Hall Passes and Word Problems
Threading the needle on student support
Over at Inside Higher Ed, Matt “Dean Dad” Reed writes about a conversation with a substitute high school teacher about bathroom passes that brought home a big difference in the level of structure between high school and community college:
But I was also struck by just how different the first weeks of college are. Here, there’s no such thing as a hall pass. Faculty don’t have bathroom monitor duty. There’s no formal “study hall.” In between classes, students are on their own. We provide places to hang out and/or study, and encourage involvement in campus clubs and organizations, but students really can make their own decisions. Going from hall pass workarounds in June to being utterly responsible for their own decisions in September must be at least a bit disorienting.
I think this is very much a true and accurate observation. But it’s very much of a piece with a lot of other such observations about the transition from high school to college, like the regular calls to rename “office hours” to encourage students unfamiliar with the concept to come get outside-of-class help. And as with those more specific policy recommendations (to be clear, Reed isn’t suggesting anything concrete here), it feels like there’s a kind of needle to be threaded here that isn’t explicitly acknowledged.
That is, I absolutely agree that the transition from the highly regimented world of high school to college is a major life change, and that can be disorienting for students, particularly those who don’t already have an idea what to expect. Given that, I think it’s entirely natural to acknowledge and sympathize with that confusion, and take some steps to mitigate it.
At the same time, though, there’s a sense in which that transition is the whole point of going off to college. Particularly in the residential college world, we’re in the business of shifting students from that regimented, controlled-by-parents high shool environment to something where they have both more personal freedom and more personal responsibility. That’s necessarily going to involve some confusion and disorientation; at some level, what we’re doing is creating an environment where students can ease into adulthood in a way that’s relatively low-stakes. If you don’t take advantage of office hours, skip classes, and maybe party a bit too much when you first arrive at college, you’ll likely get some bad grades and internal disciplinary measures, but the long-term consequences of those are pretty minimal, but can provide more enduring lessons on the need to handle your business like an adult.
(It’s important to note the stark contrast between the college environment and the alternatives facing those who don’t go to college, but directly into some part of the working world. As disorienting as being turned loose on a college campus can be, that’s nothing compared to going straight into the working world, where absolutely none of the responsibility has been off-loaded onto relatively sympathetic residential life structures and it’s way easier for early fuck-ups to linger on in the form of criminal records, trashed credit, and all that stuff.)
The core issue here is very similar to one we face in a more academic context with some regularity, in things like rich-context word problems in intro physics classes. These are a consistent source of friction with students, and in discussions about educational practices, because there’s a kind of needle-threading to be done. On the one hand, when you get too cute with the scenario for a problem, you end up testing reading comprehension more than physics ability— students struggle to parse the set-up, and end up misinterpreting the problem in ways that lead them to solve for the wrong thing entirely. (This is particularly an issue when there are significant numbers of international students whose English skills aren’t up to par…) On the other hand, though, figuring out how to interpret and break down a complicated scenario is a crucial skill for actual research, so you can’t just abandon all those problems for completely abstract and thuddingly obvious “a block on an inclined plane…” problems where students just purely plug and chug.
In the end, you need to balance these things out— test a few very explicit scenarios where students are directly led to the right form of the problem, and a few more where they have to parse some text and decide what it is that they’re trying to find. I tend to do the former as multiple choice, the later as free-response problems, but this is a guaranteed argument whenever we have to do common exams.
I think there’s a similar process on the student life side of the college experience, though the trade-offs are seldom made as explicit as in the classroom context. That is, students are going to be confused and disoriented at times, because they’re going through a very big life transition. The trick is to get the balance right— to have a level of confusion that’s appropriate and useful for instilling life lessons, but not producing excessive amounts of stress.
What’s tricky about this is that all of the individual stressors and points of confusion are things that it’s very natural to look at and say “Oh, we could make that easier…” But I’m not sure that’s always the right thing to do— at some point, whether in college or out, students are going to end up in a place where they have full responsibility for parsing a confusing environment and making decisions about how to navigate it. They’re going to start work at a new company whose internal rules and procedures are different, or move to a new city where all the public services have different names, and they’ll have to deal with it. It’s not the worst thing in the world to get a taste of that as a college student, in an environment where there’s a much bigger network of people and services around to lessen the impact of the nearly inevitable slip-ups.
It’s just really hard to know where and how to set that level. It’s tough enough to make an explicit case for the educational benefit of confusion in a classroom context, and only gets harder outside of class.
So, there’s some inconclusive musing to kick off your week. Here are the usual buttons, which I hope are not confusingly labeled:
Finding the comments section, which will be open, is left as an exercise for the interested reader.