How to deal with student who told me that he pays for my salary?

[Wahoo Redux]

I've never met a college graduate who is "functionally illiterate," even at the open-enrollment schools I teach at.

Nor can we realistically expect college to resolve all issues with young people and mold them into perfect employment machines.  We were all green at one point.  Going from the greenest turkey on the street to someone a little more savvy is part of life, including the working world.

Frustration leads to hyperbole when one does not think one's point is being taken, Polly.

One thing that would help fix colleges (among many others): Hire FT teachers.

[Parasaurolophus]

I've never met a college graduate who is "functionally illiterate," even at the open-enrollment schools I teach at.

I've had one who I think fits the bill (though I could be wrong in my assessment--I'm not a professional).

[Caracal]

I've never met a college graduate who is "functionally illiterate," even at the open-enrollment schools I teach at.

I've had one who I think fits the bill (though I could be wrong in my assessment--I'm not a professional).

Supposedly 14 percent of the US population is by some measures functionally illiterate. I'm guessing, that hyperbole about declining standards aside, there aren't many high school graduates in that number. Are there a a few? Sure, but I give essay exams and I would say two things.
1. I teach at a school that has a 70 percent acceptance rate and I  have never had a student that wasn't capable of writing something that vaguely seemed like a response to the essay. I occasionally have students who don't seem to be able to do more than write something very short. My impression is that most of these students are struggling less with literacy than expressing complex ideas, but I wouldn't be shocked if a few of them do have more basic struggles.
2. The group of students who seem to struggle with basic writing tasks, most of whom probably wouldn't fit the tag of functional illiteracy anyway, is very small, perhaps around 2 or 3 percent.

[mahagonny]

Show him a list of the personnel working at the community college followed by how much each is paid per hour. He brought up the subject.

[Aster]

Show him a list of the personnel working at the community college followed by how much each is paid per hour. He brought up the subject.

PWNED!

[polly_mer]

My anger is misplaced because people right here have admitted to ripping off students in their classes by not holding standards?  Interesting.

Caracal, all your other points indicate conflating a certificate in, say, key punch operator with a professional preparation like engineering.  Yep, state-of-the-art in engineering tools has changed dramatically in my lifetime and indeed in the past 10 years.  The math to do the physics to do the critical thinking to learn new things remains useful.  The ability to read quickly and learn new things is more important than ever. 

Yes, some people with a good liberal arts education can also learn new things quickly enough to matter.  However, someone who isn't even hitting the mark in a dumbed down college class (something about not being as good as a sophomore in high school) is not on the track to be able to learn new things and adjust as the world continues to change at a breakneck speed.

Only 30% of the US adult population has a college degree.  Dumbing down the content so that more people have a piece of paper instead of the skills and content that used to be the hallmark of a college graduate serves only the people who are getting paid regardless of what students learn along the way.

I will also say, because it's come up multiple times recently in my job and I'm still really, really angry at out-of-touch academics who can't do what we need entry-level folks to do, that two of the most useful job skills we're having trouble finding people to do is organization of the paperwork and running the calendar.  I don't care where people learned to do it, but being unable to do it means people aren't qualified for the any-college-degree-required positions we're trying to fill.  A third very useful job skill is actually being able to do a spreadsheet including writing the one page report detailing what's important in the graph.

My anger is misplaced?  No, it seems pretty well placed when people are all-but-proud that they are contributing to ripping off people to get a paycheck.

[Caracal]

My anger is misplaced because people right here have admitted to ripping off students in their classes by not holding standards?  Interesting.

Caracal, all your other points indicate conflating a certificate in, say, key punch operator with a professional preparation like engineering.  Yep, state-of-the-art in engineering tools has changed dramatically in my lifetime and indeed in the past 10 years.  The math to do the physics to do the critical thinking to learn new things remains useful.  The ability to read quickly and learn new things is more important than ever. 

Yes, some people with a good liberal arts education can also learn new things quickly enough to matter.  However, someone who isn't even hitting the mark in a dumbed down college class (something about not being as good as a sophomore in high school) is not on the track to be able to learn new things and adjust as the world continues to change at a breakneck speed.



My anger is misplaced?  No, it seems pretty well placed when people are all-but-proud that they are contributing to ripping off people to get a paycheck.

I promise I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that I actually have no idea what you are talking about. I've never said that I think engineering programs or other professional programs are worthless or don't prepare students well for certain careers. Obviously there are some careers that require particular forms of professional preparation. All I've said is that there can be a tendency to focus too much on career preparation which assumes that the people in charge know what sorts of particular skills and training people will need in the future.

As for the rest, I'll just reiterate my previous point. You've constructed a worldview where only people who agree with you and whose career and personal goals are exactly aligned with yours are virtuous. The rest of us are just shills proud to be ripping people off for a paycheck. I'm glad you like your job, but I'm betting that you are also imbedded within various systems, many of which screw people and the world over in various ways.

[Wahoo Redux]

Unaware is any poster admitting to ripping anyone off.   Maybe a sedative or a puppy to play with, Polly.  Maybe a zoomba class.

[mahagonny]

If I'm keeping up with Polly's analysis, an adjunct who is only there sporadically to teach courses that could easily be done without, until they are urgently needed, is ripping off the system because his pay and job security are so minimal that he can't possibly have any commitment to the job or the students. So the anger is entirely appropriate. We've got to find these scoundrels and stop them. Or ask them if they have friends who will be definitely available in September, if the course populates. Something like that.

[mahagonny]

Tenured faculty in certain departments at Super Dinky were fired at various points when the major was eliminated and thus the department was eliminated.  The assertion (and found true every time) was that if we had to bring people back to still teach the general education classes, then we can get adjuncts, VAPs, or nonTT folks at short notice, probably better, and likely slightly cheaper than the long tenured folks.

This is striking, since what I am used to hearing (or reading) from tenured faculty is they estimated that their teaching has improved markedly from how it was in the days when they were adjunct faculty.

Yes, those tenured faculty members would say they were excellent teachers, or at least would be if they had better students.  Seldom did the evidence on student performance back up the assertions as long as we hired experienced teachers instead of those who were still in the first year or two of learning to be teachers.

I actually appreciate this bit of candor, although I think the coast savings would have been dramatic, not slight.

But the rest of your comment on this, wherein you sort adjuncts into to opposite categories and then generalize about their motivation and merit, doesn't match my lived experience. For example in my experience, the degree of commitment to a department can be enhanced by the presence of a union with seniority provisions, input into the student eval process, a right to appeal a termination, that sort of thing. Stuff that you probably think is adversarial.

Professional fellows usually were paid more per class hour than tenured people because that was the way to keep the professional fellows coming back.  Yeah, the adjuncts in English get paid a pittance.  The "adjuncts" teaching required classes in criminal justice, nursing, and education were paid whatever those professional fellows requested to stay on another two years for courses that are hard to replace.  At one point, the provost tried to offer one of those professional fellows a full-time position because it would be cheaper for the college to also get service; the professional fellow turned it down because he'd rather volunteer for the service he liked (almost always student mentoring or similar direct student interaction) than be told he had to do mandatory service in ways he didn't like (retired high school teacher who was done forever with faculty meetings).

Why is 'adjuncts' sometimes put in quotations and sometimes not? Why are some adjuncts professional fellows to you and some not?

A professional fellow is part-time faculty who has a continuing relationship with the department that includes duties beyond teaching a class.  The professional fellows had full-time jobs in the field and taught one course per term in their particular expertise while also participating as an expert in curriculum design for the particular major, discussions regarding the student cohort in the major, and service related to mentoring of students in the major including placement in internships and forming long-term relationships to be a first node in a professional network for the students.

In contrast, an adjunct is someone teaching an extra section of something once in a while because we ended up needing more than we could cover this particular term.  Expectations for an adjunct is good teaching in their class and following all bureaucratic rules related to teaching, but no expectations exist regarding service to the department/institution, long-term individual student mentoring, or research.

An adjunct is truly extra to the institution and definitely a temporary addition for less than a year.  An "adjunct" indicated me being annoyed at the refusal to believe the difference between someone who is part-time integral faculty to a major versus the big ole pool of contingent term-by-term faculty who are offering general education classes that as a whole constitute a need for the institution, but any individual course is extra and nothing bad happens to the undergrad students if that particular course isn't offered this term.

[marshwiggle]

We're definitely ripping some of them off.

Any tuition driven school will get a few too many of the students who really shouldn't be there,
either because they can't hack the academics, are too much of a discipline problem, or just otherwise don't care.

But is it really possible to know who should and shouldn't be in college?

I can make a pretty good guess by the end of the first week of classes. Students who shouldn't be there

• missed some number of classes, especially early in the morning, because of oversleep/hangover
• arrived late at some number of classes, for above reasons or couldn't find the room
• missed labs, because "someone said there were no labs the first week". (Note: "Someone" was not the course instructor or the lab instructor. And student didn't bother going to the lab to make sure.)
• didn't log onto the LMS for any course that required it

(Note: the above attendance issues were probably not reflected in campus social activities, which were probably attended with liturgical devotion.)

In other words, students with no amount of proactivity should not be there. That's not because they went to a bad high school or are a first generation student. It's just because they are not serious about it.

[Wahoo Redux]

Good point, Marshy, particularly considering that no students ever mature during their time at college.

[mahagonny]

Good point, Marshy, particularly considering that no students ever mature during their time at college.

I find that most do, but a few of them, not too much, as far as study habits. As a practical matter, I would not identify any student in my mind as 'they shouldn't be here.' The way I would be setting things up mentally would be all wrong. You have to try like hell for each body (within reason) with success in mind. What to do about someone who comes in reeking of alcohol or reefer can be an issue.

[marshwiggle]

Good point, Marshy, particularly considering that no students ever mature during their time at college.

The problem is that these tend to be students who are not very strong academically to begin with, so they often fail out before they get a chance to mature. It's pretty rare (although it happens once in a long while) to have a bright student make poor lifestyle choices their first term but then adjust.

Instead of academic probation after they've basically torched their first year, why not have "lifestyle probation" after a couple of weeks so that they can potentially get their act together during their first semester?

[mahagonny]

Good point, Marshy, particularly considering that no students ever mature during their time at college.

The problem is that these tend to be students who are not very strong academically to begin with, so they often fail out before they get a chance to mature. It's pretty rare (although it happens once in a long while) to have a bright student make poor lifestyle choices their first term but then adjust.

Instead of academic probation after they've basically torched their first year, why not have "lifestyle probation" after a couple of weeks so that they can potentially get their act together during their first semester?

Good in theory, impossible in practice. Perhaps you and me would have been comfortable working at a Catholic school circa 1940.