Rethinking My Thinking

I'll confess it loudly:  I'm too much in my head a lot of times!  I think and rethink, and rethink again, sometimes until I no longer know what it is I think.  Obsessive?  Maybe a little bit.  Productive? Sometimes...

Well, this is one of those times when my rethinking has produced some decent fruit...I think...

After a wonderful semester with LOTS of learning and tremendous progress, I have come to the realization that one of the main things my freshmen students struggle with is knowing how to be a college student.  With the best of intentions and, perhaps, because of all the social messages telling them they have to go to college or be a lifelong loser (another topic for another day!), I consistently find my students arriving unprepared with the soft skills they need to be successful college students. I'm sympathetic to their plight, truly and deeply sympathetic, but I cannot be empathetic for a few reasons.

First, being the precocious teen I was, and being quite unlike many of my college freshmen, I was excited and mentally and academically prepared for the demands of college.  It's true, I actually started taking college classes (French, since my high school refused to bring a French program to our school until my senior year!) at the age of 16.  However, my soft skillset was highly developed even then.  Due dates?  Check!  Reading assignments?  Check! Essays?  Bring them on!  My excitement buoyed my learning and I did well in all my classes because I respected the demands and rigor of the college classroom.

Second, also unlike my college freshmen, I was always quite realistic about the various demands on my time I was dealing with, especially after I graduated high school.  I knew I worked a lot of hours and I knew that was not optional, not if I wanted to keep eating and not have to trek around naked.  I knew the demands of the classes I was taking.  And, I knew that I had to find balance among work-social-academic burdens.  It was a fact then and it is a fact now.  We simply cannot have time to do everything we want to do, unless the earth mysteriously moves significantly farther from the sun any time soon

I have decided that my realization of my students' unpreparedness for the demands and rigors of college and their unrealistic expectations of how much they can do in one day's time must be met head on.

So, our first assignment in both my transfer-level and pre-transfer level courses will consist of reading about college skillset expectations, examining the time demands of their classes vis-a-vis their social lives and their job schedules, and their realization that there is only so much time in anyone's day.  I've got several articles and essays for them to read, some simple mathematical calculations for them to perform, and an essay for them to write through which, hopefully, they will make adjustments to their course schedules BEFORE the drop dates.

Hopeful outcome? Students better prepared to deal with the realistic expectations they should have of their first semester(s) in college and a professor better able to help students manage their expectations.

Will it work?  Who knows.  But, at least I will feel, even if only temporarily, like I've made another attempt to help prepare my students, which is, after all, my beloved job!

SOURCE:
McCabe, Colin Patrick.  "Time and Time Agagin."  Web log post.  Time and time Again.  N.p.  09 Feb. 2012.  Web.  27 May 2015.