Are we teaching to success or excuses?

Posted on | June 4, 2010 | No Comments

Two things happen this time of the year for a professor.

First the professor starts thinking about the 7 weeks of vacation that is staring them in the face. Yes academics are not the most highly paid people on the planet BUT they do get great holidays.

The second thing that happens this time of year is students begin to stream into academic offices asking what they can do to get a better mark!

I wonder where we are going wrong!

Why do students think after a final assignment they can do a bit more to fix the failures of their judgement when it came to presentations, assignments and exams.

Tom Peters in his daily cube bomb summed it up nicely today.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.
–Tom Peters

In my case for either 8 0r 18 weeks I have been teaching my students to arrive to class on time, give 100% and hopefully learn from each experience.

For my part I have arrived on time, sat in my office during office hours, provided a learning experience that is unparalleled and been totally up front with the simple fact that at the end of the course I expect student work that is exceptional, based totally on the student putting in the time and applying the weekly lessons (some lessons lead to a success and some a failure but all are lessons to be applied).

As Elizabeth Gilbert says in her TEDtalk, “I have done my part.”

While many of my students do their part there are still some who are not applying the lessons along the path and figure that anything can be fixed later with a little extra work.

WRONG!

But why wouldn’t a student treat every piece of work like a life or death situation? In many cases those grades and the cumulative grade point average could be a death sentence in the academic world.

Is the classroom suppose to, at the least, have a bit of continuity to the real world?

-arrive on time

-be accountable 100% for work output

-rewards for exceptional work

-incentives to not follow the mediocre crowd (most work is mediocre in quality and creativity these days)

-the only second chance is on the next assignment and there is always an end

Fortunately many educators agree that whether we are training students for a vocation or a lifetime of academics we need to work to the reality of the world we will eventually find ourselves in!

I cringe at the professors who treat the students in a University like grade 5 students, and many do, this does the university student no favours and really makes a clown of the professor.

Then again everyone likes a good circus.

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