Computer Abuse

Most English teachers really hate teaching in a computer lab. The school administrators who put these things in seem to think that a writer spends almost the whole day hammering away at a keyboard. Maybe that's true, but a writing class doesn't.

The class enters the room. We've just read a chapter on, say, finding a topic, and I want to give them some more information. The students immediately fire up the computers and log on. I try to do the class, while two or three, sitting in the back corners where I won't see them, are hammering away furiously on the keyboard. One is doing homework for another class. Another is doing instant messages. Yet another has a furiously typing a paper that's due in our class today. None of them is really in the room. All think they are fooling me.

Classes that don't meet in computer labs almost always have at least one or two keyboard jockeys who assume I won't see that they are totally engrossed in their laptops, hammering away on the keyboards, staring with fixed expressions at the screens.

I assume, by students' behavior, that when you were in high school, only your physical presence was required in a room. If you spent the time sleeping or staring out the window or text messaging, the teacher didn't care because at least your body was there. College isn't that way.

Many of my students feel offended that I want to interrupt their 24/7 keyboarding to friends. One hour! Imagine all the important stuff they could miss in an hour! All the gossip!

Well that's fine. If you really need the uninterrupted electronic contact, simply don't come to class. See if you can pass without hearing any of the material we go over (you won't hear it anyhow if you're focused on text messaging). We'll be happier without you.

For the record (and I know it's a surprise to many students) here's the basic stuff about electronics in college classrooms. Almost all teachers would agree with my rules:

• Do not use cell phones within the classroom. Do not make or receive calls. Do not text message (even below the desk where you think you won't be seen).
• Shut off the ringer on the phone. Better still, shut off the phone itself. Your incredibly important caller can leave a voice mail message.
• Sometimes computers are useful within the classroom, but only as tools for the current class. Do not:
  • Send email during class
  • Use Facebook or other social networking sites
  • Buy things on eBay
  • Look at porn
  • Play Solitaire
  • Do homework for other classes
  • Finish the paper for this class

Do you really want to lose participation points for the class? Do you really want to convince the person who is grading your paper that you're an immature pain?

By the way, turn off your iPod and take out the earbuds too.

Beginning this fall, I will be marking my attendance to deal with computer abuse. Every day that you show up on time, you get 100% of the attendance credit for that day. (Excused absences also get 100%.) Late students (and students who leave early or wander in and out of the classroom) get 50%. Students who are sleeping, studying for other courses or messing around with the computer on unrelated material get 25%.

Football Schedule Arithmetic

Most non-football players think team members spend their time goofing off in the gym. Most football players disagree. Other sports probably have similar problems, but the football players seem to have the most intense schedule problems. Let's look at it in some detail:

Each day has 24 hours, and we can't do much with that—the number is probably going to stay the same for a while. Now let's consider the five weekdays, Monday through Friday. Weekends are a special problem, and I'll get to those in a minute. Here's what we are deducting from each of those five days:

• 3 hours for academic classes (Assuming a 15-credit load, spread evenly over the five days)
• 8 hours for sleep (a number you probably should not cut back on—an athlete in training might need more)
• 3 hours eating, dressing, brushing your teeth, etc.
• 2 hours in the weight room
• 1 hour for required team meetings
• 2 hours for practice

So far, I've accounted for 19 hours. Most people find that at least an hour daily is just sort of lost (the phone rings, a friend stops to talk on campus, etc.). Assuming that the team meeting, the weight room, and the practice somehow limit themselves to those five hours, the student has a full four hours to spend on ALL other activities: studying, doing the laundry, and so forth. That's a total of 20 hours a week.

Most counselors advise that you follow the "two for one" rule in studying: two hours outside class for every hour in class, so our football player should be studying something like 30 hours a week. No problem! There's always the weekend.

No, there isn't. Every in-town game destroys all of Saturday (and somehow I don't think the average player can hit the books for 10 hours straight on Sunday after a game). Every away game wipes out the entire weekend, from Friday afternoon (thus killing those four hours of Friday study) to late Sunday night. Somewhere someone has the impossible dream that you can study on the bus, the airplane, and in a strange hotel room with three teammates. Maybe, but I have trouble believing you can cram in 14 hours of quality time (remember the Friday we killed?) in a hotel room and on a bus.

There's the problem. I don't know the solution, but I do know that you can't afford to slack off, even for a moment. Most assignments keep rolling forward, no matter what your life is like outside the classroom.

People with Issues

The spring semester has been finished for about two weeks now, and as usual, I get to thinking about the students who should have passed with a good grade, but didn't. From my reading and talking with other faculty, I know this isn't an issue that's restricted to my classrooms. These people are everywhere, and they seem to divide neatly into three groups:

1. Clueless

Some students seem totally bewildered by the whole education process: they don't know why they are here, what they are supposed to be doing, or how to do it. I have to wonder exactly what happened during the previous twelve years of public education.

These people won't be reading this blog, and I'm not writing to them anyhow.

1a. Not on my wavelength

I've always got a couple of truly smart, dedicated students, good writers, who have a strongly-defined personal style that interferes with being an English student. Often these students are artists of some variety, people who get focused on another task (to the exclusion of things such as English papers) and miss deadlines. These are the people who can't quite do what is assigned.

I know something about artists, both visual artists and writers, and often the difference between "starving artist" and someone with a bank account has to do with discipline. A person who can hit deadlines, satisfy publishers, and do what's requested gets to pass college courses and eventually become a professional. That's when the whole thing becomes more than a hobby. This kind of skill is just as important in sculpture class as it is in English

2. People with issues

As a general rule, English departments begin lowering grades for people who have been absent more than one week a semester. That's only two or three class meetings. About 25% of my students can't come anywhere near that. I don't ask too closely because it's none of my business, but this group seems to include:

• Drunks. Nationwide, something like 25% of college freshmen drink enough to interfere with their academic work. You can't drink hard on Sunday night and be any good in class on Monday. That's all there is to it.
• Depressed people. I was one of these myself—still am to some extent. Medical and counseling help is available. It's included in the price of your tuition, confidential, and effective. You really don't want to stay that way, do you?
• Sick people. Dormitory living is incredibly unhealthy. You spend your time close to other sick people. You eat junk food, go to bed late, don't exercise, and forget the most elementary personal hygiene that your mother forced on you. Do what you can to break the cycle. Throw away the moldy pizza box. Eat an orange. Go to bed at a reasonable hour. Do you want to spend your entire college career sick?
• Messiahs. I always have a couple of students whose role in life is to go home frequently to straighten things out there. That's very noble, but not always a good priority choice. You need to ask whether your intervention really did fix things and whether that's actually more important than passing your courses.

I often get people who vaguely say they "have issues," and it doesn't seem to mean that they dislike me or the course. It usually seems to be related to physical or psychological health. If that's you, get help. You really can't afford to remain as you are.

3. Athletes

We need to face several rock-solid truths:

A. Being on a team consumes an incredible amount of time and energy. Even though you get an excused absence when the team is on the road, the arithmetic never seems to add up, and it's often close to impossible to hit all your deadlines.

B. Coaches don't always get it. Some coaches understand the academic priorities very well, but there are always a few who can't seem to remember that you need to balance practice, weight room, and games with the real business of being a student. They think they hired a professional athlete. You need to pass your courses.

C. Teachers don't always get it. In fact, many teachers neither know nor care whether you are on a team. Out of town game? The lab report is still due on Monday.

D. Confrontation won't help you any. Maybe our American tradition of screaming in the face of baseball umpires is behind all this, but too many athletes think rudeness and intimidation will improve a grade. It simply won't. Want to fail the course? Want to get expelled? Want to get in trouble with the law? Threaten a teacher. Lose the image of the baseball coach screaming at the umpire (and that never worked anyhow). Look up the kinds of offenses that get someone a red card in soccer. Then look up what happens to the player who receives the red card.

Who will stay; who will leave

I haven't written much on this blog recently—in a sense I said it all. I'm near the end of the second semester, though, and looking at a disturbing trend among my students.

Warning! Yet another politically-incorrect comment coming

I'm going to give out several grades that are C minus or below this semester. We have enough grades on the books that even perfection in the next two papers will not save these students from a low grade. That's a shame, because several of them can write. It's a shame, too, because they will probably lose scholarships. Their problem? They cannot attend class. The word seems to be spreading through several teams that attendance is optional. It isn't. Just to put some numbers out: I have a football player with a "D" average, but his papers are averaging 86%. Another is a plain "F" (with a 56% average), but his papers are a 95%. One of my soccer players has a D minus, but the writing is a 75%.

I could go on, but I won't.

These students will get poor grades for the course; they are very likely to think I have been unfair; they might not be back in school next year. Yes, they could do the work. They just couldn't turn in small assignments, be here for quizzes—be here at all!

I don't think these students are the drunks. (I do have a number of drunks who can't show up for class either, but their written work isn't often very good.) These aren't the distracted students who have "issues" that seem to conflict with every class meeting (someone is always sick or dying or needing a ride to the airport). Those students often write like distracted students—giving me a quick rough draft with the language and spelling of a high school lunch table. I'm especially troubled by the smart ones, the good writers, the ones who could make it if they didn't have the idea athletics are the main business here and academics are a poor second.

Using THAT Word

Every so often I get a student who thinks that (since we're now in college and we're all big boys and girls) it's OK to use the "F" word in an essay. Or some other troubling word, perhaps the "N" word. And I've had students appear in class wearing T-shirts with astonishing words on them (one had cartoons of women's breasts with cute little labels below them, classifying them).

Well yes, we're big boys and girls. In fact, we're bigger than that.

Two questions are really basic to all writing:

1. Who is your audience? Perhaps some of the people in the room fit best into the "bunch of teenage drunks telling dirty stories" audience, but not all of them do. One in particular who doesn't is the teacher, the guy with the red pen. This red-pen guy also knows that he has a responsibility to protect the interests of everyone in the room, so a T-shirt that offends women, an essay that disparages a minority, or an essay that is generally offensive becomes a problem


2. What are you trying to do to your audience? There are a lot of legitimate answers to this question: entertain, inform, persuade, and so forth. I doubt if "convince your audience that the author is insensitive and immature" is an aim you should pursue. And if nobody is on your side by the end of the essay, you can't accomplish any aim besides alienating them.

I NEED That Job!

Today, the minimum wage officially went up to $6.55 per hour. That's an awfully appealing number, and I know that a lot of my students (particularly in afternoon classes) will ditch class when the job demands their presence. A lot of them will get terrible grades.

Many of my students need to work. I did. Of the twelve years or so that I was in college, I only avoided having a job for one semester.

I know that when there's a conflict between job and school, the job always wins, at least nowadays.

Now let's think about this for a moment. Are there a lot of minimum wage jobs out there? If your McDonald's manager decides she doesn't need you, is that the last fast food job in town? Is there no job wiping tables, digging sewers, or planting trees? (All jobs I had while I was in school) On the other hand, if you miss English class are you cutting yourself out of a job that's better than minimum wage? Will you easily find another college if you flunk out of this one?

Priorities

Say this slowly and carefully: "College IS my job right now!" Everything else is secondary. Or to put it another way, which of these is the supreme item that has a right to push everything else (including study) off your calendar?

• Minimum wage job at a fast food place?
• Counseling your loony roommate/girlfriend/other?
• Family obligations?
• Drinking and partying?
• Social, political, or religious club?
• Sex
• Finding a spouse

Once you figure out what's number one (and there can really be only one number one), you know what's going to happen in your life. And if your priorities are (1) Parties, (2) Booze, (3) Sex, (4) Part-Time Job, and (5) College classwork, please don't complain when you only have enough time and mental resources to take care of numbers one through four and number five has to slide.

Is a Teacher Ever Right?

I'm doing my typical summer thing: getting material ready for the beginning of classes in late August. At one of my schools, we have an electronic grammar book, and we need to go to a special website to sign in.

It never works.

The problem is that our school has cut a deal with the publisher so that we get two years of access instead of one, but we have to use that special website to get in, not the general one everyone else uses.

I give the students a handout in class. I put a link on my website. I fire up the projector and show them how to do it.

And it doesn't work. A significant number, perhaps 20%, figure that I don't know what I'm talking about. They refuse to follow my instructions, and the general login site rejects them. They have to use the special one.

Which raises an interesting question:

What's the point of actually attending college? (Aside from the beer and sex, of course.) It would be much cheaper to simply buy the textbooks at an ordinary bookstore, hang out in a library, and read them. If messing about on the computer is your thing, it's a lot cheaper to go to one of those bread-and-salad restaurants that has free internet connection, buy lunch, and get online. The food would be better too.

As far as I can see, the only real reason to spend that money and time is that the college brings together a large number of people who know more than you do, all with the purpose of teaching and coaching you. And if your attitude is that these people are idiots—well—why bother?

Another view

A few years ago, one of my second-semester students informed me that he didn't actually need college for anything. He'd learned everything there was to know when he was in high school. He just needed the actual diploma so he could get more money. He was an engineer. Here's an e-mail he wrote to me after I had been out sick for two days:

just writting you to see how your doing and to yell at you i did my writing assinment last wensday to get it out of the way for friday and yep there was no class and then monday yep no class agian hehe im just kidding its just funny that the first time i do my work ahead of time is the only time i didnt have too. well im still working on my first wrighting assinment so i can make it better and if you could look over my grades and see if i have a chance of making a B+ that would be very helpfull i usally aim for the A but i think my first paper messed that up

I hope I never have to drive over a bridge he designed.

Caring for Your Body

A surprising number of my students fail because of health issues. Of course, some things cannot be avoided, but you'd be amazed how many times student failure is simply a matter of poor self-care.

• Don't engage in binge drinking. That means don't drink five or more beers/shots/glasses of wine in an evening. The number is four if you're a woman. Lots of bad stuff happens to binge drinkers: alcohol poisoning, broken bones, fist fights, car wrecks, unwelcome sex.


• As a matter of fact, you should limit your drinking to Friday and Saturday night—not Thursday or Sunday. You need to go to class without a hangover.


• Eat healthy. Pizza, pop, and Doritos are just fine once in a while, but that shouldn't be your daily diet. Find a way to work in some vegetables and fruits. Our campus food is finally working away from "Deep-fried paradise," but you need to actually choose good food. You mother isn't there to yell at you if you eat Oreos for breakfast.


• Find a way to get some exercise. If you aren't an athlete, the campus gym is still available for such things as jogging and swimming. Walk briskly between classes. Use the stairs, not the elevator.


• Build a lifestyle that includes at least eight hours of sleep a night. This means getting your assignments done early so you don't do the all-nighters (which usually produce terrible writing anyhow) and getting your roommate to shut up at midnight.

What happens if you don't?

• The Freshman Fifteen (or twenty or thirty). Poor eating habits and lack of exercise mean that most freshmen gain 10% to 20% in body weight—all fat.


• Sleeping in class. It's not just your physical body we want—your mind must be here too.


• Depression. Lack of sleep, poor nutrition, frustration with studies (because your body isn't allowing you to do a good job), and a poor body image all add up to a recipe for depression.


• Sickness. If you aren't getting vitamins or sleep, and you're crammed into a tight space with other people, you will almost inevitably get colds, flu, and the like.


• All the problems associated with drinking. It's not just the binge drinkers who have trouble with class. College freshman drinking (which is almost always illegal anyhow) isn't usually a polite glass of wine with supper. It's the stuff that destroys your academic career and your life: Tuesday hangovers, showing up for class plastered, trips to the emergency room, unwanted pregnancy and/or STDs, visits to the police station.

Consider college classes as your job. If you are habitually late or absent at a fast food job, you'll get fired. If you show up and you are physically unable to perform, you'll get fired. Same principle here: aim at zero absences and maximum health.

Having an attitude

An amazing number of students show up on college campuses with attitudes that simply fight them. This kind of thinking almost guarantees that college will be a dreary struggle (and probably a losing battle).

I'm an idiot

This blog is about Freshman English, so I'll focus here. A great deal of high school teaching (apparently) focused on the idea that the students need to be ground down to a powder. When I was a high school senior, my English teacher announced to the class that no high school student could ever write well enough to get an "A". No, you're not necessarily an idiot. You need to believe in yourself and your abilities before you can hope to make any progress.

I'm God's gift to the world

A little balance is nice, though. One of my students (who had distinctly limited grammatical skills) walked in the first day and began pointing out all the errors in the textbook. I'm not sure what he was trying to prove, but he succeeded in proving that he didn't know what he was talking about or who he was talking to. You may have been the biggest fish in the pond, but college is a much larger and more competitive pond. And things that were valued in high school English (spilling your guts and piling up colorful adjectives) may not necessarily work that well in college.

My teacher is an idiot

I'm going to say this as gently as possible. There's an excellent chance that a college professor who has spent a decade or so gaining a degree might know more than you do. There's also an excellent chance that a professor with an advanced degree specializing in one area might know more than your high school teacher who had a bachelor's degree in education and a general knowledge of a whole bunch of stuff. Besides, college is incredibly expensive. Why on earth would you come here and waste your money on idiots? Stay home if you're that good!

Losing attitude

By the third class meeting I really can tell who will pass and who will fail. Students who saunter in five minutes late with an "I don't give a damn about this stuff" attitude probably will be lucky to get a D plus. They won't do the work, won't participate in class, and will succeed in irritating the teacher. Unfortunately, they don't realize several basic truths:

• The point of college isn't simply to get a diploma; it's to become something different and better.
• A freshman can't really change the system. It's too big and you're too small. If you want to fight, choose your battles wisely.
• Teachers have the ultimate weapons: gradebooks.

What is in your backpack?

To begin with, we can easily divide freshmen into three groups. One group shows up to class with absolutely nothing—no pen, pencil, paper, textbook. This group will probably never become sophomores. Another group brings an entire office, often in a little wheeled suitcase. Then there is the majority, who carry a backpack. You in the majority are the group I'm talking to. The first aren't at all serious about this business of being a "student," and the suitcase group is prepared for all eventualities.

General Principles

Everyone forgets stuff at home, so you need a few backup items: paper, another pen, computer flash drive, etc. Put a $5 bill in your backpack so you can eat lunch, but don't put a credit card or your campus meal card in there (people steal stuff, remember). I like the idea of keeping a PowerBar for emergency food because they don't get crumbly and you can mash them in the bottom of the pack without damaging them too much. Think in terms of "emergency spare stuff."

Textbooks? You need to figure out what books will get used in class every day. Many classes don't refer to them at all (they are for homework), so don't haul them around if you don't need to. (And remember, people steal stuff.)

Cell phone? Certainly—but turn it off when you enter the classroom. By the way, if your campus has an emergency police number besides 911, program it in. Several violent crimes on my campuses have been thwarted because students put in the call.

Get organized

I really like the idea of accordion folders with dividers. You don't need the chaos of a backpack full of random wads of paper when it comes time to study. And for heaven's sake, don't do as one of my students did and put an open can of pop in the bottom of your pack!

Things nobody has, but everyone should:
Stapler, aspirin, cough drops, handkerchief, spare pen, highlight marker, PowerBar, $5 (only!) emergency money, list of emergency phone numbers (your roommate, for example), spare spiral notebook, charger for your computer, extra copy of the reading schedule for each course, folder to preserve essays and papers that you are going to turn in.

Things everyone has in a backpack, but shouldn't:
Things that leak, things that rot (tuna sandwich from last week), wallet, car keys, dorm room key, large amounts of money, credit cards, campus meal card, things that set off the alarm at the library, things that are illegal (or at least embarrassing if found), your only copy of a 20-page research paper you are about to turn in.

Whatever you do, don't:

Don't simply leave your backpack lying somewhere. It won't be there when you return. If the thieves don't get it, the campus cops will (thinking it could be a bomb).

Anonymous

It seems so simple: Put your name on your paper when you turn it in. You'd be amazed how often quizzes and even major papers arrive without an author, though. When that happens, I've only got a few options. If it's your lucky day, only one student in the class is unaccounted for—obviously the paper must be yours. Sometimes, though, I can't decide who the thing belongs to. If it's a major essay, I'll bring it into class and humiliate you by asking who wrote the paper. If it's a quiz, you just lose the points.

Reading about Politics

We're never too far from political discussions, and you are actually part of things now because you can vote. Your opinion counts for more than it did when you were twelve. (By the way, one of the main reasons originally given for establishing schools in our country was to have an educated electorate who could vote for things intelligently.)

As I sit here writing on June 5, 2008, I know that the presidential election is about to enter its final phase. Obama will probably become the first black candidate fielded by a major political party, though there's still a chance that Clinton will, instead, become the first woman. California's Supreme Court has issued a ruling that legalizes gay marriage, but the conservatives in that state promise to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot to forbid such unions. Senator Robert Byrd, 90 years old, and the longest serving U.S. Senator, has entered the hospital, and so has Senator Ted Kennedy, probably one of the most powerful Senators.

Politics is interesting daily stuff.

Last semester, I assigned Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage." It's an article that originally appeared in Time magazine in 2003, pondering what effect the Canadian legalization of gay marriage would have on the USA. Some of my students' reactions were disturbing:

• Many assumed that Canada's decision was binding on the USA. They didn't seem to realize that the two countries are separate.
• At the time the article was written, the state Supreme Court in Massachusetts seemed very likely to rule that gay marriage should be legal there. Many of my students assumed that decision would be binding on everyone else in the country.
• The U.S. Supreme Court was about to rule on the question whether a specific sexual practice should have a different legal status depending on whether one is gay or straight. Many of my students thought the issue was gay marriage.
• Nobody seemed aware that our state, Ohio, has a Constitutional amendment against gay marriage that is so broad that a live-in boyfriend who beats his girlfriend cannot be prosecuted for domestic violence.

All of this brings up two points.

1. You need to know how our country is governed if you intend to make any sort of intelligent comment. Do you know what a primary election is? What on earth is the Electoral College (and why was it put in place)? If California legalizes something, does Ohio have to allow it?
2. If you get your news from the kids at the lunch table, you really don't know anything. If you get it from online sources such as Yahoo, you are in better shape, but their complexity is aimed at a person with a fourth grade education and 30 seconds to read. You will do far better with a big-city newspaper such as The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. You really should spend some time with major news magazines (Time or Newsweek, for example) and actually read the in-depth articles.
   

Alcohol

I'll make this short, because I doubt if you'll believe me. Most of my students arrive thinking that Van Wilder and Animal House were documentaries. Most assume that heavy weekend drinking is normal and expected, and that "Thirsty Thursday" (a big drinking party after suffering through four grueling days of work) is a pretty good idea.

I hate Mondays. I always give a short quiz in my 8 a.m. class so the drunks who are too hung-over to show up get the message.

I hate end-of-semester student reflections. Every term I get at least two students who write something similar to one girl's: "I would have been a better student if I hadn't been drunk every time I showed up for class." She got a D-. Most aren't that self-aware. They think that I hate them because I give them low grades. The campus cops hate them because of all that trouble in the dorm. Boyfriends hate them because of unwanted sex when they were both drunk.

A few years ago, I read an article that claimed 25% of America's college freshmen have enough of a drinking problem that it interferes with their schoolwork. I believe it. I have no trouble naming smart, appealing kids who should be getting Fulbright Scholarships. Instead they're getting drunk. One student who was an especially close friend nearly died from alcohol poisoning.

One last word. Colleges really do want to see you succeed, both in life and in academics. Almost all colleges have some sort of counseling program. It's usually free. Legally, they are forbidden from telling your parents what's going on there (they could lose their licenses) if you're over 18 years old. If your drinking (or some other issue) is out of control, they really can help.

---

Further reading: Information on Alcohol and College Students from the U.S. Government.

Dictionary

You need a dictionary. You really do.

I've got a bachelor's degree and two master's, and I use a dictionary all the time. I assume that a college freshman might need it at least as much as I do.

It's not just for spelling, either. When your adviser writes a note saying that you need ancillary courses, what on earth does she mean? How do you pronounce it when you phone her? When someone trots out the tired assertion that "my dictionary says marriage is between one man and one woman," do you understand how to read the dictionary entry to find out what else the word can mean?

Go to a good bookstore and spend a bit of time looking through their choices. Plan on spending at least $30 (you'll spend a lot more on college textbooks, by the way). Plan on buying a new dictionary every few years because the language keeps changing.

Good online dictionaries are also useful, primarily because they are constantly updated. My favorite is Merriam Webster. Don't miss their how-to page either.

Predicting College Success

I had a conversation this morning with my sister, who is homeschooling her two teenagers. She commented that a prestigious school had dropped the ACT and SAT requirements, which made her happy because she doesn't teach her kids with a final test in mind. So we got to talking about the whole business of college admissions.

The college admissions people are in the business of filling their colleges with people who look like they might be successful students. Nobody looks good when a kid flunks out. And of course, the big standardized tests were supposed to be sort of a democratic device so a kid from a low-quality school district would have an even chance with a kid from a good one. It never worked out that way, of course. The tests were supposed to measure ability (that's why it's the Scholastic Aptitude Test), but they really measure what you have learned.

I'd like a different test. I'm not sure how I'd do it, but I'd like something that measures personal maturity.

We've all known someone like Sebastian Flyte. He's a character in the novel, Brideshead Revisited. He's got everything. Money, intelligence, social position (He's actually Lord Sebastian Flyte). He's good looking, fun, and funny. Off he goes to college. He has trouble finding time to attend all his classes. He drinks a lot. By the end of the very long novel, he has found his niche in life. He's sweeping the floors at a monastery and occasionally taking a month off to be drunk.

In twelve years of teaching I've seen a lot of Sebastians. In fact, something like 25% of America's college freshmen have enough of a drinking problem to get in the way of their studies. They were bright kids who really thought that Animal House was filmed as a documentary. I remember one boy from my hometown. He was the smartest thing that Mansfield had made in years—always getting academic prizes, winning everything for his school at Academic Challenge. And, yes, tall and good looking. He got an early admission to Washington University (my alma mater, and a pretty tough place), so he left in January. He'd flunked out by June. Booze.

I also seem to have a lot of kids who have a "condition" (and it isn't always drink or drugs) that just seems to get in the way of attendance. It seems that about 10% of my students just can't seem to pull themselves together to attend class. Sometimes they present a doctor's excuse, and sometimes not. Either way, they usually fail because they haven't a clue what we're doing.

As a little side topic, isn't it interesting that education is the only place where people are pleased to get less than they paid for? If a student pays to attend my class for 45 clock hours and I dismiss class early one day, the student is overjoyed. If the student can skip out of 20 of those hours without me saying anything, he figures he's a winner.

Anyhow, back to my alma mater, Washington U., I remember the chancellor saying that a mediocre person with a good work ethic is much more likely to do well than a person with high abilities and no discipline.

I just wish we could design an SAT that could measure sobriety and work habits.

A few attendance statistics

In the Spring 2008 semester, I had 93 students. At one school, we met twice a week (27 class sessions). At the other, we met three times a week (40 class sessions). I failed three students for plagiarism (a somewhat low total). Two of those students left in the middle of the semester, so I didn't include them in the tabulation below.

At the two-day-a-week school, 18 (out of 56) students got an A minus or better. Six of those had perfect attendance; the worst missed four days. The average number of absences for students getting A minus or better was 1.28.

At the three-day-a-week school, 9 (out of 33) students got an A minus or better. One had perfect attendance; the worst missed four days. The average number of absences for this group was 2.

At the two-day-a-week school, 9 got a D plus or worse. The average number of absences for students getting D plus or lower was 9.33, and this includes two students who only missed four days. Four students missed ten or more class sessions (a third of our meetings). I've included one student who failed her last paper for plagiarism because she showed up off and on right up to the end. She had eight absences. The student with worst attendance missed 21 class meetings (out of 27).

At the three-day-a-week school, 9 got a D plus or worse. Leaving out the student who only missed one class session (but never turned in any work), the average number of absences for students receiving D plus or below was 12.25. Five students missed eleven or more class sessions.

It's interesting that the attendance percentages are about the same. At both schools, the A minus or better students attended about 95% of the time. At both schools, the D plus or worse students attended between 65% and 69% of the time. (It's also interesting that the grade scale shows 90% as the lowest score for an A- and 70% for a C-.)