CandidProf: Students—one best vs. the rest
by Miki SaxonBy CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.
Today’s generation of college students grew up with things handed to them. Granted, that is not true for all of them, but it seems to be true for the bulk of my students.
Parents don’t want things to be as tough on their kids as growing up was for themselves. Schools don’t want parents complaining. So, the kids get everything just handed to them.
If they don’t work hard, then that’s OK. They’ll still pass classes.
Do bad grades make them feel bad? Well, then the solution is to simply do away with bad grades. A local school district several years ago did away with the grade of D because it had negative connotations. So, now the lowest grade that a student can get is a C. Other school districts quickly followed suit, since they looked bad for having lower grade point averages.
The Dallas School District even went so far as to revamp its grading policies to make it practically impossible for students to fail or to get low grades.
So, it is no wonder that students come to college without any work ethic.
Last week, we had a speaker come to campus who works as an engineer designing the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the spacecraft that is going to replace the Space Shuttle. She was amazing. She was energetic, enthusiastic, and was very excited to be working with real spacecraft.
She gave a presentation where she emphasized how important learning is to succeeding. She pointed out that all those classes that you think that you will never use have a tendency to teach you things that eventually turn out to be useful. She is quite young, only a few years older than most of my students.
She has two bachelors degrees, and she is working on two masters degrees. She is working full time and going to school nearly full time. She is excited about what she does. She absolutely loves the space program and finds working with NASA to be a dream job. It is FUN for her. As she sees it, she is getting paid to have fun. So, she doesn’t mind working extra hours, taking on extra tasks, and working weekends, evenings, holidays, etc., if needed.
I was hoping that her enthusiasm would rub off. So, this week, I asked my students what they thought of her talk.
One student said that she sounds really boring. Huh? Boring? She gets to work with spacecraft. She gets paid to do things that she finds exciting and fun. She gets to watch Space Shuttles launch. She gets to use the simulators that the astronauts use. She travels all over the country for her job. She’s boring?
Another student said that she didn’t seem to understand that some classes are hard. Huh? She has degrees in aeronautical engineering and astronautics. She is working on degrees in spacecraft systems and human physiology (she is interested in how the human body works in space). Hey, those are not easy subjects. She has taken classes far more difficult than anything that my students have ever taken.
Another person said that she can’t understand how anyone could stay in school for so long, commenting that the speaker would probably have six degrees by the time that she is thirty. So? What’s wrong with that?
You get ahead by hard work. Many of my students come from fairly affluent upper middle class families, and they have had life just handed to them.
The speaker came from a family where her parents had to work hard and she didn’t have things just handed to her. She learned to work for things. That is why she is where she is. Not everyone is going to get a job working with spacecraft. She is, indeed, quite young. But she has a very important job, with lots of responsibility, because of her hard work.
Someone like my students would not get her job.
I told my students that they don’t really have to work as hard as the speaker. After all, we need people to be assistant managers at fast food restaurants. They will rise to the appropriate level.
If they work hard, they will become leaders. If they refuse to work hard, they will be followers all of their lives. I don’t think that they were very happy with me or what I told them, but that’s OK.
If only one of them listens and decides to work hard to get ahead, then I’ve done my job.
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Image credit: NASA
November 13th, 2008 at 9:24 am
I truly feel your pain. I used to teach and saw that lack of ethics in many of my students. Also, I was amazed how many times their parents came to me and told me that my class was too hard.
I taught at-risk students and I wanted to inspired them about hard work and the satisfaction to get to a point where you feel proud of yourself.
Anyway, parents and school districts literary are sending those kids to the hole.
To be honest and hard to believe, I never ever cheated in a test since I was in elementary school. I flunked many tests while I was in middle, high school, and even in college. But, I learned that if I wanted to pass, I had to study hard and not just play around. Why I got, was learning and not just a fancy grade. My parents, supported me in that way. I wanted to teach my students that lesson and some of them took it, other didn’t.
Good luck,
November 13th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Thanks for the comment. It is very discouraging when students don’t want to learn.
November 13th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Learning from failure and mistakes is the best lesson in life a person can have. I finished my secondary schooling over half a lifetime ago with really mediocre marks. For years I used to let that get me down, but once I realised that I was humble enough to learn from any mistakes and failures that I make on my life’s journey, I became a self-educated man. It’s been hard work but I wouldn’t swap it for being handed everything up to me on a platter. Insulating students from a D mark only sets them up for a life of mediocrity and meaninglessness.
I work at a university, as an audio-visual technician, and I still find it incredible that most students are surprised that I’m an avid reader of books well removed from the field that I work in. I also wonder how some of these students made their way to university – I’ve come across a number who aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. To be fair though, I’ve come across some really sharp students.
My oldest son started his first year of school this year and the only homework he has is a reader (book). When he first started he found reading the book he brought home incredibly hard work after his initial enthusiasm. I could have let him take the easy way out and complain to his teacher. Instead he and I persevered with the reader each morning before school and after reaching a plateau, the books’ vocabulary level increased and he made a breakthrough. Now he will work his way through the books he brings home and only requires a gentle nudge from me. I can’t claim all of the credit with my son’s efforts because he has worked at improving his reading.
I’ll finish up with a quote from Thomas Edison, that pretty much sums up the key to success – “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This is something that your speaker was a pretty good example of.
Cheers
November 14th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Ben,
You are right. You learn from mistakes and hard work. Our speaker knows that. Many of my students don’t. To be fair, I had a number of students who took what she said to heart and seem to have been fired up to work hard. But, for some, the message was lost.