When I started teaching, I had a somewhat idealistic view of my students. I thought that if I respected their adulthood — that is, accomodated their autonomy by keeping rule-making to a minimum — they would respond as, well, as adults. So, for instance, I made it clear that attendance was not a requirement and did not keep roll. The (predictable) result: low attendance. After quite a bit over half of my students failed their mid-term, I realized that I’d made a terrible mistake, and now, despite my distaste for the necessity of the task, I take roll and include attendance as a part of the final grade (usually about 5%).
What went wrong, aside from my own inexperience and naivité? In the three years since I first stepped into a classroom as a teacher and not a student, I’ve come to realize that most of my students simply have not been informed of what it means to be a college student. Some view it as an extension of high school, expecting me to be an authority figure and punisher of wrong-doing, and resenting the situation just like they did in high school; others follow a similar line, seeing college as high school without any authorityfigures, so they can do whatever they want. Very few of my students have seemed to have much of a sense of what real learning — the kind of life-long commitment to the development of their minds that college kicks off — entails, nor do they have very real understandings of what the expectations of college learning are.
Steven Dutch, a professor at University of Wisconsin, must feel the same way, because he has posted a list of the Top Ten No Sympathy Lines (the title is misleading; there’s actually 16), complaints students love to give and his own pointed rejoinders. More than just a list of gripes, though, the list reads like a primer on college learning, highlighting the student’s own role in crafting an education for themselves. For instance:
I Don’t Have Time For All This
Life is about choices. We all have more to do than we can do completely, and we have to set priorities. So we may have to accept tradeoffs. Some options:
- Reduce your credit load and take longer to get through
- Cut back on social events
- Cut back on work hours and accept a lower standard of living and fewer possessions
- When you have two conflicting assignments, focus on the most important one
- Accept lower grades
The one option that is never on the table in life is to choose a course of action and choose the consequences. If you select a course of action, you also select the consequences. If you want to avoid or achieve a certain set of consequences, you select your course of action accordingly. So easier grading and fewer assignments to free up time for non-college activities are not an option. Don’t waste time asking.
Dutch’s list got me thinking about some of the other complaints I hear, and how I might answer them. For example:
It’s too much work — I have other classes!
All of your professors handed out syllabi at the beginning of the semester explaining exactly what was required of you in their class. The reason for doing this is not, if you can believe it, to avoid having to cover any real content in the first class, but so that you can review the syllabus and determine if you can meet the course requirements given your other commitments. While your professors are pretty good judges of how much work the typical student can manage in a semester (or quarter, or whatever), you are not a typical student — nobody is. That’s why we give you the chance to change your schedule after you’ve received all your syllabi.There’s something else, though: chances are you’re not complaining about the overall level of work but the fact that you have too much work to do right now. I agree that it is too much to expect a student to research and write a full paper in a week. That’s why the assignment was given 4, or 8, or 12, or 15 weeks ago. In fact, that’s why they’re called “term papers” — you actually are supposed to be working on them over the whole term. If you find yourself getting log-jammed at the end of the semester, it is most likely because you ahven’t been using your time very well; there are a lot of resources available to help you learn how to better manage your time, I suggest you get ahold of some of them before your next term starts. Your professor will probably be happy to help you with this.
What other gripes do you hear a lot, and how would you answer them? How can we better make up for the lack of preparation most of our students seem to have about the expectations facing them in college?
“My roommate got a better grade than I did, and I’m smarter than him….”
I’ve still not figured how to respond to that one…
“Apparently not?”
Actually, I tell students with this sort of complaint that they probably did deserve a better grade than they got; unfortunately, I don’t give students the grades they deserve, I give them the grades they *earn*. I had a fairly intelligent student last year who complained because I failed them — and refused to understand how I could use the fact that they’d not handed in well over 3/4 of the work as justification of their poor grade. “But I’ve never gotten a grade lower than an A!”
“Accept lower grades”
This is the hardest one to follow.
But good advice anyway.
Oh yay! Three cheers for Prof Dutch??!? Because, you know, those who have to work 2 jobs to pay for university… they are making “choices”?
Maniaku,
a) I don\’t know Prof. Dutch or his academic work, so I have no intention of endorsing (or not endorsing) him or anything he\’s written or done other than this particular article — I don\’t see how your disagreeing with something he wrote elsewhere (which is my reading of your \”three cheers\” comment) has any bearing on the topic at hand.
b) I teach at a community college and a public university, and am a product of same. I\’m not only sympathetic to the plight of students who have to work 2 jobs to support themselves but I *was* (and technically I still *am*) one of those students. That said, what is your response to those students? Should I just hand out A\’s based on my assessment of how much suffering my students are going through to fund their educations? Shall I excuse the students who have outside obligations from the work of learning? It\’s not fair, I grant you — the rising cost of education assures that the system is self-replicating — working class students get tracked right back into low-paying jobs because they can\’t afford the education that might allow them to accumulate the social capital to get the kinds of jobs that give the economic security to afford a better education for them or their children. But at the same time, how does it help to lower our teaching standards for those students?
c) That said, these aren\’t the students I or, I think, Dutch are talking about. My experience is that the students who have to work the hardest to afford their educations are the students who recognize best the value of education. I\’ve rarely had a student tell me \”I\’m working two jobs and I need a break\” — rather, the ones that seem most overwhelmed by their work schedules are the ones that work part-time as a \”supplement\” to school. These are the ones for whom the kinds of choices Dutch describes are important — the ones for whom the commitment to education represents a challenge to their high expectations of what they should and should not be able to afford to do.
But, again, this is supposed to be a conversation about our recommendations to students dealing with what are, I admit, difficult situations — what is your recommendation to the student for whom the demands of an education are an unfair burden?
Ya sorry, just being cheeky.
On the other hand, I don’t think these articles are so unrelated as you suggest. They are both premised on a kind of meritocratic individualism… I’d almost think social darwinism. “People of the Middle East make bad value choices. This is why they don’t do well”. “Certain students (the way I read it, it is implied poor students) make bad value choices. This is why they don’t do well”. A further part of my “argument” (okay I admit, it hardly exists 😉 ), is that while anthropologists (say) would be fine with accepting a structural explanation of inequality (of course race, class, gender–but possibly also, as you mention, social capital/status) on a “fieldwork” scale, in a teaching or personal capacity they would accept a different position whereby students “earn” their marks in class through a general competitive individualism. Okay, maybe some won’t accept this intellectually (if pushed), but in a practical sense at any rate. As far as “standards”, let’s just say I am skeptical of the concept, at least as currently implemented. And no I don’t have a better suggestion.
Ya, before you ask, I’m in the naive, pre-teaching stage 😉
My opinion is not well formulated, but I think for one thing it’s important to differentiate between what a student ought to do (in a duty sense) and what they should do (in an expediency sense). What they should do depends on their goals, and life-long learning (sadly, maybe in the opinion of you-or me) may not be one. In fact, maybe what they should do is whine and try to get their workload reduced? 😉
Had stumbled on Dutch’s comments elsewhere, and had enjoyed them. Thought I’d weigh in Maniaku’s comments. To understand our students’ worlds and why it might make most sense for them to “whine and try to get their workload reduced” (empirically based, empathetic) is different than trying to accomplish specific results as a teacher (normative). While the first is helpful in accomplishing the 2nd, what we try to do as professors is create a moral economy in the classroom. This is what Dutch is doing. We try, by hook and by crook, to get them to learn and to want to learn. We do this, in part, by telling them our expectations, and that our world is not the same as highschool world.
More from Prof Dutch:
bq. “All I Want is the Diploma”
The work force is full of people who do the minimum necessary to get by. Give me one reason why I, as a citizen or consumer, should help create more of them.
Call me elitist, but there are a lot more people who want good jobs than there are good jobs to go around. I think society has a perfect right to reserve those positions for people who demonstrate a commitment to excellence.
For people who want to get by on the minimum, there’s a reward already established. It’s called the minimum wage.
I was finding myself somewhat bothered by the tone of Prof Dutch’s article and was glad to turn to the comments to see that Maniaku had already raised the issue of meritocratic individualism. The quote above is especially problematic to me: do we really have to beat students into submission on working with the claim that their class position is their personal responsibility and that poverty is based on bad faith? This seems a lot like telling African American kids that they’ll have to learn to speak “real English” to make it–ie confusing a status system with a moral hierarchy. Running through the piece is the idea of deserved destitution as the consequence of bad study skills, a sort of college level _Strewelpeter_ And are we all so thrilled with the idea that the point of a college education is a job?
This is not to reject the idea of helping people learn how to study but does it have to come with all this ideological baggage?