What am I doing?

I’ve been a teacher for years. I started peer tutoring in high school, majored in Secondary Education in undergrad, earned my MLitt concentration in teaching, and have been teaching in one way or another since graduation. Heck, even my directing style tends to fall on the teaching side of the theatre process; I’m generally more concerned with coaching the actors than I am with the technical/visual elements (no amount of “pretty” can make up for unclear, uninspired performances). But in all my experience, and through all my training, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who could come up with a satisfactory definition of what a teacher’s job is.

We’re supposed to transmit knowledge—but knowledge of what (not to mention how)?

It seems the typical answer is to focus on content. A math teacher transmits the knowledge of how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. An English teacher transmits the knowledge of phonics and punctuation, etc. Obviously those of us who have taught know there’s so much more to it than that, but within institutional systems, all that other stuff seems secondary.

Parts of a Whole

Society at large (theoretically) recognizes that children don’t grow into reasonable, productive adults by accident. We need to educate the whole child. For decades, for instance, we’ve been trying to influence our future adults by building their self-esteem through effusive praise. We’re not doing a very good job of it. A recent article in New York discusses some of the ramifications brought on by those attempts. Instead of raising a student’s self-esteem, we’re actually training them to distrust adults’ praise and give up when things don’t come easily. I’ve witnessed the phenomenon personally, continually. It’s heartbreaking.

So, if we’re doing it wrong, should we give up, too? Should we just stick with content?

If you sample 100 college professors, you might find the answer leans toward yes. Now, I don’t have any data to back that up beyond anecdotal evidence. But, boy howdy, does it seem as though those who teach in post-secondary (and sometimes even secondary) education think students are empty vessels, and as long as a lecture is well thought out, the vessels will collect and retain all its brilliance. We forget that students, with few exceptions, don’t know how they learn.

Those of us who have already earned degrees remember the grueling workloads and all-nighters with a sort of wistful nostalgia. Those were the good old days of suffering for our passions, right? I mean, we really earned our credentials. Not like these kids today who get degrees handed to them. Instead of empathizing with our students, we let our memories give us a sick sense of superiority over them. They don’t have it half as hard as we did, and we never complained! We were grateful for the privilege to walk uphill (both ways) in four feet of snow from our closet-sized dorms with mildewy shared bathrooms to our enormous, impersonal lecture halls to hear our illustrious, verbally-abusive Paper Chase professors speak their golden wisdom!

Take the criticism of yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog, “Purdue U. Software Prompts Students to Study—and Graduate.” It’s an interesting story: a program called Signals provides basic, traffic signal-like color-coded feedback about how a student’s engagement in the course relates to his or her grades. If the numbers are to be trusted, the results look significant. Even taking a single course that uses the Signals program increased retention and graduation rates over the no-Signals-courses control group.

Any teacher can tell you that a student who is engaged in a course is more likely to do well than a disinterested one. No one seems to be debating that part. Instead, the criticism is aimed at the underlying concept of the Signals program. The software isn’t automatic, so the faculty need to take part in its operation, too. Critics decry it as helicopter teaching, asserting students should already know how to do well in school. This is college, after all, and they’ve been students for most of their lives, so they should get it by now.

Back to the Beginning

Unfortunately, they don’t have it right by now. The experiences of the first eighteen years of their lives are failing them on that account. Who’s to blame and how to fix it is the subject of a different debate, but for now, let’s simply accept that most traditional college students do not know how to run their lives and minds in a way that is conducive to the learning we expect of them.

Which brings me back to my original question—what are teachers for? Is it really only to address the curriculum itself, or is it to train students to be their best selves (while also learning the curriculum)? In what might fall under the “better safe than sorry” category, I opt for the latter. I find it irresponsible to treat students as receptacles instead of developing humans.

I have few, if any, answers concerning how to do this, but I work on it with every class I run. A couple years ago, for instance, I developed a late work policy based on course level. Students in introductory courses could turn in late work at a daily 10% penalty while those in advanced courses accumulated a daily 20% penalty (had I any graduate students, they would not be allowed late work). The idea is to hold students accountable for their work and time management while building in opportunities for them to learn responsibility. As they become more advanced students, the consequences for not acting like more advanced students increase. Education should not be an all-or-nothing game, and we should not assume students have already developed the meta-cognitive skills to figure that out for themselves. Failing a student, especially a young one, automatically for not turning in an assignment on time doesn’t actually teach them the importance of deadlines. It inadvertently teaches them that we’re unreasonable (even when we’re not) and don’t care about them (even when we do).

I’m not suggesting my policy solves that problem. I suspect my students still think it’s unreasonable when I take 30% off a Friday assignment turned in on Monday. And I can understand the argument that I’m rewarding them for their irresponsibility by allowing them to turn in late work at all. But I, like every teacher I know, design assignments for my students’ benefits. I think they’re worth doing, even if that means doing them late. My policy tells them not to give up or check out just because they missed a deadline. They know some credit is always better than no credit, so they continue doing the work. My policy also tells them that there are consequences for not managing their time wisely. A student who gets a C instead of the A they would have received a couple days earlier sees pretty quickly that whatever they had been doing instead of their work wasn’t worth it.

We can’t treat young students as adults and merely hope they’ll live up to the expectation, not when we have the option to guide them into adulthood.

It’s All About the Brain

Biologically, traditional college students are not adults. They’ve been through puberty, sure, but is reproductive ability really still our understanding of adulthood?

This week, one of the big headlines has been the new age guidelines for British psychologists: adulthood doesn’t really begin until 25. This decision might sound ridiculous, but it’s based on the brain’s development. Thanks to advancements in imaging technology, we now know the brain continues to develop through adolescence and into early adulthood. What’s more, it’s the judgement center, the prefrontal cortex, that’s the last area to finish developing. So, all our late-teens/early-twenties students who are legally adults but keep acting like impulsive kids? The part of their brains that imagine the future consequences of their immediate actions doesn’t quite work yet. So when they’re faced with the choice to do something fun with their friends (they’re also still in the social development phase of their lives) or work ahead on their term paper, the fun is almost always going to win out—especially if we leave them to their own devices with no feedback to help them learn.

I can’t possibly be the only teacher who remembers learning that the hard way. During my freshman year of college, I was stuck in the Saturday morning chem lab section. Did I prep for my lab early in the week so I could take part in the Friday night festivities? Of course not. I was the one who procrastinated until Friday night, then realized I had to miss out on the movies and parties because I had class in the morning. It’s little comfort knowing now what I wish I’d known then. Perhaps a few Signals on my computer or quick reminders from a teacher would’ve helped me figure it out a little sooner.

A Brief Post Script

This late brain development issue is neither a joke nor an excuse. Last month I lost a former student who died suddenly due to risky behavior. He was 23, bright, and promising. He was unlucky, but those of us in higher education see and hear about life-threatening risky behavior all the time. Too often, we laugh it off as a rite of passage.

There’s only so much teachers can do for their students, and their lives outside of our classrooms are not our responsibility. That doesn’t mean we can’t try to design a few simple extra-curricular lessons in our course. What does it really cost us?

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