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My friend, colleague and hero Peter Gray, a psychology professor and author of “Free to Learn” (one of my favorite books!), makes the compelling case we often make here: Kids need a chance to play, explore, have fun, mess up, get mad, recover, and simply live some part of their childhood UNSUPERVISED for them to develop the emotional resilience they will need. You can’t become an adult if you get zero practice being one, thanks to constant oversight and intervention by “real” adults.
I kept trying to figure out which parts of Gray’s essay, which appears on Psychology Today, to excerpt. But it was so good, I only edited out a little bit, and added the boldface. The whole essay is here.
DECLINING STUDENT RESILIENCE: A SERIOUS PROBLEM FOR COLLEGES
A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services to join other faculty and administrators, at the university I’m associated with, for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.
Faculty at the meetings noted that students’ emotional fragility has become a serious problem when in comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices….Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like, “Buck up, this is college.” Does the first response simply play into and perpetuate students’ neediness and unwillingness to take responsibility? Does the second response create the possibility of serious emotional breakdown, or, who knows, maybe even suicide?
Gray goes on to quote the issues the head of counseling sees looming over the college:
• Less resilient and needy students have shaped the landscape for faculty in that they are expected to do more handholding, lower their academic standards, and not challenge students too much….
• Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need to be certain about things. For many of them, failure is seen as catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success are more important than learning and autonomous development.
• Faculty, particularly young faculty members, feel pressured to accede to student wishes lest they get low teacher ratings from their students. Students email about trivial things and expect prompt replies.
• Failure and struggle need to be normalized. Students are very uncomfortable in not being right…We have to normalize being wrong and learning from one’s errors….
• Growth is achieved by striking the right balance between support and challenge. We need to reset the balance point. We have become a “helicopter institution.”
Gray’s college is hardly the only institution worried about this. He quotes the author of a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Robin Wilson, who wrote, “Increasingly, students and their parents are asking the personnel at such institutions to be substitute parents. There is also the ever-present threat and reality of lawsuits. When a suicide occurs, or a serious mental breakdown occurs, the institution is often held responsible.”
And so, Gray concludes:
In previous posts (for example, here and here), I have described the dramatic decline, over the past few decades, in children’s opportunities to play, explore, and pursue their own interests away from adults. Among the consequences, I have argued, are well-documented increases in anxiety and depression and decreases in the sense of control of their own lives.
We have raised a generation of young people who have not been given the opportunity to learn how to solve their own problems. They have not been given the opportunity to get into trouble and find their own way out, to experience failure and realize they can survive it, to be called bad names by others and learn how to respond without adult intervention. So now, here’s what we have. Young people,18 years and older, going to college still unable or unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, still feeling that if a problem arises they need an adult to solve it.
…But I don’t blame parents, or certainly not just parents.
Parents are in some ways victims of larger forces in the society—victims of the continuous exhortations from “experts” about the dangers of letting kids be, victims of the increased power of the school system and the schooling mentality that says kids develop best when carefully guided and supervised by adults, and victims of increased legal and social sanctions for allowing kids into public spaces without adult accompaniment. We have become, unfortunately, a “helicopter society.”
If we want to prepare our kids for college—or for anything else in life!—we have to counter all these social forces. We have to give our children the freedom, which children have always enjoyed in the past, to get away from adults so they can practice being adults, that is, practice taking responsibility for themselves.
——
So now, when people ask you, “Why risk going Free-Range when you can keep your kids safe?” whip out this essay by Gray. Do we want to make our kids too safe to succeed?
If so, we’re right on target. – L.
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74 Comments
I agree with the whole article, and I particularly liked the way Dr. Gray didn’t immediately blame the students, or the profs, or the counselling departments, or even the parents, because this “security creep” is a pervasive problem in our society, wherein helicoptering is becoming “correct,” and not helicoptering can lead to trouble with the law. I mean, take the Meitiv family. The parents said, very clearly, “We like to allow Rafi and Dvora gradually more freedom as they grow and mature. We let them walk home from the park, because they can handle it. We’re trying to raise them to be competent, confident adults.” Okay, I paraphrased, but my point is, that wasn’t good enough for CPS, who made the parents agree to a “safety plan” that basically amounted to constant supervision; even seeing the kids on and off the school bus, at ten and six years old. It wasn’t goof enough for the police, who detained Rafi and Dvora at the station for several hours upon seeing them walking together without an adult again. What I’m trying to say here is, when kids are treated like incompetent babies their whole lives, why is anyone surprised when they don’t magically become adults upon arrival at university?
“We have raised a generation of young people who have not been given the opportunity to learn how to solve their own problems.”
And we’ve conditioned a generation of parents that it’s their job to eliminate any *problems* from their children’s lives or solve the problems for them. Magically at age 18, these same kids are ready for college and independence with mom and dad taking a second mortgage on their house to afford and face absurd amounts of pressure to get good grades and succeed and we parents scratch our heads when the rates of suicide and mental health issues skyrocket.
“…two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment.”
We had mice in our house rental in college…it was a stand on the kitchen table screaming event. I reported it to our landlord who suggested we adopt a cat. My roommates and I went to the SPCA and adopted Big Bertha for free, an overweight tabby who we were told was an excellent mouser. That fat cat killed so many mice…she was a legend! We still own cats and never, ever have mice.
I’m so happy to see this. I’m currently a young (still in my 20s, remember college clearly) college instructor, and I’m stunned at what students expect. Throughout my education, wifi and PowerPoint lectures were “new” and exciting. Now, students expect PowerPoint lectures to be posted online (sometimes with notes or audio recordings of the lecture!), and also expect me to be available 24/7 due to email and smartphones. The other day I had a student email me a document they were sharing with the class at 2 in the morning. For a 9 am class. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve relented and given them my phone number, because if they expect me to respond, it’s just easier to get the “ping” from the phone. We have an exam tomorrow, and I’m getting messages asking, “how important is this exam? What if I missed some lectures? What’s the average grade on these tests? Do you curve?” I don’t know how to explain to these students that they should feel lucky to have the opportunity to learn the material, and I’m happy to spend all the time needed to explain it, but they do need to do the work. I also can’t not answer, because their reviews of me influence my job security. Basically, I’m forced doing things I know aren’t the best for the students, but are their demands, because I want to continue trying to inspire students to learn. I’m working against myself, to ensure I can work for myself, to try and create educated, involved, independent adults.
Today, my day off, I’m currently on the sofa with my 17 year old cat.This guy can smell a mouse half a block away! We live in a city with a huge Big Ten University. Maybe I should rent him out.
“We have an exam tomorrow, and I’m getting messages asking, “how important is this exam? What if I missed some lectures? What’s the average grade on these tests? Do you curve?”
Auto reply: “You will find out tomorrow.”
To add on to @Opal’s comments… This same phenomenon that she describes, with respect to student “satisfaction surveys” occurs in medicine. Sadly, both outcomes are not good for the patients or students. Oftentimes, giving the patient exactly what they want is not good for them. Nurses and doctors get ‘dinged” for ridiculous reasons that have nothing to do with the care that was given. Same for professors as Opal can attest.
For some reason, there has been a big push to make medicine and education conform to a retail or service business model that does not quite fit the bill for either. Treating both patients and students as customers has a downside, that of unintended consequences.
How important is the exam?
Care to gamble on it?
Examples:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/the-problem-with-satisfied-patients/390684/
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/04/oped-patient-satisfaction-medical-care.html
Meant to add these to original comment.
Several “famous” quotes pop into my head almost immediately when I think about this topic.
“If we don’t start trusting our children, how will they ever become trustworthy?” (Rev. Shaw Moore from Footloose)
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…” (Justice Potter in “describing” hard-core pornography)
As a parent, I totally understand wanting to protect your child(ren) from anything that might cause them any sort of discomfort. But it just seems like parenting has somehow skipped the middle ground and ended up completely on the other side in a way that society doesn’t do in regards to other things — such as stalking, for example.
For who knows how long, stalking just wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t really recognized in the law enforcement community and even those who understood that a person’s behavior had obviously crossed a serious line were really unable to do anything about it. Then, during the 80s, we seemed to finally “get it”. But even now, there is a line that has been drawn. There is a difference (albeit discreet) that separates “weird” behavior from compulsive, obsessive, stalking behavior. The law understands this. The courts understand this. And oftentimes, they err on the side of the “stalker” because while the behavior is obvious, it hasn’t yet become criminal.
Last night I had a discussion with my kids that evolved into a talk about bullying. To my children, bullying is any type of behavior that hurts their feelings. That’s what the schools and our society is preaching these days and the kids are eating it up. I’m trying to teach my kids that there is a difference between “just being mean” and being a bully and last night I resorted to using the stalker analogy which they seemed to understand.
Kids can be mean. They can say hurtful things when they are upset. It doesn’t make them a bully. But when that same child systematically strikes out at the same kids, repeatedly, then we’ve crossed the line into bullying. I’ve told their teachers the same thing when they’ve called me up, or sent a note home, with the “there was an incident of bullying today” line. Sometimes my kids were the target, sometimes they were the aggressor. But each time I always asked if this has been ongoing with the same group of kids and the answer is always “no”, to which I respond: “then it wasn’t bullying”.
Were my kid’s feelings hurt? Sure, but give it an hour and he’ll forget all about it. Will they be playing together on the playground tomorrow? I can guarantee it. But don’t slap a bully label on someone because it’s easier then dealing with it.
If kids can’t learn how to deal with crap when they’re 5, 6, 7, 8…then they will never survive in the adult world. At least adults (for the most part) have learned that there is a filter that separates their brain from their mouth. Kids don’t have that filter yet.
I enrolled in two Saturday classes at Community College Fall Semester 2013. The Instructor in the morning class spoke with a heavy accent, was not available during the week due to her first job and gave exams so hard that missing half the questions became a tool with wich she weeded students out of her class. 60 people started in August and 20 finished the course in December. I earned an A. I did not evaluate her because there wasn’t anything positive to say.
In the afternoon class, 80 students started. After a demanding Semester of papers, a formal debate with Q&A, essay exams and a culminating Research Paper/Oral Presentation, I kicked butt on the Final and earned an A. 20 classmates finished the course. We collaborated on the Instructor’s evaluation and gave her a solid B because even the students who had earned C’s recognized they had learned a lot.
I was surprised at how many of my classmates dropped the two courses. They quit so soon that they didn’t give themselves a chance to “come back” after getting a low grade. Everything was based on points so if you busted your butt after doing poorly on a test you could have gotten a B or C in either class . A small amount of extra credit was offered as well. Unfortunately the students choose to give up.
Opal, a bit off topic, but do a search for “Jeff Bezos and the End of PowerPoint..” I read the article on Forbes, I believe. Basically, it advocated that you DON’T use powerpoint to dump information, because our brains don’t work that way.
One of my favorite college professors had all the FAQ’s in his course syllabus, handed out on the first day. “Do you curve?” Answer: Check the syllabus. “How important is this test?” Answer, I cannot answer that question objectively because I believe all the tests are important. The number of points each test is worth is listed in the syllabus, and you may decide for yourself how important each test is to your overall grade.
Good luck. Personally, I’d go with the tough stance on students, but I’m 20+ years away from college, and didn’t hang out with the whiney students anyways.
College isn’t High School, Middle School, or Elementary. It’s COLLEGE, you pay your tuition, you either attend class or you don’t. No one is forcing you to go, but if you suffer because of your actions, you pay for it…on your own. Just like the real world. That’s what I’ve always known college to be, a precursor to real life. So technically, parents should be teaching their children how to live their lives after high school. Not shelter them till College, then cut the cord. That’s like pulling your kid up a mountain in harness (no work on their part), then at some point you tell them to hold on to the side of the mountain, and cut the rope. Yelling, now climb up the rest of the way.
Some adults are just too stupid to realize much in life.
“My roommate called me a Bitch!”. Years ago that complaint would be answered with a “Well are you?”.
Personally, the best thing these schools can do for their students when they call up and claim they can’t handle life……….tell them they are adults with the freedom to choose between staying and dealing with it themselves, or go home and cry to their parents. Stop treating them with kid gloves, and start kicking them in the butt. Obviously their parents didn’t.
I started browsing the comments on the Psychology Today section. The majority seemed to more or less agree with Gray, but there were still a surprising number of people talking about how hard it is for kids today even in college and we just don’t understand and they suffer so much and they’re such precious snowflakes…
Opal. Don’t be afraid to go with having them tough it out. It will prepare them for the real world. I think there will be some bad reviews but those will be out weighed by the good ones that appreciate your stance. Make a strong syllabus and make a sheet explaining your teaching philosophy. Have specific office hours and be available to help with the content and let them know your turn around time on emails. Encourage study groups. But let them know that real jobs will make you uncertain at times and they need to know how to manage that feeling. Good luck you are in a tough position.
The Army has resiliency training and it’s actually pretty good. Maybe instead of all the goofy stuff they do at Freshman orientation they should do something like that.
“””My roommate called me a Bitch!”. Years ago that complaint would be answered with a “Well are you?”. “”
I often find the question to deserve an affirmative answer. I teach in the early elementary, and the vast majority of the incidents where a kid comes crying about what so-n-so did, it’s because Kid A rather deserved it.
I once looked at a parenting forum (I know, I know, I shouldn’t go to such things) where a mother said she never expressed her feelings to her kid and discourage friends and family from doing the same. She claimed she didn’t want her kid to grow up basing his actions on the feelings of others. Well, I figured that kid would eventually be in for a world of hurt when he discovered people outside his immediate circle were getting upset over his actions.
I saw this article a few days ago and wondered if Lenore would cover it.
Of course I agree with every word and, working as I do in a secondary school I’m convinced the problem is still getting worse. When I see how helpless many of the kids we teach are, and how little we do to rectify this, it makes me shudder to think that kids like these will be the politicians and scientists and business leaders of the future.
That’s why the Free Range Kids movement is so vital. it’s not just about giving kids more independence, important though that is. it’s about the future of our society, which if this overprotective nonsense continues is headed towards the abyss.
I just saw this:
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2015/09/28/student-parent-coalition-wants-penn-to-get-serious-about-mental-health-issues/
So 100% of students at the University of Pennsylvania face mental health issues and most deal with “severe anxiety” at colleges across America.
College sounds more like a mental institution.
And then you have articles like this:
http://mom.me/blog/23117-our-parents-didnt-parent-better-just-less/
Is it any surprise?
I think the helicoptering problem is a failure to adapt, or even think about, the consequences of the declining family sizes which are necessary if we’re going have a sustainable human population. Of course, this isn’t talked about because it would “infringe freedom” to have a population policy, and decreasing family size is happening (mostly) for perverse economic reasons, but the effect is the same, and if there were to be a population policy it would need to deal with the problem. Declining family size means that all the effort that traditionally went into raising a family of 4-16 kids is now directed at 1-2. Not only is that a lot more parental attention/child, but the family doesn’t provide a “play group” of siblings to free-range around, and the social situation where kids are with other kids are the regimented age-segregated school classes, where control has been traditional, and where there’s minimal diversity among the kids in terms of age and experiences. One solution to this is the Sudbury Valley model school, where kids from many families come together in uncoerced democratic groups – http://sudval.org/ – colleges never have any trouble with Sudbury Valley kids!
“Opal, a bit off topic, but do a search for “Jeff Bezos and the End of PowerPoint..” I read the article on Forbes, I believe. Basically, it advocated that you DON’T use powerpoint to dump information, because our brains don’t work that way.”
Thank goodness someone prominent has finally noticed and said something. I always thought PowerPoint was, well, pointless. And mindless.
How often have you heard parents say they would do “anything” for their children? They should, in fact, opt more often for doing nothing in certain situations.
I was at a dinner party this weekend and a dear friend of mine, who is what I would consider a helicopter mother (she once called the police when her high school aged, 6 foot 5 inch son got some prank calls from another kid), was discussing how she was going to fly the family dog halfway across the country over the very short Thanksgiving holiday so that her daughter, who is a freshman at a school back east, could get a chance to see the dog. Her daughter had complained that she missed the dog. Seriously. It was all I could do to not scream, “she’ll see the G-D dog at Christmas! Leave the poor dog alone!”
I don’t know of one kid who has gone off to college who hasn’t complained about missing the family pets (my own son included). They survive. Just because you have the means to solve this “problem” doesn’t mean you should.
There was an article in a military publication about a year ago with boot camp instuctors voicing the same concerns about their young “enlistees.” The young men were unable to take and follow orders, or to carry out an assignment independently. This doesn’t bode well for our country’s future.
BL, PowerPoint hate is not new. Just Google “hate powerpoint 2005” and see how much decade-old stuff comes up. One can only hope the word keeps spreading.
I work for a graduate school and we definitely see this. We’ve lost at least 2 students to suicide in recent years and put a halt to one potential suicide. They just don’t know how to handle the pressure because they haven’t experienced, even at this level. And there’s so much pressure to succeed.
The article said about college:
“We have become a “helicopter institution.”
—————————————————–
That’s sugar coating the problem.
What this article really means is that spoiled brats whose parents allowed and fostered this kind of behavior at home continue to act that way.
————
Opal (the young teacher) said:
“… I also can’t not answer, because their reviews of me influence my job security.”
(How many people have a secure job for life?)
Your belief means you will jump through all the hoops that students tell you to jump through, or you will change your beliefs about what being a teacher means. And something else you should consider: “Nothing” you do can prevent spiteful students from giving you low ratings as a teacher.
————
Regarding this part of the article:
” Rates of anxiety and depression among American college students have soared in the last decade, and many more students than in the past come to campus already on medication for such illnesses. The number of students with suicidal thoughts has risen as well.”
———-
Yes!
This is The Big Difference from when I was a kid.
Today, normal ups and downs of everyday life are called disorders. Everyone is taking dangerous drugs. The increase in suicidal thoughts is largely due to the medications themselves. All you have to do is look at the so-called side effects of these drugs, and you’ll see suicidal ideation. The drugs also can CAUSE anxiety, aggression, violence, and all sorts of emotional instability.
Antidepressants can CAUSE depression and worsening depression. This information has been known for years. It is also an area where schools and colleges are part of the problem. They allow all this drug taking.
Most of today’s illegal drugs were once believed to be safe and sold legally back in the day. Heroin used to be in children’s cough syrup and was supposedly not addictive.
Parents are still the last line of defense against helicopter society.
“Most of today’s illegal drugs were once believed to be safe and sold legally back in the day. Heroin used to be in children’s cough syrup and was supposedly not addictive.”
I suppose everyone knows what the “Coca” in Coca-Cola originally stood for.
Cocaine.
Maybe what college students need these days is a good pep talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7vtWB4owdE
We made a conscious decision years ago never to fight our kids’ battles at school. How could we? We’re never there when whatever incident happens. When asked to help with a situation, I’ve told my kids that if it’s important enough to them, they need to figure out how to deal with it. That may mean meeting with a teacher, or in one instance, asking the vice-principal how to handle a chronic bully (credit to the V.P. – he said punch him in the nose or kick him in the ba..s.). A teacher erroneously accused my son of cheating. So my son set a meeting with the teach, they discussed what the teacher saw and misunderstood, and the teacher let him take the test. The teacher believed him and respected that he handled the situation himself. He told me it was always the parents.
We put our kids in grave danger later in life when we don’t let them handle things when they’re young. What will they do when they go to college and have a wreck, or blow a class, etc? They have to learn to deal with things.
Brooks – I completely agree.
I also stopped making my sons’ doctor, dentist, orthodontist and haircut appointments when they got old enough to drive and have some control over their own schedules. My older son was fine with it – younger son balked until his hair got into his eyes and he finally made his own appointment and he’s been doing that ever since. I have friends who are still making their kid’s appointments and those “kids” are in their twenties! Enough already!
If they have cell phones they can keep track of their schedules and set reminders for themselves. It’s amazing what they are capable of if we just get out of the way.
I teach at a state college, and while there is some truth to this, I think the concerns are overblown. While I do occasionally run into students who feel entitled to hand-holding and A’s, this is not the norm. I suspect more students are seeking counseling in part because counseling has been destigmatized, which is a good thing.
College has long been a difficult time for people, and older adults have been complaining about the laziness and incompetence of the young forever. I’m all for promoting independence, and I do so with my children and my students. But the view that large numbers of college students are incompetent because of helicoptering is fear mongering that does everyone a disservice. I was certainly not a paragon of competence and hard work when I went to college over 30 years ago. Nor were many of my friends. I managed, grew up, and did well in the long run, as did most people I knew.
Well my brother in law is officially in the major dog house with his wife. They dropped my nephew off at university the weekend before the Labor Day weekend. And mom has brought him home every Friday since, except this last one. That is because Dad said enough is enough, he is not coming home every weekend, he needs to get a life up there. So now mom is not talking to him, is severely pissed off, and telling everyone what an uncaring dad he is.
Proud of him, he is not caving into the pressure.
It isn’t just colleges that are becoming “helicopter institutions.” I’ve spoken with a few of my friends who work for “helicopter organizations” in the so-called Real World (hospital, engineering firm, physical therapy office). New employees just out of college are coddled by the organization and more senior employees end up covering for or doing the work of the new, inexperienced employees. The senior employees do this in order to avoid complaining about the junior employees who are considered the up-and-coming future superstars of the company by the people who hired them. The hirers don’t want to admit they’ve hired duds, so the blame of poor performance lies with the senior employees who should have trained the juniors better. It’s a vicious cycle with young people not taking responsibility for their actions. Has anyone else experienced this?
Oh, and I don’t find anything wrong with the question “How important is this exam?” If someone is giving a presentation or completing a task at work, they need to know how important the presentation or task is and how it fits into the big picture. This helps them decide how much time to spend on it in comparison to other things. It’d be nice if all my students worked extremely hard for all their exams. But realistically I know they have to prioritize time just like everyone else. Most of my students are working long hours to pay for college. They have jobs, relationships, and even children in some cases. Asking how important an exam is strikes me as seeking information that they need to prioritize their study time and balance it with the other important things in their lives.
When I was in graduate school many years ago, I was a teaching assistant for a large class in my field. The professor would assign papers on Monday–without prior notice–and make them due Wednesday. I had students come to me in tears, explaining that they were working double shifts tonight and tomorrow, and they literally had no time to complete the work. Or that they were single parents and needed child care in order to complete the work–which in that day required time at the library–and they could not make arrangements for it on such short notice. The professor thought he was teaching the “kids” (his term, though they were of legal age) to grow up and stop whining. I always thought that he was treating them as if they were still young children with no other responsibilities or obligations. Treating college students as adults requires holding them responsible for their actions. But it also requires the understanding that they have the responsibilities and rights of adults, and that treating people with respect goes a long way toward encouraging responsible, adult behavior.
Husband is a security officer. His company is nothing fancy, the lower jobs really not all that much–as in, drive around in a car checking out certain things more or less on your own time, or hang out at an assigned place checking it out. Hardly rocket science.
Apparently many people don’t make it through training because it’s “too much” for them.
Terri,
Or maybe as adults they should not have bitten off more than they can chew.
A lot of us, on a regular basis, take work home, put in overtime or have to go in at all hours of the day and night. Instead of complaining about it, we adapt and overcome. I cannot count on the number of times I would call home to say I was working overtime, with no reasonable idea of what time I would be home. Yes it was great money, but in college you get paid in grades. No difference, it is called life, and you do it.
“And mom has brought him home every Friday since, except this last one. That is because Dad said enough is enough, he is not coming home every weekend, he needs to get a life up there.”
The only people I remember in college wanting to go home weekends had a boyfriend or girlfriend back home. Nobody else I can recall, certainly not me. And I wasn’t a party-til-I’m-falling-over-drunk type, either. Some were.
A person who is unusually afraid of doing something wrong, unusually afraid of failing, will not tolerate opposing views or be curious about learning about their own or others views.
It is unfortunate that many people will not question their first understanding of something. It seams to attack their sense of self-worth. “I’m not that stupid” they think, to have believed something which was wrong.
This is much worse when a child is raised without challenge. He will not tolerate any question to his current belief. He is perfect just as he is.
Ironically, a person who accepts his own fallabilitiy becomes much more aware and accumulates more knowledge, even about how he was previously fooled. He becomes more careful about following theory over a cliff or directing others to jump off.
This is why many educated people are disasters when confronting reality. Motto: That is what they taught me at Harvard. I had no idea that the result could be bad.
I am sending this article to my husband – not for our children, but for his dealings with his Millenial employees. He is a Gen X’er married to a Millenial and still he struggles to manage, train and create structure with his seasonal staff. And his struggles mirror the problems listed in this article – employees unable to take the constructive criticism necessary for job performance improvement, an inability to cope with routine disappointment and heaps of authority issues. Today’s youth aren’t rising to the challenges of the real world, they are demanding the world coddle them just like their parents did.
(How many people have a secure job for life?)
I wouldn’t know, but not the vast majority of newly hired professors anymore. Schools are moving away from full-time faculty and towards adjuncts, and even most of the full-timers they hire aren’t tenure-track anymore. The purpose of tenure was to prevent exactly what we’re seeing now – overly sensitive students complaining that everything they don’t like is offensive or triggering, and faculty therefore being afraid to present anything controversial in class. So now faculty are on the defensive.
Anyway, I too am a newish faculty member. I’ve recently been assigned, for the first time, a freshman class. It appears that the freshman curriculum is now almost entirely remedial. The students already have well-developed bags of tricks, though. I assigned a project 2 weeks ago due today. Students sent emails on Friday evening that said things like “I don’t understand this project.” That way, there’s no good solution other than meeting with them, which I can’t do prior to the project being due, and they can then complain, after getting a bad grade on it, that I didn’t provide assistance as needed.
I think a rather big problem at the college level is that, as part of our helicoptering mentality, we’ve developed the idea of “a single launching path.” Meaning – we expect a far greater percentage of HS graduates to go to college than did in the past. In the past, college was for those who wanted to spend 4 years in deep thought prior to entering the business world. It was a privilege, was relatively cheap, and you lived poor. Now tuition is sky-high, most are there because they’ve heard you can make more money with a college degree or because their parents said “of course you’re going to college,” and they look at it as a 4 year vacation, paid for by their parents, with the irritating interruption of having to go to class. The exception to this are my older, returning students, who actually have things they want to learn and a reason to be there.
One way this has changed things is that, while we always knew HS teachers needed to first get the students wondering about things before giving them answers, professors have long been able to get away with lecture and the like, because college had a self-selecting quality – people were there because they were curious and wanted to learn. Now, it’s much more like teaching HS (I taught HS for 7 years). After teaching how to factor quadratics, then the quadratic formula, I showed the class how to use a calculator to find the roots of a quadratic, provoking an angry response from one student about why I’d bothered them to learn the first 2 concepts if you can get the right answer from a calculator. I devoted the rest of the class to explaining that what matters is understanding, now the “right answer,” and that their use of these concepts will primarily rest on things like seeing the connection between roots and factors, and the mindset that’s instilled. I don’t think it made much of an impression, primarily because they just aren’t curious to begin with. Another takeaway: I’m teaching the quadratic equation to college students.
@Warren: If a boss who was paying his people to be there, or at any rate part of a business that was paying them all, had pulled something like that, you can darn well bet that people would be up in arms. Rearrange the next 72 hours of my life, not just the hours I have to spend in your presence but ALL THE OTHER WAKING HOURS I HAVE, on about two hours’ notice, because you decided to create an artificial emergency? And you’re paying me how much? Adults who have any choice at all will apply a metaphorical lever to the boss who is being a high-handed reality-divergent obstruction to business. They tell HR, they tell the boss’s boss, they unionize. Why should people who are paying good money to go to college put up with a high-handed reality-divergent obstruction to the business of learning–in the name of learning how to adult?
Writing a college-level paper in 72 hours completely from scratch?! WHAT.
Also, @Warren: Your employer is screwing you over. If you’re self-employed, you’re screwing yourself over. Rethink your approach to work before you go down with pneumonia or a heart attack.
@Warren It would be great if people never had to bite off more than they could chew. But I’m not sure that’s always possible. If you can’t afford college without working full time, I think it’s commendable that you try to do both instead of simply giving up on college. If you have a family and want to go back to school to improve yourself or your job prospects, that seems to me to be a good thing. It is possible to value something and work at it without it being the sole priority in your life.
“The purpose of tenure was to prevent exactly what we’re seeing now — overly sensitive students complaining that everything they don’t like is offensive or triggering, and faculty therefore being afraid to present anything controversial in class.”
I disagree entirely. Tenure isn’t, and never has been, about protecting the faculty from students. Tenure is about protecting faculty from people who have power, and students are still effectively powerless. Tenure isn’t about teaching at all… it’s about research (the real business of a university). Tenure guarantees that researchers can publish their findings without having to fear retribution from powerful forces outside the university (think Galileo here.) Tenure is about ensuring that the research follows truth (or, if you insist, Truth). . Tenure says “listen, if your research causes you to discover and report facts that anger powerful people, the rest of the university stands with you.” People who teach, and only teach (i.e., adjuncts) should not have tenure, because they don’t have any research to protect. This is why tenure is primarily a university thing, and is almost unheard-of in community education and vocational education.
” In the past, college was for those who wanted to spend 4 years in deep thought prior to entering the business world.”
Depends on what and where you were studying. This probably isn’t a good place for a debate on liberal arts education vs. practical education vs. career education.
“Another takeaway: I’m teaching the quadratic equation to college students.”
I didn’t take it, but I’m pretty sure the quadratic equation was in MTH 110 when I was in college, in the 80’s. First term differential calculus was MTH 200 then, and it’s 251 now. My university required 1, 100-level or higher math class (except statistics) for a Bachelor’s degree. I took MTH 200 my first term, found that it didn’t suit my non-homework-doing preferences, and graduated with one math class. I went back and took another year of calculus later, after A) I’d already earned a couple of degrees, and B) I learned the value of homework.
“There was an article in a military publication about a year ago with boot camp instuctors voicing the same concerns about their young “enlistees.” The young men were unable to take and follow orders, or to carry out an assignment independently. This doesn’t bode well for our country’s future.”
Yeah, but you could get that same feedback from DIs 21 years ago, 41 years ago, 101 years ago, and 2001 years ago.
Opal, having the lecture recorded online can be useful for two reasons, both of which have helped me out at college:
1. It enables more students to do the subject by evading timetable clashes. (Allowed me to do a subject in first year where there were two lectures overlapping.)
2. If a lecture that’s your only class for the day, is available online, it means you can work in paid employment on that day and watch the lecture later. This has helped me out enormously as I am working to put myself through college, so having flexibility with the recorded class means I work on that day – and I always watch the recorded lecture before the next lesson.
However, I do get how it can become annoying with students telling teachers (and themselves) “I’ll skip the lecture and watch it later” then never actually watching it and turning up to the next tutorial unprepared, wasting time by asking the teacher and/or other students constant questions about things covered in the lecture.
Also most of my lecturers/tutors now have a policy where there is a cut-off time (e.g. noon the day, or two days, before the lecture or tutorial where an exam or assignment is due) before which you must email them any questions. Some even put this deadline in the subject outline!
@Opal If you go out of your way to fulfill arbitrary demands, people will make arbitrary demands. I have seen that happen with fully grown and old customers and bosses. This is how unnecessary crunches and overwork happen – people forgot or were not taught how to respectfully keep boundaries and they end up coding exhausted 80 hours a week (while producing crap cause they are too tired).
I do not think snarky answers some suggested would help, but a simple “I do not answer mails after 7:00 in the evening” rule should. Even if you need to answer, you do not need to answer each one individually. Sent one bulk mail to all with answers to frequently asked questions – and explain in the end that consultations through mail are ineffective, so they are all welcome at your office during office hours. Better yet, make office hours for students mails and do not answer them outside of those hours – they can sent them wherever they want, you do not need to answer the instantly. It is mail, it stay on server until it is read.
Unlike others, “how important is this exam? What if I missed some lectures? What’s the average grade on these tests? Do you curve?” are all meaningful questions. It makes sense to answer them in advance when you announce exam. It makes zero sense to answer them individually to each student a night before the exam.
While everyone focuses on student demands, bosses and customers (students are customers!) are pretty much the same – and people are taught to think the only acceptable response is always “yes”. However, at least in my experience, fear of repercussions is higher then actual negative response when you try to do it. Learning to say no in a respectful way is an important skill :).
I do not think all other teachers at school gave their students phones. I doubt so, so while yes it is students who are wrong in their expectations, you need to learn how not to let yourself to be abused. Again, I do not mean to be all snarky and super tough, those suggestions are naive.
In a way, it is funny how many peoples response to students essentially is “real life work will teach you not to discuss and obey” while not seeing that students are in position of customers in a lot of ways. They are the other side of coin of that equation as colleges are treated as business services more and more. It is the teachers who expect themselves “not to discuss and obey” and the students are the ones paying a lot of money.
@Reader @Open I found out I can learn much better from video recorded lecture then live one. Video can be stopped when I am loosing attention, so I get to walk around or get coffee until I am able to fully concentrate again. It can be speed up over slow parts and can be re-watched when I do not understand something. It usually took me hour and half to watch an hour of video, but I was remembering most of it afterwards and could use notes as a refresher only. When I was attending real one, I learned primary from (own) notes.
What should a girl do if a boy asks her for a date? Call mom for advice?
“I found out I can learn much better from video recorded lecture then live one. Video can be stopped when I am loosing attention, so I get to walk around or get coffee until I am able to fully concentrate again.”
I remember something even better called “reading assignments” where one could even backtrack and reread if something wasn’t immediately clear.
This, of course, assumed students could read, which is no longer a safe assumption, apparently.
@BL I was told that recording lecture is less work then putting content into writing. It is also cheaper for students, as it does not force them to buy another expensive book just cause five relevant pages. And no, library usually do not have enough copies of everything available and it is open only for limited time (e.g. cant study in the evening).
Otherwise said, if you want “reading assignment”, the reading material teaching exactly what you want them to learn must be a.) created by someone b.) reasonably priced.
BL – You’ve hit on the ‘danger’ of seminar-style classes. When I was assigned, last year, a senior seminar class, I naively assumed I could give reading assignments, then discuss the ideas and their implications in class. It very quickly became apparent that students react to reading assignments with “cool, no homework” and then expect me to recite the information in class.
James – yes, that’s a good point, although I’d say it protected their teaching and their research both. After all, engaging in research gives the professor more to talk about in the classroom, and if their research findings are controversial, their teaching might be as well. It’s true that the students were less powerful than the professor in the past, but today, walk into a faculty lounge full of untenured or non-TT professors and ask who has the power. A single complaint is enough for the university to find us not worth the hassle. With the tenure system, you didn’t need to figure out who the faculty were protected from; it was all-purpose protection.
I agree that adjuncts and other teaching-only faculty should not have tenure – my stance is that colleges should stop hollowing out their full-faculty ranks and replacing them with adjuncts. After all, if you pay $3000 for a class, you’ll get about $3000 worth of work out of the teacher. Yet students are paying the same tuition they would for any other class. Adjuncts don’t have research expectations, and the “full-time adjunct” who drives from school to school to make a living certainly doesn’t have time for research. At some schools, adjuncts aren’t required to hold office hours except by appointment. They certainly don’t tend to be “just around” when you need help, since many aren’t even given office space. They’re not fully recognized as part of the university community, and as a result, are less engaged. All of this means that what they do in the classroom is lessened. At the college level, you can’t be a great teacher, in my opinion, without engaging in research. The non-researcher looks at the material and teaches it; the researcher is engaged with the material outside the classroom, spends a lot of time thinking about it, and is prepared and enthusiastic to discuss it differently. Their classes contain their own ideas, either already developed in a paper or new ideas to go over with students.
“At the college level, you can’t be a great teacher, in my opinion, without engaging in research.”
This is a simplistic, shortsighted, and flat-out wrong view..
“The non-researcher looks at the material and teaches it; the researcher is engaged with the material outside the classroom, spends a lot of time thinking about it, and is prepared and enthusiastic to discuss it differently”
Adjuncts are selected from people who are applying the subject matter daily in their primary careers. When you hire the guy who works as a network administrator to teach a class on network administration, you’re getting a guy who is “engaged with the material outside the classroom”… this is someone who is more engaged with the material than some ivory-tower academic! You get someone who spends a lot of time thinking about network administration. You get someone who is prepared and enthusiastic about real-world application of the subject matter of the class.
The best math teacher I ever had was a professional engineer by trade who taught calculus on Saturday mornings at the local community college because he wanted to, not because he was paid to do it.
Quote:
“Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.”
Excuse me for laughing but this is absolutely hilarious!!
Jenny,
You may have a position that you can do your 8 hours and walk away, but I don’t, and I know many people that do not have that luxury.
Myself and people I know have jobs that have direct effects not only on our company’s income, but our customer’s lose can lose big money, and their employees can lose wages should we decide not to work the overtime. Hell their are customers that lose thousands of dollars per hour because pieces of equipment are down.
On the commercial truck and trailer side of the business, if we don’t work the overtime, the truck cannot go out, the load doesn’t get delivered, and that driver loses a day or more of pay.
Maybe you would be okay going home at 5 pm, pouring a glass of wine and not caring about people losing money, but that is not how I and my coworkers are wired.
@James Pollock Overwhelming majority of adjuncts do not have another career. All the money they have come from teaching.
Network administrators do not tend to teach as adjuncts, they would not even had a time for that. Network administration is not something you learn in college course and conversely a degree is not required to work as network administrator. With the exception of some, few, background theories, administration is just poor fit for college model. Besides, network administrators as a group are not exactly known for being good at explaining things – what they do daily and what beginner needs to hear are two things extremly far from each other.
Respectfully, Andy, you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about, start to finish.
James,
“Respectfully, Andy, you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about, start to finish.”
Is this your attempt at humor? As I have never seen you be respectful of anyone in here. Then again, your idea of reality is far from everyone’s.
Warren: Do you have a life? If you can comment on all these things, you must not.
While I know nothing about network administration, and so can’t comment on that, I will say James has accurately summed up what adjuncts are supposed to be, and once (primarily) were. That model still persists in many fields, in particular in professional schools. I think it is fantastic when the practicing ______ wants to come in for a night class and share the knowledge they gain in the field, although I also note that it is a different sort of knowledge than that gained through research. I don’t love, for instance, the move to “practice-based learning” in business schools – I prefer the model where MBA students largely have experience, and come to school precisely to gain theory and ideas, not to hear war stories. However, it makes perfect sense to me for an engineer to come teach an engineering class. I know some people who chose a night law program because they wanted more adjuncts (read: practicing attorneys) teaching their classes.
What has happened, though, is an explosion of graduate degrees, together with universities deciding to hire less TT or even full time professors, and fill in the blanks with adjuncts. Many adjuncts are now “freeway fliers” driving to 2 or 3 schools each day, teaching 1 or 2 classes at each, and making a living that way. This is not what adjuncting was designed for, but it is becoming more and more the norm. At my alma mater, a highly ranked state school, there was one adjunct in the department at the time I attended, and he fit the ‘traditional’ model. There were also a few non-TT lecturers, who had some special expertise, such as math education, but not a PhD. On a recent visit, I saw that half the faculty is now either non-TT lecturers or adjuncts, and that most of the adjuncts teach 3 classes per semester.
When I went to graduate school, there were large numbers of non-TT “professor in residence” and similar positions, all of whom had research and service expectations. There was also a large cadre of adjuncts, all of them teaching full-time, either there or, more commonly, by combining adjunct gigs.
At the school where I teach now, the majority of service and intro classes are taught by adjuncts. Again, these are not night classes taught by a professional who wants to give back to their field; they are taught by adjuncts who quickly hop in their cars after teaching an 8-9:30, race to another school for their 11-12:30, etc.
My father happens to be the type of adjunct James described – he ran a successful practice for many years, semi-retired to work as a fill-in OD, and combined that with a clinical adjunct position at the school he graduated from. I understand the model you’re describing, and it’s great. Today’s adjunct is, by and large, nothing of that sort though, is not up on the research, is not engaged with the material outside the classroom (because most of their time outside the classroom is spent driving and sleeping), is not available for office hours, etc.
I would question an adjunct, even the tradition sort, teaching something like a senior seminar, or other research-based class, unless their work outside the university involves staying abreast of current research, or they’re retired and can devote the time, unpaid, to stay up to date and bring fresh research into class. I still stand by my claim that, outside of service classes and clinical classes, research brings something to the table that is part of the “great teacher” picture.
Anyway, back on topic – a student who is guided and sheltered throughout high school cannot simply jump into what we expect from a college student. Instead, freshman year becomes a remedial exercise in living (and academics.) The student whose hand was held through senior year doesn’t suddenly start managing their time well, or staying abreast of assignments, because of college magic.
@puzzled Network administration is something that can be self-taught and more importantly requires continuous self learning through career. Most administrators I know started to learn during high school or even before that: fixing parents computers, learning linux as a hobby, becoming member of some online community etc. It is kind of like art that way – if you are 18 at college and do not know basics yet, chances school will teach you are low.
Or maybe more like being good carpenter or plumber – both professions that require to learn a lot specific knowledge, but not really the things colleges really excel at teaching.
It absolutely makes sense for college to have basic courses on command line, scripting, routers, plus basic concepts so the students understand what is written in manuals. It can start put those with aptitude and interest on the right path. But, you get very little benefit from moonlighting administrator teaching that. Plus, if you mean it seriously with wanting to do network administration, you need to get into those self-learning habits as soon as possible – and you need to spend a lot more time with it then what would college class allowed.
I do not mean it as a criticism of college or structured learning. I am fan of both. It is just that it is not necessary to force everything into that model and network administration is still one of those rare things that can work out for you without having to pay for the whole general purpose well rounded expensive degree.
“Network administration is something that can be self-taught and more importantly requires continuous self learning”
These are true. Somewhere between there and “With the exception of some, few, background theories, administration is just poor fit for college model.” is where you went off the rails.
That, and I suspect you’re mixing different subjects up. “Fixing parents computers” and “Learning Linux as a hobby”… these are not network administration. They are, respectively, “help desk” and “a hobby”. Cisco adapted the Cisco Network Academy to HS, but it was designed for colleges to implement.
I’m sure one could very easily link this trend with the trend in school shootings.
45 school shootings in 2015 so far….
https://slack-imgs.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FCQQUVoZWcAAJ0le.png&width=462&height=713
I can’t believe this, but there’s a first time for everything, I’ve heard. I have to say that I agree with James. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Andy doesn’t know what he’s talking about at all. I’ll just say that he is guilty of thinking that his experience is universal.
My wife is an adjunct instructor at a local CC. This CC has both academic and workforce programs. In the academic programs you will find the expected math, science, history, language, etc. The workforce side includes fields as diverse as phlebotomy, air conditioner repair, auto mechanics, web development, and yes, network administration. The web dev and network courses are taught almost exclusively by adjuncts who are currently practicing their subjects in their “day jobs”.
I think the adjuncts at this particular CC got a raise this year due to some legal changes, $2000 for a semester course, up from $1000. No benefits, and they’re prohibited from teaching more than three courses per year — that’s not three per semester; it’s one in the fall and two in the spring, or vice versa. The reason is that if they taught any more, they would have to be given full benefits, even though a large chunk of them just want the teaching pay and already have benefits from another job.
@James I did not wrote linux and fixing computer is how you learn everything. I wrote it is how you *start*.
Besides, playing around linux does teach you quite important things: command line, scripting, tools, basics of network configuration and so on. If you are not fluent with command line and scripting, there is a hard stop on what a single college course can teach you.
All network administrator I know knew the above by the time they finished high school. We had network administration course too. It was a good difficult one, assumed we already know scripting and it still did could teach us more then tenth of what virtually all future network administrator already learned from their hobby linux.
Cisco academy has reputation of producing people who have hard time to expand beyond what exactly they have been taught.
@GoogleMaster Note that I placed administration right there with plumbing (air conditioner repair).
Google the rise of adjunct faculty. If that trend went around your school, great. Colleges rely on adjuncts more and more and increasing amount of is having full time load of teaching.
“I did not wrote linux and fixing computer is how you learn everything. I wrote it is how you *start*.”
It’s A way to start. There’s lots of others.
“Besides, playing around linux does teach you quite important things: command line, scripting, tools, basics of network configuration and so on.”
It may or may not teach any of these things. And any of those things can be learned without learning Linux.
“If you are not fluent with command line and scripting, there is a hard stop on what a single college course can teach you.”
Network administration is a program, not a class. (well, back in ’98 we only had one networking class, because we only had a diploma program in computer technology, and not a degree. It covered everything: network hardware, protocols, terminology, and NetWare administration. In 5 weeks.)
“All network administrator I know knew the above by the time they finished high school.”
Meet more network administrators.
“We had network administration course too.”
Good for we.
“It was a good difficult one, assumed we already know scripting and it still did could teach us more then tenth of what virtually all future network administrator already learned from their hobby linux.”
Some of us learned network administration before Linux was a thing. Some of us were teaching network administration before Linux was a thing.
Some people who are self-taught network administrators are very good at what they do. Some are really, really bad at what they do. You seem to be working from a subset.
A couple of questions for Andy:
1. Without looking them up, can you name and explain the seven layers of the OSI model?
2. Is English your first language?
“A couple of questions for Andy:
2. Is English your first language?”
He SAID network administrators weren’t known for their ability to explain things (true enough… you’d want to check that out before you hired one to be an adjunct instructor)
“1. Without looking them up, can you name and explain the seven layers of the OSI model?”
Ugh. You had to pick the ONE thing that academics go on and on about that has little relevance to the real world. The TCP/IP model is far more relevant, and is easier to remember with only 4 layers besides.
Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Bashful, Grumpy, Happy, and Doc. Grumpy is further split into two sub-layers, the LLC and the MAC. The Mac sub-layer is where industrial design and a 50% markup are substituted for raw computing power. The LLC is where lawyers get involved.
You know you’ve got a real old-time IT hand on the line when they identify the seven dwarfs as Burroughs, Sperry, NCR, CDC, Honeywell, GE, and RCA.
.
We’ve all seen this coming for a long time….
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