This term I’m teaching a gen ed course. This gen ed course is a course that doesn’t lead anywhere unlike other departmental gen eds which can lead to a minor in basket weaving for those housed in other natural sciences or engineering. This is the default course that those with a distaste for anything science or math take. We get lots of education students and humanities majors. For several majors this is a required course. The pre-req for the course is basically “passed junior year of high school.” The expectations aren’t terribly high but we must have some learning outcomes.
This week I had a student come to office hours about an assignment that was due earlier that day. It seemed that she didn’t understand ANYTHING. I dislike using absolutes but in this case it’s close to the truth. Each assignment has 10-15 questions on it and each problem is a touch more difficult from the last. The idea is that they start out with really, really easy problems that give the students the skills to conquer the more difficult problems at the end of the assignment.
The start of this week’s assignment had some fractions. The first two problems had the students do fraction arithmetic. These were the problems that had this particular student stumped. Now I understand that it’s been a long time since this 6th grade but I would have been humiliated to come to my prof with an “I can’t do this” attitude and admit that I couldn’t add fractions especially when such things are so easily found on the internet. I even googled the one of the phrases from the question and came across many great answers on Yahoo! Answers (of all the places…:rolls eyes:).
I am at a loss as to what to do with this student. The do-gooder in me wants to help this student learn everything she has apparently not learned. But to do this the student would have to email me more than 10 hours before the assignment is due. I know that this student is a lost cause because she isn’t doing enough to make herself a success. At the same time I feel like this student will be a complete waste of my time. I mean, if you are in college and you can’t do very basic math, then you probably don’t belong at a highly ranked four year institution. This student would be much better served at a community college where they offer arithmetic and pre-algebra. Plus I just don't have the time to catch a student up on the five or more years of mathematics she's clearly lacking.
The shocker is that when I pulled up this student’s academic record she earned a decent grade in trig at her community college and earned ‘A’s in her engineering courses at this same two year institution. Yet somehow when she shows up on my doorstep she is incapable of adding fractions and long division.
So what gives? Am I being played for a fool here?
As one who is math challenged*, I sympathize with this student's plight. Of course she should be doing what it takes on her own to catch up or brush up on those skills.
ReplyDeleteDoes your campus offer tutoring services? If so, I recommend sending her in that direction. Then, it's up to her to get the assistance she needs. As math challenged as I am, there is no way I would have ever expected one of my professors to get me caught up. That was on me. Put it on her.
*Along with an intense anxiety when it comes to math, I sometimes wonder if I have a learning disorder related to math/numbers. In the end, it doesn't matter, as I know what resources are available to me, and how to use them.
I hate to tell you this but getting decent grades at a community college doesn't count for much where I teach. I've had plenty of students sail through CCs around here with A's and then come to our 4-year institution and start pulling D's.
ReplyDeleteThis makes them very pissed off. Basically the community colleges around here are a crapshoot. Articulation agreements require us to accept their credits, but often those credits aren't worth much. Teachers are paid even less. The students write much less and take a lot of scantron tests. Composition courses consist of in-class exercises and no papers. Until recently, the 3-credit studio art courses at the local cc only demanded that students be in studio for 3 hours, supposedly because it was a 3-hour course. (Obviously the people involved didn't have any clue how studio courses work.) When the students trasferred to our 4-year school, they just about lost their shit when they found out they'd have to be in their studio courses for a LOT longer than that.
The CCs here aren't regulated by the same accreditation agencies as we are. I don't know what the fuck is going on in many of them. I
Wolfram Alpha will do the math and even has a 'show steps' button.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1/2%2B1/3
I had a similar experience with a student a few years ago. She showed up in my class after somehow passing the pre-req. She had absolutely no idea what she was doing. None. She didn't even know how to ask a question about what she didn't know.
ReplyDeleteShe finally confessed (after an hour of me basically re-teaching the class she had sat through earlier that week) that she had been homeschooled by her mother. Since her mother didn't like or understand chemistry, she decided to skip it.
How she got through her pre-req to get to my class is still a mystery to me. She disappeared soon after. Honestly, I was glad. I knew I couldn't give her the individual help she was going to need to get through my class. Not with 119 other students to work with as well.
And, for as much as I suggest them, the tutoring service at our Uni probably wouldn't have given her the background she really needed. She really needed to go back and re-do large portions of her high school level work.
Tell the student that in order for you to be able to help them in any way that does any good, the student will have to come in to office hours at least 24 hours before the deadline for any assignment for which help will be needed. Tell the student that seeking help a few hours (or minutes) before the assignment is due will not be helpful: they won’t learn much or anything. Seeking help after the assignment is due won’t be much better.
ReplyDeleteThis implies that the student will need to get started early on all future assignments. I trust you announce all your assignments at least several days in advance? Tell the student to read each assignment no later than the evening it is announced, and to start thinking about how to do the assignment successfully during this first reading.
Tell your student to take a course on basic mathematics, sometimes called “College Algebra.” Your math department should have them, since they get no shortage of college students who can’t do what I used to think was 4th-grade mathematics. As you recognize, you don’t have time to tutor this student in five years of mathematics, nor should you, especially not if it's not your job.
Start the paperwork you’ll need to change the prerequisites for your class. It can take well over a year for this to go through all the required committees, so get started now. I had plenty of students who couldn’t solve 1/3 + 1/4 = ?, and indeed acted as if they’d never seen mathematics like this, in my general-ed Intro-Astronomy-for-Students-Not-Majoring-in-Science class until the prerequisites were changed. The new prerequisites require them to take a basic math course, or place out of it by getting a high-enough score on the math proficiency exams the math department gives to incoming students every semester. The math department loves the increased enrollment this has given them, of course. I like it, because it has noticeably improved the students in my course.
Most importantly, grade this student fairly, to the same standards all you other students must meet. You do students like this no favors by letting them get away with lack of background or basic proficiency, especially because you feel sorry for them. Peter Sachs discussed this in “Generation X Goes to College.” This may well be precisely how this student got into this predicament in the first place.
Good luck!
P.S. No, I don't think you're being played for a fool. I get students like this all the time: it's sad.
ReplyDeletePoint her to http://www.khanacademy.org/
ReplyDeleteover 2000 videos , from 1+1=2 to differential equations. Also has great software on the site that generates examples (gives hints if needed).
This IS all very sad. At my institution, they used to have non-credit courses for kids who were accepted but had low level abilities in Math and/or English (based on an internal test of academic readiness). Some students had to take non-credit basic math a couple of times.
ReplyDeleteAnd... this is the truth: occasionally, a kid would come along that was the valedictorian of their High Schools. VERY sad.
Even sadder? Some of the students had plans on being Engineering students. No clue.
So... what did the university do a few years ago? They cut the program and "mainstreamed" these kids into the regular curriculum. I'm not sure what has happened with the current crop of students, but I'm aware that some other Math classes have kids who have no idea of basic middle school stuff and passed some pre-reqs (similar to Crazy Math Professor's situation).
Remember, she student you teacher...
ReplyDeleteYou can't be played for anything. The time to get help would have been before the due-date, not after.
I can tell you all about having met engineers who can not do math. I have tutored them and got nowhere. There was this one guy (engineering student) when I was in graduate school, he would come in to the math lab every day. He spent atleast three years taking Calculus 1. Finding the integral of xdx was easy but udu and tdt were too hard for him (something to do with it not being fair that they use different letters...). He would often ask for help and then ridicule me for helping him. (I was never allowed to do anything about rude behavior as our supervisor was a bitch and our chair was an asshole.)
ReplyDelete@Stella-I am not sure about anything with your CCs in your area, but where I work, we have the same acceditation as the major universities and colleges. Also, my Basketweaving Program is a transfer program and we meet 2x a year with other Basketweaving program representatives from the places we have articulation agreements and local colleges and universities our students typically transfer to in our area. I went from teaching a major land-grant Uni in another state (as an adjunct and staff) to FT-TT here are mid-sized urban/suburban CC and I teach the same as I did at Big State Uni. THose people in the other Basketweaving programs would certainly read us the riot act if we were not preparing the students.
ReplyDeleteNow, with that said, I can say that there is MARKED difference between the preparedness between the students I teach (and other, usually FT-TT proffies) and the ones that the "fun" or "easy" adjuncts teach. I do teach some upper-level classes and I can basically tell which students had which proffies based on not only their content knowledge, but in-class behavior.
I am amazed that when I get Basketweaving MAJORS they don't understand that I am trying to HELP them by "teaching like it's Harvard" (a comment on a recent eval). They will get eaten alive when they transfer if I don't have the same standards. We also do NOT want to lose those articulation agreements.
I think that every dept. (even at the big and fancy univs) has proffies that don't prepare their students and pushes them along, but I think a lot of CCs get bad raps by both other proffies and students that it's somehow "easier" than "real" college. Well, when they walk in MY class, they are up for a rude awakening. LOL
Good on you, B.P. My wife got her RN from a local community college, and their anatomy course was tough. She told me about classmates who were on their third time through the course.
ReplyDelete@Stella: I'm waiting for you to finish writing your comment. What happened?
ReplyDelete@CMP: At least your student took trig; many of my students have never heard of it. If I mention trig in class, many of my students think I'm talking about the daughter of our next president.
@introvert.prof: I suspect that, even in CCs with some programs that are less stringent than they should be (our local CC is fully articulated with us, and generally does good work, though some graduates do suffer from big fish now in big pond syndrome after they transfer) the RN programs are pretty rigorous. It has everything to do, I suspect, with the fact that RNs have to pass an externally-run licensing exam. I'm not a fan of high-stakes testing, but when the measure of success is truly independent of the program whose success it is testing (as in AP and IB programs at the high school level), there's something to be said for it. Also, that kind of test sets up a situation where teacher and students are working together to meet a high standard imposed from outside; that feels different to students from the teacher being "mean" by setting high standards him/herself. In short, the test, not the teacher, is the ogre. I could wish for a few more such ogres, as long as they're high-quality ones (and I have the impression that the RN certification exam is).
ReplyDeleteFrom what I can see, our CCs do a better job than we do with first- and second-year students. The ones transferring in as third-years are generally much better prepared for the upper-level classes.
ReplyDelete