Always good news and bad news.

Good news: many of my students are doing top-notch work, and many of my students who aren’t quite to that level of accomplishment are nevertheless diligent and engaged and often very playful and insightful and inspiring. Every semester I get to watch those blooms emerge, try to encourage the flowering, and try to stay out of the way where that’s appropriate.

Bad news: some students will have that day of reckoning that will define how well they will do by the end of term. Some are in denial; some will stay that way. A few will give up, and a few of those will just ghost me. I try everything I can think of, short of knocking on their front doors. (That seems invasive and maybe even enabling, to me, and it’s out of the question in pandemic time, certainly.) Some have lives that are spinning, or have spun, out of control. For them, I often advise taking the term off if possible. Anything is better than losing time and money while digging oneself into an ever-deepening hole that no ladder can reach down into. At the same time, I always hope and I always encourage hope when it’s warranted–and it’s a tricky business indeed to know when to say “cut your losses.”

Part of the way school is structured today, however, works against the student’s own agency in these matters. There have always been parental pressures, financial pressures, life upheavals, and the sheer uncertainty of so much of what a college degree problem can entail. (Where else are you asked to devote time to study, to reflection, to reading and writing? These are not simply instrumental goods, but they can seem horribly beside the point when one has pressures and upheavals.) Now, however, I do see a change in the way coursework itself is understood by some of my students. Some, by no means all, maybe only a few, but a number that seems to be growing, expect that a course of study will have a prescribed bolus of work that may be completed on any schedule and turned in at any time–or rather, made up at any time. I get students near the end of term who’ve been running out of runway for weeks suddenly asking me if I have any extra credit work they can do. No, I reply: I have work for credit, and I’ve assigned it all along, with a design principle that holds that learning is not about filling my wheelbarrow with what I’ve asked them to bring to me. No, my learning design is curriculum writ small: these activities, in this order, with this duration or persistence or consistency, so that the learning is introduced, consolidated, extended, re-introduced re-consolidated, further extended, and brought into the realm of understanding, which Jerome Bruner defines as “going beyond the information given.”

When high schools put together “credit recovery” packets that allow students to be absent for weeks and then complete the class by plowing through a set of worksheets, the expectation generalizes, and some of my students think that’s what classwork or coursework is. (My skepticism about “competency-based learning” is largely liberal-arts driven, and particularly dubious about the worksheets, tests, and other means of assessing “competency.” But that’s another blog post.)

So I don’t know. But I’ll tell you: the thing about my courses that seems hardest for the students who’re used to delivering packets of coursework in this manner is my requirement that students post to our discussion forum and blog on our WordPress multisite platform: RamPages. This requirement is purely a class participation requirement. I do not grade the forum posts or the RamPages reflections individually. I have no expectation for length, and I’ve told students that they don’t need to spend more than fifteen minutes a day, if that, posting the forum. Maybe a half hour on the weekends for the RamPage reflection. But the amounts don’t seem to be the problem. It’s the character of what I’m requiring. What I am looking for–and I tell this to the students over and over–is consistency of participation in ways that are interesting, substantive, and relevant to the course. I tell them that I understand “relevant” very widely, though it’s a good idea to use the opportunities to post about what we’re discussing in class at least some of the time.

It’s the consistency throughout the semester that stumps the students who want to give me work instead of commit to a course of study. It’s the pure ungraded class participation with a very wide definition of what constitutes participation that seems most difficult, that moves against the grain. It feels as if they don’t want to be in a learning community, or don’t have any real, lived sense of what it means to commit to a course of study over the term. Even if it’s so easy to do so that the only way to fail is just to not show up at all.

I ponder these things. But I know this: when we do a course of study together, it’s a journey, an experience, a life, not a landfill.

See you tomorrow.