Success week!

Success Week. What a great euphemism! Somebody (Asst. dean of students?) will claim this as a great achievement and get rewarded for it. So what is Success Week? It's the last week of classes before finals. There are a whole bunch of rules about what you can and cannot do the last week of classes, however it can all be boiled down to don't further stress out stressed out students. Too many things must be finished this week along with studying for finals.  TPP never did any of the "don'ts" and it was because the big project due was their lab portfolios, and they've known about this from day one (syllabus). And he never gave comprehensive finals, although because ideas and concepts build on each other the 4th exam has the most comprehensiveness. Here's the thing. It wouldn't really make any difference because you can't make up in a week what you should have been doing all semester. "But we need time to study." No, you need time to review, studying was, or should have been, done day by day, week by week as the class went along. This means a lot of students didn't really study at all, and then try to make it all up in one week, and we're not to make matters worse. OK, TPP can buy that, but it should be called "It's too late week."  This is one of those things you learn or you only go so far with your education. But euphemisms like this make you want to gag, or choke a deanlet.

End of the semester ups and downs

TPP's email inbox is bulging. That can only mean one thing, it's the end of the semester and this is the last ditch chance to submit all those assignments that were due all semester.  Students who have paid little attention to what was going on are now want to know what is going on as if it will make a difference.  For many such students semesters end in a whimper, sadly fading away, with nothing like a triumphant finale or celebration.  But not our rainforest ecology class: bright, hard-working, positive attitudes, well-behaved, good company, cooperative, eager, observant, so they'll have a final get together, and TPP will host a dinner of Costa Rican food and a picture party.  Everyone submits their best photos (up to 30) for a visual sharing.  There will be awards for the best organism picture, the best landscape picture, and the best in-the-field selfie (a new category).  Awards will also be given for best projects and presentations. Other awards will make light of tropical field work like the teflon award for the person who just never seems to get dirty, or the peccary award of personal hygiene (only if applicable), and monsoon mud-monkey award for the person who just seems to be a mud magnet, and so on.  This will take place after final exams so people can unwind.  It's their reward for not whining, whinging, or wailing.  Now, find the student in the rainforest.

Monday, December 3 - End of the semester blues

The first Monday in December is the last Monday of the semester (exam week doesn't count really).  TPP has about 10 lectures worth of material to cover in 3 lectures, so something is amiss.  A number of students have made appointments this week.  Some of them will give me a lot of excuses for their poor performance, but no good reasons.  This distinction will be largely lost on them.  Now having been one of those students myself, albeit many years ago when the prospects of graduating more or less equated into being drafted to fight a war in Vietnam, how this happens is something TPP understands, but with one important distinction.  TPP knew perfectly well that the explanation was quite simply my own decision, my own actions, and nothing else.  So far, and typical of today's students, it's never their fault.  One young lady admitted that her mother has always called her "last-minute Lena" because she always did work at the last minute basically never studying just cramming for exams.  How's that working for you now? inquires TPP.  Answer: a D.  Lots of students suffer because their study skills fail to advance, to improve, beyond high school, and after the first couple of years of common curriculum and introductory courses, they can no longer do the work and their grades fall off.  This is very discouraging, and many of them, even when their admit they understand the problem, don't want to do anything about it (and professional help does exist).  They just want to graduate and be done with it.  So you figure you'll never have to learn anything again? asks TPP.  Do you understand that your ability to learn is your greatest skill?  This is a bitter pill to have to swallow, but it is becoming more prevalent of late affecting about 20% of students based on my samples of juniors and seniors.  The digital age has done nothing to improve grammar and spelling in fact those skills are definitely in decline along with vocabulary (Confusion over "very" and "vary"!  "Our" instead of "are"!  Lots of wrong words period.) and none of them seem to think this is important at all sadly.  Those letters of application and those little essays about "career goals" they are showing me are not going to impress anyone, but maybe the bar is now set much lower.  Hint to job applicants.  They don't care about your hobbies or your career aspirations; those are little writing exams.  This comes as a shock to some; others express their disbelief.  Ah, that's at least a different excuse.  They had their wisdom teeth removed and immediately felt their IQ decline. Sigh.     

End of the semester in sight

A good friend was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and as he put it, "Duluth is not the end of the Earth, but if you stand on your car's hood you can see the end from there." Monday is not the end of the semester, but when the Phactor stands on his chair he can see it from here. Now is when steady, diligent work the whole semester pays off. If students aren't on top of things now, it's basically too late. Students asking for help have run out of time, but you try to help them anyways. One fellow wanted to know what he was doing wrong, and after analyzing his approach, the answer was simple; he was doing everything wrong. Poor notes, tired old highlighting of text material, no integration of lab material, and so on. His old study just before an exam was totally inadequate for the volume of material being covered and he was over-whelmed. If the skills do not progress and continue to improve, the wheels begin to fall off as advanced undergrad courses stress the system. And this happens to pretty bright kids too because high school, and then all too often community colleges, just don't push them along or challenge them sufficiently to induce changes, and the bright ones get by pretty well. About half of the struggling students know something is wrong because they figure out that not everyone is having a problem; the other half know it's poor teaching. Their expectations and the reality of higher education are just not matching up. A few are still plagued by inattention, immaturity, and disinterest, and these are not a winning strategy for any endeavor; maybe the think the Phactor doesn't notice that they are playing with their little wireless toys. In the end this is what you end up evaluating, those who can and those who can't, or rarely those who won't.

Last Friday, Last Lecture

Today is the last Friday of the semester. Today was my last lecture in plant diversity. It turned out just about right. Changes that took place during the last 65 million years (since the Cretaceous) had to be covered and that's 1.5% of Earth history, and one lecture is 2.2% of a semester, so the Phactor lavished lecture time upon this time period. But it shouldn't be called the Cenozoic; it should be the Anthofloric, but such is the animal bias.
For many different reasons this was a difficult semester, but mostly it was the additional demands being made upon us because we're terribly under staffed. There just never seemed to be enough time, so you do your best for the students, but ultimately they are the ones who get shorted, and no one is confident that our administrators understand all of this. Of course there will be some sad stories when a few students realize that they have run out of time and should have invested more effort all along. But then you have those students who improve all semester and find out that they really like learning; those are our success stories. Wish they were all that way. These are students who finally realize that you don't study for exams, you study to learn, and if you do that exams take care of themselves. That is a lesson too few students learn. You should see the looks when the Phactor tells 1st year majors that they shouldn't study for exams. They never hear the 2nd part.