First day of class, quick check of student body. Hotness index 7.8 - 1.2 above last year, way to go. Smarts index 6.9 - 0.5 up, but not yet high enough for them to get ideas about how wonderful they are. Normal spatial distribution: über-keeners and brown-nosers in the first and second rows, mixed rabble at the middle and a mix of dense and bad boys in the back. Class starts.
To start in an uplifting manner, I tell them that their writing is going to suck because any scholarly writing, by definition, sucks. To make the point and as piece of evidence #1, I pass my response to an article I was sent for peer review. So, folks, relax and let’s see how far we can go. (Not being American is a lot of fun for a college prof: you can say almost anything and people will chalk it to cultural difference).
Day two: they turn in the first assignments – commentary of a poem – and, predictably, all of them suck ape nuts. I tell them so yet, despair not, we are early in the semester. Don’t write about yourself, nobody cares about you. Talk to me about the thingy written by M. Jean Lemaire de Belges, please. I pass a commentary of the same text written by myself and – that’s unplanned and embarrassing – we find six-seven substantial errors. Piece of evidence #2, all writing sucks.
Now, there is this student in the back that I have already singled as my miner’s canary – dense as a bagful of hammers and absolutely zero confidence. Her glazed eyes indicate me that I need to repeat a point. And yet, in assignment #2, for what may be a cosmic coincidence, she blows me off my socks when she finds in the text something truly critically relevant and that I hadn’t noticed.
The following day I inform the class that, as expected, their papers blow, and that only one person had said something intelligent. And point my finger at her. Her face goes from dull despair to ‘he’s pulling my leg’ aprehension to confusion to elation.
My problem: as much as I wish otherwise, chances are that this won’t happen again. Have I screwed the poor thing by letting her get a delusion of competence that is likely to be crushed in a few weeks?
Well, it's always possible that you underestimated her, and if not, this may indicate that she has the potential to improve. Either way, there's no reason not to tell her when she's right, especially if one of her problems is lack of confidence. You can always correct her when she makes mistakes in the future.
ReplyDelete"all of them suck ape nuts"
ReplyDeleteUh oh. A dangerous new phrase has entered my vocabulary....
I guess you have to be French to get away with saying that in a batch of papers only one person said anything intelligent. My fragile little flowers would all start crying.
ReplyDeleteNahhhhh, you gave her a little gift. If she's wrong or dumb the next time around, just remind her that most of us throw out most of what we write and have a deep insight only every now and then.
My droopy little hothouse flowers would all start crying, too. But then, back where he comes from, it's a whole 'nother country. It's: France! ;-)
DeleteLike F&T, I was thinking that I can't imagine being that explicit about individual performances in class (among other things, I'd worry about a possible FERPA violation, though admittedly you didn't name a grade, which is probably the protected information). I thought I was pretty tough at times, but I'm not that tough, especially not in front of the whole class (well, unless a student corners me and insists on having what I'd prefer to be a private conversation within hearing of the whole class. That happens more frequently than I'd like.)
ReplyDeleteBut I like F&T's solution. I still think if I were that frank my student evals would probably sink through the floor and I'd be called "mean" in the comments, but pointing out that all of us do both good and bad work at various times -- rather than being steadily good or bad students or writers in some existential way -- is a useful dose of reality. I'm not sure most 18-22-year-olds educated in the present American system can make that distinction between themselves and their work, but it's worth a try.
This has to be said.
ReplyDeleteYou should stop measuring your students' collective "hotness" and refrain from using phrases like "Have I screwed the poor thing..." I get it, you like sexy younger people. Maybe you should keep that to yourself. It's skeezy.
Agreed. "Screwed" is, for better or for worse, a metaphor that's become so common that people easily forget its origins, but I'm still not overly fond of it. Gauging "hotness" (and seeing it as a good thing, rather than a potential distraction for both you and the students) comes off as creepy. Gauging apparent smarts is fair game; though your initial impression may well be inaccurate, at least that's a quality that's highly relevant to the task at hand.
DeleteDitto on the hotness thing. It's not something that doesn't occur to people, but thinking "way to go" because your students (I assume, the women) are "hotter" than they were last year is...yes, it's extremely creepy. I have to ask if the student you praised is "hot," in which case, doubly creepy.
DeleteI don't take umbrage at the use of the word "screwed" that others might, however, except perhaps in this context.
As for pointing at a student in class and singling them out as the "smart one," that is not helpful to anyone, even IF the person singled out is happy about it (and let me guarantee for you that often they are definitely not). It's not helpful in the fourth grade, it's not helpful in high school, and it's not helpful in college. And if the student in question is cute and you somehow got a little charge from the connection you made with her...well, you know the rest.
Agreed on the hotness thing. I'm pretty sure we tend to learn in grad school that the students we teach are basically a different species, and interspecies romance or the slightest hint thereof is not taken very well.
DeleteOr am I the only one who learned it that way?
I have a very hard time thinking of students in terms of "hotness" because they all look like they should be holding an adult's hand to cross the street. Then again, perhaps your class is filled with people over 25 and I'm imposing my own fairly traditional classroom demographics on yours. My SLAC is pretty much the 17-23 year old crowd.
ReplyDeleteSo other than looking dazed and glazed, did your miner's canary give you any other reason to think she's dumb when she "blew you off your socks" (interesting idiomatic phrasing you've got going here in reference to a female student)? I would have praised her for an insightful comment, and shared with the class what she'd come up with. Then again, I also probably would have googled it to see if perhaps she had found the comment online, because almost every time I praise someone for insight, I later find something online that sounds almost identical to what the student said (yes, cynical is my second name).
Wait, so now we're not supposed to praise individual students? I thought it was ALL about the praise... the trophy, the diploma, the whatever-it-is-to-help-them-feel-better-about-themselves-even-if-they-can't-form-a-coherent-thought-to-help-them-get-out-of-a-mud-puddle. Or is it just praise in front of others? Or is it the combination of praise for one and derision for the rest of them? I've praised individual students in class for contributing insightful comments or for doing well on a project. I didn't think this would be harmful to them...
I have a very hard time thinking of students in terms of "hotness" because they all ACT like they should be holding an adult's hand to cross the street. Annoyingly, I find this also holds for non-traditional students.
DeleteI will confess that, every now and then, I do think, "It's a shame her mind is cabbage, she is not an uncomely lass." Don't worry, all traces of it immediately evaporate the next time she whines at me like a 4th grader, or writes like one.
Remember when we were in 10th grade, when 12th graders looked, ahem, mature? Now, whenever I meet anyone that age, it's all I can do not to smack them.
LOL, FFF, I, too, have the urge to smack them. Perhaps it's a symptom of aging in this century. Instead of yelling at youth to stay off the lawn and shaking a cane, we resist the urge to smack. :o) And you're right: the non-trads also act like they need help crossing a street (often more so than the trads).
Delete"My problem: as much as I wish otherwise, chances are that this won’t happen again. Have I screwed the poor thing by letting her get a delusion of competence that is likely to be crushed in a few weeks?"
ReplyDeleteTo answer your original question, repeated here, I say: no. Generation Y has been raised to expect a trophy for every game, whether or not they won or even came in 2nd, 3rd, or 9th. There's no way possible that you, or any of the rest of us, could praise them to the extent to which they think they're entitled.
Don't you think that is a bit of an oversimplification? I mean, it's one thing to say that when talking about students who actually act entitled, but this person's first response to praise was disbelief and confusion. That doesn't sound like a person who's expecting any trophies.
DeleteI've had a few "dull" students surprise me in the past. One in particular stands out still-- he showed no signs of intelligence for the first few weeks of class, mostly sleeping and making smartass remarks, then one day he made a very insightful comment. When I praised him for it he seemed very surprised and said that he'd never thought of himself as being good at these things, but after that he gained confidence and applied himself and became one of my better students. It seems too good to be true but it really does happen sometimes. Part of it depends on our populations-- esp at CCs, many students have never been encouraged to see themselves as smart and therefore give up before they even try.
DeleteOK, then, I don't think you'be ruined your student forever or even for the term by paying a compliment, however rare. One of the greatest late bloomers of all time was Albert Einstein. He got a C in French, you know.
DeleteRaucous.
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