It is the last week of classes. I have so many Comp II essays to grade. I know your prayers are with me.
I did Comp II a little differently this semester. We read the book (Station Eleven) first, and then I made them write a paper proposal. The topic had to have something to do with the book, but it could be very tangential -- like, I had a couple students who are business majors writing about what the Black Death, in the 14th century, did to post-plague economics. And someone else wrote how art helps people deal with great social upheavals, using the Great Depression and the WPA art programs as her argument.
Anyway, so they wrote a formal proposal, and then we revised it together as necessary. Then they wrote an annotated bibliography for their paper -- for that, we worked on how they could judge whether a source was credible or not. (And I made them keep trying until they had eight credible sources.) Then they wrote a draft of the paper, and got my feedback. Then they wrote the actual paper.
All this took the entire 14 week semester, and those who participated have ended up writing really good papers. Sadly, about a third of the students failed to turn in work, or only did some of the work, or vanished from classes entirely.
Many of them have been working full-time jobs -- I have a student who works as a nurse's aid in one of our local hospitals; and another who is helping to support five siblings -- and others have problems just getting to the campus, due to transportation issues. One student is working with the sole laptop shared by his father and his siblings.
This is nothing new -- ever since I started teaching, economic issues have kept students from doing their work. And we have an emergency fund now, which gives mini-grants to students who have sudden, relatively small problems (a flat tire, a broken laptop).
It's still discouraging, though. How can someone who is working 40 hours a week (or more) have time to be a good, or even decent, student? And our emergency fund can't fix that.
10 comments:
This is a lot of why DH left academia-- the number of students working full time while going to school full time who slept through his classes or didn't show up and failed his 101 class multiple times. It would have been so much more cost effective for them to take out a loan if it meant they passed their classes. :(
Right? Or for Pell grants to be large enough to actually give them time to study. It's pretty discouraging.
I know that the problem with some of our students is that their parents refuse to fill out the FAFSA. Which is a whole other thing entirely.
I've had a few like that, yeah.
Also, there is pressure on students to enroll full time or with heavy course loads, when that is totally a bad option for them. Most people who work full time can manage one course, maybe two. More than that is a recipe for disaster, especially if they have family responsibilities.
That's the policy at our university too -- "Fifteen to finish in Four!" We're supposed to encourage every student to take fifteen hours a semester. This is fine for students who don't have jobs and don't have kids, but not such a great idea for many of the rest.
I don't even think 15 hours is a reasonable load. Where I went to school we had units instead of credit hours visible to us students, and 4 units/classes per semester was full time and enough to graduate. I did 4 or 4.5 most semesters (half credit dance or choir usually), and 4 was a lot for me to handle. I'm probably someone who needs fewer things to handle simultaneously than most people in order to cope (my ideal would be 3 classes at a time, and when I teach 3 in a semester it is FAR easier than 4), but I have a hard time imagining juggling 5 classes. I wish our students could take fewer and still get through their degree on time. Especially if they really are putting 6 hours of outside class time into a 3 credit course (which, okay, most don't do), that would be more than a full-time job just with 5 classes.
"I don't even think 15 hours is a reasonable load."
I agree 110%. The kid went through his undergrad taking 12 hours a semester, and that was pretty much what he could handle. It helped that he had taken a bunch of AP classes, and so he started school with essentially a full semester's credit; but even if he hadn't, 12 was more than enough.
I think 9 to 12 hours is what we should aim for, and if it takes students five or six years to get their degree, then it does. At least they'd have time to actually learn what we're trying to teach. Also, we could normalize every student taking summer classes. The summer job that some of them get doesn't pay enough to make a difference, frankly.
You people are worried about students getting an actual education, while the "must graduate in four years" people are worried about a metric. There ARE some reasons that's a metric to think about (going a fifth year can be expensive, for example), but a whole lof of reasons that it's the wrong thing to really focus on!
The right thing to focus on is students getting an actual education, which may mean changing their major once or twice, taking 12 hours a semester, repeating a class... because that's how actual learning works.
Bardiac: Exactly. I took six years to finish my undergraduate degree, in no small part because I switched majors several times. (I also loved being in college.) To expect an 18 year old to know what they want to do for the rest of their lives is bizarre. I'd be a forestry major if I'd been stuck with my first major.
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