So. Many. Emails. [work, teaching]

[rebeccmeister]

I might actually be treading water okay this semester?

Time will tell.

Regatta season is always hectic.

I am being very proactive with my General Biology students this fall. That means approximately a zillion emails flying through the ether, as I chase down students who aren't showing up for class and aren't saying anything about it, and respond to students who are sick and missing class and nervous about what they're missing. In the meantime, there's a really fun NYT article that just came out about a situation where a student petition/complaints got an Organic Chemistry professor fired for being "too hard." I saw a small snippet of the ensuing commentary over on the Tweet-machine, but only just read the article itself today.

Teaching philosophy matters in all of this. It sounds like the professor at hand could maybe have worked on his bedside manner, but there's also another part of me that comes back to the point that certain subjects and certain careers are more challenging and less forgiving of errors than others. Medicine is one such field. In the long run we don't do anyone any favors if we pass the buck on medical training. As I will say to students (en masse), I don't want to go to a doctor's office, see a former student walk into the room, and have to think to myself, "Good heavens, why did I let them pass???!!!"

In any case, I fully believe that it's possible to hold students to a high standard and encourage them to develop the skills needed to meet that high standard. I also do think things got really wonky on this front during the pandemic. More than anything, standards and expectations were lowered, and have subsequently been very uneven.

I am very curious, though, about how good the evidence is for the assertion that if you hold people to a higher standard, they will rise to meet that expectation. It's an idea trotted out frequently, but is it well tested? I can only think of anecdata.

Related to all this, while out in the wild* I recently bumped into a couple former students who are now in their first year of medical school. They were getting set up to study on a Saturday morning. Their chief remark was that the first year of med school was much harder than their studies as undergrads. They were both fairly good students, so it was useful to hear them say as much, because now I can also relay that point back to our current students to help them develop the appropriate mindset moving forward.



*wild = local coffeeshop

Comments

[moodyduck]

I read the ochem professor article and one thing I wondered was how the students did in general chem and how those courses were taught. It was probably height of pandemic, it just after, so things would clearly have been hard on everyone. But if they didn't get that basis because those professors cut them a lot of slack because why not, then you might start to see a problem. It's not a problem with an easy solution, but at some point the material needs to get mastered.

It may also suggest gaps in "learning how to learn" if a student really does think they are doing the work yet are failing. I looked the points in the article (or maybe the comments) about how a doctor might not need to detailed organic chemistry knowledge but the type of learning is similar to med school so they need to get it.

[twoeleven]

the type of learning is similar to med school so they need to get it.

That's often the argument used for requiring o-chem, and especially using it as a weed-out class: it's not the subject matter specifically, but the combination of intellectual rigor in learning a bunch of rules and applying them, and the ability to absorb and recall lots of random facts. People who can't do both will fail out of med school, the logic goes, so we might as well weed them out while they're still undergrads with a chance to change careers.

I think it's probably true, but I'm not sure it's proven, nor that there isn't a better way to weed-out pre-med wannabes.

[twoeleven]

Other knowledgeable, thoughtful commentary on the subject.

[scrottie]

I've had hard professors who seemed to be enjoying some kind of superiority complex from it, and hard professors who genuinely seemed to want everyone to do well. The difference just in terms of class morale is enormous.