On Expectation and Disappointment
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Out of grad school, I began with many expectations around teaching that were unrealistic. I thought my students would begin college with a fundamental desire to learn, investigate, and grow. Instead, many have a keen desire that I rubber stamp a passing grade so they can get credentialing paper. In fairness, some of my students are curious-minded, inquisitive, and excited to explore, but many are not. That surprises me whenever I encounter it. It would be easy to get angry, and sometimes I do when I suspect laziness in a student, but mostly I try to realize that I can’t expect people with different lives and experiences to think or behave like I do. I was extremely linguistically-inclined at a very young age. I read my first novel at six years old. My family believed in learning (if not formal education) as a default state of being– there were always new things to see and do and know. The students who come through my doors sometimes have never read a book, or at least never read one for pleasure. Their families are sometimes wholly uneducated, and sometimes totally apathetic about education. Raised in that, or given a natural predisposition for other skills, I would be much the same as some of the students who enroll grudgingly in an English course only because they need it to proceed. But then, if they’re not particularly intellectually curious nor personally disposed to read and write, why are they in college?
Well, I think it’s because colleges spend millions a year on propaganda that promises a good job and financial well-being on the other side of their fun, low-impact, stress-free courses of study, but remain mum on the possibility that education is a reward unto itself. By “reward,” I don’t mean some trivial esoteric reward for academics to play with their inner selves and theorize and navel-gaze, but rather a practical and pragmatic set of skills for resisting bullshit, tools for seeking the most accurate possible mental map of reality, and important coping mechanisms for the inevitable tragedies that come into every life. Those skills and tools amount to a net gain whether you’re a ditch-digger or a neurosurgeon. Academic inquiry is an opportunity to grow outside oneself in useful ways. That is not to say college is the only way to become an educated person, but it’s a good road (or it would be if higher education were not indoctrinating students with a particular identity politics/leftist/Marxist worldview, but I digress). My point is, students are being told by colleges to get the paper for jobs and careers alone (whether those will materialize in truth is sometimes a dubious proposition), and so young people think they need to go through the motions, and they expect frictionlessness– as a result their expectations are upset when they come into my classroom and find that their way of looking at the world is being challenged by new habits of mind (because a critical review of unexamined assumptions is the meta-message of every assignment I dispense). It’s not a popular thing for a college teacher to say, but college isn’t necessarily for everyone.
Just as I feel the impulse to anger when my expectations are upset, so do some of my students sometimes get angry when they learn that their grade is a matter of grappling with, reading about, and writing about troubling ideas. As a result, my attrition rates are sometimes rather high. Students figure out quickly there are classes where they can coast and classes where they can’t, and some of them bail very quickly from the classes where they can’t coast. Their expectations are set up by a system that promises them it will be quick and easy to get paper, and by teachers who are pressured by administrators to push students through so as to keep the money machine humming.
What if the very institutions we’ve built to educate our young people indoctrinate them at worst and, in many cases, simply fail to educate them because American culture and campus culture in 2018 (and our biologically adapted cognitive biases) are at variance with the rigor required for logic, critical inquiry, free-thought, and reasonableness to take root among the populace on a large scale? It’s an unsettling thought, and I want to be optimistic about the possibility of teaching contemporary American college students en masse to think carefully, question closely, consider deeply, and to generally resist intellectual coercion both externally and internally…
but I am full of doubts.
