Rewards and consequences

In the last two days two students wrote to me about different things which seem to have the same theme. I do not want to extrapolate from the words of two to the beliefs of many. However I have heard or read enough similar ideas in the last seven years to think that there are many students who have identical or very similar ideas at least at some time in their academic careers. Since I teach all first semester students perhaps these ideas change over their time at school, I hope so.

The first idea was from a student who said I did not mark his last assignment fairly. He deserved a better mark because of the time he took to think about it and write it. This idea is often expressed as "I tried so hard" My immediate thought when I hear this expressed (which I rarely say out loud to students) is "we get rewarded for achieving, not for trying." (In the words of Yoda "there is no try, do or do not.") This particular student told me how long he worked on the assignment, which is quite unusual. I gather he expected me to be impressed that he spent two hours working on an assignment that is worth 5% of his final mark in the course. So I did a little math. If two hours equals 5%, then forty hours equals 100%. Since it is a fourteen week course, that is a little less than three hours a week. That is a reasonable amount of time for each course and it is practical for most students. The student had five weeks to do the most recent assignment, that suggests the student should have used more than two hours to do the most recent assignment, possibly as much as fifteen hours. If I marked his assignment solely in terms of reward for time spent I gave him far more than he "deserved".

The second idea came from a student who thought I treated her unfairly because of the mark I gave her for not following the rules for the assignment. (These rules have been the rules for two test and two other assignments, and she followed these same rules four times before.) Her rationale for requesting an adjustment: "everyone makes mistakes". I had to agree with that comment, everyone does make mistakes. I thought about that idea briefly and then I passed on the following idea to her. Everyone does make mistakes. However, every mistake has at least one consequence. She saw the consequence of her mistake in her mark.

Both of the above ideas seem to based in the idea that because I do something, no matter what it is, I deserve a reward, not the appropriate consequence but something positive just because I did something. This is appropriate when children are being toilet trained, but it is not how employers treat employees and it is not how post-secondary students (or even secondary students) should be treated. All actions have consequences, some consequences are positive and some are not.

Average vs Exception

In the last few days I have noticed when teachers get together, even just two of us, we often talk about students, not by name but by action. Often I hear "I have a student who ...". I think it is interesting that we talk about the exceptional student or students, not the average, the regular, the middle students. I suppose this is a human thing, to notice and discuss the one person or thing that is different from the rest. Perhaps this is in our biological history. But it can give uninformed listeners the wrong impression. The student that gets talked about is almost always the exception, the one who does something unexpected or out of the ordinary or completely differently from the rest of the class.

End of Week 5

Two weeks since I have written, two weeks of classes and assignments. Most students seem to have adjusted to being at college. Some have not. At this point I am familiar enough with most students that I have noticed patterns in their behaviour. Items I have noticed include: absences, poorly done work, little or no attention in class, reluctance or refusal to follow simple requests. I attended a faculty meeting this morning with the group who teach computer technicians and programmers. One person reported a study done several years ago that showed final marks are almost always within 1% of mid-term grades. That backs up what I have experienced. Students who don't get involved in their college education within the first few weeks do not do well. And it is possible to measure that involvement through the work they do in the first six or seven weeks of the semester.

My struggle is to find a way to help students connect with their education in courses that are basic skills for all their other work. Telling them they need to know these skills to succeed in all their college courses does not work very well. Many of them think they learned the necessary computer skills before they arrived at college. There seems to be more interest, or at least more focused work on these skills this semester than I have seen in many years.

Technological struggle: Many students prefer to play with the computer rather than listen to me. This is extremely distracting for their neighbours. Obviously if two or more students in the room are exchanging messages then several students are not participating in their education. There is software that will control the computers so the instructor controls what appears on students' screens. I would like to be mandatory software in our labs but it won't work with laptops.