I originally published this in my blog Herculodge:
One. Students show up to class without reading the assigned material. Teaching a class of 30 students in which fewer than 10 percent of the students did the reading, instructors say they can feel the energy get sucked out of the room, and they feel like they’re talking to themselves, an exhausting, depressing exercise that kills instructors’ spirits piece by piece. Pop quizzes help, but not enough. More often than not, hordes of students, unwilling to be tested on the reading, drop the class. Administration doesn’t like it when a class that started with 30 students is reduced to 10.
Two. Students are too connected to their smartphones, neuro-chemically bonded to them in a scary way, so that they cannot connect with anything that’s going on in the classroom.
Three. Students lack basic competence in critical thinking, reading, writing, grammar, and diction that so it is nearly impossible for them to meet the state-mandated benchmarks required to pass the composition class.
Four. Students procrastinate, not doing the reading and waiting a day before the essay is due, and then they assign blame and sometimes outright hostility to their instructors because the students are suffering the anxiety of failing, an anxiety that they induced.
Five. Students arrive to class sleep deprived and too often on an empty stomach so that they are more primed for sleeping than learning. Too often their snores cause uproarious laughter so that this classroom distraction launches a torpedo in the day’s lecture.
Six. Students have the erroneous notion that education is a consumer experience, that they just sit in their chairs and absorb the instructors’ intelligence when in fact they must embrace the idea that writing is a process that requires pre-writing, brainstorming, clustering, rewriting—all the methods used by successful people in advertising, marketing, Hollywood entertainment, and others who make their living with writing.
Seven. Students misspell author’s names and essay and story titles in their essay. Sometimes they’ll even use the wrong gender pronoun, referring to male characters as a “she,” and vice versa. More evidence of slapdash essays includes misspelling the instructor’s name, stapling the pages in the wrong order, stapling some of the pages upside down, and leaving food particles, grease, and fat marks on the pages.
Comments