How to Succeed in College without Really Trying

By now one might wonder from a student's perspective, what's a body to do if a body catch a body coming through the rye. How does one succeed in college at this level, not the Ivies where the rich are perpetuating their status generation to generation hallelujah, but here in the belly of the beast that the Great Society's educational ideals followed by a quarter century of attacks on the Great Society's educational ideals. (That's the part the unreconstructed Gingrich/WSJ types forget to mention when they try yet again to institute "market reforms" into education, but that's another blog.)

How does one get through the core curriculum and onto something one really wants to study? Or, how does one succeed given an utter lack preparation, no matter who's at fault?

Let me give it some thought, but meanwhile, here are two good ideas:
Don't go to college straight out of high school. Wanting to go to college is a noble thing and hoping to get a degree that earns you a good wage is a worthwhile goal. But you will waste your energies unless you really want it. So, try this for a change: go make a life without going to college and see how far you can get. Can you afford to move out of mommy's house? Can you afford to keep your car insured and running? Can you afford to keep up your habit in alcohol, cigarettes, or other drugs? Can you endure 8 hour shifts at Starbucks or Home Depot or waiting tables? If you can, more power to you. You've reached a level of zen happiness that I will never achieve.

More likely, however, you'll realize the state you're in, get motivated to get a degree and then start saving up. It may take a year, it may take two, but the payoff in the ease with which you will slide through college is worth it. And once you've made the realization, start reading: the newspaper, a good book, whatever, just read and keep reading, stuff written at a 13th grade level at least.

The other thought is this, in case you're already in the soup. It doesn't take that much to succeed and the fact is much of what it takes is what it takes to succeed in any business. Sit up, take notes, and go and visit the prof. at office hours. Give a firm handshake, look people in the eye, and pretend to be interested even when you're not. Do those things and the profs will go the extra mile to help you out of the pickle you're in thanks to 12 years of bad schooling or other unfortunate history.

Okay, so that was a blatant commercial blog posting, trying to get people to come to the site and click on the ads, but hey, the market may be god for some things

Done...

...but for the grading papers and administering the exam. Now I'm really faced with the question of how many can I fail. In one section, 18 out of 30 registered turned in the final paper. I'm scared to think how many will come out of the woodwork after the fact and I cannot imagine how some of those will do even if I were to accept their papers. But the fact is there are plenty of students who were there today, and Monday and every day before that who want to learn and the others are just gumming up the works.

I gave a speech today: according to 2006 stats, Salem State accepted 25% of its students as "Special Admissions" meaning they did not qualify for state college by virtue of poor SATs or GPAs. Now only 10% of the class that came in 2006 were special admits, and that puts SSC not far out of the norm for other state schools. But the 25% figure of admissions is staggering. I'm not sure how the college got dispensation from the state to do that, but it has got to be an interesting story. I do know that SSC claims to have support services for these students, but clearly the support services are not there. It is an open secret that the so-called "Learning Center" is unresponsive and I have still not had a reply from my request f0r them to do something about the 17/27 LC students they dumped in one of my sections without telling me (the idea is that the LC students should either be "mainstreamed" in ones and twos or put in a block in a section with 20, not 30, so they can get more attention).
So, we're back to the old question: let them slide or fail them? If I thought they were given the best chance and didn't take it, then the answer would be much easier, but I see them getting the wrong end of the stick. Of course they don't help themselves much either at times...

End of term

One more class to go and I'm assessing what we've accomplished and what we haven't. I'd like to think we've accomplished a fair bit and, in keeping with my philosophy, that has little to do with the fact that they've now heard of Hammurabi's code.

It's always fun to ask questions like, "What does E=MC2 mean?" Most are blank, others have a vague notion that Einstein had this equation and that it's important, but have no idea why. That's where Hammurabi's code will be inside of 6 months.

But we have done a few things and some of it will stick: we've learned how to look for the argument in an article, we've learned how to look things up on a serious database, we've learned how to write a precis that is concise and to the point. Of course many of us haven't learned that and even those who have can more properly be described as being introduced to a set of skills, practiced them a bit, and then moved on.

Here's two scary things that happened in the last two weeks: I had a student reading aloud in class and it sounded for all the world like my 8 year old reading a passage a bit above her grade level, stilted and missing pronunciations, certainly missing meanings, and when I mentioned this to a colleague he said, yeah, the textbook is written at a 10th grade level and the students come in some of them at an 8th grade level so they cannot read the textbook, god forbid they should see a long sentence like this one; second, I looked at a student's homework for Intro to Political Science and saw it was about what I'd consider 9th grade material.

Now maybe I'm being unfair, but here's the way it went: the student was given a table with three categories, American, Indian, and Chinese political systems. They had to fill in the boxes with words describing the types of systems, eg. two party, parliamentary, one party. They then had a page-long assignment sheet that told them how to write their paper based on the table they'd filled out with paragraph by paragraph instructions for most of it. And in talking to the student, I realized that I'm trying to get them to look beyond the dominant public discourse, beyond the pop interpretation of events to a deeper, more interesting, more useful, and more accurate understanding of the world, and I'd not realized that they were not even aware of the dominant pop discourse. So they are learning that the Republicans were conservative and the Democrats are liberal and that's a start. In my class I would ask them why the supposedly conservative party is so eager to nationalize the banks. I would tell them, as we told our students at Michigan, that all of the shades of gray in mainstream American politics are liberal in a historical sense. So, I'm still missing the strike zone, but I'll try again next term with a wonderful thing called "learning communities."

9 Little Indians

What a day. I put together two sets of primary documents: one from Ibn Battuta and one from the Ming Dynasty's traveler Zheng He. They didn't go for them half so much as for the Sogdian letters I did on Monday, perhaps because it was nothing personal. That, the Sogdian lady of the 4th c. was pretty pissed at her husband and really let him have it.

The real problem is maintaining any momentum or continuity. They just don't show up for a 3.30 Friday section. In fact, the woman who made an appointment with me for 11.00 this morning to discuss her failing grade didn't show at all. My basketball player is really working hard, so he tells me, but didn't make it to class either. Even the young woman who has been so diligent, who told me last week that she is the only person in her family to go to college, that her parents never encouraged her to go to college, didn't show today.

I honestly don't mind, don't get angry about it and wonder whether taking attendance will actually make a difference. To see I'll make attendence a huge part of the grade next term and rely on the quality of the classroom experience to keep them coming. On the other hand, having only 10 people in a room is a much better way to educate them, 30 is 5 or 10 too many.

I spoke today with one student, parochial school graduate, who came to my office to discuss her paper. She's always been a bit angry, about what I'm not really sure, but she doesn't seem to have an interest in history to put it lightly. Today she revealed that she wants to become a nursing major. It's hard to make the case for the value of liberal arts in the face of human services training. All I can say, and perhaps I will say this in my final day, is that the kids who tortured people at Abu Gharab should have known better, and would have known better if they had been well educated. That's not so say they wouldn't have done it, and it's not to say that highly educated people don't do evil things, but I get the sense that they wandered into it, that they let a dumb American sensibility take over and all the time they should have known better. Perhaps they did.

Teach the students we have or uphold standards?

Hey Professor Albert,
>
> I know you have said in class that we should come to you whenever we may
> have in issue within your class or of any sort. I usually do not ask for
> help from any professor but I really need MAJOR help in your course. I am
> well aware that I am very far behind in the work and I was wondering if we
> could meet ?? and possibly discuss what I can do to make up for my grade.
>
> Please & Thank You,
Student

Well, here's where the rubber meets the road: This student has been in class maybe 30% of the time and when there doesn't have anything particular to offer having not done any of the assigned work. The student has a roommate who is also in the class, and (according to the roommate) the student cannot be dragged out of bed for the mid-afternoon class.

There is no doubt that this student should not receive college credit for the work done thus far. It is possible, though highly unlikely, that the student could pull out a D- at the last minute with perfect scores on remaining assignments, but pigs could also fly.

So, what is one to do? The dimwitted Peter Sacks (author of Generation X Goes to College) would get angry at the student and probably me for not maintaining standards. After all, the correct response to the plea below is: you haven't come to class, why don't you just take your F and not put us all through this.

But, we'll meet and see how it goes.

No need to pay attention, I have a learning dsability

I've never been one to get along easily or be easily understood, so sometimes I worry that what I'm saying and what students are hearing are two different things. Perhaps that's what happened with the exchange below.

| | hi professor Albert, i was wondering where i went to get the information on the topic for the precis
|
| | student signature

| From: Daniel Albert
| Subject: RE: precis
| To: student
|
| Hi Student,
| You have me worried as I mentioned this several times in class and because the materials are right on the front page for the course, the links with the Maya face. This, combined with your difficulty in grasping the goals for the literature review make me wonder how much of your attention you're able to devote to class.
|
|
| | From: Student
| | Subject: precis

I've realized that it was on another link. But I do have a learning disability, sometimes it's hard for me to grasp the material right away, and to understand it but I am trying, esp with getting all my work done.

The Class Wiki

The class wiki has been an experiment in trying to get students to experience DOING history rather than just learning history. I like the line about math class: sitting there watching the teacher have all the fun on the blackboard. The point is they should do math and they should do history.

Typically this "doing history" means working with primary documents. Primary documents are great when the students have the background to understand them and make use of them. This is easier in, say, US History than in World History before 1500. But that's only one part of doing history, interpreting primary sources. There are two other parts. One is the detective work, usually done in an archive, but done in all kinds of other ways from oral history to data mining. The other is the midrash, the argument about the argument. (My friend Dave described the difference between being a history undergrad and a grad student: "As undergrads we argued about books; as grad students we argue about footnotes." So, how to get the students to argue about history when they have done, and perhaps can do, very little reading?

Enter the Blog. The idea is that they post blog entries in favor of any given historical event/thing/person. The key is in the comments. Students than comment on their classmates blog entries. For instance, once said Buddhism was important. Another agreed but said Buddhism should be characterized as a religion.

It is very bare bones and open ended. And giving them specific grades for it is time consuming. In the future, it could be more focused and the grading could be more flexible (participation grades, etc.).

The fun techno part is that I can feed all the blogs to my igoogle homepage.

Reboot

We've rebooted since the midterm and now we're spending time doing things I thought they could do for themselves going in. I turns out I have one class with 15 out of 27 students who are brought to us by the "learning center" meaning they've been identified as not having the skills to do the class. They're supposed to be in a special section with 20 students, and of course the instructor is supposed to know their status, but now I'm learning that the Learning Center doesn't do its job, or so I'm told.

Meanwhile, I'm prepping for next term: World History Since 1500 and US Transportation History, an upper level class. I'm toying with the idea of team instruction, sort of groups on steroids. That still leaves the course content to be worked out, but it's slowly slowly coming together.

MIDterm MESS

The midterm is a fiasco. Part of the problem is that they haven't spent the time they're supposed to outside of class doing work. Many would have bombed a multiple choice midterm or even a T/F midterm.

But I'm to blame for a good part of the fiasco. I tried to make the midterm that would make them think. In retrospect, the midterm should just test that they have memorized some stuff and then use the other assessments for the thinking. I've not done midterms in ages -- I hate them, but since they're part of the course here I need to go back to basics and next semester make the midterm an opportunity to force them to know some stuff, some basic stuff. That will be easier to grade if nothing else. And more to the point it will be predictable for them and they'll therefore be happy.

"Just tell me what to understand and I'll understand it."

That's from a student who is always in class and wants to do well. She's come for extra help and has really tried her best as far as I can see. Yet she's still looking for me to tell her what to think, and that's the problem. Some people call it the 13th grade problem, that they don't understand the difference between high school and college. But near as I can figure, many of their classes are 13th grade, asking them to memorize terms so that they can then recite them. If History 101 were a prelude to something, to further study in history and they had some agreed upon body of knowledge that they had to have, some set of facts and figures, they needed, or some theoretical concepts that they needed then we might usefully spend our time with those -- like learning the elements in preparation for chemistry. But it's only a prelude to further college study and in that the goal was supposed to be critical thinking. We can't MAKE them understand. We can make them know, we can store information in their heads, but where does the understanding come from?

Am I aiming over their heads? Perhaps 50 multiple choice questions would be easiest on everyone.

My students all want multiple choice for the midterm on Friday. "Then you got a 1 in 4 chance one said. Another told me he had just taken a 50-question multiple choice test for his ethics class. Ethics. Isn't that unethical?

So, they'll do some ids, they'll write some essays for me. They'll hate it and I'll hate grading it and none of us will be any the wiser for it. Maybe next term will be a multiple choice test. I'm thinking I might abandon the text book and only use Wikipedia for our class. I'm thinking they might read that or at least be happy that they haven't had to buy a textbook. Of course I've got several who haven't bought the textbook in any case.

"All our courses are the same," a student offered, "We read things and discuss or listen to stuff." Hmmm.... that's what I've been trying to avoid, but what else is there? Education is reading, writing, listening, talking. Some of this is "doing", that is to say some of this is precisely what academics do and so to argue a historical point or to learn new information by reading or hearing it is experiential. But these are not scholars in training. They are would-be graduates of the state's safety net, the system for improving the workforce and ensuring a citizenry less apt to slope off toward tyranny of the mob or tyrant than they would otherwise be.

Yet it's not the scholarship as much as the thinking that I'd like to get them toward, the careful consideration with an open mind of a splattering of data points filtered, ideally through a set of understandings that rationalize, make more efficient, the thinking process. They should know enough that they are not reinventing the wheel when considering every social, economic, practical, technical, or cultural problem they confront. We're not really set up to do that as effectively as we might, and that is because the school serves many masters, but that's what I'm in for.

Howdja get to be so wicked smart?

From a student: "i'm having a wikked hard time with the internet and i've tried to take both quizes and it won't let me"

It's not a measure of intelligence, it's a measure of sloppiness, perhaps. Or perhaps it is an effort to avoid looking too smart. God forbid you should retype or check your spelling lest you appear to care about the quality and craftsmanship of your words. If you did, you'd be an elite intellectual, like those awful elite intellectuals we all know.

Content mangement

I'm now grading 120 paragraphs from students while at the same time trying to rejigger the syllabus and get the online content management system to do what it ought to do. It's a lot of time in front of the screen, a bit of a drag. The actual teaching, responding to student work and supporting their learning is great.

I'm seeing a huge disparity in ability and I think I'll have to create groups in class that will put the haves with the have nots so that they can all begin to learn something.

At least the head of IT faculty support services feels guilty for leading me astray as I started using the system. Of course once I get it up and running it should pay for itself -- assuming I get to do the course again!

How Totalitariansim Happens

The Public Safety people have installed large flat-screen tvs all around campus following the shootings at Virginia Tech. It is intended to serve as an emergency information system, which I'm sure everyone welcomes. Of course most of the time it simply plays CNN, which helps us know how we are supposed to think and behave when putting country first.

Day One

After being oriented 6 ways from Sunday I've now taught my first class and had my first day on campus. I've taught too many first days of class to say this one was remarkable in any particular way. The students were all alive and well at 0800, which is a good sign. We'll see how it goes this afternoon.

A big issue on this campus is community, or lack thereof because, we're told more than half the students commute to school. The chair has asked that we be on campus, which I expect I will be to see and be seen. But even the students who are here, many of them, are tied to their cell phones so that physical proximity does not community make. We've come a long way from the walkman so they're really here without being here.

Meanwhile, I've just met a former 1-year faculty member who is now an adjunct, a glimpse into my future as I said to him. If some of this other work pans out it would be a fine life, assuming my wife starts a full time job, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. There's a tenure track line opening up and so it feels like this will be a year-long interview, very stressful.