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“Ladies and
Gentlemen, start your engines.” The roar is deafening. Tires
screech. Race peel out and start tearing around the track..
We’re watching the end-of-term Academic Roadrace 500! If you read the student
journals, ease drop on their conversations, look at their faces, peer into
their eyes, and notice their walk you’d know what I mean. Our
campuses are turning into very uneducational pressurized tanks.
Professors, who themselves have demonstrated questionable time management
skills, have put on their jump suits, donned their crash helmets, jumped into
their cars, reved their engines, and are speeding on the raceway in a mad dash
to “cover the material.” Their leisurely pace throughout the
term has turned into a crash course at the end of the term. They’re
racing down the stretch I the course to cover, assign, test, and cram.
Oblivious to what each other is doing, for the harried and hurried
students it’s like working for five bosses who don’t care about
each other’s schedules and demands. And, the onus is placed square
on the shoulders of the hurried and harried students. I have the students write
on the white board as they enter class each day one word or so to describe how
they feel. I do this so I can get a quick pulse of the class.
Lately, “stressed,” “sleepless in Valdosta,” “zombied,”
“stretched out,” “brain dead,” “joyless,”
“driven,” “numb,” “tired,”
“strained,” “at a breaking point,” “tight,”
“harassed,” “exhausted,” “fearful,”
“nervous,” “edgy” have been appearing as the
overwhelming majority of descriptions. Their daily journal entries reveal
that these sleep deprived, pressured, harried, and hurried students are losing
their playfulness, their physical and mental alertness and agility; their
smiles and gleamy eyes are replaced by straight lips and stares; their dance
steps have transformed into plods. Nerves are frayed; muscles are aching,
tempers are short; brains are numb. This is educationally sound?
Can students really perform at their peak in this condition? Not if
you read the studies on creativity, imagination, and pressure by Teresa Amabile
of Harvard. I think it's critical that we think about what most of us are
really doing. When we race at breakneck speeds as if we’re on a
super highway just to cover the material in these last few days, doesn’t
everything turn to a blur? Don’t we really superficially cover the
material just to cover it? Doesn’t deep learning, or any true
learning for that matter, flounder on these shallows? Sometimes, I wonder
if many of us are really worried more about covering our backsides than the
material. The proclamation that was hurled at me when I quietly raised
this question with a colleague over coffee was a simple involuntary reflex,
“That’s the way we’ve always done it in every class. I
made it through all that (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted) in
college. Why can’t they?” I missed the moment. I
should have asked him why he used a heavy expletive to describe what was hurled
at him during his own end-of-the-term experiences as a student and whether it
applied as an apt of description of what he was now hurling at the students in
his classes. Anyway, I think we ought
to slow down and reflect on what we’re doing to both the student and the
image of education. Why? Because, the more an idea, an attitude, a
belief, an action is inherited, unexamined, routinized, personalized, and
espoused as tradition, the more entrenched it becomes and the more resistant
people are to finding reasons to change and to changing the situation. Make
it a good day. Louis
Louis
Schmier
www.therandomthoughts.com Department
of
History
www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html (229-333-5947)
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