college students

This week the assignment in college comp is to write an essay about the positive and negative effects (or short term/long term; physical/emotional, whatever) of involvement in extracurricular activities. Research and valid support from experts are required. Today I read some rough drafts.

Out of twenty something papers, fourteen of them quoted as their source the same “study” done by two professors at the University of Pakistan. Their papers “reflect” the findings in a predictably vague and non-committal way, with language intended for fifth graders and excessive repetition for extreme ADHD readers. My students have not yet figured out that AI writing generally sucks anyway.

After some frustration, I took a moment to Google “Studies of the effects of extracurricular activities,” and the first six or so hits were UCLA, University of Wisconsin, Oklahoma State, Notre Dame, US Department of Education.

National Institute of Health, Texas A&M, Nature. The list of accepted expert sources is extensive.

So what gives?

Ah! I thought. I know exactly what gives.

I Googled “information about the effects of extracurricular activities,” and the first five hits? University of Pakistan. I googled “statistics and quotes about extracurricular activities” and the same Pakistani people popped up. Then I Googled “Essays about the effects of extracurricular activities” and the same people showed up. Go figure.

Quick recount: Test scores started to drop at high schools and universities about the time technology slipped into the curriculum, not unlike obesity showing up more often after the explosion of fast-food restaurants nationwide, or the numbers of hyperactive and anxiety-prone students skyrocketing with the introduction of specialty coffee shops and power drinks. After Texas instruments introduced the calculator to the classroom, the slide rule (kids, look it up) slid out of use. The conversation in the seventies was that students weren’t learning math, they were learning how to use a calculator.

This has been going on since some Bronze Age dad figured out a flint stone started fire faster than rubbing together two sticks. At the time, if he handed his preteen two sticks, the kid might have stared at them like they were relics from the Neanderthal Age.

In all math classes and for all homework, teachers used to exclaim, “Do your own work.” Not meaning don’t cheat, though I suppose that too, but meaning do NOT use electronics such as a Texas Instrument calculator to figure out the solution.

Writing terrifies students because they simply don’t do it. And if they can use AI programs to complete their work AND know the material, well, whatever. But writing is different; it is organic, but most importantly it has been proven to be the most effective tool in learning. It directly aids in retention, and we can actually teach ourselves material and figure out solutions to problems simply by writing about them, page after page. It is called Writing to Learn, and in Days of Yore, it was standard practice, wherein an eighth-grade class might be assigned Hamlet to read, and then their homework was to write two-thousand words about “Hamlet’s madness” or “Laertes revenge,” and so on. The process of writing exposed the characters to the writer with far more accuracy than “thinking” about it, or even talking about it, and the students became better writers, learned to do their own work, and gained valuable confidence in the process. That’s the key issue here—the absolute lack of confidence on the part of the student to write coherently.

But that individual, organically generated (OG?) writing ebbed during a time when individual assignments were sacrificed for “Group Work.”

But I digress. I got carried away as is apt to happen when writing. I do it a lot, though, so I don’t mind. But my students do not do it and they apparently do mind, even in a class they know was a writing class. They avoid it anyway and would rather spend time finding other people who already wrote what I’m looking for. The problem is this isn’t a history class where all I really want to know is if they understand the pressure felt by a group of soldiers on D-Day, which still should be met with original writing of course. No, this IS a writing class, where the lesson we learn is how to actually do it and the subject matter is secondary. We don’t learn how to steal it or copy it or get through by being so howl-at-the-moon lazy that I question how they got through high school to begin with.

(breathe in, breathe out)

Don’t be so quick to assume the student with the 4.0 GPA earned it. Don’t assume the new hire knows the material; they might have just learned how to present information as if they know what they’re doing. Do not automatically believe the students would make good graduate students because they seemed to excel during their undergraduate studies. They may have actually excelled at finding material, not figuring it out on their own.

So how can we tell if students are doing their own work?

Here’s what I do:

I get to know them. I pull a chair into the middle of the room, and we talk about their hobbies, their siblings, their experiences being away at college for the first time, and what they do for fun to relieve the stress of classes. I adopted Leo Buscaglia’s requirement of a “Voluntary-Mandatory” meeting at least once a semester, where every student was required to volunteer to go to his office at least once for five minutes, introduce themselves, and talk about what they want out of the class. So I do that, and I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my students better now than I did in the thirty years I was at a different college.

Does it work?

NO! Half my class thinks Hamza Abbasi of the University of Pakistan is the source for all things extracurricular in the American schools. And they all told me so using exactly the same words as each other.

Tomorrow I’m handing out slide rules and asking them for the square root of 3987.5. That will give me time to read more rough drafts.

Its the end of a semester, finishing up today, and I sit and remember one of my favorite moments as a professor; ironically, it was a day I encouraged a student to quit school. Honestly, not everyone belongs. Not yet.

A student comes to see me. He says he can’t handle the pressure of school. I tell him I think he’s a good student and he says yes, he can do the work, he just can’t stand it. He hates it, he says. He gets bored fast. It’s a good conversation, honest. Had we been somewhere else we would have talked over beers. He looks at his watch and says he has to work in a few hours and sighs. He runs his own roofing company but hates that too. He has six grand invested in equipment and no help and he just dreads doing the work now. He says he’s at some fork in the road, two paths that look the same so he’s frozen, easier to just stay put. He gets quiet and stares at a photograph on my wall of a village in Africa. Looks nice he says, like he wants to say anything to forget what he’s really thinking about. Then he remembers and sighs again. He’s quiet for some time and I find myself drifting.

I worked at a bar. Good money and mindless work; the kind of work where if you don’t think too much about what you’re doing, you can keep on smiling. I know I spent a few years there but it seems like it was always winter, all grey and bone-cold. One morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a state park near my country house, but I didn’t know how I got there. I had to work a few hours later but never made it. I drained my accounts, stuck a little aside, then bought a ticket to Africa. Turns out changing my life, kicking my own ass out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol, was as easy as jumping off a cliff knowing you’re either going to land on your feet or learn how to fly. Boring disappeared from my life.

But this student has trouble talking about it, so I talk: I tell him I get that feeling in my chest too. Tight, constricting, difficulty breathing. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the sense that something needs to change. It’s the Philosophy class with five minutes left of three hours and the prof starts another chapter because there are still five minutes left; it’s the meeting you can’t tolerate but you’re in a row of seats with too many people on both sides so you can’t leave; it’s that this-homily-is-way-too-long feeling. It’s the feeling you’re just one day away from something else, but then that day comes and you find yourself one day away from something. It’s the Whitman poem about astronomy; the wide awake at three am feeling and you can’t move so you stare at the alarm clock. Exactly, he says. I’m always staring at the clock, he says. I’d love to know what you’d do, he says.

I tell him about that bar somewhere I didn’t belong. I remember working and then not working but I don’t remember what happened between the two. I just recall waking up one day in the peace-of-mind of another world, centuries away from being behind bars; like I could finally breathe on my own. I let him know I remember dreading the moment between what was and what was next so I just kept pouring drinks, and he nods. He knows. Then I say that one day I didn’t. It was that simple. He looked at me like I was looking in a mirror. Then he says he’s going to work and he leaves. I went to class slightly high on remembering, still somehow slightly down, suddenly lethargic.

Six months later he sends me a postcard from Australia. Don’t know when I’ll be back, it says. When I am, let’s get some beers and talk. I look forward to it but, of course, way leads on to way, and I doubt he ever came back.