TA confession: I'm sorry, but most of your children (my students) are average

Parents Forum
141

I’ve been a high school teacher, in a college prep school, for 35 years.

And I think the situation is complicated.

Let’s start with the kids. I’m pretty sure that if anyone knew how incredibly average my own kids were as students, I would be kicked off this site. The reality is that the overwhelming number of kids I teach are average students. Sure, some get those straight A’s that are so very prevalent on this site. But the vast majority are no stranger to B’s and C’s, with the occasional D and F sprinkled in. Some are regulars at summer school.

And every single kid who graduates from my school goes on to college. Many find success there. Some, for a huge array of reasons, do not. The overwhelming majority graduate from college. Some find other paths. One or two have ended up in jail after a promising high school career. A few had had mental health or physical health problems, and I’ve been to more than my share of funerals for kids who should have had that happy future that everyone spoke of at graduation.

But let’s move on to the teacher.

I can tell you for a fact that I didn’t become a halfway decent teacher until I had been teaching for far, far longer than one semester. It took YEARS before I became the kind of teacher I would want my own kids to have.

Teaching well is about far more than simply knowing the material; we’ve all had teachers who knew their stuff but couldn’t teach. It’s about knowing which alternate explanation will do the trick with which kids. It’s about realizing that sometimes kids are so confused that they don’t even know what to ask. It’s about knowing how to take that incredibly confused, embarrassed kid back to where they DID understand, and guiding him/her to a place of understanding the new material without making him feel stupid or inadequate. It’s about realizing that some of them are dealing with issues that I’m not aware of, and of adding some kindness into my day. (Small example: lots of my Seniors took the SAT Saturday, so I cancelled the homework. It was no big deal for me, but made a huge difference to them.) It’s about knowing that sometimes, my own schedule has to take second place to their needs. It’s about a combination of tough love and caring love, and knowing that every one of those kids, no matter how much they might tower over me, is some mom’s baby. That every one of them (hopefully) has a mom and dad and maybe siblings and a significant other and friends, all of whom see something very lovable in that student, even if that “something” eludes me at the moment…

As a new teacher, I was confident that I knew the material, and probably falsely confident that I knew how to present it. But now, 35 years later, I can say with certainty that, on most days, my kids are happy to have me as their teacher, that they learn well in my classroom, and that I provide an enviornment and opportunities for that learning to take place. The fact that it’s only " most day" is still a work in progress after 35 years in the classroom.

I can certainly understand the frustration of the OP-- it’s hard when you’re being pushed to compromise your academic integrity by kids who simply don’t get it, or by their parents.

But teaching-- good teaching-- is about far more than presenting material. It’s about being a font of information, and a parent, and a cheerleader and a translator and a confidante and a coach and a mentor and so much more. It’s about realizing that simply having a degree and a job doesn’t really make you a teacher, or at least not a good one. The OP may very well be all those things. But I suspect that, like the overwhelming number of teachers I know, the OP will someday look back at those first kids he taught, and hope that his inexperience didn’t do them too much damage.

142

“TA confession: I’m sorry, but most of your children (my students) are average” - it just occurred to me that it is NOT the student who gets graded, it is his test, paper, lab. report, project…etc. Being average should not prevent a college student from having straight As at college. We are not talking here about developing the Theory of Relativity, we are talking about college level classes. The efforts will determine the outcome at college, and by “the efforts” I do not mean amount of time. Absolutely no genius is required for that. So being average is not so bad at all, most people are average. Just do your work, make sure that your understanding is correct, use help when needed and an A is in your pocket. No tricks, no magic, no super smarts, just an average person doing the job.

143

Also agree with much of what Al2Simon had to say, except that I think the typical Harvard student is way above average if you look at the US as a whole. Only about 1/3 of millennials (age 25-32) have a bachelor’s degree. While Harvard (or other elite schools) may have their fair share of kids that are not brilliant, they certainly are well above average. For the record, neither me or my kids went to a super elite for undergrad.

Interesting that the OP has not returned. As the moderator says, probably just venting. I just hope he/she is supportive of the vast majority of students that are not complaining, either because they did fine or because they knew they did not study hard enough.

Sometimes kids also need to understand HOW to study. The TA could help these students not by changing the grae but by helping them understand how to do better next time.

144

My department does not offer any courses that are intended to be “weeder” courses. The introductory courses cover fundamental material that is essential to succeed at higher levels. When a student graduates from college, in a number of STEM areas, there are professional standards that have to be met, or people’s safety is at risk if the student is employed in his/her major area–for example, this is true of many engineering positions, chemists, biochemists, toxicologists. The curriculum is designed to help students to reach the required professional level by the time of graduation, or in some cases, to prepare them properly for graduate school.

Some people (perhaps not in this thread) think of a “weeder” course as one that discourages students from continuing to higher-level courses, while–if only they could continue into the higher-level courses–everything would be much easier. This doesn’t happen. In my department for sure and in STEM in general, I believe, the higher-level courses are harder. The average grade might be higher, but that doesn’t mean that a student who struggled at a lower level would do better in these courses, unless the student really altered his/her approach to the subject.

145

I use a modified version of a curve in the classes I teach. At the beginning of the semester, I let the students know that there are guaranteed cut lines for each grade–usually somewhere around 80-85% for an A, . . . So everyone who scores at that level will definitely get an A. I only curve up and not down. If the class has difficulty with some of the exams, the cut line will drop a bit, though usually not drastically.

One of my colleagues assigned grades by tossing out the outlying scores at the top, and then when a more-or-less continuous distribution of scores had set in, taking 90% of the top, non-outlying score as the cut-off line for an A. I have not tried that, but can see the rationale for it.

These comments apply to grading in STEM fields, where the concepts of points and per cents make sense.

146

There are no weeder courses. It’s just a convenient way for people to explain what happened to them in the transition from HS to college. Some of the more rigorous universities actually make an effort to have the first three or four weeks of freshman courses proceed more slowly, to give freshmen a chance to acclimatize.

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One final comment concerns the idea of “mastery.” I don’t think that’s applicable in my field. “Mastery” seems to me to suggest that there is some defined set of tasks that a student is supposed to be able to execute, and that’s it, the subject is now mastered. The reliable performance of pre-set tasks is important in some areas of my field, to be sure. But overall, what my colleagues and I are working to help the students attain is not mastery, but understanding. Understanding of a subject implies the ability to solve unfamiliar problems in that area, as well as those that have been presented previously and could be mastered.

Also, understanding is something that deepens over time, and continues to develop throughout a faculty career. I recall one of my colleagues standing at the blackboard, puzzling over an aspect of a topic that he had presented about a dozen times before, and saying, “I seem to be undergoing another iteration in my understanding of this topic.”

I think many STEM faculty can relate to that. Also, at some point of working in a field, it becomes clear when the writer of a junior- or senior-level text does not really understand one of the topics in the book. This happens a lot in thermodynamics, for example. I’ve heard that E. A. Guggenheim used to open his lecture class by announcing that there were only three people in the world who truly understood thermodynamics, and he was one of them. He must have read the same texts I’ve read.

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Nah I’m here, just nothing else to add. The professor teaches the class I don’t. I just grade papers and field questions about homework or course material outside of class. Sometimes I just want to be Tom Hanks from A League of Their Own and shout “THERE’S NO CRYING IN SCIENCE!”. Are students going to cry when the chief surgeon rips them to shreds while they’re doing their residencies and they make a mistake that could have killed someone? Did the NASA engineers who made a mistake in their units calculations which torched $125 million dollars in tax payer dollars after the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed get a break because they cried during their year end performance reviews? The buck has to stop somewhere and I’m sorry a heavy dose of reality has to smack students at some point.

I pretty much expected many of the responses in this thread, many of them mirror students’ whining. Blame the instructors for bad teaching–even though the professor teaching the class has won numerous awarda from the university for undergraduate education. Blame the exam–sorry there was a mix of think out of the box type questions which required application of learned concepts, along with multiple choice backed up with explanation, and some short answer problems. The majority of students won’t produce A results, that’s why As exist. Our office doors are open Mon., Tue., Wed., by appointment, and we have 3 review sessions before an exam with open floor Q&A. There’s excise that we are unavailable is pretty thin (sorry I can’t come in on Sat. night though while raising an infant). And FWIW, I too am from GenY, albeit on the older end of the spectrum with previous industrial work experience, so it isn’t like I’m some old bitter person conmplaining about a younger generation ‘like they always do’. This is GenY telling GenY to suck it up, learn to deal woth failure, and get their house in order. I certainly didn’t get a free pass with my boss in industry when I accidentally overslept my alarm clock once. I got chewed out big time, took it, and let it never happen again.

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@xlmdienex,
I agree with you. OTOH, I have inadvertently made a male med student cry on his surgery rotations

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I have cried when asking about a grade and when being dressed down at work for a dumb mistake. Believe me it was the last thing I wanted to do. It’s just the way I am wired, so I have always been very reluctant to question grades! I was always amazed that I didn’t cry during architecture critiques. They were brutal, but we were all so sleep deprived, I don’t think they had much of an impact.

151

I’ve posted this in the Michigan forum a few times, but in undergrad I took 2 courses I consider to be weeder courses. In both of them, it was clear they were not trying to teach the material well, with the reasoning presumably being to discourage those unable to figure out another way to do well on the test from continuing down that path. And they probably chose the strategy of trying to prevent students from learning the material rather than making the tests harder because it was easier to just make it harder for students to learn. Not as a factor of the professor not caring or being incapable of teaching well, but as a matter of policy for the course. I think the weeder label gets attached to more classes than is deserved, but I’m can clearly see that weeder classes exist. Yes, there are harder higher level classes, but in those they’re trying to teach the material well, which is very different. Although, it’s a small minority of classes, at least where I went, that were like this.

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What courses were these?

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One was Organic Chemistry and the other Data Structures. The methods were mostly the same in these two. There was no homework and no sample problems/answers to facilitate learning. If you had a fundamental misunderstanding about something in the course you wouldn’t know until you walked into the exam and did everything wrong. That is unless you found someone who had taken the class before and studied from their graded exams. The other part of this was both this classes had completely useless and dysfunctional office hours.

154

I admit that I have no research to back this up, but it seems intuitive to me that students who have been academically successful in high school have at least some of their self-perception if not self-esteem connected to continuing their academic achievement relative to their peers. (This is relevant because I think the OP indicated that he or she is a TA at an “upper tier” university.) It seems reasonable that this perception could continue even if the peer group they compare themselves to is much different than it was in high school. When that expectation is not realized, students have to readjust and some do it easier and quicker than others. Some resort (or fall back on) the behaviors that the OP rightly finds off-putting.

I recall a comment S3 relayed to me about his orientation at a relatively prestigious technical institute. The speaker asked, “How many of you graduated in the top ten percent of your class?” Virtually all the students raised their hands. Then the speaker went on: “How many of you are going to graduate in the top ten percent of this class? It is not a trick question, nine out of ten of you will not. That does not mean you are any less successful or any less accomplished necessarily, you have simply joined a new group with a new ‘normal’.”

As senior now, he is doing very well, but he is not in the top ten percent. Those words he heard as an entering freshman have stuck with him.

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I have taught quite a few students who were simply incapable of receiving an A in certain of my classes, no matter their degree of effort.

And I won’t speak to the courses I teach, since I’m likely a bit biased in my view of those, but I know that, given the amount of work and insightfulness required by my colleagues who teach—and let’s pick, at semi-random, an utterly non-STEM field here—literature, an average student can by no means expect to get an A in one of their courses simply by being average. Yes, it’s not developing Relativity, but it is showing a degree of excellence.

And sorry, but it does—and should!—require some degree of excellence to get an A in a course.

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"There are no weeder courses. It’s just a convenient way for people to explain what happened to them in the transition from HS to college. "
-Yes, there are and they are well known. These intro classes are teaching way beyond AP. AP material may be presented in the first 2 weeks. However, the label “weeder” should not prevent an AVERAGE student from getting an A.in this class. I believe that the most college students are in fact average. But ALL of them are capable of getting all As given that they step up their effort. It has "almost’ happen to me in one of my classes. The previous class had a purpose of cutting about 70% as facility did not handle the crowd. Well, kids who did not step up and continued slacking, got cut (failed or close). The As were such a normal thing in the next class that prof. mentioned that he was told to make problems a bit harder. “Weeder” classes are designed to cut people who did not belong in the certain track. The good program will put such a class in the first semester of the freshman year so that waste of time and resources are minimized.

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Why can’t the test examine the understanding of a discipline’s methods without a curve?

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Re #152

Data structures should have had (programming) assignments and projects.

Also, many schools or departments make old exams available.

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@dfbdfb, I agree. “A” should stand for “excellent”. And I’ve been in classes where there was NO WAY that my work (no matter how hard I tried) would have been considered excellent. Notably math and some science courses. But I excelled as a literature student (comp lit) although even there some of the theory was just over my head. I went to school at the height of Derida, semiotics (which I actually liked) etc. in a theory-obsessed department. Getting a B was a major accomplishment in my lit theory course.

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Post #157, not if the professor is new.