Great Expectations

OK. This one may make me sound like an old goat, but here goes:


I have talked about this some before, but it keeps coming back. Since I started teaching again at the community college, I have noticed some trends that remind me of my days at Southwestern, and have shown me that the trends I noticed were everywhere. Or at least in my little portions of everywhere.


The problem is one of expectations, and what students coming into my class expect from me as their instructor. I am usually a fairly compliant teacher. I make study guides available for all exams on my Facebook page. I also post all of my lecture notes, so students really just have to show up, take their exams, and be done with it. I think this is overly kind of me to make these available to them. But, I got complaints that they were not easy to find and that they were unsure what the test covered and you get the idea. Most of them were fine, found their study materials and that was the end of it. And, most of the students who took the exam (only one student in the class of 38 did not show up for the exam) made a B or C (there were several As by the way, just not an overabundance of them). I think this is pretty good on the average. You know, making the Bell curve work for me.


Here it is: Back in my day, I would have never had the audacity to ask for, let alone expect a study guide for a test from one of my professors. We read the book, studied our notes, and hoped we would have studied the things the professor was "looking for" on the exam. When I was in graduate school, some 13 years ago, I had a professor tell me that students are consumers and they expect a lot for their money. I know she was right. But this leads me to another issue that I noticed early on in my teaching career. Not only do students expect their professors to do a lot of the learning for them, or maybe better put, make the learning as easy as possible, they get this from their high schools. It is a shame, but our high schools are doing a fine job of teaching test-taking strategies, but they are not doing a good job of teaching our children to think creatively or otherwise. So when they would get to me, I had to do a lot of reteaching. This is especially true in math and English where we have section upon section of introductory algebra and reading strategies because students did so poorly in school or on their entrance exams that they cannot place into college-level courses. Back in the day, these students would not have gotten into college at all. Maybe that was not a bad thing.


Don't even get me started on how much like pulling teeth it is to get students to answer questions in class. They do not read their books, of course, but even questions they should know the answers to, I get blank stares. If it is not a question about a reality TV program, I might as well forget it. I asked the class how many of them read books, and I got a couple of hands raised. When I told them the week before I had read like three books, they told me I must have been really bored. I was, but that was not the point. I will stop.


And, speaking of test taking. I read today in the New York Times that many universities are fed up with the test-taking monster that has been created by companies making money off of high schoolers who want to get the best SAT or ACT scores. These universities are beginning to look more fully at entrance essays than at SAT scores and GPAs. (It was ironic that a member of the church asked me to read her daughter's entrance essay just last night. I read it today and gave my feedback, for what it was worth.) If you try hard enough, you can play the exam and win a great score. Don't get me started on how these services are unavailable to people in "ethnically challenged" areas and so their scores are lower because they do not have the privilege of going to a test prep workshop. I will stop. And, since GPAs are weighted so differently depending on what types of courses one takes and what kind of community service one does, this is not always as good an indicator of academic aptitude as it might have once been.



OK, so I am an old goat, and I know people were complaining about the state of the educational system when I was in school. But hey, I was playing Scripture scramble in Miss Guy's class, so I had no idea. Can I just tell you how much it amuses my wife to tell stories of some of the Fundy things we used to do at my Christian school. She just smiles and says "They don't do that at a real school." Oh well, at least I learned to read. Now the math . . . not so much. But I never see them using math in the Bible, so I must be okay.

PS: Does anybody remember building Israelite houses out of sugar cubes in 7th grade Bible class?