My wife is a professor at a local University, I could go into detail about her issues but it won’t be a shock that she deals with sloth and ineptitude on a daily basis. The powers that be are intransigent and the students themselves are willful in their ignorance.
Can’t kill em’, can’t tattoo “read the syllabus clown” on their foreheads.
Do you have any good tricks?
Treat them like the adults they are and let them lie in whatever beds they choose to make.
I don’t understand the question. These are college students. The answer is that you fail them. The lazy ones are supposed to fail, it’s part of the model of advanced education.
Making college students motivated to perform is not typically in the job description of most colleges or instructors. It’s a self correcting problem.
This isn’t high school. She’s supposed to be weeding them out not saving them. Does your wife not understand this?
I wouldn’t teach anything below college. College is not compulsory; they came on their own to learn more… or to get that piece of paper… no matter it is their choice to be there. What more motivation do you have to provide?
This is altogether a different case but at one of my art school studio class, one of my teacher told an adult student, a lawyer who wanted to be an artist but absolutely defiant to his teaching and wanted to do it her own way, “You are wasting your money, your time and mine! Why don’t you quit while you are ahead and go home?” She cried and she said she’d report him… she eventually relented and went with the program.
I’ve taught high school juniors and seniors for a decade. I teach all AP courses, so college level stuff. I have learned that you can’t do anything about laziness, but a lot of things that look like laziness aren’t, and can be fixed through better teaching. I see a lot less “laziness” in my students now than I did ten years ago, and the difference is in my teaching. Some specifics:
Better directions. Students often don"t do assignments because they don"t understand what they are to do. I can"t tell you how many times I have written what I thought were straightforward instructions only to have ambiguities pointed out by students. For every one that asks about ambiguities, ten just give up.
Coherent purpose. Kids need to know why they are being asked to do something. It’s not at all obvious to them that making notes on this passage tonight will make writing an essay on it tomorrow easier. It’s not obvious to them that doing 20 math problems will help cement the process of solving them into their minds. But they are open to being taught these things–but you have to keep doing it. Also, if you can’t explain why they should do the assignment, toss it. Busy work kills ambition.
Confidence. Students think they should be able to do an assignment quickly and easily, and if they can’t, it’s because they are stupid losers that might as well give up. You have to make them feel like they can do the work, and that even if it’s hard at first, if they push through it, they will get somewhere.
Fixing these won’t help the lazy ones, but it will help the lost ones. All classes have lazy kids, but if you start to feel like they are ALL lazy bastards, it’s time to look at your teaching.
This may be true in some highly competitive programs/schools, but it’s not true at the vast majority of colleges.
You gonna tell me the administration wants you to “weed out” people who are paying $30,000 a year to be there? Or the star basketball player who’s functionally illiterate? No way. Schools have to release their pass rates to prospective students - no one wants a low pass rate on their promotional brochures. For better or for worse, today’s colleges are about “supporting” the student, not weeding them out.
My ex teaches undergrad at DePaul. Basketball students are uniformly the bane of his teaching existence. He gets lots and lots of pressure to “help them” so they stay at the school and retain their playing rights. Same with the “Bridge students” - those admitted to the college who need lots and lots of extra hand holding until they’re actually ready for college level course work. It’s incredibly hard to flunk anyone anymore. He’s done it, but he knows he’s going to be invited into the Department Head’s office for a chat, and he’d better have good documentation that the failure was well earned and that he tried to intervene to prevent it early and often.
Listen to Manda JO; she knows whereof she writes.
This is a real issue. We’re under all sorts of subtle and unsubtle pressure to nurture our students, to serve as de facto “retention officers,” to find or invent solutions for our marginal students, to “mainstream” students who have yet to assimillate college study skills-- the days of “fail 'em all” are gone. I don’t know a single student who could pay tuition and produce a pulse who has flunked out of college in decades.
There are also other ways to deal with “lazy” students. As Manda JO pointed out, sometimes students appear lazy because they really don’t understand what’s going on, and improving one’s teaching practice can help with that.
Other “lazy” students may have other issues, such as being in the wrong level; a student who needs the challenge of a higher-level class may not want to do the work expected of him because it’s boring and a waste of time. Move the child into an appropriate class and watch his attitude change overnight. The converse is also true; a student who belongs in a lower-level class may feel overwhelmed and unable to do the work, so he doesn’t.
Others turn it into a power struggle; it’s not that they don’t want to do the work or that they can’t do the work, it’s that by not doing the work, they’re engaging the teacher or parents in a battle of wills. If the teacher or parents shows that she is upset or annoyed, the student thinks he has won. Until report card time, when the student gets an F. In this case, the teacher has to manage the battle, which isn’t easy, but it can be done.
In terms of college, some of the problem is that some students treat college as a customer/provider relationship. They’re paying tuition, and they want their money’s worth. Unfortunately, they don’t get that “their money’s worth” is that they have to do the work to learn; the real value is in the opportunity to get an education, not in the piece of paper that comes at the end. So they don’t do the work because they feel entitled to a passing grade no matter what.
I taught for three semesters. In that time I saw a lot of over-confident freshmen and a lot of clueless freshmen and, if you’ll pardon me, a lot of el ed majors. My class was 100-level, so I dealt with them by keeping the class appropriately easy.
There was only one hard-core lazy student. He would come in fifteen minutes late, sit in the front row, and fall asleep. He would miss assignments because he didn’t have a pen (for a week). He would miss exams because “he was sleeping”.
I cheerfully failed him. Twice. Obviously I was the only person rooting for this kid, who really really didn’t want to be in college.
Manda JO has some excellent advice. The only tip I can think to add is that, human nature being what it is, the less time there is between the work they’re supposed to do and the consequences of not doing it, the less likely they are to slack off. So, find some way to make them accountable in the short run: If you assign homework, collect it every class. If you assign reading, give them a quiz on it, or grade them on their ability to discuss it intelligently.
If all else fails, OP, you could direct your wife to the College Misery blog, where she can at least share the misery.
Good point, Thudlow Boink.
One teacher I had in college (Anatomy and Phys.) had an interesting method to keep us awake and focused every day. Every week (it was a Tuesday/Thursday class, so every Thursday) we had to write down 10 things we’d learned in class that week, and 1 question about something we weren’t clear on. (If you had not a single question, she said, then you should be the one teaching, not her, 'cause she sure still has questions!) At first, they could be pretty basic, (“The femur is the longest bone in the body”), but as the class went on, it had to be more insightful or complex for her to give you credit (“A severe Salter-Harris fracture at the epiphyseal plate may impair or prevent longitudinal growth, because growth happens as osteoblasts deposit minerals and chondrocytes degenerate at the epiphyseal plate, and a fracture disrupts this process.”)
This way, you had to pay at least a little bit of attention. Also, she got an idea of what people were learning and make sure it was what she thought important to learn. Sometimes she’d discover that we’d all learned something in error, and she could correct that.
Each of these “weekly sheets” counted for something, grade wise, about equivalent to what other teachers weighted quizzes. We didn’t have quizzes.
I loved them. Other poorer students hated them. But we had a much better pass rate than other classes, and we learned lots more stuff than they did.
When I was at the U of Maryland College Park in 1976 my intro to Government 100 teacher, later the Governor of MD, Parris Glendening told us that this intro class was part of a weeding out process, and at the end of the about year half of us would be gone, and he was right.
Are things that different 34 years later?
This thread makes me sad. Lazy students fail. It’s just that simple. I can’t believe professors and instructors at colleges and universities are under any pressure to pass students who don’t deserve it. I thought it was bad enough that MY administrators were doing this to me in high school, but I always had hope that the system would weed out the bad ones at the college level.
I guess this means that in a few decades, a college degree and a high GPA is going to be pretty much meaningless in the job market. The only thing that will matter will be internships and volunteer work, job shadowing etc.
Colleges are going to make themselves irrelevant if they become no better than online diploma mills.
First class I had that was a true “winnower” was the first semester of the second year of nursing school, which I think falls under the “competitive programs” exemptions.
I’ve been in four schools - one state, two community college and one private university - in three different programs of study, and there was never a “winnow” class at the undergrad level at any of them.
Now, that’s not to say we didn’t have classes half the class flunked. We did, in Chemistry and Microbiology (community college), lose half the class after the Withdrawal date. But those failures were not designed to discourage students from going on, and they didn’t prevent re-enrollment for the next section of the course. In fact, anyone who dropped had a meeting with the teacher to encourage them to keep with it and come pay the school for another try. I don’t think that counts as “winnowing”.
Did they have Bridge programs when you were in school? These are special programs designed for people whom the school has admitted, but knows can’t handle the work without below-100 level classes, tutoring and other help from the school. They’re everywhere now.
And yeah…I’m not saying it’s for the better, believe me.
A few decades? We’re already seeing people who never work in the field they got their degree in, and many, many people with degrees doing work that non-degreed people used to do. The woman who checked my groceries today has a Master’s Degree in Education.
Of course college teachers are supposed to manage lazy students. The term we use for this is “inspiration”, and it is the cornerstone of education. If nobody had to inspire, we’d have no need for formal education. Everyone would just read books on what they wanted to learn and learn it. We wouldn’t need teachers at all.
Any leader’s first job is to motivate those that they are leading. A manager at work needs to motivate their staff. A president needs to motivate their constituents. And a professor needs to motivate their students.
And really, most humans are not lazy by nature. Look at kids playing or adults competing. We are a naturally intellectually curious species. We have a desire to play and explore and to test. A good teacher can harness that. Now and then you will meet a truly lazy person. But these are rare. Most lazy people are actually something else.
When I taught university, I found the approaches that worked best for me were basically business principles. A business needs a shared vision, or a strategy that everyone agrees on. A class also needs this. Students need to know what they can expect to get out of the class, and how it will contribute to their goals. Despite our intellectual curiosity, nobody is going to work hard at something that they don’t understand the point of. A teacher needs to communicate that point.
In an economics class, for example, you may address current events through an economic lens and explain how an understanding of economic leads to more informed political opinions. A math class may explain the value of abstract reasoning and quantitative thinking. A literature class may go in to how literary themes illuminate the meaning in life. Sometimes this will vary by student. I study development, and I am in a supply chain management class because I want to learn about getting supplies to humanitarian emergencies. My professor just put me on a group project on WalMart expanding into Spain. Given that this is a small class, this is probably bad teaching. A better teacher could get across the main points while making them relevant to the student, or at least be able to explain to the student how the material will eventually contribute to their goals.
And the same goes with assignments and assessments. Just like a manager needs to make it clear what a project entails, how it contributes to the company, and what the worker can get out of it, a teacher can explain what the learning objectives of an assignment are, how it relates to the greater educational goals of the class, and how these goals will benefit the student.
At the college level? You allow them to fail. It wouldn’t hurt to analyze your teaching methods as described above, but not even the best teacher in the world can reach everybody. There are some poor students who just don’t want to learn and will not accept your help, no matter how hard you reach out. Lots of people attend college for reasons other than education–to make their parents happy, to be in a sorority, to get drunk every night, to find cheap drugs, to be on the football team, to find a husband. Or, perhaps they’re at college to get an education, but they dislike your class–maybe they don’t think the material is worthwhile. Or the subject isn’t relevant to their degree, but they’re still forced to take it.
You’re doing lazy people a great disservice by not failing them when they deserve to fail. The real world does not work that way, and college is supposed to prepare young adults for the real world.
Letting a kid who is truly *functionally illiterate *get a degree, just because he’s good at basketball? What a shame. Is this common at private schools? I attended college from '03 to '07 and I can’t imagine all this coddling. It certainly didn’t happen at my (public, Big 10) university. We had tons of weed-out courses at the 100 and 200 level (mostly the science and math departments were known for this). But even in non-weed-out courses, plenty of people still flunked if they didn’t come to class or turn in the homework.
I had a real wake-up call the first time I (just barely) failed a class. It was Accounting II. I hated it. It wasn’t relevant to my degree, I was a junior, and it was just to satisfy an elective. Since the exams were multiple choice, and I got an A in Accounting I, I figured I could breeze through on bullshit. I looked at the exam weighting and figured out how to scrape a D- in the class (and take a small hit to my high GPA without having to retake the damn thing). I just flat-out quit going to class. Then lo and behold, I missed the needed score on my final by one percent, and even though that put my final grade at a 59.x%, the prof didn’t round my grade up (due, I’m sure, to the string of missed optional homework and quizzes, and my TA not recognizing my name or face). If I’d actually tried, I’m sure they would have rounded me up to a D-. There was even a rounding policy in the syllabus. But, I failed, and it was all on me. And you can bet I never did that shit again.
If you don’t fail someone who deserves it, they will *never *learn.
I guess I’m not a literacy specialist, so that was an unkind and unsupported choice of phrase. However, I did see these students’ papers (it was an English class) and to compare the writing skills to the worst of Yahoo! Answers would be entirely apt. So illegible that the instructor quickly learned to require typed or word processed papers, and so unintelligible as to be, well, unintelligible. We even showed a few of them to my mother, a sixth grade teacher, and she was aghast, saying her lowest level students were writing better.
So “functionally illiterate”? I’m not sure. “Writing skills less than that of a low achieving sixth grader,” absolutely.
This wasn’t *just *the basketball players, as I said the Bridge students were a problem too. But yes, basketball players were consistently lowest in the class. And the school just so happens to be famous for their basketball team, the way Notre Dame is famous for football.
For me, it comes down to this: some students are lazy, and some are lost. You can’t do much about the lazy ones, but you also can’t tell which ones they are. So all you can do is treat them all as lost and try to bring as many home as you can.
Students are lazy. But teachers have to deny this undeniable fact in order to be effective, because once you start attributing lack of progress to lazy students, you have started down the path to becoming an angry, frustrated, ineffective teacher because every possible weakness in your teaching can be hand-waved away as laziness and not your fault.
On the other hand, as a student, you have to deny the fact that some teachers are just bad, and assume that every one has much to teach you if you just work hard enough to get it. Again, it may not always be true, but once you start attributing difficulty to a bad teacher, you’ll never get anywhere because it’s always tempting to write something off as poorly taught.
In both cases, a sort of willful ignorance is important.
I don’t know about private universities, but in public ones there is tremendous pressure to keep marginal students enrolled.
The reason? Federal funding! Colleges and universities get money for keeping seats filled-it doesn’t matter if they learn anything.
The educational industry has caused enormous distortions in the post secondary edcation market-resulting in worthless degrees, unteachable “students”, and tremendos waste of taxpayer dollars.
I have taught at the college level for 5 years and a few at high school as well. Long ago, but I did 
The problem with ‘lazy’ is that people are much too quick to attach that label to people. Before you attach that label to a student, be sure they really are lazy. Many times what you think of as lazy is actually confusion and/or lack of confidence. Especially in Math, which is what I mostly taught.
There are also people that appear lazy but are not really…they just don’t care about your subject. An Art student forced to take College Algebra is probably not going to put forth much effort. A good student would…but Joe or Jane Doe…not so much.
So, How did I handle lazy students?
First - are they truely lazy? If they skip classes, then they probably are. Even if they aren’t, they are beyond help. I have nothing against students skipping class…even gave A’s to some students who seldom showed. All I cared was can you demonstrate competence on the tests. If you can, showing up is not important. Few students could pull this off though.
IF a student is showing up and failing…they just might need some help. I mean they are showing uo…they can’t be THAT lazy. I had a long list of people/ex students that wanted to tutor…audio visual aids etc etc. Approach these students and try to grab them and get them going on this. Give them exactly what you want them to do.
Many people are not confident, mentally healthy people and need some guidance. They appear lazy but are not. They are just so down and out/lacking any sort of confidence that a little direction does wonders.
For people that are not lazy but just don’t care about your class (Art majors in College Algebra for instance)…push em but unless they fail miserably, give em a D. A ‘D’ is not going to fool anyone when they see it on the transcript - they will know this person didn’t learn much. However, what is the point of torturing someone with College Algebra again when they don’t care? Get em through and on with their life. It’s not like they will show up in Calculus because Calculus requires a C or better in the prereqs.
The truely lazy? Ones that can’t even put forth the effort to get even somewhat close to a D grade? The ones that rebuke the effort you made to help?
Screw em. F. Don’t give them much thought. However, they are less common then you think.