What college students want to tell their high school teachers: Be tougher on us. Force us to be responsible.
This is one for the bulletin board in the teacher’s lounge — what college students want their high school teachers to know. I think folks may be surprised that the main suggestion is “hold us more responsible for our learning.”
Drew Appleby was the director of undergraduate Studies in the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Psychology Department. Now retired and living in Sandy Springs, he sent me this fascinating essay on what college students would like to tell their high school teachers.
By Drew Appleby
I read Epstein School head Stan Beiner’s guest column on what kids really need to know for college with great interest because one of the main goals of my 40-years as a college professor was to help my students make a successful transition from high school to college.
I taught thousands of freshmen in Introductory Psychology classes and Freshman Learning Communities, and I was constantly amazed by how many of them suffered from a severe case of “culture shock” when they moved from high school to college.
I used one of my assignments to identify these cultural differences by asking my students to create suggestions they would like to give their former high school teachers to help them better prepare their students for college. A content analysis of the results produced the following six suggestion summaries.
The underlying theme in all these suggestions is that my students firmly believed they would have been better prepared for college if their high school teachers had provided them with more opportunities to behave in the responsible ways that are required for success in higher education
1. Give us a syllabus on the first day of class that has the schedule for the class planned out for the whole semester (e.g., tests dates, deadlines for papers, and grading scales), and then stick to that syllabus the way college professors do.
2. Don’t tell us at the end of each class what we will be during the next class period. That allows us to be irresponsible because we don’t have to read the syllabus to know what we are expected to do. Please help us to become as responsible as possible when we leave high school and go to college.
3. Don’t accept lame or undocumented excuses about why we don’t have assignments done, and don’t allow us to sweet talk you into letting us make up tests that we are unprepared to take. College professors seldom accept these types of excuses because they try to be fair by making sure all their students have the same amount of time to study for tests.
4. Be sure to teach us how to be academically honest by requiring that we cite all the sources we use to support what we write in our papers. Most importantly, don’t ignore situations in which you suspect we may be plagiarizing. We need to know exactly what plagiarism is so we can avoid it when we get to college. College students who are caught plagiarizing flunk classes and are sometimes kicked out of school or are not allowed to graduate.
5. Don’t let us pass classes just because we earned a lot of homework points or extra credit. In college, we will be graded on our ability to demonstrate that we have actually learned the material we have been assigned by passing tests. In college we are graded on our performance, not our effort.
6. Don’t teach us the answers to all the questions on your tests. Be sure to ask us some questions that come from the reading assignments you haven’t covered in class. In college, we must learn to be independent learners by reading and comprehending the information in our textbooks without having to rely on our professors to explain everything to us. Our professors are more than willing to help us with difficult-to-understand information in our textbooks when we ask them questions in class, but they are unwilling to “spoon-feed” us all the information we are supposed to learn from our reading assignments.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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82 comments Add your comment
Dawn
February 7th, 2013
11:09 am
In Georgia you can throw in the additional pressure of Hope Scholarship grade requirements, which cause students and parents to complain even more when Johnny does poorly on a test for which he didn’t study or even come to class to learn the material. My argument is always “what good is it to get Hope if you’re just going to lose it in the first semester because you were not willing to challenge yourself by taking the harder courses?” Also, the elimination of the vocational/technical diploma does a serious disservice to many students and skews the labels on classes (”college prep” is really technical; “honors” is college prep, and so on). I need my mechanic and plumber to be able to fix my car or leaking toilet and communicate the problems in a coherent way, not to analyze Shakespeare for me!
College Parent
February 7th, 2013
11:13 am
When reading this article and these comments, it brings up three issues:
1) You can’t just start in high school suddenly expecting kids to know how to be responsible at a college level after being spoon fed material their whole educational experience to date. This needs to start in elementary school.
2) (in response to Nutmeg above who helps teach at GA State) Once your students graduate college and begin their first job, do you think their new employers are going to meet with them at the beginning of every day and tell them, in detail, what they needed to do that day, and again at the end of the day, tell them exactly what they will be doing the NEXT day. Do you think the employer will be satisfied with their work if they do not actually get their work projects completed properly and on time, but had moments of getting busy work done correctly (homework vs. passing tests)? Do you expect employers to give their employees ’study guides’ to their job that cover EVERYTHING they will encounter on the job? Current employers will tell you that many graduates do come out of college with these expectations and they do not make good new employees.
3) After having two children graduate from a ‘rigorous’ high school, I can say that there was a LOT of busywork they had to do every day that just took up a lot of time. Many times with so many AP courses, they did not have enough hours in the day to complete it all, having to stay up late many nights, especially if they participated in a sport, or extracurricular activity. When you have 7 different teachers giving you assignments that may take only an hour or two each, that is what you get. This ‘busywork’ took up time that, years ago, would have been used to study more deeply the material on their own, or actually read books that they would have loved to just read, or actually have more ‘life’ experiences such as a job, etc. So when we are asking for more ‘rigor’ it does NOT mean more busywork assignments!
David Yarborough
February 7th, 2013
11:32 am
I always love the pass the buck game. Clearly something is wrong with the way we provide information. We all know that but there are so many excuses given why no change takes place. It is the student’s fault, bad parenting, the institution of education won’t allow us to, and we are bound by a system controlled by higher education that puts the focus for student admissions on grades not actual college prep. None of those excuses help solve the problem. Schools must change the way they think if there is to be a change in the way we do things. Screw the excuses, determine a plan of action and go with it. It is not a question on not doing enough, it is an issue of doing it in a way that works best. I have been a teacher for 33 years and I know that teacher aversion to change is one of the factors. That still is no excuse.
Prof
February 7th, 2013
11:47 am
@ teacher&mom, February 7, 10:57 am.
Obviously, Appleby would never have to deal with the classroom situations that you do as a K-12 educator bound by state and federal laws. Equally obviously, this is due to the fact that K-12 education is required but higher education is not. My University allows its faculty to withdraw students for excessive absences, for example, and I’m fairly sure that your school does not.
But still, I think he’s saying that somehow K-12 educators need to make the reality of college expectations clear to their college-bound students before they get there. Otherwise, they’ll come up against a buzz-saw.
Elliot Garcia
February 7th, 2013
11:48 am
If that is the case, Linda, then I am glad my children are in private school…
beteachin
February 7th, 2013
12:10 pm
So many good comments today from teachers and parents. Here’s one more issue to consider: Once upon a time in our Non-PC past, schools issued cognitive ability tests (like the CogAT) to children in younger grades and again when they started high school. This measure gave teachers and parents a realistic picture of a child’s ABILITY that could be compared to the child’s school performance. If the child showed more “innate ability,” then the teacher would know to challenge the child to meet his potential–and go beyond it. If the child showed less natural ability, the teacher could introduce strategies that would help the child develop his strengths in order to minimize his weaknesses. Because no one wants to face the intellectual truth about children in poverty and, to be honest, the possible gap between certain racial and ethnic groups on these tests, most systems have done away with cognitive measures. Therefore, parents have NO IDEA of a child’s true capabilities. Just like so many parents lack the information to adequately judge if a child is MLB or NFL material, many parents also assume their child is Harvard material when his strengths lie elsewhere. We don’t want any child left behind, but we are leaving many behind because square pegs don’t fit in round holes.
teacher&mom
February 7th, 2013
12:22 pm
@Prof: Believe me when I say….I preach on a constant basis to my Junior and Seniors the level of personal responsibility that is needed to succeed in college. I can tell you exactly who is prepared and who will struggle. Their lack of responsibility is reflected in their final grade for my course. No grade inflation in my classroom.
Some listen, some don’t.
Quite frankly, I’m often amazed that so many weak students are actually accepted to a college. I guess as long as the college can get a couple of semesters of federal loan money/Pell Grant $, they are more than willing to ignore the issues in their acceptance process.
Yet…they don’t hesitate to point their finger at the local high schools.
Private Citizen
February 7th, 2013
12:29 pm
I had parents actively wanting me to push their kids, I had high level parents who appreciated me greatly and I had students who were “into it” and I made work-arounds for students who did not immediately do top work, but at the least I exposed them to “how it was done” and in a comfortable environment of belonging.
But with all of that, I had administrators who actively told me what to do and to change my teaching to suit their dictate and to reduce what I was doing. To put it bluntly, I do not forgive them. They’re supreme hypocrites and someone needs to take them down. The only thing I can figure is that top-level teaching is reserved for the private membership academy they run and call it a public school, and that they did not want any competition from scores from a regular school, scores that meet or exceed the scores from their membership academy school, which is what I was doing.
Private Citizen
February 7th, 2013
12:34 pm
My preference is doing high level work with regular kids. I do not like membership academy environments. There are administrators in Georgia who will object if you do high performance with regular kids, like it is a demerit against you. It becomes formal when they tell you that you need to be “retrained” as another here has said.
Prof
February 7th, 2013
1:15 pm
@ teacher&mom, 12:22 pm.
I really think that this is going to change considerably, if it hasn’t already, with the state legislature’s two-year old change in the USG funding formula. Instead of basing it on the USG schools’ enrollment figures, they are now basing it on their 6-year graduation rates. Schools will accept the weak students you mention when their state funding depends on the number of warm bodies in the classrooms, but not when those warm bodies seem likely to take a verrrrry long time to graduate.
BeachBoy
February 7th, 2013
1:47 pm
My school has a policy requiring all teachers who have a failure rate above 15% be placed on a Professional Development Plan (PDP). Now if only college’s will adopt this policy much of their rigorous course work will disappear!
stooge
February 7th, 2013
2:15 pm
That’s why so many teachers “cook the books” to make sure they keep that % low. It keeps the adm off their backs and ensures a load of trascripts dotted with 70’s. The kid moves on having gained nothing but credits with no knowlege of the content and then crashes and burns in college if he or she ever goes.
Private Citizen
February 7th, 2013
2:21 pm
Thought: The state ought to mandate / govern critieria for school districts telling people they should be “retrained.” They are myriad reasons school / district admin. do this and much of it is capricious, unpredictable, not above board. Management methods of teachers are all over the place. Maybe the TKES/LKES is designed to regulate / solve some of the uneven management in capricious districts where workers are “designated” according the likes / dislikes / desires of someone with local power, which is certainly not an aim or specialty of the classroom teacher.
Yeah Right
February 7th, 2013
3:24 pm
I once had a parent ask me at a conference why her child was not given more rigorous work. I responsed “Are you willing to accept the fact that your child would make a B or C?” She said no and that her child always made A’s. I said that is why we can’t push as hard as we would like. The parents go to the adminstration and we are told to dial it down. The Bell Curve is and always has been valid.
I love teaching. I hate what it is becoming...
February 7th, 2013
5:57 pm
@root issue “If you want to find the root cause- go visit elementary schools where everyday is a fun festival and very little memory work and foundation-building happens.”
LOL! Okay, as an elementary teacher, I have to stand up for my colleagues and myself – there is no “fun festival” atmosphere at our school. We work HARD and we push our students HARD. Do all of them rise to the challenge? No, and then we run into the same problem with parents complaining about the amount of homework, or the amount of studying, or the amount of reading. The amount of math practice, the consequences for not completing work, etc.
Just to illustrate my point, we a couple former high school teachers presently working in our building as support staff. They both have spoken numerous times about little the understood the level of rigor expected in the elementary schools. They had no idea we had students writing essays, taking notes, analyzing text, solving multi-step math problems, completing long term research projects, etc. They both were dumbfounded by what students are being required to do. “I don’t understand?” they tell us. “If they are doing all of this in elementary school, why don’t they seem to know anything about it at the High School level?”
Let’s blame those middle school teachers.
English Teacher
February 7th, 2013
6:41 pm
@teacher & mom: Yes!!! I’ve always wondered how my weaker students even get in to college in the first place. It boggles my mind how some of them get in anywhere, ever. But they do, and I guess a paying customer is a paying customer. And this essay is as old as the hills. “Why o’ why weren’t my teachers in high school tougher on meeeee?” Please. As soon as a zero or a failing test grade go in the gradebook, I get an email, often with a request for a conference. There’s only so many hours in a week, and with around 150-160 students, pressure to provide as much assistance to these students as possible (I once had to complete a “success plan” for a student who had a B because his mother felt he wasn’t working to his potential – and the admin agreed, apparently – his grade dropped to a lower B in the end) it’s not hard to see why there isn’t as much rigor as there should be.
gateach
February 7th, 2013
6:49 pm
This would be great EXCEPT for the district mandates to spoonfeed students pretty much everything including course content to taking numerous makeup exams when students have clearly demonstrated that they don’t know the material, allowing Saturday school, Credit recovery classes, Senior Retake exams,excessive accommodations, etc. One parent told us that the student needs a copy of the exam with the answer key two weeks before the exam. This was cosigned by the administration. I WISH I was able to do some of the things suggested however it’s difficult with your hands tied by the district and then the administration.
Home-tutoring parent
February 7th, 2013
8:39 pm
Another provocative Downey blog. Several years ago, a Latino-predominant-enrollment student in California surveyed its kids. The school’s administration and teachers were astounded that the most common students’ suggestion was that teachers expect more from their students, cover harder topics, give harder assignments, and harder tests.
Indiana-Purdue-Indianapolis caught my attention many years ago. We were home-educating, and I wanted a solid algebra II/trig textbook. I scanned a book written by Marvin Bittinger of IUPUI. It was done in black-and-white, with a couple shades of blue. I bought it, along with “more-modern” College Algebra book, with full-color phtographs and graphics. My older son, then 12, preferred Bittinger, as did his younger brother subsequently a few years later.
It wasn’t an “easy read”, but it was coherent. It was logical. It contained solid mathematics. Os I give IUPUI faculty some credibility.
I could tell you about the University of Chicago Mathematics Project, which generated a so-called icollege-prep-math textbook series, set up by faculty of its Graduate School of Education, originally in cooperation with the UC Department of Mathematics, but ending in the latter’s rejection of the endeavor, as “We refuse to dumb down mathematics, even though we could make money in publication/authorship-shares revenues.”
I think Prof has made good points. I went to a public university as an undergrad. I was a poor Pell Grant student. Only summer-work earnings in grunt-level ag harvesting, cleaning people’s houses during the school year, and some help from Grandma (a retired teacher) made it possible to live away from home to attend college. I started out with a 2.4 average (actually less, except for an incomplete rather than an F for not doing the required term paper).
I learned how to study hard, first by watching professors, writing everything down they had written before class on the blackboard, then by writing half-sentences, keywords, as they talked. I especially learned how to observe, subconsciously, when they paused and looked at their notes, and take down their immediately-following statements.
Then it was a matter of using my time after lectures. I went to office hours frequently. Often it was possible to get clarifications as class was dismissed.
I sat down ASAP to add margin notes, “replaying” in my mind the profs’ still-fresh-in-my-short-term-memory statements. Then that night I compiled a fresh set of notes, organized and neat.
I learned how to go from abysmal high-school writing to decent writing. I learned how to prowl the stacks, set up a cublicle and pile up books and primary-research journals, fill out index cards, return the used materials to the return-carts… how to number-cite authors’ ideas and facts, and how to properly describe publications (in that day, monographs and books needed publishers’ cities, primary research journal articles warranted first-author names followed by “et al.”, not article titles.)
Anyway my senior thesis was 51 pages of text, I read fully ca. 800 monograph and primary-research articles, and cited 104.
Why didn’t I cite every article I read. That was interesting. I first started by reading an interesting textbook chapter. It had citations. I read the cited articles. Then I read their “most interesting” cited articles. Then these articles’ “most interesting” cited articles, and again, and again. I had to stop because my paper was due. I didn’t want to stop!
I really was constrained, I wanted to write a history, an evolution of ideas. I did, but it was time-constrained.
On plagiarism, make the elmentary/missle-school/hig-school textbook authors list their facts-and-ideas sources, make popular press writers number-cite their sources, then you can expect students to understand this concept. Otherwise, parents can sue schools that punish kids for plagiarism.
Wikipedia demands citations. The old World Book and Encyclopedia Brittainica didn’t do this. They just presented their articles as authoritative, the fact that their articles’ authors obtained their information from other sources, was not really disclosed.
I found a false fact presented in EB, and notified them. They never acknowledged my finding. Okay, EB’s supposed fact was that Clyde Cessna invented the cantilevered wing. Actually, Fokker did it way before. Ford Tri-Motor adopted it. Wichita Cessna was claiming the invention. EB didn’t check the facts. Maybe that is why it has fallen. But when I was growing up, that’ what we had.
Truth in Moderation
February 7th, 2013
9:06 pm
The proof of the pudding is in what students do AFTER they graduate. If you look at the current state of affairs of our nation, the colleges, especially the Ivy Leagues have been utter failures. Why? Because the students have not been given a moral education, nor do they understand the law or economics. Their highest level of achievement is to work for the Wall Street Mafia and help run our Casino Economy. “They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and stone….MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN” Daniel 5
The party is over……
Ole Guy
February 8th, 2013
1:27 am
Once again…another crock o’doodoo. This sloppy sad sack story is akin to the guy who, following years of…stealing cookies from the cookie jar…finally gets caught. So the first thing he does is shuffle the responsibility for his misdeeds onto those who (somehow) “failed” to teach him NOT to steal the cookies; to simply do the right thing.
I can’t believe this kind of (what did you call it?) essay draws so much favorable attention. What the hell’s next…defendants caught in the webs of the law asking teachers, parents, aunts an’ uncles…hells bells, might as well throw in Santa, the Easter Bunny, and just about any-and-all remotely associated with “little johnny’s saga”, into the fray of responsibility. “World, you must understand, I am NOT entirely responsible for my outcomes. If I fail in college…YOU share in that responsibility; if I do, or fail to do any number of things which society expects of me, YOU share in that responsibility as well. I can go through life, secure in the knowledge that any short-comings, on my part, will NEVER be entirely my fault; my responsibility. I will remain, forever, tied to the teat; never expected to become a self-sustaining adult. And, the best part…it will always be someone elses’ fault.” What a crock…
Doing It All
February 8th, 2013
9:26 am
I heard from an employer recently that poor verbal skills are a deal breaker in the hiring process. If a candidate cann’t interview without saying “like” a dozen times in a sentence, he doesn’t get a callback. My students struggle with this. When I told them about this conversation they said “it wasn’t fair.” Oh, there’s another thing they need to learn.
Doing It All
February 8th, 2013
9:28 am
Preach it English Teacher!!!
Private Citizen
February 8th, 2013
11:23 am
Home-tutoring parent, There is a lot of Americana applied to US teaching of history of ideas and manufacturing. Much of it is nationalist-based misinformation, and maybe all of it ignores context. For example, here in Georgia, ask anyone who invented the motor car and they will tell you crisp as a stick of Dentine, “Henry Ford.” Well, they’re off by 30 years or more, Ford invented the assembly line, not the motor car, and most Georgians do not know what an assembly line is, which is an incredibly basic concept and innovation.
It would be interesting if your 50 pages of college writing were available via a .pdf file.
Private Citizen
February 8th, 2013
11:30 am
And the other things is that, in regard to computers and operating systems, many of the real US “inventors” and innovators are the true world level are ignored by the education system that tends to promote the commercial titans, not the people who do the real work. And this is hardly obscure information I’m referring to. There is a handful of real innovators who get no bandwidth on recognition. One is Ian Murdock, who just happens to have come from Purdue University in Indiana. the contribution I am referring is “Debian” named after himself and his wife, “Deb.” A lot of things are built on Debian (like the operating system I am using to make this post – hey, thank you, Ian!)
Someone else who should be taught (not American) is Klauss Knopper, inventor of the bootable cd. But to promote such would be to treat computers as machines, not neatly controlled interfaces for buying things.
Private Citizen
February 8th, 2013
11:33 am
And then there’s part where they tell US students that the US defeated Germany in WW2. The rest of the world says it was done by Russia, hands down, no comparison whatsoever, and that the Russians paid a heavy price, too. Point is they went in there and kicked Germany’s ass. The US showed up after the fact and took pictures and made propaganda movies about it.
Private Citizen
February 8th, 2013
11:36 am
Yep it all went to hell after WW2 with these lying yellow-bellied politicians.
Lovely idea, but...
February 9th, 2013
6:49 am
I repeatedly was told by an administrator that all students could earn an A in any class if they had a good teacher.
Same set of administrators also want all students to go to college.
Viv
February 9th, 2013
10:08 am
In elem. school teachers are so bound to following the “pre existing lesson plans” that are in the teacher’s manuals, there is little room or time left in the day for real creativity and students really using their “thinking caps.” There is also such a wide variety of ability levels of what the students are capable of doing. You can’t push the higher level students as far as their potential b/c the other 90% of the class will get left behind and never catch up …coming from a frustrated elem. school teacher.
Claudia Stucke
February 9th, 2013
3:01 pm
At least a couple of times in every school year, some of my former students would come back from college to visit their high school, teachers, and younger classmates. I’d often hear statements such as, “I wish I’d paid more attention in class” or “I should have worked harder on those essays/research papers.” I invited them to come to my classes to give the current crop of high schoolers a pep talk on what college was like, and it got my students’ attention for a while; but after a week or so, the students slipped back into old habits. I even obtained copies of current college syllabi from Georgia State, Agnes Scott, and other schools to show my students what was required in freshman English–they were still incredulous. Some even asked me if they got a refund if they failed a class! (”If I fail, that means the professor didn’t teach me the material, so I should get my money back.”)
Plagiarism policies were of special interest, and syllabi always addressed that issue–in college academic dishonesty has hefty penalties in addition to a failing grade. @Maureen–”You copy, you fail.” Yes, but sometimes over great objection from the parents–no kidding. On at least three occasions, with the evidence printed out and presented to them (plagiarized paper and webpage printout, common portions highlighted and quite obvious), parents objected to their children’s failing grades, even though my plagiarism policy was clearly stated in the syllabus. One parent said, “Everybody does it, so why are you punishing my child?” And fortunately an administrator was present when one angry parent said to me, in spite of seeing the abundant evidence, “If my child says he didn’t cheat, he didn’t. Saying he did is calling him a liar, which is the same as calling me a liar.” Blessedly, these were not typical reactions; but they certainly made life more difficult. I wonder what happened to those students when they went on to college.
Wes
February 13th, 2013
6:01 pm
More like “…what high school teachers would like to think college students would want to tell their high school teachers, when they are dreaming about a perfect educational world that doesn’t exist.”
Is there no responsibility for BUILDING student responsibility in schooling? And which college professor should they be prepared for, anyway? Ask any two how they grade, and you’ll get two different answers.
Quit whining and teach.
Manzai
February 13th, 2013
8:55 pm
Really? Awesome. How, exactly, is this supposed to happen when parents, administrators, and students are actively pushing back? High school teachers have no protection(s) from parents as college professors do; administrators bend in the direction the parents push, and teachers are simply stuck.
I’d rather tell the entire group to grow up.
joe
February 17th, 2013
10:23 am
Agree, and yet there is so much more than just academics to focus on !
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