Question (from "Peeved Prof"): Why won't my students follow directions?
Answer: Ms. Mentor can imagine them stepping up to the Justification Microphone, one at a time, and telling you what's on their hearts.
- "I have a different learning style from ordinary students, and you need to appreciate my special creativity. I am not like the others who just fill space in your classes."
- "Your directions are confusing."
- "It takes too long to read the directions."
- "The directions are in a huge block of text. Huge blocks of text without bullets or pictures are off-putting."
- "All life is suffering."
Maybe the trouble started in that first great classroom, the Garden of Eden, with its single peculiar rule: Don't eat the fruit from that tree. Adam went about naming the animals, but Eve was absent the day the directions were given. Once they ate the fruit, it was Adam who got a scolding for not following directions, and Adam who put up mankind's first justification: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat" (Genesis 3:12).
The woman made him do it.
Since then, in our fallen world, teachers struggle daily to grade papers, lab reports, and exams in which students give two or six examples instead of the required three; answer every question except the all-important last one; or ignore the long-winded essay questions on the second page. Page and word limits? Those must be for someone else.
"If they would just read the syllabus," many a professor fumes. That is a problem so egregious that Facebook worthies have a page called "Read the freakin' syllabus, people." More than 4,700 fans have found some solace there.
Beleaguered teachers deduct points, use pop quizzes, try shame and bribery ("we'll have a class party if we can go the whole semester without anyone asking things that are answered on the syllabus"). At some campuses, students aren't allowed into their labs until they copy the lab instructions, word for word, into their notebooks and have them initialed by a supervisor. Grades may be docked if students fail to number their pages or forget their source lists. Students who do get everything right—who, in short, do exactly what they're supposed to do—sometimes get extra points. Ms. Mentor moans.
Disgruntled students also have ways of blaming others for their failings: "I checked the instructions, and it's so totally unfair that you decided to take points off for misspellings. I want the grade changed." Or they astonish their professors with truly strange excuses like this one reprinted on AlterNet and entitled, "The Greatest Snowflake Student E-Mail Ever Sent": Ms. Mentor quotes verbatim: "Proffessor, what you fail to realize is that my story explains the topic in so much detail, that being specific is not in my nature as a writer, or a mathotical student. ... That paper is written to perfection whether you understand it or not besides an in depth detailed visual summary of a World War 2 event, that created an anaoly of the two philosopys that needed no explanation."
Ms. Mentor agrees with that last statement.
If unchecked, the directionally challenged do move on. Some become nurses who make chemical-transcription errors ("Oh, I read it as cyanide, not chloride"). Some deliver packages to the crematorium instead of the creamery. Some decorate their writings with random apostrophes, which Ms. Mentor has been told are actually announcements: "Hark! Here comes an S! Good time's will be had by all!"
Still, human history has been full of bad times for direction-scofflaws, and Ms. Mentor believes that caring professors should warn their students. The mother of Achilles, for instance, wanted her boy to live forever, but when she dipped him in the waters of immortality, she forgot to immerse his heel. Lot's wife forgot that she wasn't supposed to look back, and became a pillar of salt. As early as the Book of Leviticus (10:1-2), Moses's nephews made up their own directions for their censers, producing "strange fire"—which got them blasted to death by fire from heaven. That may be humankind's first fatal lab accident.
An attention slip may also have lost the Battle of Antietam. The papers describing General Robert E. Lee's battle plans were kept top secret, he thought—until they were found wrapped around three cigars.
Nowadays, there are different penalties. "Not following directions ruins any hope of an award" for graduate support, note April Vahle Hamel, Mary Morris Heiberger, and Julia Miller Vick in The Graduate School Funding Handbook. Failure to follow directions is the No. 1 reason that grant applications are not approved. A very famous chemist, "Dr. Schadenfreude," enjoys grant panels in which applicants are immediately rejected if they add the wrong figures, fail to sign their materials, or neglect to describe clearly what they plan to do. "I wish I had a stamp for them," he says. "It would say 'Smite.'"
In much of academic life, though, failure to follow directions goes unpunished. In group work, the good students do the job, while others get away with lounging or texting. Some teachers will extend deadlines if you have a good excuse (my dead grandmother's dog ate my homework again; nasty Fido). Assistants will write up course descriptions for professors who don't, because staffers are the ones in trouble if the copy for the course catalog isn't submitted on time. Somebody will cobble together that belated committee report. Or if no one does it, others will be too polite to mention it or relieved that it's not on their own to-do lists.
Sometimes, if you do follow directions, you can make a killing. A Canadian scientist was recently charged with spending government grant money, all properly won, on lavish home-entertainment equipment, aluminum wheels, and chrome exhaust pipes for a car. "Someone with a fifth-grade education" should have caught it, said one Canadian ethicist. But five years later, the scientist had changed jobs, and no one seemed the wiser.
Still, Ms. Mentor urges Peeved Prof not to abandon hope. Recently the physician-author Atul Gawande, troubled by avoidable medical errors, began insisting on to-do lists. His The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right shows how to do it, so that no scissors will be left inside a patient. No one will cut off the wrong foot.
Yet even Gawande had trouble persuading some of his colleagues—who seemed to think that to err was human. Ms. Mentor, in her perfect wisdom, begs to differ. She would prefer things to be divine.
Question: Of the hundreds of students who wrote midterm essays, at least a dozen didn't put their names on their booklets. I could be a deeply caring, nurturing person and spend hours going through all the exams to match the names and handwritings, making the students feel cherished. Or I could lock away the anonymous exams and set up an arcane and labyrinthine procedure that students must follow to retrieve their work, and risk being called a "meanie." What would the pedagogically sound Ms. Mentor choose?
Answer: Meanie.
Sage Readers: Ms. Mentor welcomes the usual gossip, rants, and queries, as well as directions for the conduct of a righteous, rewarding life despite the gaudy temptations of academe. She regrets that she can rarely answer letters personally, and never immediately. Identifying details are always masked, and confidentiality is guaranteed. No one will know that you're the one who clipped when you should have stapled.
(c) Emily Toth
Comments
1. geneseo - March 26, 2010 at 07:37 am
About those exam booklets with no names: my successful method is to grade them all, average the grades, and give that average grade to each of the students who forgot their names. They never forget to put their names on anything ever again.
2. jodidecker - March 26, 2010 at 08:50 am
Hmm, perfect timing. Just got an email of entitlement from one of my students. Missed four classes. Missed the final. Mising 5 assignments. Wants me to come in on Spring break and give him the final so he doesn't fail the class and lose all his money. This would sound like a slam dunk, completely pathetic, but despite all rules and policies, someone up the chain at my school will approve this poor baby's dilemma. Did he have an emergency appendectomy? No, he overslept.
3. mpressley - March 26, 2010 at 11:33 am
I give an exam on my syllabus shortly after the drop/add period ends. A number of my colleagues have started doing the same. I've been doing this for the past 5 years. It counts 7% of their total grade in the course. While it has improved things, a bit, we all know that within 6 weeks the students have forgotten 85% of what they "learned." I wish I could devise an engaging method to get the syllabus across without taking up 2-3 class periods. But I'm just not that brilliant. And of course when they are penalized for not failing instructions, it's never their fault.
4. happyadjunctfaculty - March 26, 2010 at 11:50 am
I recently spoke with a teaching colleague of mine and she said that she actually gives her students a graded quiz on the policies, procedures, expectations, and penalties of her course.
She also goes over the quiz to make sure everyone understands the correct "answers." That way, when a student turns in work late and claims they didn't know, all she says is, "Aaaaa, but you did know. You took the quiz."
AWESOME!
5. graythebruce - March 26, 2010 at 01:42 pm
I used to give syllabus tests and little quizzes on assignment instructions, and spend a lot of time going over the documents -- all of the suggestions I'm seeing here. They didn't have as much impact as I thought they would. I've since gone quite the other direction: I don't spend much time talking about the syllabus, and rarely give quizzes on it. I let my instructions get as complicated and difficult as they need to be. I warn students that the assignment expectations are complicated, seldom obvious, and fairly difficult, "but you're all in college, and college is about doing hard things." If someone asks a question in class or expresses confusion, I ask them to read the instructions aloud, and about halfway through, they usually mutter, "Oh, I see. Nevermind." Perhaps it's my imagination; I certainly haven't worked out statistical comparisons; but I swear I get better attention to detail from students doing things this way than I did when I gave those syllabus tests and discussed the instructions with them. Not perfect attention. But better, I think.
6. andrew_mcdonald - March 26, 2010 at 02:17 pm
Dear Ms. Mentor:
When I read your column, I despair to think of the sixty or seventy semesters that you have spent teaching, and the many abuses you have suffered as a result of student ignorance and folly: incidents that have been heaped upon you time and again until your skin (it seems) is as tough as a rhino's. I am sure you have reached an age when this wisdom that so serves you might be put to better uses than in these sarcastic, self-important, dismissive letters of 'advice' (invariably humorous at another's expense). It seems to me you are (sadly) encouraging other teachers to express their anger and disappointment through criticisms whose 'irony' is more a reflection on the teacher (jaded and unwanted) than on the student (innocent and wide-eyed). I am not being sarcastic, Ms. Mentor, but openly critical. In the hope that I might encourage you to think as a teacher (and not as an academic), I ask that you please write a column or two representing your generosity, your idealism, your innocence and hopefulness as an educator; that is, to remember and to celebrate all the reasons that first brought you to teaching (and to forget, for a moment, the endless paychecks, the self-important status and positioning, the self-interested back-biting and dirty politics of the academe that have so destroyed your opinion of humanity, which is the focus of literature and one we cannot teach if we no longer have any faith in it).
7. squidward - March 26, 2010 at 04:32 pm
Talk about missing the mark - I would have hoped that andrew_mcdonald was being sarcastic in the above post, but was explicit in not being so. If all these students were "wide-eyed and innocent", it would be another matter entirely. We would say "here are the directions" and they would follow them (innocently following directions because they were told to by those in charge of the class). The column instead was about the unfortunately large number of students who are something else entirely, be it uninterested, lazy, jaded, incapable, irresponsible, etc.
Ms. Mentor's column is appreciated by those who have had to deal with students who behave this way (and it is all too common), and allows us to laugh at the situation rather than be frustrated or angry (even if just for a bit).
8. andrew_mcdonald - March 27, 2010 at 02:46 am
Dear Squidwad,
Every student who steps into our classrooms is innocent and wide-eyed, no matter their attitude or their age. They may attempt to hide it from us by doing things we consider to be 'guilty', but we are teachers. We are not in a position to judge their behavior and we are not hired to evaluate them. We are hired to teach them. Too often, we lose sight of the difference between 'proving' our own worth as a teacher through evaluation and 'proving' the worth of the student through instruction. If a student lacks motivation or the presence of mind to follow through on the tasks assigned, then criticism and punishment are merely reinforcing the student's already jaded sense of 'the game', whereby teachers are judges set to condemn those who 'fail' to follow direction. All of us have quite different personalities such that some of us respond well to punishment while others of us do not; but learning has nothing to do with punishment. Particularly at the university level, it is important to seek (by whatever means) the path that leads to learning. When a student fails to learn in one of our classes, then it is the teacher that fails the student (and not the other way around: a point of view that is the product of a school's administration and not of education). We are not in a contest with our students. Instruction can only lose by becoming a power struggle. If some students are eager to follow rules and we reward them for this behavior, then we have taught them a lesson in following rules. But that is not what we are there to do. We are there to encourage them to find something meaningful and interesting in the material that we offer. And if they are 'innocent' of that material (if they do not have prior knowledge or understanding of it), then they deserve our every effort to lead them by whatever path toward that understanding and knowledge. You are the one who creates a situation in which you have to 'deal with students who behave this way'. It's not the student. The student is as innocent and wide-eyed as a child simply for being your student. The more we teachers can take this attitude of 'believing in' rather than 'expecting of', the more we will produce scholars who share in our approach and who encourage others to understand rather than who force others to understand via punishment and ridicule and (what seems in these articles to be) mockery.
9. jffoster - March 27, 2010 at 09:31 am
Mr. McDonald (6 & 9),
Followed Ms. Mentor for years I have, and have found her columns laden with generosity and wisdom. Indeed, they are the one column in the Chronicle I really look forward to. And I am particularly gratified and proud that her Ivory Tower is near the Memorial Tower (aka Campanile) at my Alma Mater.
We found on another post that we do not entirely agree you and I on what postgraduate education is about and it appears we don't entirely agree on what undergraduate education is about either. We're talking about college, not ckindergarten. These undergraduates will go into a world that does a great deal more "expecting of" than "believing in" and they had best learn that they have to show up and meet certain expectations while they are among elder friends who wish them well and where the penalties for wanton failure to meet or disregard of expectations are relatively light. If we don't "believe in" their capability of behaving like adults enough to "expect it of" them, we are doing them no favor and certainly not treating them with compassion.
10. andrew_mcdonald - March 27, 2010 at 03:07 pm
Dear usc158,
I suspect teaching is a vocation and not a job. No 'description' will satisfy what calls us to it. We are scholars first, and it is scholarship that we bring to the classroom (particularly at the university level). I don't assume we are teaching in order to contribute laborers who are better suited to the workforce. If an engineering student is forced to take a low level literature course, then it's no wonder he finds the reading of a novel irrelevant to his later employment. Telling that student he may still gain by rule-following is (in my opinion) a disservice. Our job is to instill in that student (as much by example as by the content of what we say) an appreciation of what may be gained through a genuine and purposeful desire to understand the world we live in, to recognize and appreciate the difficulties that follow from being human, and the extent to which personal scholarship may contribute to that end. We want to encourage students to explore and build upon their own understanding of the world such that they are better suited to engage with that world, not as an automaton that invariably 'gets things right', but as a thinking individual whose interests extend to those around him, and not simply in terms of a political viewpoint but as a result of a shared sense of the purpose and meaning that are to be found in our human situation. I sometimes think scholarship is a 'higher' pursuit, and that is not to say the scholar is better than the laborer, but that scholarship is (no matter one's walk in life) available to all of us and in every moment. I suspect scholarship is what will most improve our society in the ways that best suit our species. And it has nothing to do with rule-following or 'getting things right'; indeed, that is the beauty of it.
I apologize to squidward for misspelling his or her incognito; I wasn't trying to be clever.
11. douglashusca - March 27, 2010 at 03:41 pm
We can't make students read our syllabi, but we can make them responsible for doing so. My method is to attach a page at the end of the syllabus that contains words to the effect that the student has read and understood the policies on the syllabus--I require them to sign this and return it to me after the first day of class. It doesn't prevent all redundant questions/complaints, but I get very few.
12. sharonmurphy - March 28, 2010 at 10:29 am
Perhaps one problem is that colleges and universities don't expect enough of the students they recruit and admit. Far too many "students" come to "pick up a degree" and are unready and unwilling to work at learning. To keep up enrollment, standards fall, sometimes driven down by written or unwritten rules linking retention to faculty salaries. There are technical schools, apprenticeship programs and many other opportunities for job training that would better suit individuals who don't want to read, don't believe in meeting deadlines, think their "real world" full-time jobs make study inconvenient, and blame their professors when they get low grades. It's time for academe to re-think this "college for all" mentality.
13. atalanta - March 28, 2010 at 02:32 pm
Please. Mr McDonald is an undergrad, probably studying English literature. If he ever becomes a "teacher", I would invite him back after 10 years of teaching to reread his posts. LOL!
14. tekton - March 29, 2010 at 01:16 pm
Although many of Mr. McDonald's comments are so ludicrous as to invite speculation that he is in fact constructing a poorly-concealed parody of postmodern education, many of the thoughts he expresses (e.g., failure of the students is really failure of the teachers, etc) crop up again and again in the messages that come from my school's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, particulary from some of the expositors of "critical thinking." I'm sure my school is not an isolated instance of this.
To be sure, teaching involves educing, the bringing forth of the capability of the student through a wide range of meaningful activity in and out of the classroom. Teaching students how to think and how to learn is part and parcel of education. But teaching moreover involves transmission of culture, the primary function of the University; the educing part is under this umbrella. Passing down of culture to the next generation includes transmission of a body of knowledge (to which the students will hopefully add during their lifetimes), and the students had better "get it right" or we're all going to lose. If we relent in this purpose, the barbarians, like Mr. Mcdonald and his ilk, win.
15. frogprof - March 29, 2010 at 09:49 pm
Dear sharonmurphy: THANK YOU for understanding that far too many students today are in college for a degree and NOT for an education. This has been my complaint for far too many years and, despite the fact that I left [I hope only temporarily] the groves of academe several years ago, I keep my toes in the water by reading The Chronicle and -- since I live in the town of my alma mater -- the local paper, which lives and dies with [of course] the exploits of the university's football team. The university is planning to close the campus pub and has already done away with its leisure learning classes "in order to save money" -- while the football coach is glorying in his ginormous raise and while the university supports, oh, I don't know, 300 or so football players ...
As a humanities teacher [and daughter of two others], it breaks my heart to read what passes for student "essays" these days. I currently work as a website editor [nobody wants to learn French in Texas these days -- if they ever really did], and I despair of the abilities of my company's "technical writer" who couldn't write her way out of a paper bag at gunpoint. I am constantly rewriting her work and that of our boss -- who thinks himself a brilliant writer [he ain't] -- and the references and so-called bibliographies that are produced by my colleagues are laughable. And they wonder why I pull my hair at their grammatical mistakes -- errors that they should have learned to correct in about the third grade.
*sigh* No rest for the weary, I guess ... and it does keep me employed.
16. laurencejgillis - March 31, 2010 at 07:38 am
I tell my non-compliant students:
"If you think I'm bad, wait until you get out into the marketplace."
17. demery1 - March 31, 2010 at 11:25 am
Young McDonald has a point, eieio
Put your noses back in joint, eieio
With a kind word here,
A reminder there,
Here a cue, there a cue, everywhere to help you,
Many instructors write vague assignments (if you have ever assigned a "paper" I'm looking squarely at you). Many students don't ask questions, and yes, many students don't follow directions. On the other hand, if you check in early and offer formative feedback, students can catch mistakes and correct them before they become an issue.
18. davi2665 - March 31, 2010 at 11:34 am
If students want to play around with their little power games by not following directions and trying to find yet more excuses to avoid their classroom assignments and responsibilities, and if instructors are foolish enough to tolerate it, so be it. But when (if) these same students actually reach the point where they need to work for a living and carry out tasks for a supervisor that have an impact on the business and on other peoples' livelihoods, their excuses and failure to follow directions will land them where they belong- out the door. I give such individuals one opportunity to straighten up, and if that is unsuccessful, they get disinvited from their employment.
19. monkeyc - April 01, 2010 at 03:22 am
What seems to be going on in these comments is that Mr. McDonald's critics spend a lot of time on teaching and especially grading, and thus it is important to them to have students follow rules. But if one only teaches a course here and there (and spends the rest of the time on research, administration, consulting, leisure, or what have you) then it is easier to relax about rules and syllabi and just enjoy the interaction with the students. So where you stand depends on where you sit, or rather how tall the pile of homeworks you have to grade each week is.
20. catbrewer - April 03, 2010 at 01:37 am
On the first day of class I review the syllabus with the students and then have them fill out a student data sheet. At the end of the student data sheet there is a place for their signature under the phrase, "I have read and understand the policies set forth by this syllabus and agree to this contract." That way, when a student comes to me and says they 'didn't know that was in the syllabus' I can simply pull their data sheet and explain that they signed the contract -- it's been grand!