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The Fall 2010 semester at the college where I work formally ended at 4pm today. My contribution to it ended some twenty-four hours earlier, when I submitted the last sets of grades I had to turn in. There were quite a few failures among those sets, though in almost every case those failures resulted from students simply not showing up and doing the work.

I have no doubt that I shall once again find myself inundated with grade complaints over the next few weeks. It happens at the end of every semester, though I have an inkling that matters in that regard will be a bit worse this time around; there were a lot more Fs going around. In a number of cases, those Fs mean exactly what an old office-mate commented F stands for.

You know who you are.

Grades in my classes were pretty bad this time around. In one class, only four students passed; the highest grade among them was a C+. Another had only nine still enrolled at the end of term; again, only four passed, though the high grade was a B-. A third did better, with seven passing and several of those earning Bs. The last composition class did best, with twelve passing and one earning a B+. My remedial English class saw four of nine remaining students pass, though with better results than the similarly-populated composition class. One of my two speech classes fared much like the third composition class, but the other one was quite good, indeed; fifteen of eighteen passed, with two earning an A- from me.

There are several things that this could indicate. One is that my standards have increased. I tend to reject this idea, since I worked this term to make my assignments more accessible and set things up so that the information from one assignment could be--and indeed was supposed to be, as I informed my students repeatedly--used on the next. But it is possible even so that I did not explain myself as clearly as could be done, something suggested by comments from the school's learning center (oddly received only in the last two weeks of the term) that the tutors themselves had trouble understanding my teaching methods. I shall work, whether my standards have increased or not, to clarify my expectations and the ways in which they can be met still further.

Another thing that the generally poor performance of my students could indicate is that the curricular shifts imposed from on high had a culling effect. A number of students were issued Fs through administrative action, the result of their not being deemed eligible to take (or, in two cases, failing) the exit exam my department instituted this term. After the cut-off date, at which time I had to inform students that they could not sit for the exit exam, many simply stopped attending--for which I cannot blame them. And, really, many who were deemed ineligible were nailed for simply not turning papers in. I do not know how to work to fix that last part, and I have voiced my objections (complete with reference to current research in composition studies--I do take both CCC and College English, after all) to the high-stakes exam.

Yet another potential cause, and one that seems borne out by my institution's recruiting practices and events during the semester, is that this semester saw an awful lot of off-key students. My school does serve traditionally-underprivileged populations, so that the difficulty of accommodation to the discourse community of collegiate study is expected. But when students throw chairs at their college instructors or brandish weapons at one another during class time (both of which occurred), matters have passed beyond the simple disjunction between student socialization and expected practice. Such an environment is hardly conducive to formal learning of any sort, let alone the "higher education" that is supposed to be taking place at any college. It is hardly helped by the "bring them in at whatever cost" mentality that all too often permeates the admissions offices of such schools as the one at which I teach; some of my students have been homeless and have done fine work even so, but a great many others in less-unfortunate situations use their socioeconomic circumstances as excuses to make trouble.

Only one of these is even partly under my control, and I am going to be working on it, as noted. As to the other two, I can only take the break to rest and pray that next semester works a little better than this one did.