Responding To A Problem I Can't Solve

Does one accept what can't be changed?

I have radically altered my approach to undergraduate teaching this year, in part because of my shifting beliefs about student motivation, grading, and learning, but also because of deeper frustrations about working in American academia. While tinkering with different pedagogical techniques in the immediacy of the classroom gives me some satisfaction — I feel like I can exert some small degree of positive influence — a vague but growing sense of futility about the entire enterprise, or a least my role within it, lurks in the background.

Early in my career, I encountered students who refused to do anything that wasn’t graded — in truth, a rational response on their part to an educational system that prioritizes grades over knowledge. My reaction? Formally assess everything that students did, to convey the message that every task, no matter how minute, contributed to their learning.

The end result was an assessment regime with assignments worth in total well over 1,000 points but in which students needed only 950 points for an A. Again, I assumed this was a good thing: my intent was to give students opportunities to safely practice and improve, rather than to punish anyone who demonstrated less than constant perfection. I wanted students to understand failure as an essential part of the learning process, not as commentary on their worth as human beings.

However, this method devolved over time into a treadmill of busywork that stripped students of responsibility over their own learning and didn’t reflect their actual performance. My grade distributions indicated that any of my students who put in enough time and effort earned an A, while everyone else got a D or F. The once-common B’s and C’s disappeared.

So now I’m no longer grading much of what happens in my courses. For what little does get graded, I use simple rubrics that evaluate student work according to basic expectations; for example, whether the arguments they put forth accurately incorporate applicable source material in grammatically correct English. Either the student meets these expectations (full credit) or they don’t (zero). While I’m always happy to give advice, it’s the student’s responsibility to identify the possible causes of their underperformance. The system grants students greater autonomy while making the relationship between acquired skill and outcome more transparent. My workload has decreased as a result.

Yet none of this has restored a feeling of purpose, maybe because I can no longer as easily ignore the hypocritical elements of the apparatus in which I’m embedded. While this might sound like typical “kids these days” griping, undergraduates are, in fact, different than they were when I began teaching in the late 1990s. For example, the college readiness of high school graduates has steadily declined as their belief in their academic preparedness has strengthened. The gap between aptitude and assumption only becomes clear when, as happens much more frequently than it once did, I discover that a student lacks basic skills in reading comprehension — probably because of some combination of the scientifically bogus cueing theory of literacy instruction, social promotion in K-12, and No Child Left Behind policies.

So while many high school graduates get admitted to college, the motivation and habits necessary for college-level learning just aren’t there. Too many newly enrolled undergraduates think that they will continue to do fine by passively sitting in classrooms like toads on a log. When these expectations are smashed, they feel cheated or lied to, and they resent the situation in which they find themselves.

But I suspect that the damage goes even deeper. A few years ago, my wife, an immigrant and also a professor, asked me after a particularly difficult day of teaching, “How did you people ever conquer the world?” I pointed to parenting norms, which seem to have drastically changed since I was a child.* When I attended college in the late 1980s, my and my roommates’ parents were lucky to get a weekly phone call. To a degree that now seems remarkable, we experienced life beyond the ken of the folks back home, with all of the attendant benefits and risks. I now see undergraduates updating their parents on the most mundane aspects of their day between classes. These parents live their lives through their children instead of letting those children individuate into fully functional adults.

The above touches on just the input side of the equation. As for the output side, let’s just say that, after a quarter of a century of working as a professor, I’m not that impressed by higher education’s operational efficacy, for the reasons I outlined in one of my previous Substack posts.

Consequently, I’m finding it difficult to discern a path toward greater personal fulfillment in my work. From a Buddhist perspective, there is virtue in detachment. I think I’ve been somewhat successful over my career at not conflating my self-identity with my job. But I feel that the institutional system of which I am part expects the opposite.

Repeat after me . . .

*My parents were born in the early 1930s and had not-so-fond childhood memories of the Great Depression and World War II. In many ways, they raised their children as they were raised — to be seen and not heard, subject to consequences for misbehavior, and out of the house at age 18.