We ask too much of our students. I believe that by asking less, we would get more. In the large introductory course that I teach in, at least, students are asked to do so many different new things in such a short amount of time that they don’t get a fair chance to really master much of it.
And everybody knows something isn’t right, judging by the amount of complaints from colleagues about all the things students don’t know, understand, or can’t do later on in their Bachelor’s. And whatever it is that’s wrong, it must be our fault, I believe. Because even if students were lazy –which they’re very much not– it’s us who passed them in all those courses.
The metaphor of “setting a high bar” sounds good, but isn’t right. Most courses consist of many different bars to jump over and hoops to jump through. And we give points for reaching almost high enough, but not quite. This means that by cramming our courses full with as much as we can get away with is guaranteed to lead to students passing while having mastered precious little of all that material.
So why do we do it? I see at least three reasons.
First of all, it is difficult for us to appreciate how complex the things we have come to take for granted as the basics can be for novices that are just starting out. I am often taken aback by how baffled some of my colleagues can be by the fact that students do not understand something that seems simple to them, and by how casually some people dismiss students’ failures or mistakes as due to stupidity or lack of effort. This is a well known problem in settings where experts meet novices. One of the essential aspects of expertise is that complex concepts become intuitive, what was once difficult and complex comes to appear simple and easy.
Second, I believe there is a measure of wishful thinking at play. We’d very much like them to learn all this, and thus, we very much want to believe it’s possible. And didn’t all of us learn these things in a similar sort of course? I don’t think so. We learned most of it afterwards, during other courses and projects. And we’re probably the ones for whom this process was less frustrating than it was for most. People who don’t like learning things for their own sake probably don’t go on to become teachers and professors.
Third, teachers giving an ineffective course are not themselves confronted with the problem. Deficiencies in knowledge and understanding only become problematic in later courses. And we end up passing most of our students, right? That must mean they’ve learned it all!