Community college teachers run into it constantly. Most of our students are not college-ready, but often are insulted when told they need remediation or must get their act together by performing tasks like, you know, for a start, coming to class and completing assignments.
Actually, conditions may be nudging up a bit in terms of college readiness, according to the latest news from ACT, but attitude has a lot to do with success as well. Students who are willing to work hard will generally improve. But they may need a firm wake-up call from someone who cares.
Marc D. Cyr is an associate professor in the department of literature and philosophy at Georgia Southern University. He takes an amusing (if pointed) riff on the situation in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription may be required).
He begins the piece by describing a survey exercise assigned to students by a colleague, with questions composed by a group of students. One of their questions asked whether "dyeing your hair purple helps your self of steam." Not self-esteem. Self of steam.
The professor stepped in to fix the mistake, as none of the students in the entire group had detected it. To be fair, Professor Cyr points out that such errors are common with all of us as individuals, admitting that he once thought the rock song "My Woman from Tokyo" was "My Woman Can Talk to You." Some of us recall thinking the Beatles hit "Day Tripper" was about a "State Trooper"—downright weird and disturbing on so many levels. Let's not discuss "Louie, Louie."
The author goes on to speculate on whether it was appropriate for his colleague to correct the students' error. Maybe it would have been preferable for them to find out on their own, once the survey was out there and subjected to the inevitable hoots of derision. Presumably they would also get a bad grade on the exercise. Or would they?
Some choice quotes from the piece:
The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment study for 2009 revealed that, in a group of 34 developed countries, American students ranked 17th in science knowledge and ability and 25th in math, although—and let's have a big cheer here—14th in reading. But they waved the big foam-hand finger at No. 1 in self-confidence. For professors, of course, this is old news. I doubt there's a single one of us who has not encountered, and continues to encounter with depressing frequency and volume, students who perform below college standards yet confront us with anger or tears or both and the claim that they "always" get A's, that we are being unreasonable at best, and at worst that the low grades they are earning are vindictive because we don't like them. That we can and do provide them with evidence that they have earned these low grades too often means nothing to them because they know they're better than the evidence shows.
And:
We need to give our students the opportunity to develop to their true potential. We need to teach them how to actually succeed. And this means setting reasonable yet high standards, training them to meet those standards, and holding them accountable for doing so, and throughout their student careers supplying them with honest evaluations of their performance. This honesty, by the way, does not necessitate brutal or demeaning delivery. Do we want our students to have self-esteem? Then we must stop depriving them of the means and opportunity to earn it. Sooner or later they'll find out the truth; we need to do far better, even if it is painful in the short run, than we are doing in order to make that truth something better than bitter.
So, to apply terms I have read in student essays, if you think we're doing students and this country's future a favor by calling their spade a diamond, you've got another thing coming. The statutes of liberty guarantee the right to the pursuit of happiness, but we're doing our students a huge disfavor by drawing lipstick smiley faces on everything from eagles to pigs, telling them they can fly, and then shoving the whole bunch off the cliff. You can take it for granite that if we keep going on this way, even their self of steam will go up in smoke.
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