So the good news is that I finally got off my procrastinating ass and graded for one class for which I’d been procrastinating about grading. There is much good news to report here: a) I did the grading; b) the papers were not nearly as bad as they could have been, and some of them were actually quite good!; c) I did the grading!
So now I’m having a beer and resting on my laurels. And I’m thinking about “rigor.” I started thinking about this today because of Dr. Koshary’s post here and because of Historiann’s post (and Dr. Koshary’s comment on it) here. The thing I’ve been thinking about is this: does rigor equal not making the majority happy?
But let me back up a minute. I actually agree with what Historiann said, that “I don’t think that making the majority happy is a terribly noble goal as a Professor.” I don’t think that my students’ happiness is, ultimately, the point of what I do. But. I suppose I do think that if they are happy, or at least if they aren’t actively miserable, then they typically do learn more. I know that was true for me when I was a student. And student learning is, as far as I can tell, the only goal, whether noble or not, when it comes to teaching. And I’m mercenary about achieving that goal: I’ll sort of do whatever I can to make them learn, whether it means that I have to relax certain “standards” at certain points in order to get them there. It’s sort of like how I’ll make any changes an editor or a reader’s report wants in order to get a publication. At the end of the day, I’m kind of an “any means to the end” sort of a girl.
But so the question is, if students are “happy” (whatever that means) then does it mean that I’m not a rigorous professor?
I know that I have colleagues who think that is true. Basically, they equate student misery with rigor. If students are happy, then you’re not pushing them hard enough. If students are happy, then you must be inflating their grades, or assigning easy stuff, or whatever. Basically, there’s an either/or in play: either you’re “challenging” them or you’re “pandering” to them.
But I think that sometimes it’s the case that there’s a middle ground between those two poles. I suppose I think that it is important to take student responses into account, and if everybody’s unhappy, well, then not a whole lot that’s productive can happen in the classroom. I don’t think taking that into account is pandering so much as taking a “spoonful of sugar will help the medicine go down” approach. And while it might be an effort for me to administer the spoonful of sugar, it’s a hell of a lot less of an effort than beating them into submission is.
The longer I teach, the more that I feel like I am most successful when students learn in spite of their basest instincts – when they learn by accident, only to discover they’ve learned something when they get the assignment back, or when the course is at an end. I want them to learn without it feeling like drudgery. Does this mean that I don’t push them?
I don’t think that it does. It’s just I don’t want them to feel pushed, to feel backed into a corner. Because as often as that works – and it does work for a certain sort of student – it also backfires. And the backfires are a real bitch to recover from. And yes, I’m self-centered about this: I want to deal with teaching problems that are not of my own making, as opposed to ones that I create for myself.
But what I’m going to say next will probably surprise you: I’m actually pretty intolerant when it comes to what I expect a class of mine to run like. What Koshary describes about students waltzing in 20 minutes late and then proceeding to text? It doesn’t happen in my classes. I don’t tolerate it. I ask them to leave. With a smile on my face, and with a spring in my step, so the rest of the class thinks it’s funny, but I don’t hesitate. It happens, and they’re out. Do that a few times, and it stops. Late papers? I don’t care about your reasons: you lose a full letter grade a day. I don’t care if your grandmother died and you were in the hospital – deadlines are deadlines. You show up unprepared, and you’re out. You complain about the reading and I’ll tell you, again, with a smile on my face, that this is college and if you’re not prepared to do the work then you really should consider dropping out. And then I giggle. In front of the whole class. Because while I want everybody to be on board, I am the captain of this ship. The point isn’t that it’s not work, but rather that if we all do the work, then it can be fun, albeit in a nerdy way.
Rigor doesn’t have to be about pulling teeth. And god, I hate it when it is. So you know what? Maybe I do pander to my students. But if we’re all having a good time, and if they are learning, why is that such a bad thing?
I totally agree with you, and your classes sound like my classes even though I’m totally teaching math stuff. A common comment that I get on evals is that they never knew that a math class could be so much fun. AND they’re learning. My students do very well in the next courses in the sequence and they have an intuitive understanding of the material that I hope and believe facilitates memory of the material long after they leave school when they actually have to apply what they’ve learned in a less sheltered setting.
I try to channel my mom as teaching persona, who I believe is herself channeling a nun she had in high school.
One difference is that our university has a list of excused absences so we can’t not accept late papers when the student is in the hospital.
And yes, students don’t walk in 20 min late and proceed to text if you don’t let them do that. We’ve been talking on our blog about the teaching tactics my DH has been implementing from the Doug Lemov book about K-12 teaching. The majority of the book is really just about controlling the classroom involvement using little nudges, many of which I already did naturally while channeling my mom channeling the nun. Right now DH is grading his class’s first exam. Last year 2 kids got the first question correct (and in previous years, never ever more than 5 students total, and one demoralizing year nobody got it right). This year a full 50% has nailed the first problem. So not only is the classroom environment better under the new stricter DH style, but they’re learning the material better. We’ll see if that hurts his teaching evals or not, but I’m willing to bet it won’t (or maybe it will solely because kids who wouldn’t normally show up for evals will be in class that day just because they’ve developed that going to class habit this semester).
And knowing the material better gives a sense of accomplishment and true happiness that no pandering can bring. Even among marginal students, who can be tipped to reasonably ok students if given the right nudges.
Working on a post about this in my new context.
I’ve had colleagues suggest that because my courses fill up quickly that my classes must be easy, pandering affairs. This is annoying because it’s feeding their ego rather than dealing with the complex realities that some students want subjects that I can teach while they can’t or need class at a time they’re not offering. Instead, they comfort themselves with the thought that “she isn’t that rigorous!’ (Also, if they’re so much more rigorous than I am, why are their course averages so much higher than mine?)
I find that if you state your policies clearly and stick to them, you’re doing the students a favour as much as yourself. When they know what the expectations are, and that you’re serious about the policies, they have a clear guideline for what they need to do to succeed. So my students know that starting at the end of the class session when an assignment is due, I knock off 5% per weekday the assignment’s late and they’re completely out of luck the day marked assignments are returned to their classmates. They also know the policy for requesting an extension (documentable medical, family or personal emergencies such as the moose totalling car en route to school scenario that happened a few years back for one unfortunate student).
I should note that I exaggerate a bit when I say that being in the hospital wouldn’t produce any leniency…. But I do expect that they email me what they have so far as quickly as possible in an extreme circumstance. Basically, you should have *something* done, even if a catastrophe happens at the last minute – I give my assignments for papers weeks in advance. It’s interesting, since I started with this policy, there just aren’t catastrophes. Nobody is in the hospital, and nobody has a dead grandma. Because they know up front that any leniency on my part depends on good faith on their part. (It also helps that I tell them the story of me lying in undergrad about having mono to get an extension and to get a bunch of excused absences in – gasp – a required English course! In other words, they know that I’m bad in my heart, so I can detect their own bad impulses.)
I’m working through all this stuff, I know. Really, it’s too early in the semester for me to draw the huge, grand-tragedy conclusions I’ve been whinging all over the internet today. (Today was kind of a bad day, I admit.) I definitely am not – don’t *want* to be – one of those profs who equates rigor with a critical mass of misery. At least some of my students, mostly but not all from the high-achieving end of my class spectrum, are engaged and active, and really seem to be learning. A lot more of them are at least haphazardly learning: they’re not taking to pseudology like ducklings to water, but they manage to get their minds around some of the new concepts, and on a good day can even apply that knowledge to problems.
I keep trying to reconcile my desires for what they might learn with what it is reasonable to expect of them. Maybe I just haven’t yet fully absorbed the advice you and others have given me, Dr. Crazy: that a few of the students are bound to self-destruct and fail the course, another relatively small bunch will ace everything, and the huge mass in the middle will be a mixed and inchoate bag that has to be graded somewhat situationally in order to make sense of their learning processes.
I was blindsided by the dumbfuck who came in twenty minutes late and started to text. As is always the case with me, I didn’t just let it go. This particular egghead has resisted the ‘no cellphone’ policy since the start of the semester, and even sending students out of class doesn’t seem to have made an impression on hir. I tried an experiment: I confiscated the phone and made the student come to my office hours the next day to retrieve it and hear a riot act about why this behavior was going to bite hir in the ass, come exam time. I’m curious to see if an entire day without the electronic lifeline made an impression on Stu, or the other students who witnessed the phone vanishing into my bag.
So right on!!! I am so like you. I don’t tolerate certain behaviors in my classroom either. I believe it’s more about setting expectations and boundaries. As I explained to the faculty in my program, it’s not about being mean or an orgr. You set the tone on day one. But, make sure that you are reasonable and be ready to defend the boundary. I truly believe that students want the structure, they just don’t know that they want it.
The challenge is taking the student from where they are and guiding them to where you want them to be. For Dr. Koshary, I completely understand your situation. I have a new faculty person whom I am working with on the same issue. It take time, patience and a willingness to keep trying different things. I do think that you made an impression.
Dr. Crazy, thanks for this response. I think we’re on the same page. I don’t think it’s noble to have as one’s main goal student happiness, but I also don’t think that spreading misery is the point, either. Effective learning is the goal–and the strict behavior expectations you set are the conditions in which that can happen. Students may not *like* it that you expect them to come to class on time and to put their fucking phones away, but then, they’ve never been to college before and they may not understand the conditions for effective learning. Students may not *like* it that I make them write a short essay every week on the assigned readings, but at the end of the term they thank me for 1) making them do the reading every week, and 2) making them create handy study guides in the form of said essays for their final exam prep. The dedicated students who want to learn are actually pissed off by professors who don’t enforce classroom policies and who don’t take their leadership seriously.
My classes always fill–some students drop out because they don’t like the weekly short essays, but then, I find that I get the students I deserve when I enforce my own policies and grade according my own standards. The *majority* of students at Baa Ram U. probably wouldn’t love my classes, but there are enough who are interested in what I’m doing to keep me plenty busy. (And I’m fortunate to be in a department that lets me teach pretty much whateverthehell I want howeverthehell I want to.)
I found this interesting “I’ll sort of do whatever I can to make them learn…” I just got my class evaluated by my department head and my tactics were not ok. Despite the fact that I know these tactics will hit the point home–this is what they’ll remember over the “suggestions” the department head made, that I’ve tired in the past. And my hands are tied when it comes to classroom management. I can’t kick them out for beign late, I can just “remind them to be on time.” I can’t lower their grade for missing too many classes and I have to accept late assignments. The school itself is lowering the bar and the students know it. When I was at schools where I could enforce such rules, it went well. Any ideas for how to appraoch rigor, or at least how to keep teaching tactics that work when your department head doesn’t like them? Or how to have rules when the college won’t let you?
rented life: Well, that completely stinks. I would say that one thing you might try is graded in-class exercises that you do at the beginning of each class, so that the latecomers miss it and have to accept a grade penalty because they didn’t turn in the work. I’m thinking something like: quizzes or a short (2-paragraph) essay that test them on the assigned reading. The kind of thing that you have to be in class to do and turn in, and the kind of thing for which you can’t offer extended deadlines or makeups.
Why don’t the students who show up to class and behave themselves count at your school? Does your institution recognize how discouraging this is for the good students?
I was an English major lo those many years ago. Thinking back I couldn’t remember the courses feeling rigorous, so wondered if I would survive one of your courses. Until I read what students were doing- we didn’t call that rigor back in the day. That was meeting baseline expectations. No one came in late, or whispered to a classmate( you know, before texting existed). In 4 years I turned in 1 paper late (and notified the prof that day of the reason) and missed one final (due to an infection/antibiotics that incapacitated me) and was given an opportunity to take it later in the week. What is being allowed in unconscionable in my opinion.
Sorry to have been checked out for so long – super-busy today with all the things. But quickly, to rented life….
Does having to accept late assignments even include assignments that are included in class participation? So, not like a test or a paper or something, but a tiny, inconsequential thing? Because here’s a technique that I know some people use, which deals with tardiness/missing class/etc. As part of participation, students need to show up to class on time with their “ticket to class.” The ticket to class is usually an index card with three things about the reading, or a short reaction to the reading, etc. If you fail to submit your ticket to class when you enter the door, then you don’t get credit for that part of your participation grade for that day. Could you slide something like that by your chair?
Another thing that I do that does wonders is that I have students do presentations throughout the semester at the start of class, and I make it clear up front that there will be questions on the final exam about the presentations. This does a lot for attendance and to eliminate tardiness, because they know that I won’t be able to recreate the presentation for them, and none of their classmates will tell them either.
Would either of those ideas help? Maybe with some adaptation?
I’ve got mixed feelings on all of this, in part b/c I’m trying to reconcile my intellectual ideas about rigor with how things are turning out in the classroom. I’m turning out to be nicer in class than I’d anticipated. Here’s what I mean: I kinda don’t care if students are late. That’s their problem, and on the campus where I’m teaching, there are some transportation logistics that are beyond the students’ control (at least those who have a class that ends 20 minutes before mine) that can make getting to class on time impossible on occasion. Students who are more than 15 minutes late will be marked absent. I also have a more lenient attendance policy: in my lecture course, students get 4 absences, after which their part. grade will drop dramatically (as opposed to the third-of-a-grade plan after 1 or 2). But here’s what I don’t do: I don’t put up lecture notes or slides on the blackboard site. I don’t repeat myself. I don’t provide lecture outlines. If they miss material, it’s their responsibility to get notes from a classmate.
I do ban laptops, however.
And, when it comes to rigor, my syllabus is reading-heavy, and I don’t apologize for it.
So is it not rigorous that I just ignore student tardiness, even though I expect a lot from them when they’re in my class?
Frog Princess – I think my feeling is that rigor is contextual – yes, there is a platonic ideal of rigor, in which students do all the copious amounts of reading and show up for class – every class- on time unless they are on their death beds. And then there is the reality – in which you push students to do more than they do elsewhere, in which you have clear expectations that are non-negotiable but yet you have leeway in other areas, in which you recognize that sometimes not all the students will do all the reading, or some students might read more deeply than others. I don’t think that the reality is actually not being rigorous – I think that it’s just teaching the students that you have. At the end of the day, there is theory, and then there is practice. And if your theories aren’t what work, why not institute practices that do? It’s not, as far as I can tell, a zero sum game. It sounds to me like you’re finding your “voice” or “persona” as a teacher. That’s a good thing, and not something to apologize for or to feel guilty about.
@Rented Life I have this problem. Hands down best thing about having tenure is not needing chair’s backup on policies. Have them anyway. You can do that as well if you’re not tenure track. On tenure track you have to watch out for 5 years but once you have tenure you can have policies again.
@Crazy I also don’t believe in spreading misery. I’ve been posting for over a month about how research is fun, gol ding it, and this also applies to student learning, I say.
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