What we expect of our students

Azpazia's suggestion that we "stop whining and do something about our students" has not gotten me to stop whining or do something, or even to post thoughts on her blog (sorry). But it has gotten me thinking about what I want from my students and whether I would have measured up to my own standards in my undergraduate years.

What do I want from my students? Actually, I don't necessarily need my students to have read everything I've assigned or to have understood it. What I want most of all from my students is two things: questions and context. If I ask a generic warm-up question about an article I've assigned - "what did you think of the article?" - I don't want "it was too long" or "it was ok" in response. I don't even want a concise summary of the article. What I want is for a student to tell me that there was something in the article that he strongly disagreed with, or that opened her eyes to something she hadn't thought of before, or that raised a question that has been spinning around his head ever since he read it. I want the students to use the article as a launching pad for their thoughts, not as the ultimate destination for their journey.

I also want students to have enough background in current events, political science, history, philosophy, etc. to make sense of what I'm giving them to read. If it's about the budget deficit, I want them to be up on the debates going on about making the Bush tax cuts permanent and so on. If it's on the founding of the Federal Reserve, I want them to remember something from high school history class about the populist era.

I guess I want one more thing from my students, and that is to take their work seriously. Just as you wouldn't go out in public without taking a shower or brushing your teeth (sadly, many of our students don't meet that standard), you shouldn't give your professor a paper riddled with typos and sorry analysis. That means you're going to seek out feedback and do multiple drafts.

So by way of answer to Azpazia's question, I don't think our students' main problem is lack of good study habits, but the lack of the proper attitude toward their work. I want them to be knowledgeable enough (which means having cared enough in the past about retaining knowledge) to have some context for what they read, to care enough and be curious enough to let what they read spark original thought, and to be conscientious enough to work hard at refining those thoughts in their papers and essays.

How would I have stacked up against those expectations as an undergraduate? Not very well, I think. I showed up at classes (maybe 90% of them), but I didn't speak up much. I didn't keep up with the reading, being too preoccupied with other things (usually a fine amalgam of women, alcohol, and wallowing in my own misery). I was the master of the 24-hour term paper, usually composing the second half of my papers as I typed (on an electric typewriter) from 3am to 8am the night before they were due. But I did read the newspaper voraciously, sought out alternative sources of information, debated big issues (most often something about the iniquities of capitalism) with my friends. I cared intensely about what I was studying, but didn't show it much to my professors. Despite my sloppy habits I got great grades, which satisfied my professors and infuriated my friends.

So I guess I'm a hypocrite. But the difference between my experience and what I want from my students is the expectations of a liberal arts college in the 21st century versus the expectations at a large(r) university in the 1980s. The ethos at a liberal arts college is intense interaction with students, intense monitoring of the intermediate input into their work. Where and when I was in college, the professors saw their job, basically, as delivering information in lecture form, and then testing at the end of the semester whether we had absorbed it. They wouldn't have been too frustrated with me (I think) because they didn't see it as their job to read multiple drafts of my papers, to see me frequently at office hours, and so on. By contrast, my students drive me crazy because I put myself in the position of monitoring their work habits rather than just judging their final product.

In the end, I don't know how to make our students into the kind of people that won't drive me crazy with their sloppy study habits. There's only so much you can do with 18-21 year olds, after all. There is a small number of our students that are a joy to work with, maybe 10 or 20% of the student body. Most of the rest, it occurs to me - the ones who don't come to office hours, don't engage with the work, turn in shabby first drafts of papers and forget what they wrote about a week later - are probably wasting their money and time at a place like Gettysburg. These students would probably get just as much out of a place like Penn State as here, for a fraction of the cost. It takes two to tango, as they say. I spend most of my working hours standing on the dance floor, putting on my best moves, waiting for a partner. Is there something in my teeth?