Maymester is almost over. I will turn grades in on Monday. I had a great class. The students were very dynamic and engaged. I had only one or two students who struggled with the material. This summer, as last summer, I noticed that the students are stronger. They always seem to be that way during the summer. Several students are not actual BRCC students, but four-year students who are picking up credits during the summer. Even during my experience at universities, summer students always seemed more committed, probably because they are aware that they have to work harder in a compressed time. I am sure I've written about this before.
Summer, though, reinforces my confidence that I'm a good teacher and doing things the right way. It's harder during the school year to feel that. It's not the workload. I manage that just fine. It's the student culture at BRCC. I've also written about this before. Students just don't come to class. They walk away from good grades by absenteeism and failure to do their assignments. They don't seem to care one way or the other. At universities, it was a struggle to get students to do the reading before class. The way my classes were structured with activities and heavy discussion, classes wouldn't -work- if students weren't prepared. Most of my students quickly learned that and stepped up to the plate. Some didn't and they failed.
At BRCC I don't even expect the students to have read before class. Half of them don't buy the books, even though I tell them that they need it to pass the class. Of course the content at BRCC is vastly different. It's not as theoretical, so there's not as much to process, meaning that discussions aren't going to be as fun and challenging as they are in junior and senior level classes. Nonetheless, class time could still be devoted to application, to personal awareness, etc. But, the students just won't read. Not just a handful, but the majority. I would say a good quarter of the students don't even have the reading skills to read a college-level book. Now, I'm all for differentiated instruction. I've incorporated that philosophy into my classes for years. But truthfully it's impossible to teach a class where one-fourth of the students are illiterate and one-third of the students are absent.
To adapt to BRCC's culture of absenteeism I started making attendance mandatory in public speaking and in the fundamentals class. The fundamentals class has group projects and absenteeism prevents the groups from getting any work done. In the public speaking class, students cut class on the days they aren't giving speeches, leaving no audience. In addition, some students just don't even show up for their speeches. Unfortunately, even severe penalties do not discourage students from absences. In the interpersonal class, where I do not make attendance mandatory, absenteeism is very high. Upwards of a quarter of the students miss about a third of the class meetings. (I'm reviewing my attendance records and finding this to be the case.)
This is not even counting the students who just stop coming period and fail the class. That is a larger and more frustrating problem. BRCC students seem to walk away from a passing grade. They stop showing up one, two, seven weeks into the semester. They just stop coming to class. They don't drop. They just accept the F. I preach and preach during the first two weeks about dropping instead of getting an F, but they still don't drop. I've had students go through the first ten weeks of class, sometimes doing well, sometimes not, and then just disappear the last two or three weeks, thereby failing the class.
I understand that part of this dynamic is promoted by restrictions on financial aid. Students are required to show up in order to continue receiving their financial aid, so some will make an occasional appearance just to keep their money. They fail to see that they will have to pay that money back and having an F on your transcript isn't going to help get a job that will enable loan repayments.
All of this utterly confounds me.
My responses to these cultural problems have not been good, I think.
1. I call or email students who miss class excessively. I send multiple emails reminding them of the drop date. I invite them to contact me so we can work out their return to class if they desire.
Is this a good thing? Am I working with them and being responsive to their needs? Or am I babying them and enabling their lack of responsibility and engagement?
2. Although I still try to hold discussion and do activities, I lecture more heavily than I have at any other institution. I've gotten into the deadly and stultifiying habit of "covering" the material. Conversely, not covering the material means they won't get -any- of it, since none of them read. Moreover, fear of failure does not motivate them to read. In fact, there's a "reverse entitlement" dynamic going on here. At universities, students seem to feel entitled to grades if they show up some of the time to class and do some of the work. At BRCC, I think, students don't even feel entitled to good grades. They are content and even grateful for a C. (There are exceptions, of course.)
So by covering the material am I adapting or enabling?
3. I have simplified many of my assignments and exams. I give more multiple choice exams now, something I did only rarely at universities. My exams come straight from the testbank, something I used to be fairly disapproving of because most testbank questions do not reach the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Yet, when I wrote my own questions for BRCC students, they couldn't pass the exams.
Am I dumbing down? Or simply giving the students an opportunity to pass at the level they're capable of?
I'm used to the students rising to the challenges that I set for them. I'm used to my ability to motivate them to -desire- to step up to the plate. I get discouraged during the school year because things just don't work out this way. I internalize it and take the blame for it. I feel like I keep lowering the bar in the guise of being student centered.
My dissatisfaction affects my teaching evaluations, which have dropped since I started teaching at BRCC. This is ironic since evaluations really don't matter at universities, where I had outstanding ones, while at BRCC they are taken into account in determining merit raises. Of course, I could easily teach to my evals, but I refuse to do that. I've had people tell me that I unnecessarily make my work too hard on me and too hard on the students. Sometimes I think they are correct. At the end of the spring semester, I begin to believe they are correct.
I sincerely wish there was a pedagogy for community colleges listserv to discuss these issues. Maybe there is... If not, maybe I'll start one.
So when summer classes are consistently successful, I feel very rewarded and affirmed that I'm doing the right things.
