How to explain the difference between college/high school...professor/teacher

[hmaria1609]

When I was in library school, I knew classmates taking both graduate level education classes and library science classes for the K-12 school media track. (They already had their bachelor's in education) Prior to graduation, they took PRAXIS II.
Requirements for school librarians vary from state to state.

[kaysixteen]

I dunno.  Last fall, when I taught the (admittedly remedial) reading class at a local slac, I had students going to the bathroom all the time.   It would have been impossible to forbid without potential bad consequences for me.   Certainly I always had to let kids in k12 go.  But why would one want to forbid this altogether?   Some kids will have physical issues that would perhaps have them wetting themselves if they are not allowed to go.

[AvidReader]

As someone who has taught extensively in both (private) secondary school and as an adjunct (and also as a dual enrollment instructor) I feel uniquely qualified to respond to this, but my experiences might be different than others', of course. But I am responding to the original post more than to the subsequent discussion.

AR - thanks, these are all good distinctions. I feel that they tend to focus on structural  differences, though, whereas I'm trying to get to think about the actual nature of the pedagogy. I know these structural differences do feed into that, and they can't entirely be separated but I'm still interested in the question of how we would define (albeit in theory) the difference between what a college professor does and what a high school teacher does in terms of their actual teaching content, methodology, and teleology. And I know this might be discipline specific, which makes it tricky to generalize.

To me, the college/high school divide really is structural. I'm in humanities. For writing or (foreign) languages, I don't feel that the content is substantially different between 7th grade, 10th grade, and a first-year college course. What changes for me across these 3 levels is the pacing, the repetition, the amount of work done in the classroom vs. for homework, the number of constraints I give the students, and the type of feedback I give afterwards. In languages, the difference is skill-based and not age-based; I have taught the same sentences from the same language textbook to 3rd graders and graduate students, but the pacing and the amount of support I offered in the classroom varied significantly. Where there are constraints for me, they are curriculum-driven, or driven by the needs of particular students (reviewing rather than moving forward, for instance).

In upper-level courses, my format changes because I can expect a level of expertise from the students. For me, again, this isn't broken down by the high school / college divide. A 4th year high school language course is not substantially different from a 4th year college course in the same language (again, I've translated the same text with 7th graders, 12th graders, and in an upper-level college course). Literature is a little different; in 7th grade, I mostly ask the students specific questions about a text to teach them the process of analysis, and I would do the same in the early weeks of either a high school or a college class. In the latter two cases, we would talk about what makes a discussion useful or enriching and how we could make the next one better, and then we would do that the next time. By the end of the semester, they would be bringing the questions and leading the discussion, and I would provide context and steer when necessary. In an upper-level course (juniors or seniors in high school or university), we might review the qualities of a good discussion at the beginning, but we wouldn't waste the early weeks on learning to discuss. I can't imagine that this would be different in the early levels of science courses (I don't remember high school biology varying especially widely from college biology 101, except that the college laboratory was substantially better stocked and thus the experiments were better), but one difference would be that there is no upper-level biology in most high schools, so most students won't be able to get to those more focused courses until college.

Maybe I am/have been teaching high school or college wrong, and maybe this is really different in other fields. Going to college levels the playing field in a way, because the teacher has no idea what the students have already learned, and so the early college classes might repeat content. Upper level courses, in either type of school, shouldn't.

I do point out to my college students, early on, that they no longer need to ask to use the bathroom, which seems to be a hard transition for them.

Does this happen often--students needing to go use the bathroom in the middle of class?  I remember it being quite rare when I was in middle school, and nearly unheard of in high school and college.  I don't believe I ever had to excuse a student for that purpose when I was a teaching assistant.  Maybe I'm naive, but I just sort of assumed that adolescents could schedule their bathroom breaks and control their bladders well enough to keep "going" in class from becoming an issue, bar the occasional emergency.

Some of my high school students had serious bladder and bowel issues, borne both out of water consumption and, I am sure, boredom. College students can (perhaps) plan their schedules to accommodate, but I might have one student leave briefly each class period (less, again, in upper-level courses, but I'm sure that is also an interest thing). Since I don't allow phones in class, the bathroom breaks are also probably also phone breaks. 

AR.

[apl68]

Some kids will have physical issues that would perhaps have them wetting themselves if they are not allowed to go.

I suppose.  And yet three decades ago it doesn't seem to have been an issue except on rare occasions.  Do traditional-age college students today have a higher incidence of bladder control issues than they used to?  Or have they simply not been taught to plan their restroom breaks so that they can go into class with an empty bladder?

I'm reminded of the current movement to open schools later in the day because teenagers supposedly have innate biological needs that made them unable to perform before ten in the morning.  Again, within living memory they seemed fully capable of getting in gear earlier than that.  We seem to be mistaking a current social convention (teens prefer late to bed and late to rise) for biological necessity. 

[marshwiggle]

Some kids will have physical issues that would perhaps have them wetting themselves if they are not allowed to go.

I suppose.  And yet three decades ago it doesn't seem to have been an issue except on rare occasions.  Do traditional-age college students today have a higher incidence of bladder control issues than they used to?  Or have they simply not been taught to plan their restroom breaks so that they can go into class with an empty bladder?

I'm reminded of the current movement to open schools later in the day because teenagers supposedly have innate biological needs that made them unable to perform before ten in the morning.  Again, within living memory they seemed fully capable of getting in gear earlier than that.  We seem to be mistaking a current social convention (teens prefer late to bed and late to rise) for biological necessity.

I'd agree with that, and maybe it also has something to do with the "water bottle ritual". Decades ago, it was expected that peope would get a drink, if they needed one, between classes. Now in some circles it's almost a religious requirement that people stay "hydrated", as if going for even an hour without fluid intake will cause intellectual and/or physical catastrophe.
(As always, there are probably a small number of people with some medical condition which makes this true, but for the vast majority of people it's just a convenience.)

[Caracal]

I'm reminded of the current movement to open schools later in the day because teenagers supposedly have innate biological needs that made them unable to perform before ten in the morning.  Again, within living memory they seemed fully capable of getting in gear earlier than that.  We seem to be mistaking a current social convention (teens prefer late to bed and late to rise) for biological necessity.

It isn't that teenagers have become less capable of waking up early, it is that schools have moved start times earlier and earlier. In my county, most high schools start at 715. That's absurdly early. I never started school before 830.

[Caracal]

[
Some of my high school students had serious bladder and bowel issues, borne both out of water consumption and, I am sure, boredom. College students can (perhaps) plan their schedules to accommodate, but I might have one student leave briefly each class period (less, again, in upper-level courses, but I'm sure that is also an interest thing). Since I don't allow phones in class, the bathroom breaks are also probably also phone breaks. 

AR.

A few years ago I just added a bathroom spiel to my first day of class expectations discussion. I just tell them that they don't need to ask me to leave the room because they are adults, but that people coming in and out all the time does get distracting for everyone, so save it for times when you need to leave. It actually seems to help a bit.

[AvidReader]

A few years ago I just added a bathroom spiel to my first day of class expectations discussion. I just tell them that they don't need to ask me to leave the room because they are adults, but that people coming in and out all the time does get distracting for everyone, so save it for times when you need to leave. It actually seems to help a bit.

Yes, I have a similar spiel. I lump cell phone use into it also.
AR.

[fishbrains]

Since I've had the four daughters, I've been made aware that there often are not enough bathroom stalls for women to conduct their business within a limited time-frame--say with only five or ten minutes between classes.

Anway, I've noticed when I teach dual enrollment in the high schools that if I don't let students take their cell phones to the bathroom, they suddenly don't need to go nearly as often. Go figure. Also, HS students often use their phones to arrange to meet their friends from other classes in the bathrooms-- to consult on that cancer cure or something. Hence the administrative concern.

When students ask to go to the bathroom, I always think of The Shawshank Redemption when Red--fresh out of prison--keeps asking his boss at the grocery store to go the bathroom.

[apl68]

Anway, I've noticed when I teach dual enrollment in the high schools that if I don't let students take their cell phones to the bathroom, they suddenly don't need to go nearly as often. Go figure.

Okay, that makes sense.

BTW, I'm sorry for derailing an interesting thread.