The Facts of Undergraduates

If you’re driving through the city and you’re in a hurry, you’re probably going to arrive at your destination and be under the impression that every light was red. You notice the red lights because they get in your way – worse, you may have convinced yourself that you need greens all the way and anytime that this situation doesn’t occur you have to deal with your expectations being thwarted.

Some of you, reading this, are getting angry or frustrated just reading this.

Setting up false expectations is the best way to get disappointed, frustrated and angry. I always set myself up with a positive mindset before lecturing or student contact, because starting a lecture or a meeting angry or frustrated is just going to set you up so that every negative interaction makes it worse. But, throughout an entire course, there are certain things that some people are going to do, we can’t just prepare for a course full of quiet, always attentive, highly intelligent, well-prepared and engaged students. Let’s look at a short list of other behaviours and my list of positive preparation for it.

1. Students may not show up to lectures. Some students will stop coming and won’t come back – a lot of students will come back if the lecture is useful, interesting AND you have things like recordings or notes to let people catch up with missed lectures. Unless 100% attendance is required (and the question there is always “Why? Where is the educational value?”), giving people a mechanism to get back in is probably going to work better than holding a hard line. Recordings, and podcasts, let you collect your thoughts and review what you said – these help you as much as they help students.
2. Students may not prepare. Once you start requiring preparation and you give students some value for that (participation, marked quizzes, things like that) students tend to re-optimise and prepare. This is a great opportunity to add some formative or small summative exercises in that can get great discussion or participation going.
3. Students aren’t always focused on your lecture. There are many things going on for our students and they’re trying to work out where to spend their effort. This is a challenge, sure, but what a great opportunity to invest enthusiasm, talk to people and try to bring out the passion that brought at least some of your students in. Getting students talking to each other gives you a huge scaling factor and a communications network where your students can’t hide.
4. Students just don’t do assignments sometime. I’m a great believer in giving a clear indication of what is required at the start of the course. This isn’t just me being prescriptive, this is a fantastic opportunity for me to review my expectations, my thoughts, my grading schemes, review changes, integrate new content. My course profile is not just a way to let students know what will happen if they don’t do things, it lets me frame the whole course to lead students into the necessity of the assignments and integrate that knowledge from lecture to tutorial to assignment to final exam.

Accepting that some things will not match your vision of the ideal student doesn’t mean that we have to walk into every lecture under a thundercloud. Yes, there’s effort involved, but there almost always is to achieve a good outcome.

Thinking About Students: What a Student DOES Rather Than What a Student IS.

Yesterday’s post briefly discussed Alfred Korzybski and, today, I wanted to talk a bit more about some of his ideas, applied as a method for describing students.

“Why do I need a new way to describe students?” you might well ask. After all, we all know that there are good students, bad students, hard-working students, lazy students…

Or do we?

I only have read a relatively small amount of Korzybski but what struck me was his discussion of the verb ‘to be’ and the way that it could be used in a way that confused someone’s actions with their fundamental identity. For example, if I do something foolish, you could say “Nick is a fool” but what you really mean is “I am calling Nick a fool because he did something foolish.” (There is an old, and obscene, joke along these lines that I shall say no more on.) Committing one foolish act no more makes me a fool than the word “Nick” actually reflects the entirety of my identity.

Similarly, let us consider the movie “Green Lantern”. If I say “the movie is bad”, what I am really saying is “I did not enjoy the movie Green Lantern and would not watch it again, even for free on a plane.” The latter is a fact, based on a subjective opinion, but it is clearly identified as such. Anyone else sharing the longer form would clearly be saying that “I heard Green Lantern was not enjoyable to Nick and, given that I have similar tastes, I believe that I would not enjoy it either.”

How does this apply to students?

It’s easy to talk about good, bad, hard-working and lazy students but this often confuses the facts of a student’s actions with the student themselves. How do we characterise a good student? Michael hands up all of his work on time, has never cheated and achieves high marks. Does that make him a good student? These are all characteristics of a good student, certainly, but by listing these actions in full I make it clear how other students can achieve this aim. If I tell someone to be a good student – or to work harder (to be hard-working effectively) – I don’t actually tell them what to so, I ask them to match an identity or fulfil a predicate, rather than clearly showing them what I expect them to achieve. Of course, there is no guarantee that Michael is a ‘good’ student – but by listing our perceptions of his actions we explain why we might apply such a categorisation.

Referring to a student with ‘This student is…’ risks hiding a factual statement inside a statement that appears much stronger and has much wider impact, but without qualification. Now this goes beyond identity and simple statements and extends to the way that we interact with students as well.

“The student is responsible for handing up their work on time” – sounds good, but just saying it is an assertion of what you want to occur. What I mean when I think this is “We expect students to read the deadlines for submission, allow enough time to complete the assignments and submit their work on time, to the correct locations, in the correct format. If you don’t do this, then you will lose some or all of the marks for the assignment and may not be allowed to continue with the course.”

This is, by definition, a discussion of semantics and it is a little bit of me thinking aloud. As a mental exercise, I find it very useful because whenever I want to classify a student as ‘this student is…’ I force myself to think about what the student has done to make me think that way. Quite often, in review, I find terms like ‘bad, lazy, hard-working, good, indifferent, difficult’ dropping away because such simple classifications are beyond me – although not always. You’ll note that a recent post of mine dealt with the ‘rude student’, although I went on to describe why this may or may not be a fair description. Sometimes, for brevity or ease of reference, we may use this form to describe a group or a type, especially where people know what we mean. The problem arises when we make absolute statements about someone from smaller, and occasionally ephemeral, information. Extrapolating to a strong statement when we do not have enough information to do so. And some of these labels will stick – and stick hard – throughout a student’s life.

I suppose that the benefit for me lies in considering everything, good and bad, that a given student has done because it makes me regard them as a person, rather than a simple “is a…” – a being who has taken a number of actions, and may take any of the other possibilities in the future. Somebody that DOES rather than somebody that just IS. Someone with a great deal of unrealised potential and untapped energy. Someone who could do anything rather than being stuck in a box from the misapplication of a strong label somewhere back in their past.

What Do I Study? What Do I Do? Showing the Path

One of the things I’ve learned from flying a lot is that it’s never as easy to get from one point to another as you think. There are regional hubs, legal connections, affiliations and the many intricacies of which routes are allowed into which countries. There’s a reason that you can either retain the services of a travel agent for a fee or spend a lot of your own time trying to work out the best way to get from A to B. It would be nice if you could fit everything onto one simple diagram and see the best way to go but, even without the commercial concerns, it’s a very hard problem to solve if you’re worried about efficiency rather than connectivity.

We allow our students a lot of latitude in picking their path through their degrees. Although we offer programs that have a core of prerequisites, there are many opportunities for electives – courses that they can pick and choose from. But, on many occasions, students look at the total number of points they require, and the year level, and pick based on interest or short-term goals, rather than any form of long-term vision.

Going back to our airline model, it’s like trying to get to to New York from Sydney by picking the cheapest flight that goes east. Thinking in one-step-ahead terms prevents you from realising the benefits of flights into longer-range hubs, special deals and the round-the-world flight. Technically, optimising your solution so that your next step is the ‘best’ from those available is a greedy algorithm – each step will be optimal but it’s not guaranteed to give you the best overall solution, just a solution.

What would be great is if we could present students with a simple flight path, a map, a poster or an interactive tool that allows them to see where they want to go, where they’re starting from, and how they could get there based on our courses. I’ve started sketching out some ideas based on this but complexity is proving to be a problem – as expected. I have some sketches of solutions and, when I have something that might be useful, I’ll share it here.