This is a fitting day to reflect on the experiences of the last 24 years. When Martin Luther King died in April of 1968 I was full of enthusiasm and promise. That decade of disaster killed a president, a presidential hopeful, and extinguished a beacon of light in the darkness of bigotry we lived with in the sixties. That decade was also the most formative for me of the five I have experienced. I graduated from high school, went to work at Disneyland, drove the Monorail, found the love of my life, brought two children into the world, and in the rainy winter of 1969, enrolled at UCSB to complete the undergraduate and graduate education that would eventually bring me to Santa Barbara City College. I began my full-time faculty experience in 1987 and I will end it in June of 1998. It doesn't seem like so many years but when you add all the time I spent as a lecturer at UCSB, it does equal about a quarter century. Small potatoes for the likes of my friend, Henry Bagish, and others with Methuselan backgrounds, but enough for me I think.
What a fine time I've had with all of you and all most of my students. Good fortune has given me experience with the Academic Senate, the Honors Program, the college's Redesign effort, accreditation, an administrative internship, teaching thousands of students, and a lot of other related activities.
I will leave the college in June so this is my last inservice. Aptly enough, since I've managed to wangle my way into so many of them, I'll have a small role for this one too and I appreciate Jerry Pike's invitation to participate.
In the Fall of 1997, my colleagues in the Communication Department decided to include a set of Standards for Student Success into their classes. All of us - contract and adjunct faculty - agreed that the standards might do some good and at worst, in the spirit of Hippocrates, could hardly do harm. This two-page document (attached) originated some years ago in different form. My contribution was essentially editing and rewrite so if the standards seem to inspire either censure or congratulation, my colleagues share the praise and/ or blame.
The Standards have had a semester's trial run so my job today is to report on the outcomes. Ideally I would have the accumulated responses of our entire Communication faculty but, unfortunately, we haven't formally put our heads together yet. What you see here is the largely anecdotal evidence offered by one teacher based on the experience of five classes and about 150 students. Since forewarned is forearmed, I will note that the results do not nestle comfortably within my Pollyannically perverse approach to all things pedagogic. Forcing a lean toward the positive is perhaps as forgivably inherent in the professional life of one who has years to go before she abandons the rhetorical mission (moi of yesteryear) as the somewhat cynical (but still optimistic) candor of the retiring Peterson.
For the sake of both accuracy and fairness, I will say now and you can apply the qualification throughout this essay, that most of my students demonstrate appropriate adult learning behavior and make teaching for all of the denizens of SBCC sheer joy. My comments here focus on a minority of students. However, that minority is growing and that's not good.
The matter of classroom behavior provides an excellent example. 20 years
ago, I would not have dreamed of the experiences I'm finding to be fairly
routine today. Here are some examples: (I took notes last semester).
| - Students coming to class a half-hour to forty-five minutes late expecting
to get credit for attendance.
- A student who left class after signing the roll (5 minutes into the class period) and sat outside talking to a friend for the remainder of the class session (in full view through the classroom window). When I marked her absent for the class, she was angry and said it wasn't fair because she "signed the roll." - Students strolling in late, stopping to chat with friends while lecture/discussion is in progress, and walking in front of me while I'm conducting the class. - Students coming late to class and walking up to me to ask a question or attempt discussion on some personal issue while the class session is in progress. - Students who not only do not take notes but have nothing with them (pencils or paper) to be able to take notes. - Students who continually talk with one another while class is in session despite repeated admonitions. - Rudeness; many examples. One that stands out is the student who confronts me with a grade dispute and then turns his/her back and stalks out of the room while I'm talking. Some of my confrontations with students on this issue have been unpleasant on both sides. - An inability or unwillingness to understand that deadlines are deadlines. Some students are nearly apoplectic with indignation when late papers are not accepted. - Converting personal circumstances into "reasons" for neglecting assignments. e.g. "I had three midterms and couldn't get the paper done," "My roommate had a fight with her boyfriend," and the intriguing, "I had to go to court." - Anger at instructors, Communication Lab Assistants, and others for problems directly traceable to student irresponsibility. Fault-finding often does not begin at home and many students are adept at transferring blame. - Noncompliance with assignments and amazement at being held accountable to standards announced many times and provided in writing. - Lying about illness, emergency, etc. - Drug and alcohol use. I have had students come to class obviously under the influence. I'm sure you have too. The incidence does not seem to be growing in terms of direct class impact but my grapevine discussions suggest that drinking and drug use are on the rise. Marijuana seems very commonly accepted among many students. - Students who "need" the grade...to transfer to Yale, maintain eligibility for fill in the blank, etc. (The number here is really rising in my experience). - Relentless expectation that the rules do not apply to the particular student. (I will want to come back to this one). - Virtually no interest in public issues, current events, politics, etc. Very few of my students seem to care at all who is elected to office, what they might do in office, or what issues should be of interest to all of us. This one is quite a source of professional unhappiness for me. I love talking politics with my students. - An absolutely astounding ability to locate loopholes. One example from Fall 1997. Schedules printed on the syllabus, the lab manual, and the class workbook listed a particular lab deadline as November 24. In one misprint, the deadline was listed "12/24." I announced this mistake in class at least three times and imagined that students would easily detect it without any assistance because December 24th was Christmas Eve and the semester would be completed before then. Nevertheless, a number of students complained to me that they didn't have the opportunity to do the lab because I gave them wrong information. - An expectation that something - anything - will pull a failing grade up to an "A" or a "B" at the last minute. This despite complete inattention to assignments incomplete, failed, or simply ignored all semester. I am beginning to believe that "extra credit" is a bad idea. Students sometimes seize on it with a sense of desperation all out of proportion to reality. |
Some of my reflections on the issue of standards - or rules or norms or whatever else we choose to call them - follow:
1. In my opinion, we are confronting a fairly widespread student perception that might be identified as "rule by exception." Many of my students understand the rules but simply do not accept the fact that they belong in the rule-governed group. I cannot count the number of times I have announced a policy, procedure, rule or whatever (often discussing it with the students to ensure their compliance to at least lip service degree) only to have one or more students immediately defy or ignore the rule. When I point this out, the inevitable response begins with, "But....my roommate took my car, my alarm didn't go off, my dog ate the homework, etc. etc."
2. Many students expect to be rewarded for far more than they deliver.
3. Some of our students are not prepared to be adults; they behave like children. They are rude and obnoxious. I have stopped accommodating them and it is a challenge to keep up the pressure to conform to simple standards of human courtesy.
4. The sense of "entitlement" among some of our students is out of bounds with the reality of college life and the professional lives they will encounter after leaving SBCC. We have all heard the cliché about the world owing us a living. Some of my students believe it. Worse yet, some of us seem to buy into it. A colleague once told me that we would be "failing this student if we don't convince him to stay in school." This is a student who was "earning" an F in my class and had done nothing to suggest a shred of academic promise. We were not failing this student. He was failing himself.
5. None of these standards or rules or expectations or ideals are going to be worth a darn without some consistency across the curriculum. I don't think we should feel obliged to walk in lock-step on our classroom and curricular methods/goals/standards but some degree of coordination would go a long way to set a reasonable expectation for our students about what college is all about.
6. I'm not sure if writing out two pages of common-sense information about such things as taking notes in class and participating in discussion is going to have a cataclysmic impact on students who have spent 18 years or more developing an immunity to the commonplace expectations of college life. An 18 year-old is an adult and any psychologist will probably agree that it isn't easy to change his/her attitudes and behaviors. We decry such sentiments as the following but I think it is true: Some of our students do not belong in a college classroom. They are too immature, too resistant, too disinterested in what this enterprise involves, too oblivious, too whatever. Maybe someday they will be ready but right now they are not. My deeply ingrained compassion (as well as the considerable impress of political correctness) forbids me from speaking my heart and mind at times when I am trying unsuccessfully to work with some of my students. The unexpressed thought is, "Your work in this class is so minimal that it is not worth your time or mine. Straighten out your priorities or go somewhere else and think about your life for a few years while I'm spending my time with students who know how important this is."
7. I believe that we place too much emphasis on self-esteem from the outside-in and not enough on what it takes to generate self-esteem from the inside-out. It isn't given away like a birthday present, it is earned.
8. As I have noted many times with thanks to Aristotle, "there is no science of the individual case." The world does not operate according to the needs of the individual; it functions on simple equations that apply to all of us in the aggregate, such as supply and demand, competence equals job opportunity, incompetence equals welcome to welfare dependency, economic despair, and so forth. We, as humane and dedicated educators, toil in a field that bestows nourishment and care on every little seedling, and that is as it should be. We want each one of our charges to thrive in the world, but they aren't going to live long and prosper if they garner a false impression of the world from us. We do them no favors by accepting less than the expected performance standard and ignoring execrable behavior.
One of the questions quite relevant to my discussion today is, "How did we arrive at a time in which the Standards for Student Success emerge as somewhat of an academic imperative?" We are advising students to "read text assignments and comply with homework assignments?! " This is college! Maybe we need to whack ourselves over the head with that simple thought and demonstrate with every word and behavior in the presence of students that we accept no less. This is college.
January 20 - evening.
Thank you for reading/listening to my reflections on the Communication Department's Standards for Student Success. I will send these pages to Jerry Pike for inclusion on a web site so any of you who did not receive a copy of this somewhat hastily written essay will be able to read it at your leisure. Perhaps I should note the obvious; this is less a finished product than the proverbial "think piece." If it inspires further discussion, I will be grateful. Thanks so much for your positive response today at the workshop.
Janice Peterson