Next week I go back into the classroom. I will be met by a number of young people who could really benefit from my class - from college! - if they just weren't missing that one thing!I see so much potential and promise in them, but there's always some essential ingredient left out of their makeups.
Q: At the beginning of this semester, what one thing, one attribute, one skill, would you give your students to help them succeed where they might fail otherwise? An alarm clock
? Patience? Writing ability? Whatever.
? Patience? Writing ability? Whatever.A: Reply below!
The desire for an education as opposed to a credential
ReplyDeleteA better high school, and on down the line. My current crop actually seems pretty bright, but woefully unprepared.
ReplyDeleteI can't improve on those first two answers: these kids don't have the preparation or motivation we expect...
ReplyDeleteThis may sound lame, and I certainly didn't have it at 18 or 19, but I just want my students to be excited about being in college. There are worse things.
ReplyDeleteBut so many of my students over the past several years just look like they've been asked to dig ditches.
To critically think instead of pure regurgitation.
ReplyDeletePerseverence.
ReplyDeleteBesides the first two posts, I would recommend that students understand that office hours are a time for a student to get help. Students seem to be under the impression that going to a professor's office is a bad thing--a leftover of high school maybe. On my first day I try to convince them that I'm there to help not scold. Still, though, I spend more of my office hours playing Solitaire rather than helping students.
ReplyDeleteAll of the above, but with an emphasis on DrNathaniel's "...on down the line". If a kid has a bad start, they may never catch up (some do, but part of that is the perseverance that Lord Humungus mentions).
ReplyDeleteThey need to be able to *read*.
ReplyDeleteAll of the above, but especially motivation.
ReplyDeletePlus, at the moment I most wish that my students understood the relationship between numerical years (e.g., the 1800s) and centuries (= the 19th century, not the 18th). I never cease to be amazed how many of even my 'good' students truly don't understand this system of correspondence.
The humility to accept that they don't know it all already and that is why they're here.
ReplyDeleteIf I tell them to try something, they're supposed to try it, because I want them to see something and it's NOT what they already think they know it is. Especially when I tell them to make sure they know how to use their calculators. No one uses paretheses when they divide by a number in scientific notation. So the second multiplier is always multiplied when they want to be dividing by it. I can always tell them immediately that I know they did this because the power of 10 will be off by twice whatever it was in the second input was. But they yes me and blow it off and then they cry to me that it was "just a math error". No, it was failure to follow directions on day 1 when I told them to practice it and tell me if they got answers that differed from the examples. "Just a math error" sends you back to Lowes for another box of floor tiles. Failure to follow directions sunk the Titanic.
It would be nice if they actually bought the textbook.
ReplyDeleteI wish they would read the book, pay attention in class, and take good notes.
ReplyDeleteY'know... all that stuff that I didn't bother to do as an undergrad, and now think are the basics of being a student.
There are so many things I wish I could give them, but if I were able to grant only one, it would be a genuine curiosity about the world in which they live, rather than the self-centered "me-me-me" perspectives they come with.
ReplyDeleteI think that curiosity would motivate them to listen, to read, to write, to discover, to make connections.
A work ethic. Failing that, a good, swift, smack in the head, delivered by that Chinese mom.
ReplyDeleteFroderick, I thought that the point of the post that having a Chinese mom was functionally equivalent to having a work ethic. Indeed, psychologists are probing self-motivated people to try to find the CMH (Chinese Mom Homunculus)
ReplyDeleteSelf-discipline, which is similar to Froderick's work ethic, I think. Intellectual curiosity would be wonderful but they can succeed without it if they've got self-discipline. Mere intellectual curiosity isn't enough.
ReplyDelete