Weekend Engagement #112. I picked the last topic: Back in Fashion.This is my entry to @galenkp’s
What would you like to come back into fashion and why?
Old School Nostalgia
Over the weekend, I had one more of those moments that makes me miss the old good days (cliché as it may sound) when our students were more responsible and teaching made a bit more sense.
After an eight-week EFL course (English as a Foreign Language) none of my students presented their final assignment (even though they had been given an extra week to do it, some video demos to follow, and the offer of getting feedback from their drafts, if sent before class). It was just a short 3-minute video or in-class presentation using the voc learned during the course. They were unable to provide an articulate explanation for not doing it. They simply did not do it and they knew that was the last day of classes.
I recently ran into a quote attributed to Kevin Maxwell:
Our job is to teach the students we have. Not the ones we would like to have. Not the ones we used to have. Those we have right now. All of them.
At first sight, the thought makes sense (we can’t live in the past or impose past standards to modern life—which is actually one of the main problems with organized religion). However, as it happens with religious ideas, some principles, such as “the golden rule,” may be considered universally useful: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you…” (Mathew 7:12).
That being said, teaching “the students we have now” in educational systems that tend to accommodate to the “new fashions” comes with a catch. A combination of poor parenting (the causes of which would be the subject of a different post), technology, and an institutionalized sense of entitlement have turned today’s students into give-me-give-me machines that do not see the point of taking responsibility for their actions. Whatever failure they experience in a classroom is always someone else’s fault.
I say this fully aware of the responsibility some teachers may have in students’ academic failure. I have always been very critical of mediocre or abusive teachers at all levels of the educational system. I actually tend to question my own pedagogy after each course is over, and wonder how I could have helped those who failed. In my particular case, doing more for those who failed would simply mean passing them just for being registered or doing the academic work for them.
Putting the extremes aside, I am still left with a complex situation where most students I have had in the last 10 years or so refuse to assume responsibility. They expect to move smoothly through their academic lives without acquiring learning tools, knowledge about specific subjects, or a sense of their historical subject-position and purpose. I have a long list of cases of students who don’t miss a chance to badmouth me for having failed any of my courses and others who, after many years, have not yet found the time to send whatever final paper was due, despite having gotten passing grades after a verbal commitment to submit pending assignment during a convenient grace period.
In the last years, we have seen a change of perspective from teaching specific knowledge towards teaching social skills or whatever some theorists or politicians think children need more than knowledge, responsibility, and critical thinking.
In our particular case, we have a system that has been reduced to graduating HS students who can’t even read or write well (let alone have any hint about their own history or world history). They are the perfect mass for a totalitarian regime. Parents and students do not seem to see the big picture and are content with the prospects of all having A students at a D-level performance.
When you try to revert that and demand a little bit, you face backlash and resistance.
I obviously miss the old days when teachers, parents and students worked in sync towards achieving a common goal. Parents taught kids the fundamentals at home and reinforced school instruction and discipline. Discipline itself has become a curse word in academic circles as if it only meant physical punishment. I do not advocate a return to that part of the old educational system, but I cannot see with good eyes the extreme leniency that characterizes the current system. Students and parents see it as easy As; they do not see how handicapped they are becoming when it comes to job markets or just personal growth.
Controversial as this idea may sound, I miss the pre-internet days. From the academic perspective that was also the time of zero excuses. As a student you had to work hard, cancel any party that might distract you from finishing school assignments, and accept the academic challenges because you had the tools to meet them. Technology (smart phones, internet, social media…), despite all its promises and potential, had done tremendous harm to students. They now have plenty of distractions, shorter attention spam, and a variety of absurd excuses not to do school assignments.
Failing a student now means facing students’ absurd complaints and their parents’ naïve defense. From my personal experience, parents (ironically, most of them my age; that is, formed under the same old-school principles) only perpetuate their children’s tendency to avoid responsibility. They tend to justify their kids’ lack of engagement and in some extreme cases, it is the parents who study on their kids behalf. With the new distant-learning options, in some cases, it is the parents or some friend of the family, who are taking the tests for the students.
Source
Going back to Maxwell’s quote, “teaching the students we have now” sometimes comes with additional complications. It can also mean teaching students with specials needs and learning disabilities who are supposed to benefit from regular classrooms’ interactions. Teachers, without the additional especial ed training or resources, are supposed to know how to address all the different learning styles and needs.
Whoever thinks fulling Maxwell’s premise is as easy as reading it and agreeing with it in principle has not dealt with the complications of teaching the students we have now under the limitations of the average public ed classroom. In some places, like Venezuela, it is still more complicated, even if we still can maneuver away from excessive political correctness and progressive agendas.
We (at least here) are facing a moral crisis that will affect our society for decades to come. Teachers (at least those who honor the free-thinking aspect of their profession) can make a difference, only if allowed to do their jobs and free students’ minds from the limitations of their self-inflicted intellectual and moral poverty. If left to their own devices, students are joyfully heading towards a precipice assuming they are actually making a glorious revolution.
Thanks for your reading. Does your school system suffer from similar issues? If not, how has it been able to achieve academic excellence?
A dose of reality, dear friend. I am alarmed, since, at least here in Caracas, all teenagers pass their subjects and pass the year. There is not a single failed student who has to repeat the subject or the year. I don't believe that, it is another invention of this fantastic education system. I will always take my hat off to the teachers and professors who fight to reverse these anomalous situations. If I didn't understand the subject, the fair thing to do is to repeat it, even if I failed more than three, you repeat the year, unless by magic you pass them all in September.
The ideals of this glorious revolution are taught to these children at home and that is what is frightening. First we have to change the mentality of these parents, who are supposed to distinguish the good from the bad. As always excellent chronicle, and above all my respects to you as an educator, one of the most difficult and worst paid activities in Venezuela. Best regards.
Thank you very much, my dear friend. Ironically, this situation may be one of the easiest to solve, and yet...
Excellently written. Thanks for this
Thanks for stopping by.
WEEKEND EXPERIENCES community.The original #weekend-engagement concept by @galenkp featured in the