<p>And here are some very specific suggestions that I have for you.</p>
<ol>
<li>Do all the reading, every day. Look at some of the websites on how to read in college, because they offer great advice on how to get the most out of your reading. Here’s where a lot of the “take a reduced course load” stuff fits, because you may need to spend more time preparing for class than your classmates, and that would mean that you need to take fewer classes than other people with similar work schedules would in order to be prepared.</li>
</ol>
<p>Ask for extra reading suggestions when what you’ve been assigned to read is hard, and then do those too.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Try to figure out – based on the reading and the description of what’s going to happen on the syllabus, and also on any information you’ve gotten from teachers when you visit them in office hours – what the teacher is going to cover on any given day. (This works for lower-division classes, where what happens in class is more closely tied to what was in the reading, better than for upper-division classes. But community college classes are all lower-division classes.) Come up with an outline if you can. This serves two purposes: first, it means that you will not be struggling to follow what’s happening in class, and people who understand the lectures tend to feel a lot more competent and able than people who are struggling to keep up; second, an awful lot of the good stuff in college classes goes right over the heads of the people who are just trying to keep up, while the people who are hearing stuff they already know are able to benefit from little hints about how what they’re learning fits into the larger discipline, or how it connects to ideas in other disciplines, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>As soon as possible after class (so that you can remember what happend as well as possible), rewrite your notes so that they are clear. Also, when you have done each bit of reading, write clear notes about it as well. Your goal is to have notes that you can study for each exam – or look over in 10 years’ time when you have forgotten a lot of the details of the class – and that are sufficient to allow you to understand the course.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>On a regular basis, look over your notes to remind you about what has come before. </p>
<ol>
<li>Keep an academic journal – a blog, or something in a notebook, or a computer file – in which you write about what you’ve learned (and that can be outside of class as well as in class) and what you think about what you’ve learned. What interests you? What things do not seem important to you even though your teacher is spending a lot of time on it? Do you agree with the author of a given argumentative essay? Are there parts of someone’s argument that youthink don’t hold up?</li>
</ol>
<p>This, obviously, is exactly what you say you cannot do. I hope you will try to do it anyway – and in any case your journal isn’t something you have to share with anyone else, so even if you think your efforts are pretty awful it doesn’t matter: only you will ever see it. I suspect that after a few months you will be able to look back at the start and see improvement.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Talk about what you’re learning. Even if it’s only to a pet or in your mind. (My dogs are really getting tired of hearing about the things I’m reading, but that’s kind of too bad for them. 
I also, instead of singing in the shower, talk to myself, and try to go over the ideas in the most difficult thing I’ve read since the previous day’s shower.) Try to figure out how you would explain something to someone you were tutoring. Try to connect the ideas you’re learning to things in your everyday life. I once was supervising someone at a retail job and I asked her to tell me about how prices for a given line of products were determined. The answer I was going for was “The company tells us what price we may sell the items at. We are not allowed to have sales or give discounts. If we do, and if we get caught, we will no longer be allowed to sell this line of products. So if you’re buying from a legitimate seller of these products, you’re going to pay the same price anywhere – you won’t get a better deal at some other store.” She, however, had apparently taken a number of economics course, because she went off on a lecture about supply and demand. It wasn’t really the place for it, but the fact that she could do that probably had a lot to do with her success in college.</p></li>
<li><p>Try to connect what you’re learning in one class to what you’re learning or have learned somewhere else. If you take a developmental math class and a developmental English class next semester, you probably won’t be able to connect too many things from each. But if you take a sociology class and a psychology class, even if you don’t take them at the same time, you’ll be able to make connections. And in your major you will find that a lot of classes deal with common ideas.</p></li>
<li><p>Keep track of how much time you’re studying. At first, I’d just write down when you start and when you stop – including when you stop to go to the bathroom, to get a drink from the kitchen, to say hi to a classmate who sees you in the library, etc. – so that you know how much you’re really doing, and so that you can you can get close to an hour’s worth of studying done for every hour you aren’t doing anything other than studying (I know I lose time going to the bathroom, getting something from the refrigerator, answering email, and playing with my dogs whenever I’m “studying” something that bores me and I’m working on that). If you have a class from 9 to 9:50 and a class from 11 to 11:50, you don’t want to waste the time between 9:50 and 11 not doing much of anything. If you can get 45 minutes of going over the notes from your 9 am class before you 11 am class starts, that’s 45 minutes you will be able to use later doing something more fun. Once you have an idea of how much you are actually working when you are “working”, you can figure out how much downtime in the middle of studying is reasonable for you (I need at least a 5-minute break in each hour of work) and cut down on time that you don’t need for downtime but that you aren’t working. Then you can make a study schedule that allows you to get your work done and that reflects how much time you really need, both for study time and for downtime.</p></li>
<li><p>Take a break sometimes. The standard estimate is that you should be spending 2 hours working outside of class for every hour you spend in class. You will probably need a bit more than that, at least at first while you are developing skills and experimenting with how you learn best. But if all you do is work and study, you’ll burn out. You’ll probably have periods in the middle and at the end of each semester when you really do need to spend most of your time working or studying. But if you can’t find time to watch a TV show (one of the bloggers I read says he’s expecting the show “Community” – about students at a community college – to be really entertaining, so I’m planning to watch that; I usually have 2 or 3 shows I really follow at any one time, and a few more that I watch if I have time), read something that entertains you, see friends, go out, etc., it’s too much. It is better to get Bs and have a life you like than to get As and miss out on everything that is important to you – if for no other reason than that it will be harder to finish school if it requires you to be miserable for years.</p></li>
<li><p>And, finally, recognize that many, many teachers would be thrilled to have someone like you in class. Like you, my main skills are reading and writing. Unlike you, a lot of schoolwork came very easily to me. As a result, I got lazy. (The huge irony is that I blew off a class when I was a college freshman; but now, because I am doing a different kind of work than I originally expected to, I’m reading the same professor’s blog and studying all the books he wrote.) Worse than that, when I encountered something I was bad at I tended to quit very fast. I had little discipline. I lucked out and found something that I was talented at and that held my attention so that I was willing to work hard for it. But a lot of people like me never did find anything that excited them the way I did. When I started teaching, I realized that I loathed the students who were most like the person I had been. They struck me as lazy, and I hated that they quit so quickly when something got a little challenging. Someone who has spent most of his or her life in a system that requires them to work very hard in order to succeed, on the other hand, is my idea of a dream student. I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few of them. It takes a lot of character to stick with academics for 12 or 13 years when academics don’t come naturally – or when the way academics are taught in one’s school doesn’t come naturally – and keep going. The strength of character that such students display makes me ashamed of who I was when I was 18. </p></li>
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<p>And if I’ve learned anything from the community college teachers I know and the ones whose blogs I read, it is that they get this. They get that they have students for whom academics (at least academics done in the traditional way) don’t come easy, students who have responsibilities on the job or in their own families, students who don’t speak English well, and so on. The students who annoy them most are the ones who don’t take school seriously, who resent any expectation that they work, who show up at the end of the semester asking for extra credit instead of showing up at the start of the semester asking for help earning all the regular credits. Students who assume that their failure to perform is entirely the teacher’s responsibility drive everyone I know who teaches completely up the wall.</p>
<p>I don’t think you should go to the other extreme and assume that your difficulties in school are all due to your own limitations – though I do think that assuming that the problem is more on your end than on the teachers’ or the textbook writers’ gives you power, I also think that that assumption has a heavy cost in terms of what you think of yourself – but I hope you will believe me that someone like you, someone who assumes some responsibility for their own performance, is someone that a huge number of teachers, especially at schools where teaching is valued over research, would love to have in their classes.</p>
<p>Your original question was about what your chances are. I think a lot of that has to do with you yourself. But from what you say, I would be very optimistic that you can get yourself a solid education and a good credential – I think the main risk for you is that you will decide that you are not intelligent enough and stop trying. I really hope you won’t do that. I know that it hasn’t been easy for you up to now, and I know it won’t be easy for you to take the next few steps, but I hope you will hang on long enough to at least get a Bachelor’s. It will open a lot of doors for you, and I have <i>absolutely no doubt whatsoever</i> that if you choose your teachers well and manage to stave off burnout you can make it.</p>
<p>I realize that my posts here are of the TL:DR variety; but I will check back to see whether there is anything else you would like me to tell you.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>