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?

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? 😉

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?

This is the hardest one to follow.
But good advice anyway.

“My roommate got a better grade than I did, and I’m smarter than him….”

“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!”

I’ve still not figured how to respond to that one…