The Kids Are... All Right?
In which the years continue to be weird.
We’ve had a few local summary discussions about the academic year that ended at the start of this month, which reminded me that I didn’t write anything about it. On top of that, my slowly growing collection of open tabs includes a Pro Publica story and a Washington Post editorial about the problems of pandemic-related “learning loss,” which is a big piece of the content for this past academic year. Put those together, and, well, it’s an obvious blog post topic.
Of course, it’s very hard to for me to say anything all that sensible about this year, for a bunch of reasons, starting with where I am. We’re a small liberal arts college, in the elite category that’s probably the most insulated from any kind of preparation issues. On top of that, as a department we’re very committed to the idea of small courses, so even in a heavy year, I tend not to teach enough students to really draw statistically valid conclusions. And this was very much not a heavy teaching year for me, because I get a couple of course releases as department chair, so for the entire year I saw something short of 50 students in class.
This was also a weird year in that all three of the full courses I taught were effectively new preps for me. Only one was strictly a never-taught-this-before new course (Intermediate Quantum in the Fall), but my Winter term course on Quantum Optics I last taught in 2013, and the Spring term intro Newtonian mechanics course has changed textbooks since I last taught it, from the Matter and Interactions curriculum to the OpenStax textbook, which drastically re-orders a lot of the topics. From a personal mental health/ work-life balance standpoint, this was a terrible, terrible idea, and I never should’ve agreed to it. But, you know, water under the bridge.
The final factor making this an unusual year is that I was on sabbatical last year, and so didn’t teach at all in 2021-22. So there’s a bit of a gap between my last time in the classroom and this year’s classes, which I suppose might heighten any changes over time, but I think mostly just confuses matters.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that anything I have to say about the experience of teaching this year is extremely anecdotal and should be taken with enough grains of salt to pickle some small vegetables. It was a weird year, and my experiences of it were weird, and I’m not sure I would be comfortable drawing sweeping conclusions from them.
With that said, I’m not sure I saw all that much evidence of “learning loss” in the sense of any specific skills deficit. At the same time, I’m not sure I would’ve expected to see all that much of one. Two of the courses I taught were populated with juniors and seniors, who were either already in school when the pandemic hit, or enrolled during the first year, when we were in-person with masks and distancing. They struggled with some things, but not in unexpected ways given the material I was covering.
The third class I taught was introductory Newtonian physics for (mostly) first-year engineering students. This isn’t really a course that taxes the mathematical skills of students who come in with reasonably good preparation, so I wouldn’t expect a whole lot of concrete “learning loss” to show up. The points of confusion in that course tend to be conceptual: once they set up the problem, basically everybody we admit can do the math without much trouble, but seeing how to set it up is tricky for a lot of students. As it was again this year, but again, not obviously to a drastically different degree than in past versions of the course.
To the extent that I saw any significant difference between this year’s classes and those of past years, it was mostly a deficit of knowing how to be a college student. The primary struggles I saw weren’t strictly academic, but more in the vein of issues with operating independently in the context of a college rather than a more tightly supervised high school. I think this year may have set records for the number of students who just disappeared from class for a week or so, and it definitely set a record for students rolling into class 20 minutes late or just getting up in the middle of class and wandering off for 10-15 minutes.
I find both of those behaviors baffling, which is in large part a generational thing. I don’t generally bother with a specific late arrival or mid-class departure policy, because it’s just kind of incomprehensible to me that anyone would do either of those things. When I was in college, I would’ve skipped class entirely rather than walk in five minutes late, and would’ve needed to be in acute distress before I’d leave a lecture for a bathroom run. I think I may have to add something to the syllabus and the opening class, though, because this is getting out of hand. I had several occasions in the spring when students showed up late enough to miss the 15-minute quizzes I give at the beginning of some classes, and those are announced one class in advance.
That said, this is to some degree just a continuation of a trend that’s been going on as long as I’ve been teaching. It’s very definitely worse than it was when I started here, but I’m not sure that reflects anything all that recent, rather than just the previous steady increase passing a threshold level of annoyance for me. I don’t keep records of class attendance, so there’s no real way to sort it out empirically.
So, on the whole… I’m not sure. It did feel like students were a bit more burned out/ checked out by the end of the Spring term than in past years, but honestly, I was completely fried by mid-May so this may have been largely projection of my own mental state. My spring term class did a bit worse on the final than I would’ve liked, but properly calibrating exams is always a tricky business, and it was given at a weird time that might’ve thrown the class off a bit. The specific content areas that caused confusion weren’t any different than in the past, though, so I’d say I’m concerned, but not worried, if that distinction makes sense.
But again, that statement comes with a lot of caveats, so generalize at your own risk.
I guess this has the requisite daily dose of “old man yells at cloud,” if that’s what you come here for. Here’s a button if you’d like more:
And if you want to offer your own anecdata, the comments will be open:
" I think this year may have set records for the number of students who just disappeared from class for a week or so, and it definitely set a record for students rolling into class 20 minutes late or just getting up in the middle of class and wandering off for 10-15 minutes.
I find both of those behaviors baffling, which is in large part a generational thing."
Wow, I am baffled as well. But then, I'm even older than you. Considering only the tuition, skipping class is a huge waste of money.
Anecdote? In my working life I have attended a ton of "training classes" covering a wide range of topics. I had one instructor who told us the first day he would not tolerate late arrivals. Every session after that, he locked the classroom door at the appointed time and would not open it, even one second later.
Off on a tangent, but I switched to the Openstax also for the same University Physics -- I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Overall I'm going to keep using it, although it just seems a bit clumsier than what I used to use (Serway, Moore, M&I).