REVIEW: MY FRESHMAN YEAR
Rebekah Nathan. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. Cornell University Press, 2005. 0801443970. Reviewed by Marylaine Block
Like many of us who work with students, anthropology Professor Rebekah Nathan had long wondered about what seemed like a steady decline in their willingness to do the work, to engage with the material, and to speak up in class -- indeed, she quotes a community college professor who said he never used the jargon of his field because he knew that if the students didn't understand what he was saying, not a single one of them would ever ask him to explain it. Why, she wondered, was this generation, which was paying so much for an education, so uninterested in it, so hard to teach?
Unlike us, she didn't settle for complaining. She took the time and trouble to find out -- by infiltrating their culture. As a cultural anthropologist, she had the tools to do so; she had frequently lived in the middle of tribal communities and learned to understand their folkways by total immersion in them. So she used her one year sabbatical as an anthropological field study: she applied for, and was admitted to, her own university as a freshman. She lived in the dorm with students, took classes with them, talked with them (finding that no more than 5% of their conversation relates to academics), and ate meals with them (she stopped short of getting drunk with them).
While simultaneously managing the demands of five different classes, she began to understand that there is in fact some merit to the eternal student complaint that professors act as if their class was the only one students were taking. (Most of the students were also juggling the demands of a part-time job.) Even though Nathan was a lot better than most freshmen at reading, researching and writing, she too began to feel overburdened, and started cutting corners on assigned readings -- for the same reasons mentioned by juniors and seniors she interviewed later.
They told her that they did not automatically ignore assignments, but subjected them to a series of questions: "Will there be a test or quiz on the material?" "Is the reading something that I will need in order to be able to do the homework?" "Will we directly discuss this in class in such a way that I am likely to have to personally and publicly respond to this reading?" If the answer to all the questions was No, they didn't do the reading. [Needless to say, now that she has returned to teaching, Nathan has now figured out ways to make students accountable for doing their reading assignments.]
As freshman Rebekah, rather than Professor Nathan, she began to understand how peer pressure compelled even good students, eager students, to conform to student norms: fun, partying, pragmatism, and careerism. She says, "Like other students wishing to fit in, I responded to the unspoken pressure to make the appropriate critical remark about the class, to emphasize how little I had studied for my decent grade, or to reduce my academic focus to what was on the test."
Her experiences as a student led her to understand the results she got year after year in an assignment she gave in class. In a unit on witchcraft, she would tell students to assume there is one person in the room who is responsible for everything that goes wrong in the class. She would then ask them to write on a piece of paper the names of 3 people in class who might be that "witch." After she gave each person a chance to stand and state their name clearly, the students wrote the names of their 3 suspects. Every year when Nathan tallied she had found that student suspicion unanimously focused on the same few individuals.
Now Nathan understands what their identifying marks of "witchhood" were. The suspects were all students who throughout the semester had asked thoughtful questions about the subject matter. They had established themselves as outside the norms of student culture, where the only acceptable questions were pragmatic ones that other students needed answers to, like "Will this be on the test?"
Having learned how faulty many of the assumptions faculty and administrators make about students are, she concludes with a chapter on the mismatch between university goals and policies, and student goals and behavior. She has come to believe that in order to achieve their goals, faculty and administration need to understand student motivations and work with them rather than against them
I would recommend this book to anybody who works with students. The stance of many teachers and teaching librarians (yes, I include myself) often seems to be, "I taught them good, but boy, did they learn bad." But if what we are asked to do is teach, it is our job to help them learn, inspire them to learn. Understanding students' culture is a good starting place.
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COOL QUOTE:
Well, we know how to use our book knowledge, the stuff we get tested on, as far as it goes. But what are we to do in the realm of our not-knowing? Knowledge is the stuff of an education, but wisdom also requires knowing how little we know. And the stores of our not-knowing are limitless.
Marvin Bell. Commencement Address, Alfred University, 2002. Reprinted in Take This Advice: the Most Nakedly Honest Graduation Speeches Ever Given. Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2005
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