Periodic b*tching about students :-)
They come into my classes with some kind of preconceived notion of how much work they have to do. I am not sure where that notion comes from: I give rubrics for my various assignments, so if they know how to read they should know how I score. But inevitably someone comes along and says "I feel I deserved a bit higher grade because I did everything I was asked to do." This is a little like saying "if I hand in anything, even if it's pure crap, I should get an A because I did it."Anyway, here's where the notion comes from:
- They've been graded a certain way in the past. If they get an A in high school English with two hours work per week, that's what they expect now. If they can hand in unformatted documents in high school and have them graded, they expect that now too. Sometimes in the workplace we expect our evaluation standards to remain unchanged even when our responsibilities, and even our teammates, change. We learn this behavior as college freshmen.
- It's a vacuum. Even when they know certain other students are strong, they do not emulate the habits of those other students. They may COPY off those students, or try to work in groups with them, but they will not change their behaviors. So they work in a vacuum. I try to tell them that for me to give them good grades when they do bad work is cheapening the good grades I give good students. They don't care. Sometimes they even say "it's not fair." Which suggests a moral standard of "fairness." But what we have instead are the beginnings of cheapening workplace performance awards by giving them out to everyone in the organization, "in turn."
- They do not easily use sources other than Web sites. I try to tell them that almost anything else is fair game, but that doesn't seem to work. And this behavior will ultimately lead to laziness in the workplace. Venture capitalists do due diligence. If we want to be noticed by them, we must do it too, but we are not practicing it in college.
- They've learned to goof off. This past semester I had to deal with three young women who ignored me for the entire semester, and were disruptive in class, then wondered why I would give them Cs. I understand that the workplace requires us sometimes to socialize rather than hunch over our work. But there's a time and a place, and people aren't learning that before they get to me.
Labels: education
posted by Ron @ 11:39 AM
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