Bad Students or Bad Teachers?

I graduated in May and will be starting graduate school in August, but in the mean time, I am taking a Toni Morrison class and an editing class at the university near me. Both not needed but very interesting, so I am spending time learning about something that I want. My job, while I am at this particular university, is to work in the writing lab. Well, it’s actually a computer lab, but since I have been working there, it has been changed into a writing lab. I look over the students work and offer suggestions, help them understand the different kinds of sentences, clauses, phrases, and the rules of grammar, that is the ones that I remember. I think this is one of the things that I will miss the most, well I will of course miss my favorite professors and a few of the students. Anyway, it amazes me how many students are in upper level classes and are unable to write a complete sentence. There are two students that are taking senior level classes, in fact one graduates and will be teaching in a couple of weeks, neither of these students can write a complete sentence. They don’t know how to write a compound sentence because they fail to follow through with the complete thought connecting the two. I don’t understand how they made it through Comp I and II. I even asked them and they both admit that they barely made it through. I feel so sorry for poor students that they are going to teach or not teach. I offered to pick books up for them at the used bookstore, that is high school grammar books. I find that those are the best to teach students who don’t have a clue. But they both say, they just want to get the hell out of this school and get a job. I am so sad. At this university there are excellent English teachers, there are, however, a couple who need to be sent back to school, and I suppose lazy students tell others that those teachers are the ones to take. A breeze, they say. The only good that comes from this is that while they both came to me to help them, I am trying to feed as much information about punctuation that I can in this short time period. If they just learn to identify subject and verbs, agreement, and how to keep their essay smooth, well then, I will feel something was accomplished. Who knows, maybe they are just conning me too.