20100612.1059

During my composition class last night, one of the semesterly occurrences happened.

A student, one who is quite active in class discussion and actually quite enjoyable for the most part, railed against my requiring papers (as opposed to paragraph answers), remarking among others that the student's desired profession (counseling) will not require writing and that my policies endanger student GPAs. Also noted was the difficulty of my assignments relative to those of other instructors; said the student, "You should be more like them [the other instructors]."

This seems to happen every term I teach, though the level of course varies. Sometimes, it comes up in remedial--I've been told by a student that I ought to treat those in my classroom like idiots.* Sometimes, it pops up in literature classes--I have student evaluations claiming that I demand "too much from a beginning class." Once or twice, it popped up in a class required for many students' graduation, one populated with senior undergraduates who really ought to have known better.

Each time, I laugh afterwards.

I have discussed some of my reasons for my policies. At root, I push my students because 1) they need to be pushed, and 2) they are capable of doing what I ask them to do. Were I to be "easy," there would be no drive for students to improve. People do not get better at doing things if they are allowed to do only that which they can already do easily.

It is true that some students disengage when presented with my teaching persona. I make a point of not worrying much about whether or not a given student passes or not for several reasons. One is purely selfish; I have enough of my own work to do without worrying about students doing theirs--they will or they will not, and those who do will do well or not. Another is the simple fact that my students are adults; I can recommend choices, but I cannot compel them--and I do not wish to try.

Quite frankly, if one of my students decides to not do the work (and a number of them admit to me in writing that they do slapdash work), I cannot force that work to be done. So I apply the stated consequence; it is not as though I do not make my policies transparent, so that if my standards are arbitrary (and they are, admittedly, though they are not capricious) they are at least explicit. And it is not as though I do not give my students the opportunity to revise their work after it has been initially graded, so that they have the opportunity to remedy what I perceive as deficient in their presentations of argument.

I openly--even proudly--admit that I demand much of my students. And it seems to work for most of them, which is all that any system of teaching can be asked to do. There are, admittedly, other ways to go about doing this. Teaching, though, is not a simple skill-set to be learned by rote and reproduced without thought. It is instead a development of inter-human relationships, and as such becomes idiosyncratic to each instructor. I cannot teach other than I do because I cannot be other than I am.

Why should I be expected to be?

*Sometime, I'll tell the story of being told by an employer in education that I needed to treat my students as though they were all intellectually differently-abled. Though the employer was not so polite in the language used.

Addendum (posted July 18, 2010)
The student in question, the one who railed against my policies, has been repeatedly absent after submitting the first of the required papers for the course. That student, as a result, has disappeared from my roster; the school at which I teach has a policy that those students who miss three consecutive classes are considered to have unofficially withdrawn. And since my class meets only once each week...