Wednesday, October 9, 2013

In Which Bella Wonders If She Has It All Wrong

I have a situation this semester. One of the things I do in my Composition class is have my students read, and then answer questions independently, using notes they have taken at home.  Yes, this is fraught with peril in a world where no one does homework.  But I make the "in-class exercises" very easy to answer----they are more like journal exercises.  The whole thing is designed, at least in my mind, to encourage reading at home (if they have read, they will do well-----they should get 100s in fact, especially because it is an open notebook exercise and I encourage them to take notes).  I am also trying to encourage active reading, note taking, reading to understand and remember. We really have a strong focus on the reading/writing connection in my college system.

I have had success with this, many times.  I have had classes where the majority take part and actually read their assigned pages to get an easy 100 on the in-class exercise.  This semester, I have one of those other kinds of classes.  Monday, as I was watching six of my students happily write out their exercises in class, and nine of them sullenly read the material (also, I don't assign all that much reading----four essays, two or three pages in length...they can easily finish much of it in the 20 minute period during which the others are doing the exercise) I felt very sad and full of self doubt.

We had an in-service training where we were reminded, for the thousandth time, to "meet students where they are at."  We were told we need to try to capture their interest, make them come to class.  We had to listen to a twenty minute clip explaining how professors could be more exciting to encourage more of their students to attend class.  We were encouraged to go outside for class discussions....to do fun things. 

One part of me just thinks FUCK THESE GUYS.  I am not asking them to do all that much, in terms of reading.  Just fucking do it!  Or fail, and screw you!  But another part of me thinks of what Cool Cal said about our focus-on-the-reading-element in our composition classes at the last in-service about it: "Our students just won't do the reading----it's simply absurd to ask them to do it.  We will lose so many of them if we ask them to read in a Composition class.  I for one plan to continue to focus on helping my students where they need it most----just to feel comfortable putting words---any words at all, onto a page."  Cal also spends a lot of time just getting his Comp students comfortable in the college environment.   You pass by his class and see them with blindfolds on, leading each other around.  He says it is a trust building exercise because writing is a scary thing and we are all in this together.  You pass by his class and see students pounding their chests, Cal at the front pounding away, everyone laughing, having a great time.  Cal says it is a way to get the blood moving for a quiet or frightened class. He also spends ten minutes at the beginning of his classes doing exercises----jumping jacks, windmills, even playing tag.  Cal is Very Popular and has an excellent student approval rating, both officially and on the site that must not be named. Cal is highly educated----a PhD from an Ivy League school.  Part of me thinks he is actually a snob----he truly has extremely low expectations from our particular student body.

But is he right?  My students in this dumbass group of low achievers (the six beautiful hard workers aside) in this M/W Composition class are not getting what I am selling.  Is it me who needs to change?

27 comments:

  1. First, you sat inside an auditorium listening to a boring presentation about how a professor should work to get an audience's attention and have discussions outside? Got it.

    Meet them where they are at? Yes. I agree. Send the students to the local elementary school. You can meet them when you perform some outreach event to the third grade class.

    If most of your students can do the writing and reading then don't worry about it. Just make a note of the idiots who can't do the work. Those are tomorrow's administrators.

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    1. Lazy students with shitty study habits don't need gimmicks, they need consequences. I'm always happy to meet them "where they are", but we're meeting there so I can help them get where they NEED to be in order to pass the course. Until they buck up and do the work, they'll keep getting failing grades. Cool Cal is engaging in cynical pandering, and whether or not he can look at himself in the mirror is his business, not yours.

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    2. Words of wisdom, Surly: "Lazy students with shitty study habits don't need gimmicks, they need consequences." Yes yes yes yes yes.

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  2. Bella, I said basically the same thing the other day. I feel like I have made every change and tried every gimmick and approach. For some classes none of it works. For some classes I don't have to do anything at all, they show up and engage and we have an amazing semester together (but these are rare). I have a class where the average grade on the exam went down after I gave them notecard to use on the exam. WTF?

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    1. That's because if you let them use notecards or their books, they don't prepare carefully. They then waste time looking up information instead of organizing and constructing their answers. I never give open-book tests or essays for just these reasons. I DO, however, give them study guides with review questions that are designed to help them focus their approach to the material. This is also an advantage when dealing with students who bomb the test. When they literally had the questions ahead of time and didn't prepare them, there's nothing they or their administrative advocates can say in their defense.

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    2. I do it to even the playing field because I know people cheat. I gave a review sheet for the first exam and that didn't work (means in the 60s) because they don't know how to study.

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  3. Cool Cal is a fucking moron. I want to punch him, very hard--hard enough to give him an aneurysm. "Meet them where they are" is the new euphemism for "lower your standards." FUCK HIM.

    You have it right. In order to write, they MUST read. MUST. If they refuse, they fail.

    I have little 5 point CATs (Classroom Assessment Techniques) where I had out 3x5 notecards. They write their names, and a question or something they want to discuss from the reading (generally in Comp classes the readings are under 20 pages for 101, and under 50 over a weekend for 102). If they didn't read, they simply write DNR on the card. This rewards the students who do the reading, and those who don't lose out. For some reason, they hate losing out on the little 5 point things. The other thing it does is tell me what they have questions about, so that I can target discussion in that direction.

    And as ^ACA said above, sometimes it just isn't going to matter what you do, and a larger percentage of them will fail. I am having that with my 101 this semester. I have been ill, and asked them to take the lead on discussion of a 15 page packet they'd all read (to judge by the CAT cards). They refused--just stared at me blankly. So I made them write a summary for each of the essays. And it seemed so High School. And I hated it--but I literally could not talk and I refused to reward them by calling class early.

    Good luck. I hope you hold your ground.

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  4. Two answers. One is that you are not asking anything demanding: official guidelines for credit hours say that students should work at least two hours out of class for every hour in class. They can read, they should do the reading. You're doing good.

    The second is that certain classes aren't reading. This could be one of two things: statistical fluke, wherein all the bad students are in one place, or it's cultural mode-locking: the students all tell each other not to do the readings. The latter one you can try to fix, perhaps? Burn a class day: send home all the students who did the reading, and sit down the ones who haven't and make 'em do it. Throw in some Cool Cal stuff wake them up, then sit their asses down? Beats me.

    Or, you could just decided that it's their money, it's about to be your money, and you read just fine.

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    1. I've done something like this in a hybrid class, but made everyone stay in the classroom (attendance being mandatory). I had the ones who came in prepared move to one section of the room, where we discussed the readings. Those who hadn't read prior to class could use the time for reading, but couldn't join the discussion or even take notes on it. They were disbelieving and disgruntled at first, but it usually took only two weeks of this to have students either drop out or get with the program.

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  5. Do you really teach with Cal from the blog? He sounds like a d-bag.

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  6. No. No, you are not doing something wrong. But Cal is, unless he is a PE teacher.

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  7. I think I understand your dilemma completely, and I don't have a solution.

    It is one thing if a handful of students in the class are not doing the work; then you can just fail them. But increasingly, in my fresh/sophomore classes (gen-ed), it is the vast majority of them. Don't come to class (or do whatever they do while they sit there), don't do the homework, don't crack a book open before a test. Can you fail half the class (including drops)? Maybe once. Can you do it repeatedly, especially if your colleagues take a more relaxed attitude towards "today's college students"? Then you become the problem and the admins know where to find you. (Tenure only slows things down.)

    I just finished grading my first test. In a class of 70 (soph-level, STEM majors), 35 got Ds or Fs (and 40% is a D.) Was the test too hard? Well, I just took the easiest homework problems from the text and copied them. Most had been solved in class. Half the problems were discussed in the "review session" preceding the test. How much more can you do? Typical attendance to lectures is about 50. With this group, I'm looking at a 60% "success rate", tops, at the cost of much massaging of grades. I'm sure I'll be harassed for it.

    I have a colleague in another department who says openly, "screw it--look out for number one, and give them what they want: open book, questions they can answer without taking the class, whatever." But it's hard to come in and go through the motions of lecturing, when you know that no one (now including yourself) takes the process seriously.

    In academia, increasingly we're expected to behave dishonestly (certify they have learned something they haven't) as the price of keeping our jobs. It's exactly like "liar loans" and the mortgage crisis. Integrity has become an an anachronism, valued only by (mostly) tenured old people who can't retire soon enough.

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    1. Peter- you said it perfectly. I am finding it harder and harder to go through the motions because there is no integrity or rigor. But as I look around, I am the only one here who is miserable, other colleagues have averages in the 80s and are happy. Others give no papers- because students can't write and they feel no obligation to teach them that particular skill. What we call education these days is a joke.

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  8. I am so sorry to have implicated Cal. I don't know what I was thinking! Cal, I hope you can forgive me! Cool Cal is a very different guy-----not truly cool like our Compound Calico. Cool Cal is a legend in his own mind.

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    1. But you know, there is something I like about this: "I for one plan to continue to focus on helping my students where they need it most----just to feel comfortable putting words---any words at all, onto a page."

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    2. The trick is to get them to continue from that point. There are a fair number of students who stop once they have any words at all on the page. They don't edit. They don't revise. They don't do the work.

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  9. I appreciate all the support, everyone. BUT, I alternate between feeling like I did in the middle of the night (when I wrote this post) and feeling like I am a complete failure for asking so little of them for a college course.

    I keep expecting someone like Stella to chime in and say HELL YES you have it all wrong. You are dumbing it down too much. Stop taking it so easy and give them some REAL reading to do.

    I wish I had some secret to getting them to just flokking do college level work. I really do. Because as Peter said, I can't fail 75% of them for too long....

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    1. Well, I'm not Stella, but that's what I meant. You are doing nothing wrong. Cal sucks. Continue with the standards. The end.

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    2. Oh Frog! I so much appreciate that and you! It's just that I feel like I AM doing something wrong, being WAAAAY to limited in the readings I give them. I feel like I should be publically flogged, sometimes. Like if someone got ahold of my reading and assignment schedule and published it, I'd be shamed and humiliated. It's that simplified, really.

      And the schmucks STILL won't do it. Because simplified as it is, I am still asking them to read something, however short, that they have to THINK about.

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    3. Yep. So, you know, assign more and give reading quizzes -- let 'em hang by their own rope! Here's a calculus you can use: 20 pages = 1 hour of reading for my 7-year-old. 2 hours outside of class for every 1 hour in class = 40-60 pages per class session, or a minimum of 80-120 pages a week. Expect at least that!

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  10. Meeting them where they're at? Good to know it's OK for me to also show up drunk to class now.

    You're not a failure for making them do what they're supposed to do. If your class is about reading and writing and they're expected to know how to read and write after taking your class, playing games in the quad or watching birds outdoors isn't doing them a service. We already have idiot coming in because too many of them had teachers who wanted to be liked and "met them where they were at," which was essentially 4th grade, because that's the last time anyone made them learn something on their own.

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    1. And this really pissed me off (not you; the fact that you were made to watch something so inane). It's not like, in the employment arena, bosses are being told to meet their employees where they are. This coddling shit must STOP!

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  11. The next time someone encourages professors to do fun things like go outside for class discussions, I wish someone would raise their hand and ask the speaker if he could give his presentation outside. Only do it if you have tenure.

    To "meet them where they are" I guess you'll just have to change your entire lesson plan and incorporate Bert, Ernie, Elmo, Oscar, and Big Bird. Include the Count for the STEM classes.

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