If you are under the impression that today’s society…even on colleges…is nuturing and war/fuzzy…I can assure you that is not the case. Many students face unfriendly/cold environments.
It is NEVER wrong to try to nuture a troubled student…you Darwinian types be damned.
I see I should have read all the posts in the thread. Manda has this covered.
Depends on the school, but my experience is similar to yours. The weed-out courses generally weren’t 100-level courses necessary for general education requirements, but they were the 200-level courses required for majors and minors. Those who did not do well in those courses weren’t kicked out of college, but they were encouraged to find a major that would be more suitable for them. Some of these courses were designed to be weed-outs because of the nature of the program, but others were more informal.
We are encouraged to fail the students who do not do passing work.
At the same time, we are continually told our jobs are on the line if enrollment in our department’s courses dips. Guess what? If your department’s courses are the most rigorous, your enrollment dips, unless it’s business, law, or the hard sciences where the students see short-term monetary advantages for putting up with it.
We are continually told that our jobs are on the lines if students evaluate us poorly. Guess what? If your class is rigorous, you will receive lower evaluations than if it is easy. (You’ll also get some hits if it’s too easy, because many students genuinely want a challenge.)
So there is pressure in both directions: hold the line and challenge students into educated critical thinkers, while at the same time providing fun infotainment and keeping the [del]customers[/del] students happy. A bit of a mixed message!
My wife taught at a business school. They called her the ‘gatekeeper’ because she managed to keep so many students in class meeting requirements long enough so that the school could keep the tuition money. She did this by leading them around by the nose and constantly pushing them to do the work. Then when the time had passed and she concentrated on the motivated students, the lazy ones rapidly dropped out. There really isn’t any point in helping them. They’re adults, and helping them just kicks the can down the road. Sure, the schools benefit from the money, but most of that is publicly funded, and it’s a waste. Even if you push them through to graduation, they won’t get good jobs, and will never pay off their loans. The Feds have tried to crack down on this abuse, but the regulations are generally ignored. One local school got shut down because of the low graduation rate. They opened up under a new name a few months later, doing the same thing.
The pressure from administration can be contradictory in terms of “lazy” or unmotivated/lost students. On the one hand, administration claims to want to uphold the standards of academic rigor in a particular discipline, but on the other hand they want us to focus on retention and persistence rates.
Of these three things:
You can generally only have two at a time. Since we are an open-admission school, we necessarily have to sacrifice one of the other two at any given time.
In terms of “lazy” students - there are times when laziness is actually confusion or despair on the part of the student. I do my best to build in times when I check in with students about their understanding of an issue or assignment.
And there are genuinely unmotivated students in my classes. They are there because they are living on the student aid, or because their parents said “job or school, get one,” or for a variety of other reasons unrelated to getting an education. My job is to try to figure out the differences between those two groups. And that’s not always easy.
Personally?
Cattle prod.
I’ve been an adjunct at a local private university for three years. I teach math and science.
When I know a student has genuinely “given it their best effort,” and asks for help, I am *always *there to help them.
When I first started teaching, I used to go out of my way also to help students who were demonstrably lazy or irresponsible. But I no longer do this. They won’t like the grade they get, but oh well.
**Educators, how do you deal with lazy students? **
I don’t. I let them deal with themselves. If they don’t learn the material, they will fail the tests. Period.
I have a question for those whose replies are short and pat - “flunk 'em.”
If you have a reasonably small class size, do you take the trouble to confer with the student about their situation? Or do you lump all problem students into the “lazy” category?
BlinkingDuck is right that not everybody is in a good mental state or has confidence. Of course, some teachers truly do not give a shit. I just wonder if any of you are up front about not giving a shit.
Yes. I failed two students last semester. They were both quite aware of what was going on before I failed them. Neither bothered to show up for the final. After that, it was a pretty easy call.
I also had one student who, after the midterm, was headed for a gentleman’s C-. He was a freshman and was apparently used to earning excellent grades with minimal effort. He seemed genuinely confused that he was doing so badly. We talked through his midterm and, like magic, he got his act together and ended up doing quite well. He definitely had it in him; he just needed a little more motivation.
Let me tell about how I feel about lazy students. They keep me up at night, still, wondering how I can reach them, what I can do to connect with them and motivate them to participate in the learning process, what changes or additions or deletions I can provide them (and the rest of the class) to create a spark of interest. I spend an INORDINATE amount of time focusing on the students who can’t seem to find a way to participate in their own learning process, wondering what I could possibly do differently or better. Even if the student has well and truly earned an F, in spite of any interventions on my part, each time I enter that grade, my stomach hurts.
Sometimes, it really IS the student, and not the learning process or the professor. And even professors and teachers who seem to not give a shit may actually really care, but have learned to verbally brush it off.
Not at the school where I teach. I have never been pressured to give a certain grade to anyone, and about 20% of my students are athletes.
Others have said the professor also has a responsibility to “motivate” students. I disagree. At my regular (non-teaching) job, I don’t play clever games in an effort to motivate my technicians to do their job. They need to be self-motivated. If a good paycheck, good working conditions, and good benefits are not enough to motivate one of my employees to do a good job, I will simply replace them with someone else. Students need to learn to the same.
This would all be quite applicable if students actually were our employees. It may feel that way to us in the classroom, but the students themselves feel that they are our customers. I’ve had employees as well, and managing them is a lot simpler than managing my students because there is very little ambiguity in how both sides perceive the relationship.
I fall somewhere in between Kolga and Clothahump in my philosophy.
On the one hand, as a college teacher I’ve always believed that my first responsibility is to the students who are there to learn, who actually want to learn and are willing to put forth some effort and meet me halfway. That means I don’t spend so much time giving pep talks or being entertaining that I don’t have time to actually teach. It means not discouraging effort and initiative by shielding the slackers from the consequences of not doing the work. It means not dumbing down the course lest I injure someone’s self of steam.
But, above and beyond that, the more I can do to engage, to motivate, to inspire the students who aren’t motivated, the better. Part of the challenge of teaching is to keep looking for new and better ways of making the class interesting or relevant or entertaining.
Plus, I have no right to compain about my students being lazy if I’m being lazy myself. They can’t learn without effort, but my job is to make it so that it’s no harder than it has to be, and that takes effort on my part—organizing, clarifying, guiding, etc.
If I’ve done my job, then, if a student fails where they could have succeeded if they’d only put forth more effort, I may feel more or less bad about it, but I won’t feel guilty about it.
The problem with that is that the only way as a teacher to tell if you are holding up your side of the bargain and teaching effectively is to observe how much they are learning. If you start dismissing a lack of student learning as the result of laziness, you never fix the problems in your own approach. I’ve seen this many times: a teacher has a sort of Platonic Ideal of what should work to convey information and skills to the students, and when it doesn’t, they blame the kids. Over the years, they get more and more angry at all these lazy ungrateful bastards and can’t understand how they always end up with such terrible groups of kids. They never see that their lectures are vague and disorganized or their assignments confusing and irrelevant or that the students are systematically lacking some piece of background knowledge that they could provide.
Sometimes it is just a matter of a lazy student. But that excuse is so, so tempting for a teacher and you really have to be careful about falling back on it.
YES! Preach it! I have noticed exactly the same thing…the profs most complaining about lazy students are the same ones that are godawful boring in the classroom and do the same lectures they did several years ago.
You , as a prof, have to TRY to get better. Everyone can get better…and that means you (the prof) as well.
I still remember teaching Calc II for the first time. I reached Series and I was awful…and the students did not do well.
I taught it a second time and tried something different. It didn’t work too well…how did I know even though I thought my method was good? Students didn’t do too well.
Third time…I was bound and determined to do better. Got to Series and nailed it man…nailed it. How did I know? Students did much better overall.
Some colleagues, though, taught Calc II the same way every time…complaining about how students didn’t study enough/lazy etc. They never sat down and focused trying to do better themselves.
Teaching is WORK man! It requires some serious effort. You don’t just sit down for a few minutes, look at what you are teaching and go…oh…no problem…walk in and lecture. You need to keep stats and notes on what you tried to find out (objectionally) what works and what doesn’t. When some students falter on something you need to tackle it like a football linebacker so it isn’t a problem next time.
{and do not get me ranting about how many profs ‘test’. Grrrrr}
There is also subtle and not-so-subtle pressure, especially aimed at adjunct profs, to keep students happy (the “customer service” crap) so they will give said profs good evaluations. That means passing grades, even if undeserved. Those evals count for something. If the contract makes a big deal out of them and they count towards the prof’s rehire rights, then it’s in their own personal best interest to keep passing those who don’t deserve it.
I’m fortunate to be at a college where my dean and dept. head remind us that students have the right to fail.
God knows, I’ve tried to keep students from sabotaging themselves, but some of them insist on doing it. I had a bunch of them last semester who just wanted to screw around with their phones, iPads, music, etc. to the point that I had to kick four of them out of class, at different points during the semester, and report them for being disruptive. It wasn’t fair to students who were there to listen, work, and learn.
Not surprisingly, many of these rowdies ended up failing. They blew off classes, had no documentation in their so-called research papers, and didn’t work to improve their deficiencies.
Again, I tried to get them to seek help, to improve, to do better. It was their own choice not to do so.
I selectively cull the herd. You may not like my methods, but you can’t argue with the results…
But seriously, let them know that you are abundantly open to helping them succeed, be there, and if they don’t meet you at least half way? Then they failed. In one class last semester, I ended up having to fail over half (it was a first-year class, though).