In light of recent discussion about the hypersensitivity of college students, you might be interested to hear what just happened at the high school where I teach. The administration announced today that faculty members should refrain from discussing college admissions with students, including those for whom we have written recommendation letters. The reason? “We know that you want to express support for your students during the application process, but by asking them which colleges they have applied to, you are reminding them of the possibility that they might be rejected.”
Perhaps you are retiring at just the right time, because with current high school students being coddled to this extreme, the future crops of college students are likely to be even more fragile than anything we’ve yet seen. It doesn’t bode well for free speech on campuses. And now in Texas, these kids who can’t handle a subtle reminder of even the possibility of rejection are going to be allowed to carry concealed firearms on campus. Soon it’ll be free A’s for everyone, and for more than one reason.
Well, I don’t have much to add. American colleges and high schools have increasingly opted to coddle students, trying to insulate them from the disappointment and offense that they will surely encounter in the real world. It’s gotten so bad that professors who could support students, or help them during their application to college, aren’t even allowed to discuss college admissions with them. (I went through that process, and know others who are advisors, and to a person they’re supportive and helpful.) I guess when a student says, “Where do you think I might apply, or which college might be best for me?”, you’re supposed to say, “Sorry, I’m forbidden to discuss that.” Apparently the possibility that students might get nervous when reminded about colleges to which they’ve applied outweighs the benefits of giving support or advice to those students.
Though I’ve never encountered the “offense culture” as a teacher of biology, it still disturbs me to see the American educational system everywhere catering to the easily-bruised feelings of students rather than treating them as adults or near-adults. Yes, we have to avoid imposing unwarranted distress on students, but the request of this Texas school is simply silly.
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I am happy to say that my daughter went to an excellent high school where none of this nonsense happened, and the students were continually challenged. She is now a freshman at Princeton.
By the way, if she hadn’t gotten in early, she would have applied to the University of Chicago. She said it would probably have been her second choice. We visited a couple of summers ago. It is a very nice campus. We were impressed.
Surely Michael you should say ‘Freshperson’?! We would not wish to stereotype or impose gender barriers!
No no no…… Freshperson unfairly privileges personhood over other modes of being! Freshentity would be far more appropriate.
Way to marginalize the non-existing! You should have put a trigger warning that you are going to discuss things that are there.
Damn us having two genders!
Princesston. Freshperson at Princesston.
Monarchist!
Freshperson at Citizenton
Oh, now we require citizenship?
Freshperson at Comradenton
Freshwoman would cover both men and Women. Use that. And since men are biologically a subset of women it would be better than the sterile use of “person” which comes off as awkward if not awkweird..l
Back in my own college days, I read a book of limericks that noted that the abundance of bawdy limericks about Yale was probably due to the fact that the school’s name rhymes with “tail”. The author also offered the observation that “…nobody has ever written a similar limerick about Princeton.”
I took that as a challenge, and did so. However, that was thirty years ago, and it used prevailing stereotypes, and so is rather outdated now.
my daughter went to an excellent high school where none of this nonsense happened, and the students were continually challenged. She is now a freshman at Princeton.Clearly you think these two facts are related in a causal manner. I suspect you are correct.
Freshwoman. Freshman. Seems reasonable and better than “freshperson”!
You can bet your bottom dollar other countries that ARE still competitive will not mollycoddle their students, & that in the future they will out compete students from places like the US where they do…
Recall the philosopher Diogenes – he was, reputedly, begging from a statue. When asked why he said, “I am learning to meet with refusal”.
This from memory but I expect it was in Xenophon or Diogenes Laertius…
Japan is bad for students. Some pay for it with their lives. Worse for S. Koreans that double down on the pressures. Not sure about the Fins in this area yet.
A lot of this begins with parents who want to protect their children, but have the time, resources, and inclination to over-protect their children. Their children don’t learn from adversity; they don’t learn how to deal with failure; they don’t learn how to take action; or even be their own person. Some parents have carried this behavior on through job interviews and even in the workplace.
This is an excellent book on the subject: How To Raise An Adult
A friend of mine always comments:
Texass(sic: 0 days without being a national embarrassment.
When I was at school in the 80s, many teachers had little compunction about outright bullying children — name calling and ridiculing, and physically hitting kids till they banned that in the UK in 1987. Maybe things have swung too far the other way, but it could be a lot worse.
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> … but the request of this Texas school is simply silly.
Texas is simply silly.
So much for tough Texans. This protection ends up opening those they want to protect vulnerable to things they should have experienced when younger. Too bad the short sighted parents are blind to it.
I had some grade school teachers in a biology
class back in the 80’s who insisted that they should get credit for attempting to answer a question even if the answer was wrong. They also complained that there was too much terminology and wanted be to rename meiosis and mitosis somehow. Another student in that class complained that his mother would be angry if she heard what I said about evolution. Fortunately I had some good vodka in stock when I got home that day.
I don’t see anything wrong with the concept of partial credit, especially if answering the question involves multiple separate steps or parts. I had a QM prof who only gave full marks or zeroes on each question. Made a typo? Zero. Simple math error in one part that you then carried through? Zero. I confronted him about it in office hours and his ‘defense’ was that it took time he wasn’t wiling to spend to review incorrect work and figure out whether the student deserved points for it…nor would he ask his TA’s to do that. That was incredibly frustrating to the students and IMO terrible pedagogy.
So I don’t have a problem with the concept of giving partial credit for attempting to answer questions and getting them wrong. But its got to be sensible – show the teacher you’re thinking about the problem and have made some progress in learning the material, even if your progress is incomplete.
I guess I’m a purist about this. On a medical exam a prospective MD renders a partially true conclusion that nevertheless yields the wrong prognosis. The prospective MD is partially right but the patient is not treated appropriately, and her/his life might be partially in danger. The consequences in a marine biology course of being partially true may not be as serious, but by how much should we lower the standards?
Ah. Yes I guess it depends on the profession. For a scientist, we would expect other people to pick over our work and spot some mistakes before publication or before the experiment is actually done, so it makes sense to give credit when someone has done 90% good work but got the wrong conclusion; you just show them where they went wrong and the experimental procedure gets corrected before it the experiment is carried out (or; the draft gets corrected before its published). Then a week later, they do the same for you. Its rarely the case that someone dies because you got the science only 90% right.
I agree with you that partial credit is reasonable in the case of a long, multi-part question, which isn’t too different in principle from a multi-question quiz.
But I got the impression that Steven was referring to questions that weren’t long or complicated, in which case I think credit just for trying is silly, like those participation trophies schools often give out. It may be suitable for kindergartners, but that’s about it…
Yes I agree, that’s the ‘be sensible’ part. No grading rubric should say “if they wrote any text at all in this blank, give 1 point.”
The major difference between our crazy quilt school system and the universal one in Finland run by teachers. Every aspect is teacher driven and only professionals need apply. I dare say that if any teacher there short changed the students they would be out on their ear for it or severely disciplined.
As a former high school and junior college math teacher, I agree with you 100%. Towards the end of my career the admin was pushing for more multiple-choice tests, which I strongly opposed.
Triggered by the American constitution? We can shred it for you:
https://youtu.be/3PZAzLTQlX8
I’d like to propose a two-track approach to education.
First up is the Safe School. Everybody gets an A and is protected from even the merest hint of perceived adversity — exactly what we’re headed towards, by all accounts. There are no criticisms, only soft words of encouragement and copious praise for any hints of goodthink.
The alternate track would be an Extreme School. Not only will there be no guarantee of success, the demands will be ramped up to the point that everybody fails at something. There will be safe spaces for the kids to retreat to when needed, and they can quit at any time and go to a Safe School…but the basic standard, the expected norm, will be to demand the impossible — and true success will only be earned by those who actually deliver on the demands.
b&
A number of years ago here in South Africa, schooolkids protested under the banner of “Pass one, pass all”, as they felt it was discriminatory for some kids to pass exams,and others to fail.
A number of years ago here in South Africa, schooolkids protested under the banner of “Pass one, pass all”, as they felt it was discriminatory for some kids to pass exams,and others to fail.
Yeesh, that is a toxic concept and similar to how democracy has been applied to schooling. Why fools think in a democracy they are on par with educated people. Onerous and dangerous. We see what such stupidity has given us here. Why anti-intellectualism still reigns supreme.
I’m not sure where I stand on this. Examples like this seem to support the notion that kids are being systematically coddled. On the other hand, we have also seen articles claiming that today’s students are increasingly subjected to pressure-cooker, highly competitive environments. How many parents worried about getting their child in the right pre-school thirty years ago?
As a Gen-Xer, I don’t envy kids today. Outside of these instances of treating kids as porcelain dolls, their world will be increasingly frenetic, stressful, and riddled with uncertainty. I shudder at how the working world will look for them if current trends continue. My father was a professional scientist who basically worked 9-5, and rarely, if ever, on weekends. Holidays and vacations were sacrosanct. He had many hobbies and plenty of time to devote to keeping up the house and helping raise us kids.
My working world is 6 AM to 8PM; that’s a short day. I am never finished with my tasks (I could work 24/7 and still not complete everything), and because of technology I am expected to attend to them as soon as possible, wherever I am. The old boundaries of work and personal time are completely disintegrated. My wife works just as hard, and we struggle to allocate sufficient time to our personal lives and child-care. Other than reading this website and one or two others, I no longer have any hobbies; I don’t even read books anymore. In speaking with professional friends who also have young families, our laments about work/life balance are very similar.
One of my brothers became a scientist like our father. He is trying to climb the greasy pole of achieving tenure at a university. His schedule and workload make mine look like a walk in the park. When he is not groveling for grant money, he is trying to keep up with increasingly insane publication expectations. It seems so much harder for a young scientist to become a full professor at a research university than it was a few decades ago. His wife, also a scientist, is in the exact same situation. They drink a lot.
I hope that by the time the youngsters are old enough, the working world will have regained some of its sanity. But outside of some type of massive external force (like across-the-board mandatory limits on work weeks), I’m not sure it will get better.
I’m not a teacher/professor but I’m a parent. IMO the best way to thread this needle is for teachers and professors to simply act the professional. When it comes to advice about schools, treat a mature student almost as one would a co-worker. Be polite, be honest/straight-forward, but also limit criticism to the constructive, ‘forward looking’ kind rather than recrimination for past mistakes. Generally avoid politics and religion, unless they seek out those subjects. Education is your work and their work and the school is your collective workplace; so generally keep discussions on ‘school business.’
Not only does this approach probably help the teacher to set reasonable limits on how to interact with a stressed out kid, but frankly you’re helping me teach my kid how professionals behave towards one another, because that’s probably one lesson that I, as a parent can’t ever teach my own kid. I will never be looked upon as just a co-worker, boss, or professional contact. I can’t be. So you other adults with more professional relationships to my kid have to be the examples to my kid of how those relationships work.
That’s a shame. It’s a common tactic for managers to give more work than you can finish in a normal work day. I don’t know about your job, but I’ve personally found that if I just unapologetically come in and leave when I want, take time off when I want (vacations, family time, etc.), etc. my coworkers and managers would adapt. If they gave me too much work I’d simply tell them how many days it’d take to finish, without compromising my schedule. (I would still work late and on weekends on the occasions when it really mattered, but not all the time.)
Maybe you could start by leaving at 5PM on Fridays and if anyone asks just say “I’m going home to spend time with my wife/family.” and make no apologies for that. Then start coming in at a reasonable time (6AM is crazy :-P), etc. Unless you’re easily replaced, I think they’ll bend, and they may even respect you more too. At the very least, it may prompt a conversation with them where you can explain that you’re unsatisfied with the work/life balance and negotiate a better one.
But I do know that some companies consider everyone to be expendable and their strategy is to work people to the bone and not brook any dissent, and in this economy some people feel they have to put up with that…
I work in a massive professional services firm where the goal is to make partner; it is up or out. If I just left whenever I wanted, or did not respond timely to work requests, I can be damned sure that another one of my cohorts vying for partner will be. Merely meeting expectations or getting things done within a reasonable amount of time does not cut it, not by a long shot. Then there are all of the business development and firm activities that are “optional”, in the sense they are not optional if you want to make it to the next level.
The modern working world and technological aids enable workaholic freaks to out-produce those of us who value more balance or have family lives to negotiate. Our firm recognizes that its people work too much. But as much they are trying to reduce workloads, they still promote those who put in the billable hours to the winners’ circle.
To fix this for myself, I probably need to switch jobs, perhaps even careers.
What you describe is very common across many professions (for good or ill; I’m not agreeing with the practice). Most white collar profession put huge workloads on the up-and-comers. This tends to taper off when you reach the upper ranks, for several reasons: one, your bosses want to know how serious you are about being successful at the profession and after several years, you’ve shown them. By the time several years have passed, you’ve also shown your work quality and work ethic, and how you cope under pressure. After several years on the job people have also generally (but not always) learned how to be more efficient – to produce more quality product in less time. Which means you actually require less time in the office to generate the same successes, whether that’s in court, in the OR, in the lab, or typing in front of a screen. Lawyers work their interns like dogs. Medical internships are the same. PhD programs have their grad students work long hours in the lab and force them to TA at the same time (one professor at my school used to drive by the lab at 2am on Saturday nights; if the light wasn’t on, the grad students heard about it on Monday. Again, I’m not defending the practice, merely describing it).
Could it be any other way? Yes. Even for competitive jobs, it could be structured differently. But sadly, I’m not optimistic about that happening. I truly believe that educating the general population to a higher level is a net social good. Having said that, it does have some downsides. One is that we now have an overabundance of highly educated workers compared to the job market. We have many more would-be professors and lawyers and doctors (and vets, and scientists, and and and) than we have jobs for them. The solution, IMO, is to continue to educate our people as much as we can while grow our job market to keep pace. 🙂
“This tends to taper off when you reach the upper ranks, for several reasons: one, your bosses want to know how serious you are about being successful at the profession and after several years, you’ve shown them. By the time several years have passed, you’ve also shown your work quality and work ethic, and how you cope under pressure”
Fantastic comment overall. But I think this part has changed. I am only one rung below full partner (it could happen next year) but I still work a lot; everyone in my cohort does. What has really become disconcerting is that the partners put in very long hours as well; there seems to be no let off.
We have more work than we have experienced people. We have hired over 30,000 more folks in the past 2.5 years, but it doesn’t seem to make a dent, as most of these new hires are fresh college grads (almost 80% of the firm are young enough to be considered “millennials”.
We have massive problems with turnover at around the 4 to 5 year experience level as people realize that a) they now have a very solid resume and b) they might have more than a decade to make partner, after which they will…still work their asses off.
This is the kind of thing that reminds me of this quote from Babylon 5
I think of this as the motto for the entire show.
Jesus wept. Encouraging students is bad now?
I simply cannot identify with any of this and the video on the constitution seems more like a bad comedy. As someone who went to college way back in the early 70s, wouldn’t the most important thing be figuring out how to pay for school?
Here’s hoping this is one off-the-rails administrator rather than a general trend.
It also seems utterly futile; the colleges and universities they apply to are going to send rejections/acceptances regardless of the kid’s feelings. Not discussing the possibility of rejection does nothing but push the day they’ll have to deal with those feelings off by about 3-4 months.
Having taught high school, it would be business as usual. I wrote hundreds of reference letters and never discussed any of them with students unless they wanted to but I always told the best students to apply to the best schools (Stanford…of course!).
If any of my students were afraid to fail, they knew I knew and they did not like the lack of respect they got from me.
Life is built on the risk of failure. This push for anti-dissapointment is sucking the life out of America.
Consider: How many times does a swimmer fail before winning the Olympics? About a thousand times more than any whacko coddlers have ever considered.
Riding home on a train last night, I saw a mother with her 3 year old, the mother was reading her a kids book. Reading through the books pages, I saw every page of the book filled with ‘self-esteem’ boosting nonsense like,
“You are special person and are very unique!”
“Dont be afraid to be yourself, you are very special and offer so much to everyone!”
etc etc,
Pages and pages of this ego boosting drivel, the kids start with this crap at 2-3 yrs of age, by the time they get to college they are complete and total PUSSys. Perfect unique special snowflakes, who balk at anything ‘offensive’ and refrain from ‘triggering’ any negative emotions.
Oh I can’t wait to see how they handle performance reviews when they star working.
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“Though I’ve never encountered the “offense culture” as a teacher of biology”
I’m quite surprised at this, given that there’s all sorts of things in biology that could cause offence – all sorts of insults to human dignity, and notions like asymmetric reproduction strategies and sexual dymorphism.
And how sharks eat sea turtles, limb by limb or parasite controlled ants or bears eating their babies:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140328-sloth-bear-zoo-infanticide-chimps-bonobos-animals/
Don’t forget brain parasites you catch from cats that might be influencing you without you know it. Toxoplasmosis Gondii
This isn’t the kids. This is the Rise of the Administrators.
Citizens demanded oversight of teachers. They demanded accountability.
They got administrators. Tons of them. At every level of education. They’re generally paid as much or more than teachers. They don’t teach. And they have to justify their existences.
Getting tired of the “everyone gets a trophy” narrative. My public university students are graduating into a mediocre economy with more debt than anyone in my generation ever had to put on. They’re concerned and anxious. They certainly don’t feel entitled or special.
But don’t mind me. Keep the anecdotes and isolated incidents coming.
And here in NZ, it is November the Fifth. I’ve just been out to watch the fireworks. A few years back, it used to be great to walk up Mt Roskill (a little local hill), everyone would gather there to let their fireworks off, and of course all gathered together they made a nice display.
You can guess what happened. The safety nazis , who are disturbed by the suspicion that somebody somewhere might be having fun, have managed to get fireworks restricted to private property. You can still buy them (too much money to be made selling them to ban them), but now they’re spread thinly around and much of the spectacle and the enjoyment has gone out of it. Thanks, safety nazis, may you all die in freak accidents.
cr
I am embarrassed by my generation. We have coddled our children to the point that many are so self-entitled as to be delusional. My parents taught me to take responsibility and when I played sports, I learned how to deal with both failure and success.
I recall sitting on the bench in Little League, being told I wasn’t good enough to be a starter. I vowed to try harder. I eventually became the captain of my high school baseball team and played in College. Today, the parents would sue the coach!
Where did it go wrong? Is it too late to out a halt to this nonsense?
From a conspiracy stand point having most children emotionally “protected” and living under police state conditions at school would make them more amendable to following orders and not questioning when the police act like death squads and storm troopers. Just a thought.