For once, blame the student

Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration. —Patrick WelshFor once, blame the student (Yahoo!/USAToday (will probably expire))

This essay is written by a high school teacher frustrated by the lack of motivation many of his students show.

Every year, I have had parents come in to argue about the grades I have given in my AP English classes. To me, my grades are far too generous; to middle-class parents, they are often an affront to their sense of entitlement. If their kids do a modicum of work, many parents expect them to get at least a B. When I have given C’s or D’s to bright middle-class kids who have done poor or mediocre work, some parents have accused me of destroying their children’s futures.

While the excerpt above is the quote that got me to read the rest of the article, it was the “Colleges keep complaining” quote that made me want to blog it.

I regularly have to un-teach the survival mechanisms my students learned during their high school English classes. Because they come into my classroom expecting to rely on their proven ability to summarize the plot or relate the protagonist’s experiences to incidents in their own lives, I emphasize the idea that they should think of those skills as a useful base, but that they will need to move beyond those skills if they want to demonstrate the ability to think and communicate at the college level.

I know I’m assigning far less reading to my students than I did as an undergrad, and giving far more personal attention (in the way of paper consultations, revisions, and in-class affirmations) than I ever received from my professors. I feel guilty when I drop two novels from the syllabus and replace them with a short story anthology and a writing workshop, but I have to keep reminding myself, I am not teaching at the same kind of institution where I was educated. I went to a big, state, research institution (where the professors were expected to be brilliant lecturers who put most of their time into making an international name for themselves in their chosen subfield), and I am working at a small, private, teaching institution (where the professors are expected to put most of their time into their students, via a dynamic student-centered curriculum in a wide variety of subjects, including some outside our chosen specialty). The literature survey courses I took were packed with 300 students who were majoring or minoring in English; the courses I teach are capped at 18, and less than half of them will be majors.

What I face as a teacher is not bad, it’s just different.

As I continue to gain experience as a teacher, I continue to adjust my delivery and expectations to meet the reality. While I’d love to think of the small upper-level majors-only courses as the “norm,” most of the time I will be teaching a mixed population that includes non-majors who are being asked to look at the world in a strikingly different way than any of their other classes required, and majors who have sat through my “what is a peer-reviewed academic journal” speech four or five times already. Throw in a few students who are my age or older, and a significant number who are training to be the very English teachers whose training I am implicitly challenging, and no class meeting is ever routine.

This year, I have a new perspective, because I’m on the academic standards committee. If an applicant doesn’t meet the university’s standardized-test admissions requirements, I’m one of the people who looks carefully at class rank, academic transcript, letters of reference, and information we can gather from the personal essay, in order to determine whether this particular student is worth making an exception.

A few days before the committee meets, the members individually read through applicant files. Then, the seven or eight of us sit around a table, with a list of names in front of us. For each name, we each vote whether to accept the student, accept the student on the condition that they participate in a developmental program, defer their application to see how their senior year grades are holding up, or deny admission altogether.

We’re really not doing students much of a favor if we recruit them to campus in the fall, only to have them drop out the next semester. And to that end, part of our function as a committee is not simply gatekeeping, but rather to identify those students who will likely need additional academic support in order to succeed in college. I’m constantly reminded of the fact that if I vote to offer a student admission, I’m telling my colleagues that I think I would be able to teach that student in a freshman comp course.

I welcome the occasion to reflect on the role of college admissions. Colleges admit students on the basis of their academic records, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether the student who got a 2.7 average and ranks 25th out of 500 students is better prepared than the student who got a 3.5 average and ranks 250th out of 500 students – especially when both students earned the same SAT scores.

What kind of a school has a B- student in the top 10% of the graduating class? What kind of a school gives out an average score of A-? There’s such a huge range of factors that we can’t with confidence predict which student is more likely to succeed.

Whenever I find myself reminding students that “Plot summary was enough to get you through high school,” I remind the students (and myself) that their high school teachers have to deal with a situation that is very different. Teachers deal with more discipline problems, they can rarely choose their own textbooks, and they may have to deal with 150 or 200 students in a total of six or seven classes each day (on top of advising a club or coaching a sport). I don’t expect high school teachers to have the time to make college composition classes obsolete.

On a busy day, I deal with 45 students in three classes, and maybe 30 students in two classes on a typical day. Fridays, I have only one class of 12 students. Because I teach writing-intensive courses that are capped at 18, I have the time to read student drafts, and comment on them in detail. High school teachers simply can’t devote that much time to marking papers – not when they have so many other things to deal with. I’m not trying to paint a picture of leisure here. Since we’re also expected to serve on committees and publish original research, my days are pretty full. (With committee work, lately, rather than research, which I’ve started doing at night after the kids are in bed.)

So, while I was nodding my head in silent agreement when I started reading the article, I still ended up dissatisfied with the “blame the students” thesis. Welsh also blames middle-class entitlement, “busy parents guilt-ridden over the little time they spend with their kids,” guidance counselors who let students drop difficult classes, and the colleges who admit the resulting mediocre students.

Of the share of blame to be shouldered by high school teachers, he merely asks rhetorically, “Who among us would say we couldn’t do a little better?” Yet I can’t shake the feeling that the teachers who let unmotivated students pass from one grade to another are a bigger part of the puzzle than Welsh seems to want to admit.

Am I pointing the finger at teachers? Of course not. But I do feel Welsh is very generous to teachers when assessing their role in this complex puzzle.

9 thoughts on “For once, blame the student

  1. You say that “teachers who let unmotivated students pass from one grade to another are a bigger part of the puzzle than Welsh seems to want to admit.” You seem to think that high school English teachers are allowed to pass or fail students according to what grade they have earned. This was not the case in 2006-2007 when I was a high school English teacher. Administrators are under pressure to have their schools look good statistically, and that pressure is exerted downwards onto teachers, forcing them to provide unlimited make-up opportunities to students who have made no effort or done no work for weeks or months. How is this fair to those who do make an effort? How does this encourage students to respect teachers or take education seriously? It doesn’t!

    • I’m not sure I can recapture the frame of mind I was in when I wrote this blog post in 2006, but my experience was affected by the fact that I was, at that time, on an admissions committee, and was feeling my responsibility that if I voted to admit a student who was not academically prepared to succeed, that would not help students in the long run, but I was not comfortable with Welsh’s “blame the student” thesis. At any rate, after reading your comment, I admit that if I had phrased my comment as “the *schools* who let unmotivated students pass,” I could have made my point just as effectively.

  2. Thanks for your comments, Mike and Will. I have really come to love my role as a generalist, though lately I’ve been a kind of serial specialist. I did a lot of literature last fall (two sections of American Lit and “Drama as Lit”), then I did Video Game Culture and Theory for three solid weeks, and now I’m doing “Intro to Lit Study” and “Am Lit” again. This fall, I’ll be teaching “New Media Projects” and “Writing for the Internet,” so I’ll be getting my geek on again with a vengeance. Of course, I was teaching news writing along with the lit courses last fall, and I’ll be teaching freshman comp along with the geeky stuff this coming fall. Both journalism and freshman comp are areas with their own jargon and methods.

    Will, I agree that gen-ed courses are very valuable as part of an undergrad education. I took “Physics as a Liberal Art” as an undergrad, and while I only got a B in it, watching a falling teddy bear get shot with a bullet (to demonstrate that both the bear and the bullet were falling at the same rate), watching a rubber ball shatter after being immersed in liquid oxygen, and actually understanding how the earth, sun and moon line up in order to create the phases of the moon really helped me appreciate the outside world. But we didn’t conduct a single experiment ourselves, since the idea was we could get what we needed to know from the textbook, the lectures, and in-class demonstrations.

    It’s still a challenge for me to find the proper balance when I teach, since the very same class includes some students who are taking it as an elective, and others who need it in order to gain specific skills they’ll need to draw upon later in the major.

    Right now, our Am Lit survey courses are all writing-intensive seminars, which means that some students who might enjoy a “sit back and listen to lectures, participate in discssions, and cram for the midterm and final exams” class find themselves instead writing and revising literary research papers. I know that the students who write are learning the subject matter much more thoroughly, but it does make sense to let students choose whether they want a traditional course or a writing-intensive one. In the near future, all students will have to take at least one writing-intensive course, so the students who choose to take it in literature will be making a conscious choice to do so.

    Well, this blog entry seems to be have inspired quite a bit of rambling, hasn’t it? I think I’m about done with this comment.

  3. As someone who came from a high school where the GPAs decided the valedictorian (who, contrary to what many may think, was not me), I can relate to this article on so many levels. Sometimes I felt like my grades were deserved, and sometimes I know I wasn’t being challenged. But that’s high school–and this is why I’m in college (and want to teach college, also).

    As someone who originally thought that she wanted to be one of those high school English teachers (who are necessary, but, yes, could use improvement–though I had a couple terrific ones, myself), I find there is such a great number of things those teachers have to worry about that it surprises me that students can learn at all. I came from a small school, so I have no idea what large disciplinary problems are like, what it’s like to be in a crowded classroom, what it’s like to be in a place where those that didn’t want to participate weren’t forced to participate… Classroom management and state standards are necessary evils of the educational system, if you ask me. Teaching to a test to pass those pesky students… If teachers didn’t have to focus so much attention on these two things, students would have it better.

    But the students who are apathetic, as Dr. A mentioned, I don’t think can be pushed to change by the time they’re in college. If they’ve glided through life thus far, who’s to say they didn’t think college would be a sleigh ride, too?

    I personally get tired of hearing about how schools are ruining education. What ever happened to personal responsibility and taking an interest in learning?

  4. P.S. Just wanted to mention that a lot of your author’s comments on your blog entries have seemed pretty balanced. To me, at least, it’s pretty good.

  5. hehe I remember what I heard of your reputation as a teacher at Eau Claire, “Dr. Jerz”. :-) I remember the impression that if I wanted to take a class I was really interested in, you sounded like a great professor. But if I needed to take a class for a gen ed, or if I was curious about a subject but wasn’t sure how curious I was really going to be, I would stay the heck away from anything you taught! :-P

    A lot of teachers take this as a good thing, but students really need a mix of “easy” and “really challenging” teachers. Some subjects we have to take but aren’t actually real helpful *couch* math *cough*. Sometimes we have to take classes that are required, but we simply aren’t interested in at all, and have little use for. The same college curriculum is, after all, applied to everyone in your major, not customized for each student. And sometimes you think a subject might be interesting, but the last thing you want to do is end up in the middle of the semester with a hard class that you can’t stand.

    It isn’t feasible to have all classes be of equal work and difficulty either – if all my classes were as tough as my computer science classes, I would have either died of exhaustion or dropped out. Looking back now, with the insane amount of time I spend on my computer science work, I wonder if I would have been better off with a somewhat easier program.

    The worst thing is to be a student in a “challenging, difficult” class and either get burned out or completely lose interest. The class just gets harder and harder, and you just sink deeper and deeper into the void…

    I’m rambling now. Did I have an actual point I was leading up to? I don’t think so…

  6. Great reflection. Coming from one of those big research institutions you mention — which virtually all Ph.D.s do — it also took me awhile to recalibrate and adjust to my new “audience” at our liberal arts college. But I know I’m a better teacher — and more enthralled by the daily act of teaching — for embracing my generalist status than clutching onto the feeble robes of specialization. Specialization is what we do as scholars; general studies is what Bachelors’ students do as scholars. We can’t forget that they need the “breadth” of knowledge (to understand multiple contexts) as much as the skills it takes to go in “depth” in an inquiry in any substantial way. This is why reading a lot is so imperative in any writing class.

    I have to admit that wheever I have a student who is severely academically-challenged — and apathetic, to all appearances, about their own intellectual growth — I always wonder how the heck they got into college in the first place, why they’re there if they’re not trying to grow, and what on earth the admissions office was thinking. Thanks for giving some insight into the committee’s role in this process.

    In terms of writing and literature courses, one thing to consider is the natural progression of readers from “responders” to “evaluators” to “critics” to “theorists”. (Wish I could recall the source I read that made these distinctions…) I’m reluctant to naturalize things, but there’s merit in the argument that high school students simply aren’t ready yet to be literary theorists, and that teaching criticism can backfire when students aren’t ready for it yet. It seems to me, often, that freshman year is right when students are just beginning to move out of the role of “respondor” to a text and to see themselves as “evaluators” rather than “critics.” Our job in many ways is to usher them away from simple emotional responses, to call into question their criteria for evaluating texts, and to gently introduce them to critical responses to reading. I don’t blame high school at all for the paucity of critical skills in students… in fact, I’m happy that they’ve introduced students to SOME way of understanding the organization of language and the artistry of literature. Any oversimplification of a text is a start…I like working with student assumptions and helping to “liberate” them from them (my definition of “liberal arts” is to do just that).

    I’m rambling. Just wanted to thank you for this post and share my thoughts.

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