pots and set them in the window; students watered the pots to see how the seeds sprouted and burgeoned. Popsicle sticks were saved and used to build miniature forts and houses. Games were played to help kids remember facts and timetables. Elocution lessons were taught so that we learned how to stand in front of the classroom and make presentations. The bottom line to this part of my story is that I had a fortuitous head start before I began first grade, something denied at the time to the vast majority of the nation’s first-graders.

What is equally important to know is that throughout my schooling, Mother never bragged on me. She felt that would be prideful and akin to bragging on herself.  I had to learn from another student, whose mother had told him, that I had achieved the third-highest score in the state on a standardized test when I was in elementary school. Mother was of course aware of how I had done, but she still chose not to tell me or praise me. She just told everyone, “My son works hard; that’s the only reason he does better.”  When my report cards showed straight A’s or my test scores placed me in the 99^th percentile of test takers, Mother wisely refused to compliment me on being smarter than anyone else; she would always say that I must have studied harder. The result was that I was blessed to reach young adulthood with what is now recognized as a “growth mindset,” the belief that one’s abilities are not fixed at birth but can be developed over time through consistent and persistent hard work and diligent and focused effort. As I have written before, your IQ does not determine who you will become; your innate talent does not determine what you will accomplish. Whatever your natural ability or talent, it is the effort that you put into following your passion that leads to success. In other words, “effort is what ignites [one’s] ability and turns it into accomplishment.”[3] As one of my teachers used to say, “I can’t grade potential, only performance.” What counted was not whether I had potential or not; it was how I performed that mattered.

That emphasis on working hard and performing led me to achieve many things: graduating with a straight-A grade point average and sharing the number one ranking in my graduating class of 400 students in Memphis, matriculating in a university honors program that accepted fewer than 4% of students and graduating summa cum laude and with highest honors, obtaining my master’s and doctorate from Harvard in less than four years, writing or co-authoring eight books and approximately 150 refereed articles, encyclopedia entries, essays, and book reviews.

Third, what happened when I (who had a lifetime of being well prepared and working almost exclusively with other well-prepared students) started working with less-prepared and often woefully under-prepared students?

Initially I was surprised, if not shocked, at how unprepared some students were for college. They claimed to have gotten through high school without reading a single book all the way through. They did not know how to set SMART goals, take good notes, read for meaning, manage their time, prepare for tests, write grammatically correct sentences, balance curricular and extra-curricular activities, or manage their finances. They didn’t understand why they needed to eat healthily every day and get a good night’s sleep every night. Some of these deficiencies my office addressed with “High Impact Practices,” such as “early start” or transitional “bridge” programs; others were dealt with in mandatory developmental or remedial courses. We added SI (supplemental instruction), required and monitored study halls for athletes, made sure we had after-hours tutoring sessions, improved our writing labs, arranged for a course or lessons in how to use library resources, and initiated early warning systems to monitor attendance and guard against absenteeism. We encouraged teachers to involve their students in small group work and to organize study groups for every class. Students were required to meet one-on-one with each of their professors early in the semester and to meet monthly with their faculty advisors. The most challenging part for most students was making each course relevant to their lives.

How does a teacher accomplish that?  How did I assist on a personal level?  For one thing I taught a first-year seminar or first-year experience course at the two liberal arts institutions I served as provost, and I worked hard to get to know as many students as possible by their first name. Then I set about motivating individual students as occasion and time would allow. A true story follows with an invented name for the student.

One evening after dinner on campus I walked over to see how the study halls were doing.  As I walked into the football study hall, I immediately spied Charley slunk down at a desk much too small for his massive frame. He was staring blankly ahead, and one of his muscled legs was extended far into the aisle. On his desk lay a copy of Homer’s Iliad open but face-down. He smiled sleepily when our eyes met and made a half-hearted effort to sit up and pick up Homer.

“Charley,” I said quietly, “why don’t you pick up your book, get a piece of paper, and follow me to the classroom next door?”

“Right now, Mr. Provost?” He drawled, “Am I in some sorta trouble?”

“No, Charley, you’re not in trouble. I just thought we could do some reading together.”

Once we were alone and seated in the adjacent classroom, I asked him to draw a vertical line down the middle of the piece of paper that he had brought and create two columns.  He lazily complied and then looked at me quizzically.

“Are you goin’ give me a test, Mr. Provost? I hope not, cause I hadn’t read but one page of this here book, and I don’t understand nuttin’!”

I started with a narrative that I thought he could relate to. “Charley, the Iliad is the story of two teams locked in a fierce competition. The teams have names, and I want you to label one column or team “Greeks” and the other column “Trojans.”

He started snickering, and I asked him, “What’s so funny?”

“Mr. Provost, isn’t it kinda funny that the second team has the same name as rubbers – you know, male protection? Is they the stronger team or somethin’?”

I smiled patiently and continued to explain that our task, first of all, was to figure out who was on which team and to record the names of the players in the correct column.  I then invited him to read aloud, and he looked somewhat sheepishly around the classroom to make sure the door was closed and that no one was lurking in a corner.

Charley began to read, slowly and deliberately:  “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.”

I stopped him and asked, “Which team is Achilles on?”  As Charley had no clue, I introduced him to the glossary in the back of the book and asked him to look up “Achilles” and also “Achaeans.”

“Hmmm, it seems that Achilles is on the Greek team, Mr. Provost! And guess what: the Greeks are also called Achaeans! But what’s Achilles doin’ hurtin’ his own team?”

“Well, Charley, that’s a great question you ask. Why don’t you keep on reading and see if you can find the answer to your question?”  This he did, and soon we had a list of Greeks and a list of Trojans, and Charley started asking more questions.

“What the heck are these Greeks fightin’ over and among themselves of all things?”

“What do you think, Charley?”

“Seems to me like them’s fightin’ over a girl!”

“And you would be right!”

“Mr. Provost, I done seen that many times.  Two players likin’ the same girl, and the first thing you know, all H-E-double toothpicks breaks out.”

By now Charley was getting into the reading.  I offered to spell him off, but he politely declined and kept reading out loud until about half-way through the first book when he stopped and smiled more broadly than I had seen all night.  With a huge grin on his face he slapped the table and exclaimed, “BRAD  PITT!”

As I looked at him with bewilderment, he almost shouted, “BRAD  PITT!”

“Charley, what does the actor Brad Pitt have to do with anything?”

Now Charley became animated because he was going to teach me. “Mr. Provost, this is the story of the movie TROY, starring Brad Pitt!  Brad Pitt is Achilles, and I think I know what’s goin’ happen next. He’s got some real smooth moves in the movie.  You oughtta watch it!”

At that point I knew that Charley was hooked on Homer.  I soon accompanied him back to the study hall, not much more than a half-hour after we had left it.  He immediately plopped down at his desk and kept reading avidly, although now to himself.  As I exited the room, I couldn’t help but smile at all the puzzled football players who were wondering what in the world had happened to Charley.

The pay day, however, came a few days later when Charley excitedly ran over and stopped me as I was walking across campus.  He had signed up to give a presentation on one of the later books of the Iliad and wanted to invite me to come hear what he had to say. I couldn’t help but reflect on a saying that’s often ascribed, rightly or not to William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” For those of us who teach, making the “3 Rs” (“readin’, ’ritin’, and ’rithmetic”) or science or history or foreign language relevant to under-prepared students often means having to meet them on their level.  I have repeatedly found that, once the teacher starts making connections that a student can relate to, before long the student will begin making his or her own connections. When the student becomes the teacher, that’s when teaching can be judged a success. 

[1] The median ACT score for entering BYU first-year students in 2019 was close to 28, which places students in the top 88^th percentile nationally out of two million test takers.

[2] The best-prepared students at the two liberal arts institutions where I led the academic programs were comparable to the best almost anywhere in the nation, scoring above the 90^th percentile.  I remember one student who as a sixteen-year-old had been accepted to Harvard but had chosen to attend the small liberal arts college because of proffered individualized attention. The average students at the two institutions were average, scoring anywhere from the 45^th to the 55^th percentiles. Today’s blog, however, relates to those who entered college with admission scores anywhere from the 30^th percentile (an ACT score of 16 or 17) to the 45^th percentile (an ACT score of 19 or 20).

[3] See Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2016), p. 41.