Students. Who ARE these people?! (Or: On the generation gap)

Several faculty who attended Hofstra’s 75th anniversary celebration stated that they thought the cultural difference between students and faculty was bigger now than it had ever been in their experience.

Some of my staff love to remind me that “kids are crazy” has long been a cry of every older generation.

Somewhere in between these two points is the truth. There are always generation gaps; but some generations are certainly gappier than others.

I’ve talked to faculty who are frustrated that students don’t see the value of their topic, don’t know how to interact with each other or the teacher, don’t have sufficient basic knowledge to progress to more advanced work. These are all conversations that I also had with faculty twenty years ago.

What might be different is that some faculty get sidetracked into blaming technology, or students’ use of technology. “Students don’t pay attention, don’t follow directions, aren’t honest with the professor, can’t grasp the fundamentals of what’s being presented,” some faculty say. “So I force them not to text or Facebook.”

I can’t be the only one who sees the disconnect here.

Don’t let your students sidetrack you into a discussion about communication technology. If they rely on it every minute of the day like breathing and you don’t, chalk that up to cultural differences and move past it. What’s really the issue?

Too often I think we as faculty have a tough time separating what we want students to do from how we want them to do it. To draw on my old experience teaching composition (and it is old – I haven’t done it for ten years, so forgive me), we want them to write a lucid essay, yes. But we want them to write it in drafts, too, and we want them to write it on their own time outside of class, and we want them to be able to talk about it productively in class, and we want it laser-printed on one side of white paper with double spacing, and we want it to incorporate research material that is correctly quoted but not plagiarized, and we want them to write it by themselves, and (if you’ve ever taught at Brandeis) we want it to be about something other than their trip to the Holy Land that changed their lives. We spend an awful lot of time focusing on the how, actually.

Faculty can get so frustrated with how often their students do things differently that they lose sight of what they really want students to do in the first place.

Try it. Be honest with yourself. You probably have a short list of actual pedagogical goals for the class – some basic research methods, perhaps, or an understanding of basic statistical methods, or the ability to write a five-page essay. Sit down with a colleague and try to tease out all the underlying assumptions of  your supposedly short list of goals. Of course the students need to not plagiarize, off the web or from each other. They have to work alone, and they have to understand what research-quality research is. And they have to talk in class, and they have to listen when you talk, and understand your spoken lectures on one hearing, and they have to answer your questions when you pose them out loud in class, and they have to value the topic. And, and, and.

No wonder so many faculty can get frustrated. Guess what? The students are frustrated too.

Pick something you think you have to get from your students, and give up other things in favor of the thing you really want.

Really want them to be able to analyze a case study? Okay. Give up on the rest. Focus on that analysis and let them guide you to the ways they want to learn how to do that case study. Relax on the ways you think they’re doing it wrong. Let them text about it, Google about it, do whatever they want to do  – then put them on the spot and see if they deliver. I highly recommend an in-class exercise where they do what you’ve been asking them to do all semester, with perhaps fifteen minutes’ prep time, in front of the whole class, and present the answer to the class. You might notice how much that looks like what happens in every active learning classroom setup. Under pressure, in front of everyone, on demand – can they do what you want them to do? Never mind that those are tough goals to meet; they’re actually the goals that match the world outside academia most closely.

See if they can figure out how to take their “wrong” roads to a right answer. If they can’t, they’ll be much more open to your methods. If they can, give them credit and move on.

I don’t think I have any perfect answers to these generational conflicts. I may not even have any good ones. Smarter faculty than I am will figure out better answers. But I can point out that differences in methodology are not absolutes of good teaching or good learning; they are generational differences, and faculty would do well to try to separate their goals from their methods and see how much they can let students keep their own methods to reach the goals.

This means spending a lot more class time repeating something that faculty probably aren’t used to repeating. Students need multiple shots at the goal in order to get it right. They need feedback along the way to let them know they aren’t getting it right, and they need time for guidance to finally see how to get it right.

Technology has nothing to do with almost any outcome you’re probably seeking as a teacher. So don’t lay down any rules about it. Grade what you get, but do it repeatedly. If you get poorly thought-out responses composed on the fly, possibly composed on a phone, grade them according to their quality, not their method of composition. If you get plagiarism, grade it accordingly. Take advantage of students’ experience with game culture – let them lose a life and try again.

Why do we spend so much time trying to prepare students to get the good grade in the end? Why do we take it personally when they don’t want to do things the way we do? Let them do what they want, give them the grade it deserves – but then do it again. And again. Not the same assignment, but something geared toward the same outcome. It is far, far more important than the grade they get at the end of your class. (Though you can give that grade a lot more weight, to ensure that they do pass the class if they get the clue along the way.)