It’s OK to Fail

Today, I had my usual second-class lecture on the advantages of active reading and how students usually read for pleasure/emotion and thus need to change how they read “school work” in order to engage their brain. It always goes over well, as students realize that basically staring at words on a page for two hours every week  and then living off of energy drinks and little sleep for a week while they cram for finals is really not a pleasant, effective, or ideal way to spend four years and thousands of dollars. But today, I added a little unplanned and wholly instinctive wrinkle to the second-day lecture: I don’t expect perfection and it’s ok to get the answer wrong.

I mentioned this at first in regards to their in-class free writes and homework: they get credit for making an effort to understand and engage with the materials, regardless if their engagement takes them in wildly strange directions. It might seem really touchy-touchy to reward effort, and I always shudder when students cry about a bad grade on a paper, claiming they worked so hard on it, but when we’re talking about the process of learning, then mistakes and misdirections are as important as eventually getting it right. Their mistakes are as important to me in my process of helping them learn so I can adapt my teaching in order to meet them where they are. 
I’ve always tried to set up my classes in such a way that if the students give an honest effort, they will produce work that is of good enough quality to have earned them an A. We read and reread. We discuss and debate. We write, revise, and rewrite. We give and get feedback. I am the first person to admit a mistake when a class or assignment clearly didn’t work the way I had envisioned. I’ll meet them where they are, but I’ve got to know where that is. And that means I need them to be honest about what they are learning and what they aren’t.
In other words, they have to be ready to possibly fail the first time they try something. They don’t want to think too hard about what they’ve read in case their reading is wrong. They don’t want to try something different in how they read/write/study because it might not work and thus their grade will suffer. They don’t want to put too much effort into something that might not pay off. I think a lot of students’ current apathy or laziness stems from fear: fear of being wrong, fear of wasting their time, fear of looking foolish. I told them today that if they learned something, even if that something is “this really didn’t work”, then they are further ahead than when they started.
I try to remember that lesson myself when I teach. It’s never going to be perfect. And sometimes it will fail. But as long as I am open to recognizing and then fixing whatever went wrong, then I think I’m doing ok. I hope to get my students to understand that, too.
PS You have just read my 100th post here on College Ready Writing. Thank you so much for reading, sharing, commenting, and generally participating in my ongoing conversation about teaching, higher education, and beyond, mistakes and all.

First Day of School!

Yup, I finally started teaching today. Finally. The syllabus was done yesterday afternoon while the children napped. I used a great deal of “Readings: TBA” in part so I can be more flexible as the semester moves on and in part because I really have no idea what we’re going to read. Yet.

The good? I was able to move all of my classrooms into rooms with a smartboard (I still don’t know how to use one, but maybe I’ll learn this semester), a computer, and Internet access. I also found out that there is a computer lab that I can use with my students. Time to revise papers on the spot! I am very excited about this.

The bad? Blackboard was acting weird, and so I had to actually go over the syllabus in more detail than I would have liked because my course was still reading “unavailable” and thus the students couldn’t access anything I had put up there. It’s fixed, but it’s still annoying.

The ugly? The textbook I selected for my 100-level class, the one without readings?  Turns out, we could have selected the one with the readings, and that is the version that the bookstore brought in, charging the students more money than they needed to spend. I didn’t even know we had the option. So now my students have “wasted” money, or I have to change my syllabus (hey, Readings TBA, right?). Or, some students may have bought it with readings and some without. Ugh.

Live and learn.

But it’s great to be in front of the classroom again. This semester, I’m a lot more confident about the courses I’m teaching; when my 200-level students’ eyes glazed over when I said that we were going to be discussing education reform, I knew with a decent amount of certainty that I will have won most of them over by the end of the semester. You know, why high school sucks.

Now if I could only get a chair in my office that puts me in a good position to type and work on my computer…

What’s Your Attendance Policy?

As I have admitted before, I was not the best undergraduate student. I routinely didn’t go to class. I can count on one hand the number of courses where I attended every class. Most of them were taught by the same teacher. She was an adjunct, and she taught some of the most thankless courses. Our first course with her was Technical Writing. And yet, we all attended every class, did every assignment, and were usually lined up around the corner to see her during her office hours. I don’t remember if she had an attendance policy in her syllabus (she probably did), but it wasn’t for fear of punishment that we did or did not attend her class. We wanted to be there, and we saw the utility of attending her classes. 

Another instructor (another adjunct) that I vividly remember also got me to attend every class. But it was because there was a severe penalty built into the syllabus if you missed even one class. We hated it. Everyone in the class resented the fact that we were being “forced,” through threat of punishment, to attend the class. We would sit through his long lectures and plod through his boring exercises wondering why it was we absolutely needed to be there. It didn’t help that it was Editing at 8:30 on Friday mornings, but if our Technical Writing teacher had been the instructor, we would have been there, no matter what.
This is the problem I have with attendance policies; it gives students the wrong incentive to attend class. if I am doing my job as an instructor, students will understand the utility of my class, enjoy (or at least appreciate) the learning process, and willingly attend. If a student at this level doesn’t yet understand that attendance matters, then docking them a few grades won’t help; if anything, they’ll end up resenting you, your class, and your policy.
A number of my students have told me about the zero tolerance policy their high schools have developed in regards to attendance; if you miss a day for any reason not deemed acceptable, you get detention or suspension. Most of the time, however, those students who are “forced” to go to school are disruptive or don’t bother doing the work required of them. No amount of punishment seems to change their attitude towards school and schooling; they see it as a waste of their time. I want to make sure that my students don’t think that I am wasting their time.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a stick that goes along with the carrot. The students learn very quickly that every day we do a variety of activities in class that directly relates to their upcoming (or in progress) essay assignment. All of these activities count in their final grade. For me, the incentive isn’t that they lose marks by not being in class, but that they miss out on important practice and preparation for major assignments. Doing well in my class isn’t about just attending, it’s about actively participating and working on what we focusing on that day. I have a number of students who show up and either sleep or just stare at me during class. The quality of their writing has not improved. 
I want to be more like my Technical Writing instructor than my Editing instructor; I want students to want to attend my class, not feel that they have to attend but are wasting their time in doing so. 

Growing The Readers You Want

But what kind of readers do we want?

It’s the beginning of the semester, and we professors/instructors of any and all ilk are always faced with the same challenge: getting our students to read. I addressed it a little bit in my previous post about homework, but at the end of the day, we can (eventually) get our students to write because of a big fat grade attached to it, but it’s really, really hard to get them to read. I went to a PD session this week that addressed this very concern. We were told the session was going to be about our State embracing the Common Core Standards, but instead we learned about “Growing the Readers You Want.”

The PD was given by a wonderful literacy professor from WKU, Dr. Pam Petty (please don’t judge her by her Geocities-looking website). WKU has done a fantastic job of creating a university-wide literacy program that is also available to professors looking to improve the reading skills of the students they teach, regardless of the subject matter. She painted us a depressing picture of what the true literacy levels of our students are (way too low) and asked us how we expected our students to read at college-level when they were barely reading at a high school level? But she also chastised us for allowing the students to “drive the bus” so to speak when it comes to developing our courses: slowly eliminating the need to read, or at least read anything challenging. 
We, she told us, needed to keep the challenging, college-level readings in our classes but help the students with their reading, giving them more guidance and direction in how they should read. She also reinforced the need to somehow hold the students accountable for the reading. We discussed various methods (guided reading forms with general and specific questions, visual keys, etc) and saw how one professor almost double his retention and passing rate for a large Intro to Psych class. 
I think it’s important for those of us who teach writing to keep these things in mind as we design and teach our courses. I tell my students much of the time: it’s not that you can’t write; it’s that you have nothing to write about, and that’s where active or critical reading skills come into play. Technically, we’re not supposed to teach reading skills in our developmental writing class; there is another class for developmental reading. But if I want my students to be able to write a college-level paper, I need them to be able to do college-level reading. I cannot and will not divorce the two. And most of the advice she gave to us were variations of exercises I already do with the students (but she also reminded me of the importance of letting go a little on the guidance by the end of the semester). 
So now I’m torn again about the readings I am going to require my students to do this semester in their 100-level class and even in my developmental writing course: pop culture and short op-ed essays are more interesting, relevant, and accessible, but do they suitably challenge my students? Am I doing them a disservice by asking them to read Fahrenheit 451 (I hate spelling that word) instead of 1984? Should I even be asking them to read fiction in a college writing (and reading) class? Is it fair to assign them to read a textbook “Everything is an Argument” when only one form of argument (and critical reading) is even acceptable in higher education? Have I, have we, allowed them to take the wheel of the bus?
I am so glad that I haven’t invested too much manual labor (as in typing and formatting) my syllabus for the upcoming semester; I would have junked it more than a few times now. I just got my student evaluations back from last semester; one of the comments that kept coming up was that I genuinely care about my students and that it shows in my teaching. I do genuinely care about my students, which is why I take forming my syllabus and selecting the readings so seriously. And why I am worried about pushing them to be their best and succeed in college. 

What “Text” Do You Teach?

This semester, I’m teaching Freshman Writing for the first time at my “new” institution; I’ve taught the class before at other places, but as anyone who has taught the “same” class at different schools knows, it’s never the same. New requirements, new textbook, new guidelines, and thus, a new class. I also know that I have a lot of students who took my Developmental English class with me signed up for the class, so I want to make sure I keep things fresh, so to speak, for them. I chose an entirely new and different textbook for my class (we have to choose one, out of an approved list of three); usually, I chose a textbook that has lots of readings and I focus on teaching the writing part. This time, I chose a textbook that exclusively focuses on the writing (and critically reading) part, but is light on texts provided as examples and for students to “practice” on. I selected Everything’s an Argument (searching for the link for this book, I just noticed that there is an edition with readings; that’s not the one we’re using, for whatever reason).

The idea was that this would provide me with more freedom to allow students to find their own readings, encouraging them to take ownership of their education, engaging them in critical research activities, and providing materials that they themselves are interested in. Or force me to do so. I will be looking for my own texts to provide for them, in order to make sure that they are being challenged in their work and in their thinking. I’m also thinking that their final assignment might be to critically “read” and critique the argument in anything of their choosing, reality TV, sports, a novel, the healthcare debate, a video game, whatever they want. This could be controversial.

The issue, for me, comes down to this: is a Freshman Writing class supposed to prepare students for college writing (and reading), or is it to prepare students more broadly for the challenges and reality they will be facing after they leave the university? If my only job is to prepare them for college writing, then asking the students to write about “texts” that aren’t written is a mistake; as many have already pointed out, the university is not the center for curricular innovation. We like our textbooks, we like our academic essays, and we don’t really like all of these trendy topics (like media studies or digital humanities) encroaching on our turf of the classic liberal arts. I’m, of course, not speaking for everyone, but for many, dare I say, most, I should be teaching “the classics” over Jersey Shore.

That’s an argument that holds a lot of power for me. I think that part of higher education is being exposed to (read: being forced to read and examine) texts that we probably would never have picked up on our own, and for today’s student, that usually means anything written over 20 years ago that doesn’t involve a vampire or wizard. I’m being glib, but how many students really enjoyed reading Shakespeare in high school or picked up a copy of Plato’s Republic for the fun of it? I know they’re out there, but they are not in my classes. If we, collectively, in higher education, don’t expose students to the wealth of knowledge and the richness of the written word, who will? It isn’t just requiring that the students read the works, it’s also providing them with the skills to be able to appreciate the work, engaging them in a way that makes the experience meaningful.

This is where I think pop culture can come into play. The “classics” are always concerned about human behavior, for better or for worse; pop culture just seems to exaggerate those arguments writ large. For example, when talking about manly nihilism, we discussed both Nietzsche and Fight Club. If we want to talk about social mobility and empty materialism, then why not talk about The Death of Ivan Illyich as well as our current obsession with game shows and give-aways? Afraid of run-away technology? So have authors as far back as Rousseau, but most “recent” examples can be found in dystopian fiction. These are just a few examples, and I’m sure you probably have better ones (please, share, that’s what the comments are for).

And to say that the works and authors who are generally understood as being a part of the Canon didn’t concern themselves with base interests or popular culture, then what were they writing about when they critiqued religion and religious practices, the popular playwrites, poets, and musicians of the time, or the morality of the population in general? What is popular has certainly changed, but our need to analyze and understand it has not.

I think critical thinking is critical thinking. I think that students are too passive in their consumption of all media: written, visual, aural, etc. It used to be that only those who were in a position of power or affluence could afford to engage in such activities. No more. If we can get students to critically “read” the texts they usually only consume for enjoyment and entertainment, then we can also get them thinking critically about their discipline, their education, and whatever it is we have asked them to read/consume for school. If they can write a well-organized, well-thought out, well-researched, clearly argued essay about reality TV, then I think it’s safe to say that we’ve done our job of preparing them for college writing and beyond.

(For a great example of critically “reading” a show, check out “Should We Watch ‘Bridalplasty’?” I love how the author shines the light back onto the viewer; the show is really informative about what it says about society, but we have to be willing to go an extra, self-critical step)

The Homework Paradox

This week, in honor of #FYCchat, and the fact that I’m working on my syllabi for the upcoming semester all week, I’m posting all about some of the decisions we face as instructors, trying to come up with a plan for our students for the semester. First up, homework!

I have a love-hate relationship with homework. When I was a student, in the dark ages, before computers and word processing programs, I used to be reduced to tears, writing and rewriting my essays and other assignments because I am a terrible speller. “Good copies” could only be written in pen, and we were only allowed three White-Out marks to correct mistakes. I used to sit at the kitchen table as my mom proofread my work, dreading the inevitable: the fourth spelling mistake which meant I would have to start all over again. 

I was lucky, because I had parents who were very involved with my school work and education. I always had help with math, French, or whatever else I was tasked to do. But, my parents also never over-stepped their role as tutor and coach, much to my dismay. Every piece of writing, every problem solved, every verb conjugated, it was all done by me, but if I got stuck, I would sit with my mom she would guide me as to how to figure out my problem. When I had trouble with biology and she couldn’t figure out how to help me, she hired one of my swimming teammates who was older and studying biology to tutor me. The idea was always to help me become self-sufficient in my learning and studying.

(A quasi-relevant aside: my friend who tutored me in biology figured out that I needed a narrative in order to learn; biology was hard for me because it was a lot of memorization. I always complained that I didn’t understand biology, when really, there was nothing to understand, only things to memorize, at least at the high school level. So we wrote stories about the cell and all of the parts and their functions, a tool I used to study for all of my biology tests from then on. I would start each biology test by writing down whatever story or stories I had come up with and then filling in the blanks. It worked, as I passed biology, and my friend went on to become an excellent university professor.)

As a professor, homework is essential if we, myself and my students, are to be able to accomplish our learning goals. I remember my mother’s lessons, and I try to help my students see how they can become self-sufficient learners. But it is nearly impossible to get my students to do their reading or take any active reading exercises I assign seriously. While they complain about how they are bored by lectures, they fail to see the connection between being able to have meaningful class discussions and exercises if they haven’t done their reading. One day, I really will stand in silence for an entire class period waiting for students to answer my discussion questions to show I am serious a) about students doing their readings and b) that I want to do more than just lecture.
But I also understand my role as a coach for my students in their learning (see the above parenthetical aside). For example, when we are working on editing and revising their essays, I have them do their peer reviews or self-assessments in class, so if they have any questions or need any help, I’m there to give some guidance. What do I hear from them? Do we have to do this right now, or can we just leave and do this at home? Really? I can’t get you to do homework because of a variety of excuses (no time, too much other work, etc) and now all of a sudden you have time to do this? It frustrates me, but I tell the students that they can take the time now or take the time later. 
I understand the argument that students (children especially) need free time to explore and play, and that homework often drills the love of learning from them. But in university, I don’t see my students every day, and the time we spend together is very limited. I don’t have the time in class to learn all about the students’ strengths and weaknesses, and how they learn best. Tasks assigned to them to be completed outside of class is also one of the ways I can gage what tools work best for certain students. And, because we don’t see each other every day, it forces them to practice and reinforce what we’ve been doing/reading/learning. 
Homework, especially in college, isn’t going anywhere. But I remember my 10-year-old self, and I work to make sure that every exercise we do, inside and outside of class, has a clear purpose. I just wish my students would actually do it.

Loyalty or Desperation, Revisited

In honor of the job numbers coming out of the MLA regarding potential jobs for all of us PhDs and ABDs, I want to reexamine an idea I put forward this summer. Last July, I wrote about how loyalty to a university can just as easily mask desperation in contingent faculty (the university that I mention in the post is not the same university where I am currently working). But I have been rethinking the ideas of loyalty and/or desperation in faculty members as it relates to the students I teach. I hope and wish that my institution would show loyalty towards me because of the loyalty I feel towards its students.

I have moved around quite a bit during my career. Being one half of an academic couple has lead to my traveling to multiple universities for work. But I am tired of moving around, tired of learning and relearning a new academic culture, and, most of all, I am tired of never knowing how the students I have taught have done in their academic careers. Teaching developmental writing, especially, creates a type of bond for me; I have invested a great deal of time and effort getting to know these students and trying to help them be successful in college. And I want to be there for them if they ever need me during their four or five more years in college. I want to be readily available to write letters for them if a reference is ever needed. I want to help my student who wants to get a PhD in Economics achieve that goal, even if it is just cheering him on from the sidelines. And I want to be there at graduation when they cross the stage and finally achieve their goal of getting a degree and becoming a teacher, a nurse, a vet tech, or whatever else they are hoping to do with their education.
But I can’t do that, at least not easily, if I am not employed at the university. I told my students that even if I didn’t have a job on campus next year or beyond, chances are I’d still be around because my husband is on the tenure-track and we have just bought a house in town. But how much weight would a letter carry from a former instructor, versus a current one? How easily could they track me down to ask for help, guidance, or a pep-talk, or would they even bother, if my campus email was shut down and I no longer had an office? I hope that I am still an employee, even as an instructor off the tenure-track, for many more years, not only for myself, but for the students I have taught and will teach.
My loyalty is to them. Many of them have come from very difficult situations, and I really want to help them succeed, or at a minimum smile proudly when their names are called and they cross the stage to receive their diploma, knowing I had played a small role in helping them achieve that goal. So, to my institution I say, your students have won me over. Now, are you going to show me a little bit of loyalty in return?

What Can We Expect From Freshmen?

I asked, in a recent post, what do we expect from Freshmen? I was responding, in part, to the criticism, that I had expected too much of my students in their final assignment. And then, today, I came across (or rediscovered) the following essay by Alfie Kohn, explaining “How to Create Nonreaders.” In it, he radically proposes that we empower students and allow them to shape the curriculum in their language arts/reading and writing classes at the K-12 level. 

Now, imagine if we did that in our Freshmen Writing or Introduction to Literature classes. Based on the comments on my blog post about allowing students to propose a fictional course, I don’t think that it would go over very well. 
Here is the paradox that Kohn points out and that can be extrapolated even further into higher education: 

The sad irony is that as children grow older and become more capable of making decisions, they’re given less opportunity to do so in schools.  In some respects, teenagers actually have less to say about their learning – and about the particulars of how they’ll spend their time in school each day — than do kindergarteners.  Thus, the average American high school is excellent preparation for adult life. . . assuming that one lives in a totalitarian society.

We expect even less of students in college classes. Part of it is the institutional tradition: students come to higher education (and pay a lot of money) in order to benefit from our (the professor’s) expertise. If they wanted to direct their own learning, they are free to do so, for free. You get what you pay for, and they are paying for my wisdom, experience, and knowledge. But why does it have to be that way? As Kohn points out, the instructor is not removed from the equation; they are important guides in the process of shaping the educational experience. Why does our experience have to be shared with students in a top-down approach?

When I ask the question, however, what can we expect from freshmen, I don’t just mean what could we reasonable expect a freshman to do in a class. I don’t think that it would be entirely unreasonable to immediately ask a freshman to take control and ownership of their education in order to prepare them for not only the next four years, but their professional lives beyond their degree. No, I am also asking what are we allowed to ask of our freshmen.

Kohn talks about how it’s important that students are given “voice and choice.” Why? Two reasons:

The first is that deeper learning and enthusiasm require us to let students generate possibilities rather than just choosing items from our menu; construction is more important than selection.  The second is that what we really need to offer is “autonomy support,” an idea that’s psychological, not just pedagogical.  It’s derived from a branch of psychology called self-determination theory, founded by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, among others.  To support students’ autonomy is to meet their need to be in control of their own lives, to offer opportunities to decide along with the necessary guidance and encouragement, to “minimiz[e] the salience of evaluative pressure and any sense of coercion in the classroom” and “maximiz[e] students’ perceptions of having a voice and choice.”[10]

 How can we allow students to generate possibilities when the instructors themselves aren’t allowed to generate possibilities, allowed our own autonomy? Instead, we are limited to a selection of pre-approved texts, mandated assignments, and set learning outcomes? My fellow University of Venus colleague Afshan Jafar has written quite eloquently on the McDonaldization of higher education and why it is taking place, but I am interested here in examining the effects on the teaching and course development process. For Mary Churchill, the assembly-line teaching mentality caused her to choose administration over academia. For me, it means that I can’t at least try to empower and challenge my freshmen writers.

This next semester, I am teaching Freshman Writing at my institution for the first time. I’ve taught the course elsewhere, but of course, I have to re-learn a new textbook, fit in all of the mandated assignments, and this semester, the added pressure of being one of the courses whose papers will be evaluated for accreditation and evaluation purposes. Could I, would I, come to class on the first day with the long pre-formatted syllabus with all of the requirements, course goals, learning outcomes, and assignments already in place and pre-selected textbook, and say to the class, here are our guidelines, now we make the class together? I do have the flexibility to assign specific readings, come up with homework/in-class exercises, and a small number of major assignments, as well as the specific schedule for the semester. Could I, would I, hand over the small amount of choice and freedom I do have as an instructor to my students?

I worry about my job. I worry about the perception of me as an instructor. I worry about my students learning. I worry (in my most optimistic moments) that I will upset the expectations of other professors who later have my students, students who now expect a degree of autonomy that they will not receive in other classes. I worry about our accreditation; I have now been at two schools that have completely overhauled their Freshman Writing because of the demands of the same accreditation board. Of course, the accreditation board didn’t demand specifically that Freshman Writing change, but they did demand that there be put in place a program that would impact all students. Freshman Writing it is.

I have about three weeks to decide. I’m not going to lie; I’ll probably take the “easy” and safe way out, developing my syllabus myself, mostly dictating the readings and assignments, according to the limitations that have already been placed on me. But like I did in my 200-level class this past semester, I’ll push the envelope; blogs, self-directed reading and research, and at least one assignment that upsets everyone’s assumptions, students’ and professors’, as to what a freshman can do. It might not be much, but it’s a start. It is, literally, the least and most I can do.

What Do We Expect From Freshmen?

I’m not breaking my Christmas vow to focus on engaging with the comments on my blog/writing; this post, in fact, is a long response to my recent University of Venus post, “What is a Course in Higher Ed?” One particularly negative comment focused on how I live in a fairy-land and should never be allowed to teach again. Never mind that the course focused on education and its role in our society, and that the assignment was warmly and enthusiastically received by my students. And while some of my students didn’t do as well as I had hoped, when do they ever? 

But that isn’t what this blog post is about. No, my fellow University of Venus blogger Mary Churchill dealt quite well with the issue of instructors and professors being openly discouraged from trying (and potentially failing) in the classroom here.

I want to focus on the critique that I expected too much from my Freshmen in the class (never mind that most of my students were, in fact, Sophomores or higher). One of the comments read:

Freshman are not educators; most of them do not even know how to do critical thinking, much less create a course that develops it. Freshmen are supposed to be somewhat self-centered with a limited worldview. Changing that is the purpose of higher ed. While, along the way, imparting skills and knowledge.

True enough, they are not educators, but they have all chosen to attend an institution of higher education, at great cost to themselves and/or their families. But is it also true that they are “supposed to be somewhat self-centered”? This goes back to the central question of my post, what is higher education? Is its purpose to produce well-rounded, critical thinking individuals? And is it the only place where this could and should happen?

In the West, most people still do not attend college, let alone complete a degree (note that I’ve said college and not community college or technical schools). We are a democracy, and we rely on a population that is capable of making informed decisions when they vote. Why, then, is critical thinking the sole responsibility of colleges and universities? Why has that role been taken away from or fallen away from the high schools? What about the significant numbers of the population who have not gone to college?

We spoke at length about education and its role in our society both with my more advanced 200-level writers, about whom I wrote, and with my developmental writers, who were all Freshmen. All of them agree that their college education, in fact, all of education, is motivated by economics. It was very difficult for them to even contemplate or imagine education serving any other purpose. Why then, I asked, was education historically reserved for the wealthy who didn’t need any sort of education in order to perpetuate their (mostly inherited) wealth? Why did the emerging merchant class insist that their children receive a classical education when their trade was, well, trade?

I don’t think any of us ever came up with a satisfactory answer. Is this a failure on my part as an instructor? Well, I could have told them or lectured them on their self-centered, capitalist worldview, which would have gone in one ear and out the other. Instead, we read, we wrote, and I let them create. And, really, at the end of 15 weeks, is it too much to ask of a student to apply what we have read, discussed, and learned, regardless of what level they are at, Freshmen or Seniors?

I think in our disgust with the level of K-12 education, our increasing course loads/student numbers, our push to standardize courses, and our general disdain for the motivation of our students (or lack thereof), we have severely underestimated their abilities. They don’t want to be challenged; they’re not ready to be challenged; I’m too busy to challenge them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Most Freshmen, heck most students, will rise to the challenge, if you are willing to go there with them.

Back when I was naive, I taught a developmental writing course in California, at one of the state schools.  The need for remediation was so strong that they created two levels of developmental writing, one that was one 10-week quarter and another that took place over two 10-week quarters. The only requirement was that the students had to study (read, write, and discuss) a non-fiction book, one that makes an argument. I, in my naiveté, chose Manliness by Harvey Mansfield. The students, I thought, would love it. And they did, eventually.

We spent the final 10 weeks on the book. I told them ahead of time that it would be the most challenging book they’d probably ever read, but if they trusted me, worked hard, we would get through it and they could be confident that they could get through anything college threw at them.  It was the hardest 10 weeks of my life and probably the students’ (intellectual) lives. But we did get through it and at the end of the semester, I was more proud of the results they produced than I ever have before or since. Why? One reason is because I never had the opportunity to teach the book again. But another reason is exactly because it was so hard for me as their instructor and thus a deterrent to ever teaching something that challenging to Freshmen or developmental writers ever again. Why should I be surprised at their uninspired writing and ideas when I give them (or am required to give them) uninspired things to read and write about?

My idea to have all of my students, regardless of their level read and write about education and education reform has produced the most satisfying results for me as an instructor since I taught Manliness. And, it was my most challenging teaching experience since then, too. Were all the essays stellar examples of critical thinking and college-level writing? No. But, they all showed evidence of at least an attempt at both critical thinking and college-level writing. It didn’t earn them an A, but it did reinforce my belief that much of the time we expect too little from our students, Freshmen or otherwise.

For Part II, I ask, what can we expect from Freshmen?

What difference does it make that you get an “A”?

The students are handing in their papers and writing final exams. Once the grades are in (and even before that), it will begin. The grade grubbing. It’s my least favorite part of the semester. It has already started; students who have missed a lot of assignments and then have not done well on major papers are at my desk before and after class, asking if there is anything they can do (build a time machine, go back to the beginning of the semester, do better). But the students who really frustrate me are those students who come to me demanding to know:

“Why didn’t I get an A” or “How can I get an A”? 
I tell my students at the beginning of the semester that if they work hard, attend class, do the assignments both big and small, take it seriously, and take advantage of the services and support offered to them, then there is no reason why they can’t all get A’s. But as the semester progresses, it becomes clear that some of the students’ only motivation is to get an A. It doesn’t matter that becoming a better writer is a valuable life skill, they just want to know what list of changes they need to make in order to make something into an “A” paper. It’s one of the reasons why I try to keep from too heavily editing students’ papers; the students don’t see it as an opportunity to learn, only an opportunity to get an A. 
There has been a lot of debate recently about how we evaluate students and how pressure to do well (get a high GPA) is leading to an erosion of the educational experience. Students increasingly don’t see anything wrong with cheating; all that counts is that, in the end, they get their high grade and their degree. I try to work with my students on the process of writing, in order to make the writing the focus, instead of the grade. But it doesn’t work. Especially since many of my classes are general education requirements that students think should be easier because they have to take them, in part to make up for lower grades earned in their more demanding classes in their major. 
And so the student who comes to me complaining about a B will be met with one question: why is it so important that your grade be an A? What are your priorities? Why? And then, what didn’t you do this semester that kept you from getting an A? Earning a B in my class may be the opportunity a student needs to really take a hard look at why they are in school and how their behavior and choices are undermining their ultimate goals and aspirations. But, it is also a good time to ask, what difference will that A really make? 
I’ve earned A’s and I’ve earned D’s. I’ve had wild successes and massive failures. If all I did was stop at the letter grade assigned to any project or assignment, where would I be? I was wholly unprepared for a job because there wasn’t the finality of a grade one way or the other, and that my bosses we not as ready or willing to reward me with the same accolades my work had previously earned. In school, the grade is final. At work, my writing was constantly being edited, revised, rewritten, and, worst of all for me, heavily critiqued. While I would always forget about a good or bad grade immediately after it had been posted, I didn’t really learn anything, or was I ever motivated to improve. Working was a rude awakening to how inadequately I was prepared, despite my stellar (and not so stellar) grades.
What difference is that A really going to make? 
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