Regular readers know that I spend a
significant amount of professional energy building culture for my
classes. It's not useful for physics - or any class - to be perceived by
students as a means to an end, as a game to play in order for the winners to
earn the prize of high grades and college admissions.
At a meeting about revising the school's
extracurricular-hours-based community service requirement, I strongly
encouraged that we concentrate on culture building in this realm as well.
A community service requirement has the opposite effect than we intend if
students game the system trying to find merely the most convenient or least
burdensome manner of finishing their required hours.* The vast majority of
students talk openly about how to arrange community service such that they
check off the school requirement with a minimum of effort.
Just as they talk openly about the path of
least resistance to a high GPA and admission to a high-status college.
*Or if well-connected parents can
simply arrange easy service hours for their kids, while the students from less
well-connected families spend an hour on logistics for every hour engaged in
service.
After the meeting, a colleague got to
thinking... "That contractual, transactional relationship we have with
students," he said. "I wonder in what ways we [teachers] behave
that might indicate (for better and/or worse) it benefits us?"
In my early days teaching, I know I
reinforced a transactional relationship with students. Fact is, teenagers
resent being herded into rooms where adults - too often adults who are not as
smart or as talented as they - use their authority to demand that the teenagers
do what the adults say. When I was not much older than the students, and
when I was newer to the school community than the students themselves, I felt
like grades and the college transcript were my only tools toward ensuring
short-term cooperation with my long-term mission to teach physics. I
sympathize with young or new teachers grappling with leadership issues. I
sympathize with young or new teachers who merely use the same carrots and
sticks that their teachers used with them.
For experienced teachers, though, I think
it's important that our every word, our every action, demonstrate the higher
purpose for which we and our students are striving. I didn't take this
job so I could give students privileged to attend a high-class boarding school
an even bigger leg up in a rat race. My classroom mission, aligned with
my school's mission, is to promote intellectual thoroughness through the study
of physics. The skills and evidence-based attitudes to which my students
are exposed will serve them and society at large in the long term, whatever
professional path each student eventually takes. (And I know that I'm
on-track with this long-term mission because a large and diverse number of my
alumni have shared with me that they have been well served by my class.)
So what steps can we take to avoid
reinforcing a transactional relationship? Start by considering typical
conversations with students. What do we, formally and informally, praise
our students for?
In December, both my school and the
national zeitgeist* were abuzz with colleges' early decision decisions.
Who got in to where? Who was rejected? How can those rejected folks
deal with their failure? Who should have done better? Who should we
congratulate now that they've been admitted to Stanford?
* that is, Twitter
AARRGH! With the best of intentions,
teachers all over my school and my country were further embedding the notion
that our students' worth is in large part measured by the perceived status of
the college they attend... that the primary purpose of school is to
secure high-status college admission... that the purpose of a teacher is as an
ally - or worse, a hired servant - toward grade, test score, and college status
maximization.
Teachers generally understand that college
admission is largely a crapshoot. Seemingly ideal candidates are often
rejected; often of two students from the same high school, the one with the
perceived lesser resume is admitted. Teachers see a broader picture of
hundreds of students each year, all of whom continue to live full lives
regardless of whether they are admitted to their first-choice college. I
have never, for example, heard anyone over the age of 25 lament that their life
turned for the worse due to college rejection; rather, these folks tend to say
"go state!" Yet students and
their parents still measure their worth by their personal result in the college
admissions jungle.
Consider the unintentional messages sent
when a teacher says, "Congratulations on getting in to Stanford!"
The student who got in feels validated,
and perhaps a bit smug. He or she achieved a goal! Um, is that
really the goal we want to praise, winning an admissions lottery? When we
know damned well that it's truly a sorta-random lottery?
And what about those didn't get
congratulations? What about the student whose friend is receiving praise
for admission to Stanford while they got rejected, or while they were admitted
to their first choice of James Madison University? (Or the student who
has carefully and consciously decided not to attend college?)
The teaching community is sending
conflicting messages, and don't think students don't notice. On one hand
teachers say "your worth isn't defined by college, if you were rejected, that's
okay." On the other hand, teachers repeatedly and publicly fete
students for admission to high status colleges! That sounds exactly like
coaches who pay lip service to how everyone is an equal part of the team, but
then focus all their attention on the starters while never talking to the bench
players. As a bench player, I knew where I stood* with such coaches.
* or rather, where I sat
I mean, I know it's a big deal to each
individual student when the college acceptance is finally there. And I
don't object to those teachers who want to celebrate a student's acceptance to
college as they would a coming-of-age ritual. It's socially normal to
congratulate students on their first communion, bat mitzvah, getting their
drivers license, turning 18 years old...
My real objection is less
"congratulations on receiving your college acceptance, this is a life
event!" and more "ooh, Hannah, you got into Yale, you must be
so smart and accomplished! And Ashley, you're going to VCU? Is that, um,
a community college? Anyway, back to Hannah and Yale!"
My personal approach to culture building
is that I don’t discuss college admission with my students. Instead I
discuss, and praise them for, concrete accomplishments. And if a student
was in fact admitted to Stanford, there must be numerous other impressive,
earned accomplishments that I can recognize instead.
"Julie, I saw the school musical last
week - your performance was outstanding." "DeQuece, congrats on
the all-time school receiving record." "Javon, I've heard great
things about that podcast you started." "Palmer, I really liked
your presentation about your semester in Italy." These students are
hearing praise for something of authentic value to our current school community
- not that an admissions committee pulled their name out of a hat of applicants
with similar backgrounds, but something that their teacher noticed and cared
about. Something specific they've earned through their dedication,
talent, and effort.
Chances are, throughout every particular
student's time knowing us, we teachers will naturally and organically find some
concrete accomplishment to praise, something unique to that student - thus our
praise becomes special, personal, meaningful. And if you do want to
congratulate a student on their life event of college acceptance, you can make
the congratulations personally applicable to them - as my colleague Pete
suggests, something like "Oh, congrats, you're headed to North Carolina
next year! Do you know yet what you'll be studying? Will you be
playing trumpet in the pep band there as you did here?"
When alumni come back for their 10th or
20th reunions, I want them to remember that I went to their ballgames, their
plays, their speeches; that I worked just as diligently to teach and build
relationships with their peers with B's as those with A's; and that I
effectively and passionately taught them skills that served them in their
future pursuits, especially if those pursuits involved physics somehow.
I don't want them to remember me merely as
the guy who wrote a college rec that might have gotten them in to Princeton.
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