Skip to main content

Enabling students

Lisa of Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog has put her finger on something that has been bugging me for the last several weeks:
After years of being accommodating to students, and providing flexibility to deal with their hectic schedules, and alternative assignments to cater to learning styles, we’ve done it. We’ve helped create an entire generation of students who assume alternatives for everything, and expect us to accommodate everything. They also comfortably assume that every instruction, limitation, restriction applied to their coursework will be repeated to them many times in a variety of formats, and are, at any rate, negotiable if they didn’t get it the first four times...

Enabling, that’s what they call it. I really don’t like to be harsh, but I can’t imagine them negotiating every deadline (most don’t even bother to negotiate it — they just skip it and hand it to me later) and requiring instructions be repeated four times in the working world. I hope they grow up to be highly successful professional surfers, fashion designers or movie producers with a secretarial staff and personal assistants to take care of them, but some won’t. It sure keeps things friendly but, even setting aside my own mild annoyance at all this, I don’t think we’re doing them a service.
I highly recommend reading the whole post - Lisa's story about literally repeating something 4 times (in a row!) is depressingly familiar. I often find myself simply incredulous that after I've repeated something upteen times AND posted it on the website in multiple places, I STILL get students who email me because they missed it. And then I struggle with how to handle that - do I give them partial credit? Any credit? A lecture on how they need to pay closer attention? If I don't make accommodations, will they hate me and think I'm an unfair bitch? But if I do make accommodations, am I just encouraging them to continue being clueless? And is that fair to the students that paid attention and did everything right the first time?

This has been a particular struggle with the 500-seater because I know that with a class this size, there are going to be more students who miss stuff. On the one hand, I try harder to make information as clear and as available for students as I can so I know they have no excuses; on the other hand, they still miss stuff and then email me to ask for accommodation. I've come up with a couple ways of dealing that I think are marginally creative; I'll come back and post about them as soon as I'm done with the stack of 400 one-pagers that need to be graded...

Comments

  1. This semester, I had a student come in two days after the final, asking to take it. His reason? He didn't know when the final was given.

    1) The date was in the courseschedule on the syllabus.

    2) I had posted an announcement reminding them when (and where) the final was being given on the on-line course mabagement system.

    3) I had announced it daily in class for the last two weeks of the semester.

    I told him he had to take some responsibility for his actions, and his final exam score was a zero. I felt not one bit of an issue about doing so. But, then, I do have a reputation to maintain (grin).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I try to put everything administrative on the course website. That way, whenever a student asks an administrative question, I simply say "It's on the website." My students seem to find that a reasonable response, though the questioner may be less satisfied.

    I'm usually more forthcoming with questions about understanding the content, but then I don't have 500 students.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

What are the costs?

I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p

What was your high school economics experience like?

As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu