My eyes are getting bloodshot. My muscles are aching. I feel my
energy
draining. For the past few days, I have been reading, pondering, reflecting
upon almost
600 evaluations written by the students of themselves and each other, pouring
over notes
I've taken during the semester about students, going back to read project
evaluations,
pulling up a host of journal entries out from the pool of over 10,000 entries.
Grrrrrrrr!
All this is for the most uneducational and education-destroying aspect of
getting an
education: final grades. It is struggling times like this I wonder at my
"idiocy" of not
just giving tests, grading them, adding up test scores, dividing by the number
of tests,
throw something in for participation and attendance, and finally, when all the
curving and
bending and twisting and doubling up and dropping lowest and generally skewing
is done,
inscribe the appropriate subjectively arrived at objective letter on the final
grade
sheets, and just saying with a note of self-serving satisfaction, "the grades
made me do
it!"
But, as I waded through this weighty process I've weighed on
myself, words and
phrases in these evaluations, notes, and journal entries waxed and waned like a
series of
verbal novas. Put together they made for host of wow-type realizations about
these
students that fast danced through my mind. So, for the next few days, I'm
going to
rat-a-tat a series of "quickies" about my experiences with and impressions of
these first
year students before I depart on Monday to teach in China as part of VSU's
Maymester Study
Abroad Program. Here goes the first installment.
By and large, except for the very, very few non-traditional first
year
students, the first year students are high school graduates facing the future
without much
know-how which way to face and how to face it. They are not "young adults."
They haven't
gone through some genetic mutation during the summer between their June high
school
graduation and August entrance into college. They are not those so-called
"young adults"
so many of us academics like to call them--however we may often treat and
control them as
children--when we don't want to get involved with them or take any
responsibility for what
they do or don't do. In many respects, I understand. Outside those in the
collegiate
First Year Experience programs, so many of us academics have no preparation,
much less
inclination, support or encouragement, to deal with eighteen and nineteen year
old
adolescent teenagers. Those first year students, especially emotionally, are
far more
demanding and dependent old children than self-reliant and self-directed young
adults.
They are still molting teenagers. They are, at best, what I call "adults in
training."
And, we have the heavy responsibility to be their trainers in some manner,
shape, and
form!! In the thriving, tenure seeking, resume growing, time consuming world
of research
and publication, of classroom lecture and testing, these first year students
demand a lot
of time and attention and effort; more often than not, individual time,
attention, and
effort. To spend that kind of energy, a teacher is forced to "low tech" it and
find the
time and make the effort to see, to listen, and to feel. They have to do
subtle teaching
in areas not associated with their academic discipline. A day doesn't go by
that they
wouldn't have to intervene, ameliorate, negotiate, advise, guide, console, and,
at times,
prevent. It's so much easier to weed out with "oughts," "shoulds," "they
aren'ts," "they
can'ts," and "they don'ts" than it is to nurture. The problem is, as a friend
told me, a
weed is Mother Nature's magnificent flower that is just as beautiful as a rose;
we just
don't want them in our organized and pristine and low maintenance garden.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History www.newforums.com/L_Schmier.htm
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /\ /\ /\ /\
(229-333-5947) /^\\/ \/ \ /\/\____/\ \/\
/ \ \__ \/ /
\ /\/
\ \ /\
//\/\/ /\ \_ /
/___\/\ \ \
\/ \
/\"If you want to climb
mountains \ /\
_/ \ don't practice on mole
hills" -/
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