One fears for the future if these students are typical of today's crop:

Once again, I explained how to answer the question, and once again the student was pleased. The error was just a trivial difference of opinion. "Yeah, I get it," she said. "I was just thinking of it differently." You say tomayto, I say tomahto.

No, I wanted to say, you weren't thinking of it differently, you had it completely wrong; you didn't understand it at all. But like her many compatriots, she was unlikely to acknowledge that, or admit to a mistake even when she created a version of reality never seen on a map, or in the actions of a blackbird.

Students have always deluded themselves, of course, and hope has always sprung eternal, or at least until final grades appear. And at least some in my classes really do eventually master the material. But confident placidity in the face of error seems to be on the rise.

Maybe it's all that self-esteem this generation of students was inculcated with as youngsters, or maybe it's the emphasis on respecting everyone else's opinion, to the point where no answer, even a mathematical one, can be truly wrong because that might offend the one who gave it.

I am begining to favor manditory military service for 2 years follwing high school as a means of deprogramming their skulls full of mush.

These kids need an old skool Drill Sergant or Drill Instructor to help pull their head out of their fourth point of contact.

Then they can actually EARN self-esteem thru genuine accomplishment instead of having it cheaply assigned .

I heard that "My answer is just as good as your answer" excuse a lot when I taught. It's just an excuse, a more verbose way of saying "Who cares?". They'd have another excuse the next day. No one's been brainwashed by the self-esteem police.

Mike, I don't think that would be a good idea. The US military has a purpose and it's not babysitting people for two years.

OTOH, public schools have a purpose too, and it's not babysitting people for twelve years. So I guess someone has to actually do the job. I'm reminded of Sam Dinkin's article on opening the flood gates of immigration. Frankly, it's probably cheaper now to import a skilled worker than it is to retrain the average public school graduate particularly one who has subsequently coasted through a slack and liberal college experience.

We should fix the problem rather than continuing to create a culture of incompetents.

"...a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside."

Here is the saddest part, students at that level who still haven't heard, "...NO, your answer is wrong!!" Or at least won't admit when they are wrong, or worse still don't KNOW the difference in an inch and a mile.

Personally as a former military instructor as well as a former civilian technical instructor, its not only the thing to do, its mandatory to tell students the difference in being slightly wrong or down right dead a$$ wrong!! Its never the instructors job to worry about someones "feelings" when teaching. Unless you are at the kindergarten level.

How will the ex-student feel when they get fired for being almost right on that particular subject later in life.

Many factors come into play here- I don't think there is any one simple fix. Low pay for teachers makes many of them not care. Tenure assures them they'll get a paycheck no matter what. Failing a student tends to reflect more on the teacher than the student, so many are promoted by rubber stamp. And- we have at least one generation of young teachers in place now who are products of the same faulty system. A high precentage of teachers are professional educators- and there's certainly merit to that- but how can they prepare students for the real-world job market when most have never been there themselves? More and more educational efforts are targeted toward getting kids to pass state-mandated competency exams (like Florida's "FCAT") and less effort goes toward actually preparing them for work and/or further education.
I'm certainly tired of having young degree-carrying engineers assigned to me who cannot spell, punctuate or construct a coherent sentence; who can write lines and lines of programming code, but never quite got the concept of a square root.
I think the touchy-feely 'I'm OK, you're OK' self-esteem psychology is a job for parents- not teachers.

How will the ex-student feel when they get fired for being almost right on that particular subject later in life.

We all learn at our own pace, Steve.

I find this part interesting:

"No, I WANTED TO SAY, you weren't thinking of it differently..." (emphasis mine)

Why didn't he say it? He's a science teacher, for pete's sake. If a math or science teacher are to scared to say that something is wrong, how do we expect people to learn?

Best people I ever learned from were those who didn't take any crap from anyone, and weren't hesitant to tell the truth.

Bob

We all learn at our own pace, Steve.

Very true. Unfortunately people now have an expectation that the lessons will not carry negative consequences even out in the real world. We need to bring back the serious negative consequences in academia so they'll have a better handle on what to expect if they screw up when playtime is over.

billg,
I agree with you somewhat. We should learn these things at out own pace, but we should NOT be sheltered from being told we are wrong, we failed, and we have disappointed someone.

I am now 50 and have children and grandchildren. I remember teachers I had, I remember teachers my kids had and I see the teachers my grandchildren now have.

Here is my observation. Some were then, and are now good teachers, some were not, and some are not good teachers. The difference is not the personnel; it’s the difference in the system.

When I went to school our self-esteem was gained through earning it. Learning came first.

It was the same at home, when I was wrong or did wrong I heard about it. Sometimes to the detriment of the seat of my pants. Not often, but I was taught to be responsible. You don't learn responsibility from never being told you are not right, when in fact you are NOT RIGHT.

Some of that type thinking had eroded when my sons were in school.

NOW, self-esteem is the rule of the day and education is secondary. I have 2 grandsons in grade school and both of them have had good teachers, and bad. One of them actually had a kindergarten teacher who did his work so he wouldn't FEEL BAD about himself. My son and daughter-in-law were furious when they found out.
When they reported it to school administrators they saw nothing wrong with it.

It has taken all of us a year to convince this boy that HE and only HE is responsible for his work. Before that teacher he could recognize the alphabet, write his name and do some simple math. After that teacher, we all had to start over teaching him those things. ESPECIALLY the idea of personal responsibility.

THAT’S the problem, people who are concerned about how the kids FEEL, over how and what they LEARN.
Don't get me wrong, teachers should not be cruel. I went to Catholic grade school, so I had some old school, really mean "for your own good" nuns for teachers. I learned just enough to keep them off my back. When I had good, caring, nuns for teachers I learned a lot more.

There has to be a balance of toughness and tenderness in a child’s life. That way when times do get tough, they can survive it.

Authoritarian systems eventually fail in predictable ways. That's what we are seeing here.

Consider just one phenomenon. When I went to high school (early 1960s) we got up around 7 AM for a school start around 8:30 AM. Well, in the 1970s, larger schools, bussing, etc., led to school start times around the country being moved up to around 7 to 7:30 AM with students arising much earlier than I did. All this resulted in more students falling asleep in class that when I went. What got blamed? The new start time? No. Our schools blamed parents, students, society at large. Authoritarian systems don't learn unless the people at the top learn. The people at the top are all too frequently insulated from bad news -- especially if it's bad news about their actions.

The end result of this kind of system are students who are praised for obeying rules, not learning material. Of course some students don't obey the rules, but that allows the system to blame someone else for failure and to also praise students who aren't learning but are obeying the rules.

Yes, I can be cynical sometimes.

Anything is possible if you lower your standards far enough.

I first coined this phrase about military space systems but it applies to education as well. Sure, we can increase graduation rates if we don't actually expect the kids to know anything. And I can fly, if you count jumping into the air as flying.

When I graduated from high school 30 years ago, I heard about how teenagers had different sleep patterns and how it wasn't right to expect them to get up early. When I reported to Army basic training a couple months later, I found it wasn't hard to get up early. It's all a matter of motivation. A Drill Instructor has quite a way of motivating people.

Steve, I agree that students should't be sheltered from the consequences of their mistakes. If anything, that's the surest way to learn. That's actually what I meant: this guy would get fired and, finally, learn his lesson.

Teachers have an obigation to do everything they can to get their students to learn, but they cannot compel anyone to do that. If a student wants to screw off and make excuses, that's the student's responsibility.

When I was teaching, I once had a student come to my office after I'd given her a failing grade on a quiz. She was concerned, she said, because her divorced mother's new boy friend had convinced her mom to ship her off to a boarding school if she failed my class. I told her nothing stood in the way of her passing. I offered to answer any questions she had and to help her learn as best I could. If she was confused about something, all she needed to do was come to my office and I'd try to explain.(I didn't like the idea of her Mom dumping her to please the boyfriend du jour, but I was not going to give her a free ride. That's the wrong kind of lesson.)

She wanted me to guarantee I'd pass her, regardless of her performance and her test results. I checked her situation out, and everything she'd said was true: Thanks to the boyfriend's pressure, her mom was going to ship her to boarding school if she flunked.

Long story shorter: I refused to simply give her a pass. She never came back, never asked another question, never opened her mouth in class again. She never passed another test. She flunked.

I don't know when she started to learn that her behavior had consequences.

Larry J,

I presume you were a volunteer. The draft was dead by 1975. You were probably more motivated because you were a volunteer. I will also point out that Army basic training isn't nearly as intellectually demanding as high school. I've experienced both.

For what it's worth, I didn't find DIs intimidating. They were, in fact, a bit scared of a very unwilling conscript with a degree in physics.

No, I was motivated because my senior DI had spent two tours in Nam with the Vietnamese Rangers. He had killed a lot of people and gave the impression that he enjoyed it. He also had at least 6 inches and 50 pounds on me, and virtually all of it was muscle. He had no trouble getting this 18 year old out of bed at O-God Thirty in the morning.

I've taught school at different levels from grade 7 through graduate school. While a person's motivation mostly comes from within, fear can be a very powerful motivator. Today, kids know they have nothing to fear, either at home or at school. If they don't do the work, they'll be passed anyway in most cases. Too bad for them that the real world is out there, where the absurdities of academia have no basis in reality. The schools are setting the kids up to fail.

Larry J,

Fear motivated you. You're making a false generalization that it can be an effective motivation across the board. The world simply doesn't work the way you think it does. There's been a fair amount of research into authoritarian vs. democratic leadership styles. You might be surprised, but democratic leadership is generally better connected to reality and achieves superior results in learning.

There are places where authoritarian leadership is clearly preferable. Some military settings fit that bill quite well.

The real world is a complex, wonderous thing. Understanding it takes time, patience and a good bit of listening.