Last fall a new instructor taught a remedial writing course at a community college in Maryland. Most of her students came from low-income backgrounds. Many had gone to broken schools. That they had made it to college at all was a feat.
In teaching them to write, she faced challenges that went to the foundations: Several students had no clue how to construct a sentence, let alone a thesis. She tried to help them catch up, picking books they might relate to, reviewing multiple drafts of essays. When students copied from websites, she gave them lessons on plagiarism and another chance to do the work.
Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Education.