Preventing the slacker culture from taking hold in your class

Last fall I “shadowed” a senior through his class day. I wrote numerous pages about the experience for our school’s prefessional development app. (What really, Greg writing long-winded commentatry about teaching? Imagine that.)

Among other things, I reflected on how my school - like *every* school I’ve taught at or visited - has two distinct levels of student engagement. The difference between an honors class and a general class isn’t always just the rigor, or even the brainpower of the students; it’s also the intellectual engagement of students, their willingness to wrestle seriously with ideas to the best of their ability. 

A number of students over the years have hinted that the main reason they are happy taking solely honors classes is that they can avoid the less-serious students.  For example, one bright and engaged student was quite frustrated in our un-tracked 9th grade English and history, and not because his classmates were “dumb”, not at all.  He was frustrated because so many of them approached schoolwork as an exercise in minimization of effort, and thus poisoned all interactions among classmates.  I observed the same issue when I taught a required junior-senior physics class one year. And it happens on the athletic fields, too – every season we have teams or programs that are dumping grounds for those who not only don’t give a crap, but are actively perverse in their lack of crap-giving.  It is practically impossible for a serious student or athlete to have a positive experience once the slacker culture begins to prevail.

This is where toxic teachers complain regularly and publicly - in the faculty lounge, on twitter, in front of parents, even - about how kids these days don’t care, won’t listen, are bad down to their very soul. Well, that doesn’t help.  You talk about a teenager or group of teenagers behind their back, and they *will* find out - and then they will live down (or up!) to your prejudiced notion of them. It’s one thing to occasionally vent because you’re frustrated. It’s another entirely to make repeated sweeping generalizations or accusations about the quality of students’ personal character.

And yet... the slacker culture exists, and will persist if teachers don’t actively fight it. Yes, I know you don’t have the administrative support to dismiss every student who causes you a problem; I also know that even the best teachers with the best administrators usually don’t have all the support they’d like from above. But fight we must.

How have I fought the poisonous slacker students over the years? 

·        Attrition.  I make it more time consuming to disengage than to engage.  Once students give up the fight, once they see that *I’m* not giving up, once they see that neither their advisor nor their parents nor the academic dean is going to tell me to back off, they recalibrate their minimum effort.  Sometimes just enough, but they recalibrate.

·        Reputation.  Where students have taken my class by choice, they’ve generally known what to expect from me, and so they’ve pretty much cooperated from the get-go.  Once I successfully build a positive physics culture in one class, that culture became contagious over long time frames. Exceptions includes my first year at each school, and the year I returned to the upperclass AP section after a long absence. Those years were quite difficult and frustrating for me.

·         Avoidance.  I teach primarily 9th grade now, and 9th graders are poor rebels.  Honors students of any age, once I’ve establish my reputation, are usually pleased to focus and learn in a positive atmosphere.  Research students that I’ve hand picked are thrilled to work with me and my expertise – they very much appreciate my “trust but verify” approach.  

But the upperclass, required general physics class? Our department puts teachers where they can best succeed. The other physics teachers do better than I do with that class because they are more in tune with the non-serious student, and they all have better relationships with those folks, especially given their extracurricular work.  One teacher simply wasn’t particularly demanding of such students, and thus won cooperation with those few things he did demand. The other two have better instincts about how to be successfully demanding of typical general-level upperformers, just as I have better instincts in other situations. That’s more than okay, that’s awesome - different people with different talents make for a well-functioning department.

·         And finally, reasonable expectations. I'm careful never to assign work outside of class that could possibly be construed as busywork. I am respectful of students’ time - I don’t assign summer work, or work over breaks. I taper my class so that seniors have much less to do in the spring than in the fall. Students need to see that I’m never asking them to do something for the purpose of, in their perception, asserting my authority.
Does it all work? Never perfectly.  When a cadre of slackers persists, my job is to ignore them, to instead pay attention to the vast majority of students who appreciate my dedication and expertise.  Eventually, perhaps one of the slackers sees the light and joins the positive culture - in which case I welcome him, never ever shaming him with reminders of his previous intransigence.  Some never adapt; but they can’t spread their poison effectively, because their classmates don’t allow it to spread. Hopefully.  I have to fight this battle every year.  I have to have faith every August that the positive culture will prevail.  I’m usually rewarded.