...that my students are wholly unlike me. I went to college for a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with career positioning. I'm not even that old, but I feel like someone from another century - whoops, I guess I am.Is every college sort of vo-tech now? Is a college degree just the new high school diploma?
Is that why students fight my attempts to get them to think abstractly, or "just for fun"? Has economic realizations made everyone think of college as just the next hoop?
I even have fond memories of classmates who went to college to get wasted. They, at least, got some of the college experience.
I have kids now who could give a shit less about going to the football games or scamming on a sweetie in the quad.
And above all, when I was in college, I never wanted it to end. My students are ready to leave as soon as they get here.
That's why my day sucks.
Terry, you're damn good.
ReplyDeleteYou keep putting your finger on central problems like this and the rest of us are going to just hand you the keys to the compound and go home.
You're complaining about students being aware of the fact that the university system is primarily interested in replicating middle mgmt?
ReplyDeleteSaying that college is about learning, about discovering oneself is just buying into the ideology of an institution that primes its students for life on the career hamster wheel of capitalism.
Students just don't have that kind of luxury anymore. The BA really is the new high school diploma- just try getting a non-retail job without one these days. I say this as a creative writing major who's completely terrified of graduating next year and trying to find a job in this economy, hoping to get into an MFA program even though I've been told multiple times to wait and get a job first simply because I don't want to go back into the real world with nothing more than the new high-school diploma, as far as the working world is concerned.
ReplyDelete@Maomao: I just cannot agree with you. Your brand of whiny cynicism is a self fulfilling prophecy. How is that really the institution's ideology, whichever institution you are referencing? What makes for an institution's ideology anyway? Call me naive, but I don't buy it. College always was just exactly what you make of it. My thought when I read Terry's post was to suggest to him that he probably does not teach at a college very similar to the one he himself attended. Or perhaps he is just overwhelmed by the underwhelming majority of students who are as he describes at his college (and at many of them, it's true). The intellectually awake and vibrant and challenging ones are still there---maybe he is not noticing them as much? I was just lamenting the other day with a work friend how much of our mind space gets taken up by the "difficult" students---the ones who don't care. We have to keep reminding ourselves to pay the lion's share of our attention to the students who are there to truly learn and to stay on autopilot with the rest.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThere are two main arguments here. On the one hand, I imagine that Terry may simply be coming to grips with the fact that most students are, and perhaps always were, simply punching their ticket, nothing more. Thus he, and all of us here, were always unusual in comparison to our classmates. As someone who has taught at a series of top-tier institutions, I can say that in my experience the truly engaged students are exceptional everywhere. The students at the name-brand schools know how to fake it a little better, I suspect, but ultimately they are as intellectually vacuous as students everywhere. This is simply the flipside of the truism that the very best students at crummy regionals are just as smart and driven as the best students in the ivy-covered walls of the northeast. I happen to think that both are accurate, and that all of us have to eventually come to terms with fact that the vast majority of American college students view their degrees in purely instrumental terms. This has, in some sense, always been the case. Let's call it the technocratic vision of American higher ed, in which the youth of the nation are taught technical vocations--engineering, accounting, business and so on--that will allow them to enter or remain in the middle class and service the machine. Such an education provides no incentive for intellectual curiousity, and so it is hard to blame the students for the lack of same.
ReplyDeleteIf that is the case, Terry, then welcome to reality. Hope it isn't too much of a shock.
On the other hand, I think there is something to the argument that the character of higher ed has, perhaps inevitably, changed as it has become more democratic. That is to say, what Terry is wishing for is an older model of higher ed in which the elite were happily acquiring the cultural markers of their status. And so they got engaged, because while college might not have been strictly necessary for their futures, they did very much want to be able to quote Shakespeare at the club and whatnot. Whatever the faults of our current system, I personally do not have any nostalgia for those halcyon days of yore when our betters gathered to the strains of "Old Nassau" to decide our fates. Perhaps MaoMao, despite the radical handle does. I couldn't say.
The bullshit technocratic ideology happens to be in the ascendant at the moment, which accounts for the fact that the morally and intellectually bankrupt business degree is the most popular major of the moment. I suspect that we will continue in this state of affairs for some time. But it is always foolish to assume that things will always continue as they are. And so I hold out some hope that as the for-profit higher-ed scams are exposed for what they are, and students begin to realize that business majors are going to be unemployed while Goldman Sucks continues to hire traditional liberal arts majors (for those of you who are ignorant, mathematics and the traditional sciences number among those) including the dreaded English BA, the pendulum may yet swing the other way.
In the meantime, teach those you can, and flunk the shit out of those you can't. That is all you can do.
Archie, your casual cynicism is probably how many of us deal with the horrors of college students every day, but every once in a while I go back to Terry's fundamental question: why the hell don't they want to learn anything? Even if they are just punching a ticket.
ReplyDeleteI've been fantasizing about going into my freshman class for students who have to take Junior Basket Topology but don't want to, and telling them,
"If you don't find anything in this class at least a little bit interesting, you're morally, ethically, intellectually, and aesthetically bankrupt. You will never amount to anything in your life. Get interested.".
This of course is a Bad Idea, but I still like to think about it.
There is nothing casual about my cynicism. I'm fully professional in that regard.
ReplyDeleteAs for the answer to Terry's, and now your question is: why should they? There is nothing in American culture that in any way whatsoever encourages or otherwise values learning beyond the purely instrumental purpose of "going to college and getting a better job." And given that fact, they are ultimately quite right not to give a flying fuck.
You can go ahead and march into that class and call them nitwits, and all that will do is confirm them in their all-American conviction that you are an egghead asshole elitist who wants to keep them down.
The only possible way you or Terry, as an individual proffie, can do anything about this is to teach your stuff and make it as clear as you can why it matters and why they should be interested and care. If you can do that, then you will win a small victory. But you are never, ever, ever, going to win over a whole classroom, much less the entire culture. It ain't happening. So try to maintain some standards and move on.
Parenthetically, the meaning of maintaining standards is going to differ a great deal by institution, and this may be part of Terry's sense of frustration. Where I teach almost no student is foolish enough to actually flunk. I do give out a few F grades every semester, but those are reserved for the chronically truant and stoned. For the most part, they all know how to pass the course. For me, maintaining standards means keeping a pretty strict limit on the B+ and higher grades. This entails a fairly consistent amount of one-on-one explaining to kids who have been handed participation trophies for their whole lives that showing up is not enough to get a ribbon.
For someone else, it might mean flunking students, which is equally unpleasant in a totally different way.
Terry, as the French say, bon courage.
Archie is, as so often, God.
ReplyDeleteAmen Archie. I remember hearing a radio spot a while ago, in which a prof from out in the Eastern Dangly Provinces summed it up nicely. As best I can recall they said:
ReplyDelete"Going to University to get a better job is like going to the movies to get a snack. There are better, more efficient, more nutritious places to eat, and all your slurping and munching are disturbing those of us who actually do care about cinema."
Lots going on here.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, I do think that many college classes are designed to do little more than preserve the status quo. On the other hand, I do think that college is what you make of it.
On the other hand--yes, I'm a three-handed freak of nature--I get completely what Terry's talking about. Very few students go to school to learn, to engage on some course of self-discovery.
As for the argument that a BA or BS the new high school diploma and therefore necessary to get a job, I ask you this: what jobs? Many colleges, universities, and CCs pitch higher education as a means to an end, that end being employment. Given the direction of our economy, what employment will that be?
And how long after they graduate will our students begin to feel bitter?
I tend to agree with Archie: 'twas ever thus, at all levels. I spent my senior year at an ivy-league university writing a thesis that actually amounted to a (very small) contribution to a scholarly conversation; my roommate -- a last-minute substitution after the roommate of my choice had a change in plans -- spent the year joining a selective club and networking like crazy there and elsewhere and jetting off for interviews with Fortune 500 companies, paying minimal if any attention to the smorgasbord of intellectual delights on offer in the classroom, the library, the lecture hall, the local shops, etc., etc. The only major difference I see is that the "gentleman's C" (which I'm pretty sure originated on the more rarefied academic heights, at a time when getting in had more to do with family background than intellectual interests or ability) was already fast becoming a B- or B by my time, and is probably now, despite Archie's best efforts, the "gentleman's B+" (and may soon be an A- or A). (This, mind you, comes from somebody who got a good many B+s herself, but that was because I tended to wander off exploring intellectual trails of my own, and didn't always rejoin the main trail blazed by the professor in the course of the paper, or the exam. The undergraduate paper which I found the most satisfying -- aside from that thesis, which got the equivalent of an A, and a couple of prizes, and so launched my grad school career -- got a B+, and I was perfectly happy, because I discovered something new to me in the process of tearing it apart and rewriting it from scratch at the last minute, which left it a bit messy, organizationally and quite possibly physically as well, since I was still using a typewriter. But I'm a bit odd. I know that).
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, we push them a bit -- to write well, to think about where "information" comes from (possibly a more taboo subject in some circles than where babies come from), even to think about why their ambitions are what they are, and whether they're realistic, and/or socially useful, and/or ultimately productive of happiness. And some of them (many of them, in my experience, at least now and then) appreciate it, and others don't, and they're all hearing, from family, and the culture at large, and the school itself, that it's all about getting a job, even more so now that the economy is so scary. I still think it's worthwhile to ask them to think, even if they don't like it, even if they write nasty things on the student evals about our not being clear about what we want from them or not giving As or whatever. I tend to cling to an old (and, I realize, somewhat unfortunate) metaphor that was a favorite of one of the junior faculty members at my graduate institution (who didn't get tenure -- too good a teacher, and maybe too openly gay for that institution at that historical moment): teaching is like planting land mines. They won't all go off, and you probably won't be around when most of those that do go off detonate, but you do, eventually, have an impact.
Or so I hope.