Risk and Reward

One day you're in; the next you're out. That's the way Project Runway scores the contestants. Doesn't matter what you did last because what's in front of us is what we're judging, and if it doesn't make it, the contest is over for you.  As a classroom teacher for 30 years, this was the hardest part of teaching, having to tell a student that work handed in for grading didn't cut it--or work over the course of a semester just wasn't up to the standard for passing the course. 

Teachers have feelings, and they usually try very hard to look for the best in each individual student's work, but sometimes, no matter how hard a person works or how much they want to earn an A it isn't going to happen this time.  Earning a grade of C means that a student has met the standard for passing a class, but far too often both the student and the parent thinks that working really hard and trying to be the best is good enough to earn an A, and that's not true. There is no way to sugar-coat a less than stellar grade, and we try with positive affirmations about next time, but some students simply will have to accept that their work is not stellar, it's average, and that's what a grade of C indicates.

I am suspicious of the news articles about a dozen students sharing valedictorian honors at graduation because that means that those students were rocketmen/women who blasted into outer space for 4 years and landed safely every time. Earning a 4.0 used to be a rare occurrence, but in today's inflated grade environment, it's much more common to have a group earn highest honors, even at the college level.  If everyone, however, is outstanding, then no one really is: they become average in a group of high achievers.

I learned as an adjunct college professor that students cheat. I knew that before, but especially became aware of it as electronics entered the educational environment. Before teachers were given permission to confiscate phones, students would send messages to other students both inside the same classsroom and to students sitting outside with the textbook (often a teacher's edition) so they can look up the correct response for a test or essay. Cheating used to be a risk; in today's classroom, it's a ritual. For every countermeasure the faculty employs, the students have a newer, better counter-measure to make sure that they can cheat with impugnity. The risk is not high as it's incredibly challenging to catch cheating, stop cheating, and deal with indignant parents whose child simply would never cheat regardless of the evidence to the contrary. My career in education formally ended a decade ago, when the electronics were first making their appearance in the classroom. I had issues at almost every class with students who were trying to succeed dishonestly because ... the excuses/reasons were endless. When the cheating was stopped in progress, the tears began to flow. What was expecially challenging at the college level was the stop at a counselor's office for a tear-filled counseling session that often ended with a heart-to-heart with the instruction that included an explanation of why it happened "this once," and why it would never happen again, and what kind of documentation is going to be needed to strengthen the accusations about the student's conduct if the instructor thinks the student should be suspended from college. One key piece to this problem in the general education environment is the backing from the parents. Believe me, if a teacher catches a student cheating and goes far enough to involve a counselor and the parents, the student was cheating--and it probably wasn't the first time. At the college level, a student who is caught cheating either has never been caught before or realized at an early age that the student has the upper hand when it comes to dealing with the teacher, then the counselor, and finally the administration. Yes, as you can probably realize, one of the reasons I retired before I had finished my teaching career is that I was burned out by issues such as students' cheating. As an adjunct professor teaching aboard a military base, one adult student actually called the MPs on me for "stealing" from her when I confiscated her cheat notes during a testing environment. That pretty much showed me that I was a dinosaur and it was time to move on. As they say, "One day you're in and the next you're out."