After giving my annual "Parents Go To Class!" presentation last week, I was asked a very interesting question. Well, the gentleman more raised a concern than asked a question, really. I had shared with the group some disciplinary frustrations. I wished I had been an archaeologist: students come to university interested and accepting that they need to be taught a lot, if not everything. Psychology students sometimes, erroneously, think that the discipline is all "common sense." But English students often have a little discipline fatigue, and they think they have been taught everything, anyway. I was explaining to the parents that I make an extra effort to demonstrate to students what, genuinely, is "new."
The father who raised his hand was worried. With his daughter moving away from home for the first time, having to learn how to look after herself in a different community, how would she be able to handle academic work? While, obviously, we should care more that students learn, say, to stop their abuse of commas than whether they discover the secrets of each Lethbridge grocery store, the general point is still relevant. We look for other biases: how do we ensure that students who went to a bad high school have the same opportunities in university as do students who graduated from top flight programs? I think we even go some distance to ensure that students who are too freely feeling their first freedom are not left behind. But how often do we think about students who are simply homesick? How often do we think about students who have, simply, fallen out of rhythm in their sleep patterns and do not, really, wake up until sometime in the middle of their third class?
There are so many combinations of things that can be students' undoings. The best student I knew in my first year at Memorial University in 1987 was carried off by a nightly poker game in residence that went on until dawn. I spend a fair bit of time talking about how we need to keep separate, but connect, the academic side and the social side of our operation. Here is an example where the well-meaning student life officers need to be vigilant and active. Here, for once, the answer is not with the professor: we cannot, ultimately, wait until November to really start our courses, can we?
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