Open Admissions: What Teaching at Community College Taught Me About Learning

by Ned Bachus

Overview

For the children of our elites, attending college is an expected part of late adolescence, an experience for which they have been groomed since birth. First generation or nontraditional students also enroll in college but generally with far less preparation and support. Award-winning writer and teacher Ned Bachus argues that for our greater society their outcomes matter more.

Bachus began the fall 2011 semester knowing that before the year's end, he must decide if he will take early retirement or remain indefinitely in his dream job at Community College of Philadelphia-where he began his own college studies as a bad student from a working-class single-parent family. Open Admissions interweaves the story of this decision-making semester with the month-long sabbatical residency the following spring when, on a cliff-hugging cottage on the coast of Ireland, he begins to make sense of the previous fall and of a life measured in semesters.

Open Admissions offers an important window into the real lives of community college students and their professors. The memoir sheds much needed light on the barely known and often disrespected institution that serves as a launching pad for people who make a positive difference, from doctors, nurses, and researchers to engineers, entrepreneurs, and creative artists on the world stage. Bachus offers story after story about teaching and learning practices that transform lives. Including his own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798986618807
Publisher:	Tree of Life Books
Publication date:	01/01/2025
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Born in Quebec and raised in Philadelphia, Ned Bachus taught at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf for two years before attending graduate school at Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University), where he founded the first rugby club for the Deaf in the United States. A founding member of Blackthorn Rugby Football Club, Bachus has been inducted into the Blackthorn RFC Hall of Fame. During his four-decade career at Community College of Philadelphia, he won multiple teaching awards, including the Christian and Mary Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. His fiction has been anthologized, published in literary magazines, and presented at the Writing Aloud Series at Philadelphia's InterAct Theatre, and has earned him fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and a residency at Ireland's Cill Rialaig Project, where he began writing Open Admissions. His Fleur-de-Lis Press book of short stories, City of Brotherly Love, received a 2013 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction. A singer-songwriter, his songs have been recorded by numerous artists and performed on National Public Radio programs including A Prairie Home Companion. He sings and plays percussion as a member of the Louisiana-style roots rock band Sacred CowBoys. He was named honorary member of Alpha Sigma Pi, a Deaf fraternity, and of Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society.

Table of Contents

Prologue .............................................................................................................. X

1. Fall Semester, Week One......................................................................... 16

2. Spring Sabbatical, Day One......................................................................... 29

3. Fall Semester, Week One ............................................................................. 39

4. Spring Sabbatical, Day Two......................................................................... 48

5. Fall Semester, Week One ............................................................................. 65

6. Spring Sabbatical, Day Four ........................................................................ 71

7. Fall Semester, Week One ............................................................................. 79

8. Spring Sabbatical, Day Five......................................................................... 93

9. Fall Semester, Week Two ........................................................................... 101

10. Spring Sabbatical, Day Six ........................................................................ 116

11. Fall Semester, Week Three ......................................................................... 125

12. Spring Sabbatical, Day Nine...................................................................... 147

13. Fall Semester, Week Five ........................................................................... 155

14. Spring Sabbatical, Day Eleven .................................................................. 182

15. Fall Semester, Week Seven ........................................................................ 195

16. Spring Sabbatical, Day Thirteen ................................................................ 218

17. Fall Semester, Week Nine .......................................................................... 226

18. Spring Sabbatical, Day Twenty-One ......................................................... 250

19. Fall Semester, Week Eleven ....................................................................... 258

20. Spring Sabbatical, Day Twenty-Two ......................................................... 284

21. Fall Semester, Week Thirteen .................................................................... 290

22. Spring Sabbatical, Day Twenty-Six ........................................................... 306

23. Fall Semester, Week Fourteen.....................................................................308

24. Spring Sabbatical, Day Twenty-Six.............................................................329

Epilogue ........................................................................................................... 341

Acknowledgments .............................................................................................346

About the Author ............................................................................................. 348

Endnotes .......................................................................................................... 350

Editorial Reviews

Bachus is a clear-eyed and likable protagonist and his hard-earned reflections on the way humans learn from one another are worth a read. A valuable and thoughtful work from a professor at the end of his teaching career.

—Kirkus

I loved this book. Ned Bachus can really write. This memoir is brilliant, engaging, and instructive. Open Admissions is both moving and personal; it is serious without being sanctimonious. Bachus is never pious and he is always inspiring, whether he’s talking about the students he’s teaching or about his own experiences and family life. A must read, not only for those who teach at community colleges or at public institutions, but for all teachers and all administrators. I recommend Open Admissions with a full heart.

— Gina Barreca, Professor of English, University of Connecticut, contributor to Chronicle of Higher Education, and author of Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League

In a time of crumbling infrastructure, education budget cuts, and spiraling college debt, Ned Bachus finds hope and possibility in our country’s community colleges. Open Admissions is a love song to the promise and accessibility of affordable higher education. Weaving a narrative tapestry from the threads of his own search within and abroad, Bachus discovers that while he thought he taught writing to nontraditional students, what he really was teaching was independence.

— Roger LaMay, General Manager, WXPN

With humor and compassion, Bachus reveals the transformational work that occurs in community colleges in helping students reach their educational goals. He intertwines his own mishaps in a foreign culture with the challenges that students face as they enter the new world of academia. Teaching and learning occurs by both faculty and students in this must-read book for anyone employed at a community college.

— Kathleen Hetherington, President, Howard Community College

From the Publisher