By CandidProf. This is the second part of a discussion about what today’s teachers face and the choices that they make. Read all of CandidProf here.

There are some students who come along who are indeed beyond anything that we should realistically be expected to deal with.  Yet, all too often, we are expected to deal with those students.

Every semester I get a notice from the Disabled Students Office about several students who are taking my class who are registered as disabled.  We are expected to make “reasonable” accommodations.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what constitutes “reasonable.” Some students have hearing problems and need to record the lectures to play back later.  No problem.  Others need extra time on tests.  I can do that.  Some with visual difficulties need class handouts to be printed with extra large fonts.  OK, that is not such a big deal.

These all take extra time, but I put them in the category of students that I mentioned earlier that simply need more of your time.  But, of course, we have NO training in how to handle such cases.  Again, we are trained in our disciplines, not in how to deal with disabled persons.  We have people who have studied that, but they have not studied the individual academic disciplines, so they can’t help.

The real problem comes with those students who have major disabilities.  For example, students who are blind or have major motor impairments.

We have curricula set up that involves students doing certain things to learn; part of that is lecture, homework, and tests.  But in the sciences, there are also labs.

I have had students come along that simply could NOT do the regular laboratory work.  In some cases, safety is an issue.  How to you keep a blind student safe in a chemistry lab when there are open flames, beakers of dangerous chemicals, and fragile glassware?

What about a biology student whose hands shake and then tries to use a scalpel to dissect something?  This means that you have to stick with that student through the laboratory exercise to make sure that they are safe.  But you are also supposed to be watching out for other students.  It often isn’t possible.

One solution is to meet with the disabled student to do the lab at some other time with just them.  That means that you are effectively teaching an extra class, only not being paid for it.  Some institutions have TA’s to help, some don’t.  But, do you want to put the safety of this student in the hands of a TA even less trained to deal with them than you are?

I have had blind students before.  The Office of Disabled Students is supposed to have someone to read the textbook to them and to read the test questions to them.  Only for physics questions those people don’t understand the symbols that we use and they don’t want to come to class to learn the material, so they ask me to read the text and questions. Of course, that is extra, unpaid, work.

I have had other students with cognitive difficulties.  One in particular required me to sit with her for about 3 hours after each one hour lecture explaining things.  There are three of those per week.  I worked with her for about 9 hours per week doing each lab that the other students did in less than 3 hours.  That means that I was spending about 18 hours per week, extra, with just that one student. I still had a full teaching load, plus my other duties.  And, of course, I did not get paid one dime for that extra 18 hours per week.

There have been other times when I have had to write entirely new laboratory exercises for some students who could not do what the existing labs required because of some physical limitation.  That is even more work than teaching an extra section of the class because I was unable to use the existing lab manual.  I had to spend about 6 hours per week writing new labs and then 3 hours per week doing the lab with the student.

Naturally, I did not get paid for teaching a special section of the class for this student.  I don’t want to sound like all I’m after is money, but it really is not fair to expect me to put in all that extra time without ANY compensation other than that I feel good about helping someone.  At least they could cut back on my teaching load, or actually count these special circumstances as part of my regular teaching load, but they don’t.  I do it all on top of a full load.

Some might suggest simply not having the students do the exercises, but then that defeats the whole purpose.  Those are supposed to be teaching experiences that help them learn.

Besides, is it fair to give laboratory science credit to a student who does not do a lab of any kind?

Is it fair to the disabled student to just hand them a degree if they have not earned it?

Apparently we got in trouble some years ago for giving a student a degree in a field that required passing a state licensing requirement, only for said student to be unable to pass that state licensing exam and get a job in the field because of their disability.  The department in question had made many adjustments to its curriculum and requirements in order for the student to pass classes.  The problem was that the student was unprepared for what came later.

Would it be right to adjust the curriculum so that a student got an accounting degree even though they had a cognitive problem that prevented their understanding numbers?

There has to be a better way.

This quickly gets past where I feel like I have any experience or ability to truly help someone.  However, all too often, it falls on my shoulders to do the work.  Of course, I am not the only one.  This is happening in colleges and universities all over the nation.

Obviously disabled people can do quite well. I have met a blind astronomer and a blind computer scientist.  I know of a deaf news reporter.  Look at Stephen Hawking.

But these are people who did most of the work in overcoming their disabilities themselves.  They did not have their accomplishments handed to them.  They earned them, and they did so the hard way.

I know that I am probably going to upset a lot of people with these posts.  But I see this as a problem facing us in the colleges and universities.  I am not suggesting that we not work with disabled students.  My fiancée is disabled and I really appreciate all that was done for her in her education.  That is particularly true because I recognize that most of that was done by individuals who bent over backwards for her.

Until she met me and saw how much I have to do to help disabled students, she had been thinking that it was her university that had done all of that work.  Now, she realizes that the university probably didn’t do as much as she thought.  Rather, it was her professors who did most of the accommodating.

But I don’t want to leave her out.  She has worked hard to not let her disabilities disable her.  She often never asked for what would have been reasonable requests.  She worked to perform like everyone else and she still does.  To me, she seems to be quite a leader herself.

Readers of this site, I suppose, are looking for insights into leadership.  Well, as I see it, a leader’s role is often more than just directly job related.

We are all human beings and human beings interact in all sorts of complicated ways.

We cannot totally separate our individual beliefs, feelings, and emotions from our professional selves.  We bring all of these things into the job.  They are what build the framework of how we see things, both on and off the job.  So, when extraneous things are going on, they impact how we do our job.

Sometimes a leader needs to recognize that the people they are leading are people not robots.  They can’t totally forget whatever else is going on in their lives.  So, in order for them to be the best followers, their leader needs to help them address these outside influences.

Unfortunately, that takes time and it is often beyond what the leader is trained to do.  I think part of the innate “leadership potential” that some people have is in their ability to help people focus on the job at hand.

You also have to know your own limitations.  You need to know when dealing with these outside factors is over your head.  That is when you need to refer the problem on.

Leaders have limits, too, and the best ones know their limits.

What do you consider “reasonable accommodation” in a college setting? [Miki]

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By 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.

Some students are just “needy.”  They want you to spoon feed them.  They don’t want to study and learn on their own. They would rather call you or email a question than to look it up on the textbook’s index.  They won’t go to the library to do research for a paper.  Instead, they’ll just do an internet search.  But they won’t do that to answer any of their questions.  If they hit a tough homework problem, they will come ask rather than try to puzzle it out for themselves.I don’t mind helping the ones that truly need it, but many of my students don’t even try on their own.  You can help too much.  Then the students don’t learn how to learn. But these are not the students that I really have a tough time with.  I can tell them to go work on it themselves for a while and then come back if they can’t figure it out after they try on their own.

However, some students have extracurricular life events impacting their studies.  Sometimes they tell me what is going on as a way to explain why they are not doing well.  Others try to turn to me for counsel.  Those students are tougher to deal with because my training is in physics, astronomy, and astrophysics—not in psychology.  In fact, I have never even taken a psychology class.

Students often look up to their professors, so that is why they come to me with all sorts of personal issues.  All I can do is listen sympathetically and be supportive, much as anyone else would do.  I can’t really advise them on anything.  I do tell them that perhaps they should talk to someone at the college’s counseling office, but often they are unwilling to admit that they need professional help.

Many students are dealing with difficult issues.  Most college students are young adults, and they are facing adult situations for the first time without parental support.  I also have many students returning to school after several years, and they face major life issues, too.  I have students come to my office to explain why they are not studying and doing well, only to break down in tears.

I have had students whose parents died; students going through a breakup with someone (including some students whose spouse left them midway through the semester); students losing their jobs; and even students diagnosed with cancer or other life threatening illness.

In most cases, there is nothing that I can really do.  I do listen and that is sometimes the best thing that I can do and sometimes that is all that they need.

I have spoken with faculty here and elsewhere, and we all agree that this is not something that we were prepared to deal with when we became college professors.

Our training is in our academic fields, but we are called upon to be teachers (most of us have never even had any training on how to teach), role models, mentors, counselors, friends, and even in-loco parents for our students.

A few universities offer support for faculty placed in these unfamiliar roles, but most do not, so we are left to fend for ourselves.

Join us next week for Dealing with student disabilities

Is this multi-role profile good for the students? For the professors?–Miki

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By 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.

On my last post, I wrote about a student who was taking quite a bit of a colleague’s time.  Today, I wanted to write more about that topic.

[Thus starts a multi-part discussion of what today’s teachers face and the choices that they make. Miki]

Some students simply require more instructional time than others.

Sometimes they have gaps in their background that you need to fill in.  That means seeing you outside of class, since you can’t take up class time filling in gaps for everyone’s background.

Other students have difficulty mastering some topic in the class.  These students take more time.  In some cases, these students add significantly to my work load.

Unfortunately, the college administration likes to have bigger classes.  They see it is as more cost effective to have one professor teaching in one large class what would otherwise require several faculty members to teach several sections of the class. They don’t see the extra work on the faculty.  Administrators see you teaching the same number of hours, no matter how large the class, because they only look at the time spent lecturing and preparing for lectures.

They do recognize that three times the number of students would require three times the grading, but somehow that gets lost.  And they almost totally ignore the fact that three times the number of students likely means three times the number of students requiring addition effort.

Eventually, those out-of-class meetings take on as much time and effort as teaching an extra section of the class.  Of course, we don’t get paid for that.  Plus, we are still expected to teach the other classes, serve on committees, do research, etc., so our total productivity goes down.

But promotions and tenure often are based on those non-teaching duties, so that means that faculty wind up spending less time on the students who need extra time.  For some faculty members, that is just fine.  But for me it is a problem.

I take my duties as an instructor seriously.  But, I take my other duties seriously, too.

How would you handle the “extras?”

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One of my colleagues was talking to me a few days ago about a student who has already contacted her before the start of the fall semester.

Normally, this is a good thing.  I have a number of students who have already contacted me for the upcoming semester.

But I am still teaching summer classes, so I have not had time to prepare syllabi for the fall yet.

Instead, I direct these students to look at the syllabus on my web page for the previous semester.  I am using the same textbooks, so I’ll be covering the material in pretty much the same order.  I don’t mind if students ask if the coming semester will be using the same textbook.

However, my colleague’s student is getting to be a pest.  She has emailed numerous times, asking all sorts of questions, and asking for word lists of key terms, a list of homework, etc.  Now, that is a bit overboard.

As faculty, we have a duty to be available for our students.  I go a step beyond that, and I am available for prospective students, too.  However, being available doesn’t mean being available 24 hours per day.

I have a lot of students.  It would be nice if I could give each one an individual mentoring.  But, that is not how it works.  I hate to tell them “no,” but sometimes that is what you need to do, in order to have time to do your job.

I have to focus on my current students, all of them.  Sometimes I have a student who takes far more of my time than others.  They are always coming by my office.  If I have the time, then I am happy to spend time with them, but not if it keeps me from helping other students, doing my own research, and doing all of the other things that I have to do.

That’s the hard part of the job:  deciding how to apportion my time among so many different things.

I spend far more time with students and prospective students than most faculty, but I still get things done.

Knowing your limits is important.

Do you know your limits when apportioning your time? (from Miki)

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CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts.

What I do is not just a job. I know a few college professors, and several pre-college teachers who see what they do as just a job.  They are not very good at what they do, though.  Sometimes, you have to do more than just stand in front of a class and talk.

Good instruction means taking time to prepare what you are going to say. Yes, I’ve taught for enough years that I can just walk into a classroom, with no notes and no preparation, and start lecturing.  And, my students would learn something.  But they would not learn as much as if I had actually prepared.  Now, I don’t often follow my notes.  I have gone over what I’ve got to say before I say it, and I’ve taught this material for so long that I am quite familiar with it.  Still, I prepare.

That preparation also means that I have to keep current in the field.  What new developments have there been?  What new discoveries supersede what the textbook says?  It is my job to know my field.  That means spending many, many hours reading journals.  It means going to conferences.  It means keeping up with my own research.

And, of course, I need to grade student papers.  I want to give reasonable feedback so that they can learn from their mistakes.  But that takes extra time.  I don’t have to do that.  I know several faculty who don’t give students any feedback.  But for my class practically every thing in the class is a learning experience.  There is a reason that I have certain students go out of their way to take my class.

I am not the easiest professor around. That is clear from the internet sites where students evaluate their professors.  However, I am thorough, fair and my students learn. So, those students that want an easy “A” take someone else’s class and those who want to learn take my class.

How tough are your kids teachers?

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I wrote a guest post for Sean over at FranchisePick in which I said, “Why does our society denigrate those who work low-paying jobs, when they’re honest, hardworking, pay taxes and even manage to raise families?”

Then in an email Sean said, “I think this is a good topic and one that’s had some controversy – especially when “McJob” was added to the dictionary despite McD’s protestations.

I have personally seen many many times training situations where teens and adults were being trained in basic manners and courtesy that they never learned from home or school.  We’ve got this snotty attitude instead of teaching the value of service.

My poor kids work… their friends pull up in brand new Audis they never had to work for.  You value what you earn.“

A couple of decades ago I read a study that showed how a lack of ownership tied to a lack of respect for private property leading to a casual attitude to its destruction. (I can’t find a URL, so if anyone out there has it please add it to the comments.)

I don’t think this has changed, in fact, I would posit that it’s gone much further—

• employers consider renters are less stable;
• single people are subject to higher turnover;
• car age reflects negatively on the owner;
• clothes labels are indicative of intelligence;
• and dozens more.

All this goes hand-in-hand with the writings of CandidProf and related posts and the angst found in thousands of article on the subject from around the world.

Am I nuts or is there a problem here?

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The last half of CandidProf’s post yesterday made me queasy, especially when he said, “In the city where I live, the local suburban school district had a case of a mathematics teacher who was noted for being far tougher than other teachers.  The parents of the students in this teacher’s class complained that their kids were working too hard.  The teacher gave far too much homework.  Too many of her students did not pass.  Eventually she was fired.”

In many cases these are the same parents who babble on about their strong ethical/religious (take your choice of which) principals and moral superiority and are oh-so-quick with their judgments of others.

They are the same ones who scream at the coach for not letting their child play; condemn the teacher when their child’s grades aren’t up to their expectations; complain that the boss is incompetent when their child is fired for poor performance.

Supposedly it’s parents’ responsibility to lead their children by providing a value structure, encouraging/supporting their growth and doing all those other leadership things about which we’re constantly reading.

I say supposedly because based on the very visible results very few are actually doing it.

The bad old times when the assumption was that the child is always wrong have been replaced with the assumption that everybody is wrong except the child—as long as the child is theirs and the family is of an acceptable social level with enough economic power to insist.

I’m not saying the old way was good, but it did produce stronger character than having every bump in the road smoothed out for you.

But, then, the children long ago stopped taking their direction from adults, preferring the advice and ‘wisdom’ of their peers.

The problem is that advice sans judgment; a false belief that whatever they screw up their parents can/will fix; or a strong ‘the rules apply to everybody but me’ attitude can have serious reprecussions.

So where exactly are we headed?

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CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday— anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts. Read the first half of this post here and all of his posts here.

Now, these are kids that don’t want to go to school in the first place.  Giving a lecture about school is boring to them.  It is not the way to reach out to them.  Instead of a Powerpoint presentation, I have some demonstrations.  I have a table full of equipment.  I show them several things, and then ask them questions about what they think will happen.  I force feedback.  They are not just going to sit passively.

Then I say that the mathematics shows that certain things will happen.  Lo and behold, what happens is what the math says will happen!  I pick some of the more showy demonstrations—things that I remember from decades ago, and things that my students still find exciting.  Then I show a couple of 30 second videos, such as the famous Tocoma Narrows bridge collapse (after showing a demonstration of a similar phenomenon).  I explain how each phenomenon relates to everyday life.

The kids wake up.  I get started only three minutes before they are supposed to leave.  The secretary asks the person in charge if I need to stop since it is time for them to go.  He decides that the bus can wait.  This is important.  Finally, someone is engaging the kids.

When I am done I caution the kids that this is all fun and it was what got me interested in the field.  But that if they want to study science and engineering they need to STUDY in high school.  They need to take the tough science and math classes even if they don’t want to.  They won’t make it in college if they are not ready to come here.

I don’t think anyone else told them that.  But it is wrong to lead them on to make them think that all they need to do is enroll in college to get a college degree.  Too many slackers in high school come to us with the same mind set.  They don’t make it.  And, I think that too many people let them think that they can get away with it.

Where I live, as well as in other states, there is a move to get more students to go to college, particularly the “at risk” students.  They try to get more of the students who had no plans on college to go to college.  BUT there is not much plan on what to do with them once they get here.  The state is moving towards “performance based funding.” But performance is not defined as teaching. Performance is not defined by how well students are prepared for the workforce.  Performance is defined by the number of students coming to college from under represented demographics.  Performance is defined by how many students complete classes and get degrees.  Performance is not defined by the quality of those degrees.

This tends to put us in a bind. They want more at risk students, most of whom are not prepared to go to college, to be accepted.  And they want those students to graduate.  So, come colleges drop standards.  They water down courses.  They put pressure on faculty to pass students no matter how poorly they perform.

Already, the beginnings of this movement have had their effects.  Degrees are weakening. And many American educated students are having difficulties competing in graduate school with foreign educated students.  At my institution, academic standards are still being held high.  But, if our funding is eventually tied to how many students finish, those standards will have to drop.  If standards drop all over the country, then what will a college degree mean?

We’ve seen this before.  The states took a look at pre-college education, and they saw that not enough students were completing high school.  Too many students failed classes.  They began tying teacher pay to the number of students who passed.  So students began passing even if they had not learned.  Any teacher that added work to students to make them learn more was disciplined.

In the city where I live, the local suburban school district had a case of a mathematics teacher who was noted for being far tougher than other teachers.  The parents of the students in this teacher’s class complained that their kids were working too hard.  The teacher gave far too much homework.  Too many of her students did not pass. Eventually she was fired.

Then word then came out that her students scored FAR higher on the state assessment tests and the SAT than other students in the district. But that did not matter.  Learning and scores on those tests are not performance measures.

Sometimes, I get very discouraged at the direction that education is heading.  But it is important to keep going.

Someone needs to hold to standards, and that is what an effective leader does.  You hold the standards even if it is unpopular.

Is this is what “no child left behind” means?

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CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday— anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts.

Knowing your audience is important for any public speaker.  That is particularly true for someone who is teaching.  You need to know where your students are coming from.

A few days ago, one of the local high schools brought several bus loads of students to campus for a college day.  They wanted us to give presentations to the students on why they should go to college and what sort of things that they could study when they got here.  These were summer school students.  The students who take summer classes at college are often the better students, the ones who are trying to get ahead.

The summer school students in high school are normally different.  A few are working ahead, but most are in summer school because they failed classes and are having to go to summer school in order to advance a grade.  These are students who don’t want to be there, and often don’t want to go to school at all.  These are what they call “at risk” students.

They are the ones that are unlikely to go to college in the first place, but the school is trying to do the right thing.  These are high school freshmen.  They still have a chance if they buckle down and study hard for the next few years, but if they continue to not take high school seriously they won’t be ready for college when they finish.  Even if they go to college, they are unlikely to finish.

These students are bussed to the college and they are led around to different departments where somebody gives some presentation about their areas.  We are given a specified time period.  They have me following someone talking about the health sciences.  The kids arrive late.  The previous presentations have all run over.  The person in charge tells us that we’ve got about 1/3 of the time that we were allotted, since they are running late and need to catch the buses.

The person before me gives a standard sort of thing, like probably everyone else had one all day.  She has a Powerpoint presentation.  She talks about what is offered, what programs of study are available, and what jobs in those fields entail.  It is pretty standard; each slide has too much information (lists and such).  I know that these can be interesting fields, but the presentation is boring even to me.  The kids are falling asleep.  She races through her presentation, but it still takes as long as mine was planned to take.  There’s no way she could have finished in the allotted time if she’d gone at normal speed.

Then it is my time. (Cont’d Thursday, July 10th)

Is this a good approach to motivating high school students?

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Post from Leadership Turn

Today is theme day around the channel, all about graduating and new beginnings in a downturn. For a full list of participants check with Darlene over at Interview Chatter.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Their reputation precedes them.

Hiring Millennials is an iffy business when your focus is a desire for long term employees.

On top of their sense of entitlement, many have no idea how to be led.

As CandidProf says, “Teaching is also an exercise in leadership, particularly in college. You do not simply download knowledge into student brains… Students need to be properly prepared in order to be led to learning.”

That goes double (at least) in the work arena. Too many Millennials see more value in peer information and advice than in listening and learning from anyone who has been there/done that. Their actions, more than their words, display an ‘I am the sun” attitude; they already know how to do it better and faster—cheaper rarely enters the equation—and see no use in learning other approaches, since theirs is better.

I’m not saying that every 18-35 year-old thinks this way, but plenty do—although the severity of “Millennial Fever” varies by individual.

The problem for you is that turnover is costly and you need to minimize it.

How? By latching on to the number one piece of hiring intelligence that is espoused by the smartest companies—attitude trumps skills.

And if you don’t agree, ask yourself whether you would rather teach someone to program in a new language or convince them to change something in their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™)

It’s really a no-brainer when you think about it and it applies not just to Millennials, but to all people at all levels—from entry-level to executive.

What do you think? Does attitude trump skills?

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