Yes. But they’ll feel like they’re the one who failed.
Today, I had 3 students (out of 11) show up for what I thought was a scintillating talk about the immediate aftermath of publishing The Origin. Wilberforce and Huxley! Huxley humiliating Owen on the hippocampus minor question! Fleeming Jenkins’ extremely awkward question! Darwin’s epic genetics failure! How can you not want to discuss these dramatic events?
Maybe I’m not as scintillating as I thought. How are these students going to learn anything if they don’t keep up? Less significantly, how do they expect to pass?
Retirement looks ever more attractive.
P.S. I should mention that my entire class is not at risk of failing. Some are. Others may be working on a lower grade than they want.
Maybe coming to grips with the current existential drama is already more than they can handle.
I’m amazed that students in college give so little regard to soaking up the knowledge of a professor while they have the chance.
I considered it to be very important to attend classes and participate in discussions.
It seems that those attitudes have mostly disappeared since the ’70s.
There was one young lady who was in several classes with me. She showed up on the first day to pick up the syllabus, assignments and test dates. She would show up on the test dates to take the tests.
The rest of us were fairly resentful that she always passed each class with high grades. I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she may have had a good reason for avoiding classes, but I felt that she missed out on the rich experience of participating in classroom discussions/debates. I suppose the attitude of a teacher was inborn in me.
I remember well the one day that my boyfriend/now husband of 48 yrs coaxed me into skipping classes.
We had a nerdy day-long date that he had planned. We attended a special presentation at the planetarium in Forest Park, then had a picnic lunch under the trees, and spent the afternoon strolling through the St. Louis Zoo.
Other than absences caused by illness, that was the first time that I had ever ditched classes in my life!
It is a sweet memory, though.
I hope they’re all having sweet memories, then.
It’s a creationist plot. They realized sending ignorant loudmouths only increased your resolve.
But stonefaced non-interaction? That’ll drive you straight to retirement.
Some of them think they’re buying a degree, rather than paying for access to earn one, and it doesn’t matter whether they attend or not. Some of them have failed to adjust to managing their own education after ~12 years of having everything mandated and controlled by others. Some of them are taking this specific class, which they are not interested in at all, because they need a class with that specific description to get through a requirement to graduate with a degree in something they are interested in.
And a startlingly large number of the remainder have been trained by their entire pre-college career and basic-level college classes to consider any classwide “discussion” session to be a complete waste of time because in every single discussion up to that point, half the timeslot has been taken up by dullards who had no comprehension of what they’ve read (if they’ve actually read anything and aren’t trying to bluff) and therefore said things which were a waste of time, a large chunk of the people who might have been able to understand the reading well enough to have a non-wasteful discussion did not actually do the reading, and the people who were actually interested in the subject already had done enough reading — both the class material and usually stuff they encountered elsewhere — to have pretty much covered all the ground which might be covered in the talk in class, so by the time they reach specialized or advanced-level classes nobody actually expects such a session to be worth paying attention to. It’s like “group projects” — by the time you reach a level where collaboration might be interesting, most American students have been trained to think of group projects as “one or two people with interest and/or GPA motivation doing all the actual work and everybody else either sitting around not contributing or not even showing up”.
It would be a bummer if 70% of your class simply didn’t attend the class which they paid to take. Maybe you could discuss this in the next class? I think Covid has really affected the current generation of students and their learning experiences. Speaking in public is also simply uncomfortable for many people.
Perhaps there are other reasons why they didn’t attend, such as the part where it’s a Monday morning class?
Are they traveling or working on weekends so that they don’t get to bed until the wee hours? I don’t think you should take it personally in any case, it’s not a rare thing for college students to be a bit irresponsible, especially Monday mornings or Friday afternoons.
The real bottom of the attendance barrel is Friday. There are 3 classes a week; I can’t do the job if they regularly miss 2 of them.
Interesting thing about the Huxley-Wilberforce debate is that no transcript was taken and both sides retired thinking they had won convincingly.
Give extra credit points based on attendance?
Isn’t there always an adjustment period for students in the first few months? Letting them know that they are Failing the class might be exactly what some of them need in order to become responsible about their very expensive education.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that the unseasonably warm weather is making it feel more like late summer than nearly Halloween.
And to the point of the OP, I am sure you are an engaging lecturer, PZ. I think you are seeing the effects of social and economic changes.
It’s late capitalism. Don’t blame the professor, don’t blame the students. If your students are anything like mine, they have to work full time while studying full time just to keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables.
Maybe this is cold comfort, but – based on my own experience – I feel that college is often wasted on the young. I entered the University of California right out of HS, and then dropped out in the middle of my junior year because I was uninspired and bored – I eventually realized that I wasn’t there because I wanted to be there, but because I was expected to be there. When I returned several years later, it was a very different story. I was much more mature, disciplined and confident, and I appreciated what I was learning so much more.
Sure, maybe it’s just me… but when I worked as a TA for an upper-division, required course for my undergraduate major, I saw a whole lot of students who strongly reminded me of my old, younger self. It was not a difficult class for anyone who showed up, did the labs and had a grasp of basic Algebra, but the exams revealed that a lot of students were simply half-assing it… just like I did, once upon a time (albeit in different classes).
So, my guess is that yes, you are as scintillating as you thought. You’re just dealing with students who are mini-mes, for lack of a better description. It’s a pity, for you and for them. If they were a few years older, methinks it might be different.
The whole ‘kids these days’ tenor of some of the comments bothers me: it’s a very familiar pattern to blame the vulnerable for the material conditions of their lives and to ascribe to lack of character what is better explained by desperation.
I feel like your class could be a good metaphor for the American electorate – barely engaged, not really taking it seriously, and going to get the result they deserve…. and, like in your class the ones that would like to do better are being dragged down by the ones that don’t care.
[canadiansteve, ouch! Mordant]
@14 canadiansteve — At least in my area, the electorate is very engaged right now … and anxious. Both sides. Your comment might have rung true a decade or more ago, but in my experience that is not the case today. My partner works at a state university and deals with students daily — they are scared for their future, made especially poignant by the overwhelmed campus mental-health facilities here. I doubt PZ’s students are a metaphor for anything other than desperation.
[sorta OT]
Can you roughly quantify the proportion of eligible voters in your area who will actually vote?
(Seems to me that’s a reasonable and less subjective metric for political engagement than how it seems to you)
My personal hypothesis is that Homo Sapiens reached an apex around 1945-1955 and has been retreating from that apex into Homo Stultus. Your students are not exceptional in their retreat from knowledge, it’s just that people now are not a smart, nor have a desire for learning, as 70-80 years ago. …stultus factus est omnis homo ab scientia… You yourself have often remarked how people are antagonistic to learning. They are merely destroying what they cannot understand. It’s going to get worse depending upon whether you are an Eloi or a Morlok.
“Retirement looks ever more attractive.”
Oh, yes. Retirement is a paradise. I wake up in the morning and look out the window. If it’s rainy, grey, cold, I go back to bed. If it’s bright & sunny out, I go back to bed.
TonyHinchcliffe: “Can’t you take a joke? Some of my best friends are Puerto Rican!”
@16 Dennis K: as also pointed out by John Morales above, what % of those students will actually act on that anxiety and vote? Young people are well known for having the lowest participation rates of all voters, an important part of the reason their concerns are largely ignored in elections.
:)
cf. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/a%2Fthe%20squeaky%20wheel%20gets%20the%20grease%2Foil
—
Anyway. More of an allegory than a metaphor, that much I think is fair.
(But still mordant)
Seems your not the only one struggling with these issues: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-05-16-is-student-absenteeism-a-growing-problem-at-colleges-too
Drat…You’re not your. Sorry
Drat…should be you’re not your. Sorry!
PZ, have you thought about writing a version of your lecture for New Scientist or a simillar outlet?
I think The Vicar at @5 describes some of the possible reasons for the absences well, but I am also curious to know how old these students are. In my experience, as was mentioned, not all students transition “well” from organized school days to the freedom of university life.
I am in the lucky position of having no teaching duties in my job(s) but can do it and have done so in the past decades. I have similar experiences to PZ with often a large part of the students who have enrolled not showing up. However, in my case, those students are in their mid twenties and sometimes older, and the course is not one they have to take for their degree. They also don’t pay for it as education is free in this country. So, my attitude is that I offer my “wisdom” to them and try my best to make it interesting and relevant but in the end they are adults who make the descision to take it or leave it. If they think they can get through exam, essays and exercises without be present during the lectures and/or put effort into learning about the course content, good luck, but I don’t feel then any obligation to go the extra mile or making any effort to have them pass if they don’t deserve it.
Luckily, there are still sometimes those that are really interested and engaged, and those are then the ones who might end up not only with good marks and, hopefully, useful knowledge, but also with internships, Bachelor or Master theses in our lab. And those are the ones that keep me going. (Retirement still a decade away. :-))
I was fascinated with that time ever since I read. Darwin For Beginners a while ago . It’s a graphic novel but goes over how Darwin and some of his precursors thought about evolution and what happened soon after Darwin and Wallace published. The scientific community basically going from creationist ideas to accepting evolution in a couple of decades before the 20th century.
I may have been the exception to what many of you are saying about learning being wasted on youth.
I grew up on food stamps and welfare with an abusive single mother. Since she did not allow me to socialize, my friends were books from an early age. Luckily, I had teachers who recognized my potential and guided me along the way.
My mother wanted me to quit school at 16, get a “real” job, and support her. Instead, I graduated second in my class at the age of 16, with a 4 year tuition scholarship to a very good university.
I appreciated the fact that the scholarship was my way out of poverty and refused to give it up, even when my sweet husband and I married during our junior year and had our first baby soon after my last exam that year. I graduated Magna Cum Laude on her first birthday. She is now a neuroscience PHD, by the way. Thanks to the great education that we both had at that university, my husband and I have led a good life, as well as launching five children into successful lives of their own.
We’re looking forward to the next phase when he retires at the end of this year, as long as we still have a functioning government at that time.
I was always willing to tell this story to my students, and I feel proud that some of them listened and went on to be the first college graduates in their own families.
As Michelle Obama said, “When the doorway to opportunity is opened for you, don’t let it close behind you. Hold it open for the next person”.
A neuroscience PhD? Cool! What is she studying?