Culture building: an alternative to mixed messages about college admission.

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.