My Favorite Season

To many people, spring is the season of rebirth. However, to an educator like me, the real season for change and renewal is the fall. That, of course, is when school comes back into session after the summer break.

The fall semester is when I see a lot of new faces in my respective classes. New students that are attending college for the first time … or coming back after years away from classes. Returning students that are continuing with their academic pursuits. And, if I am lucky, students that took a previous course of mine and sought me out for a different subject.

This semester, based on the rosters I have seen, I will have a mix of all of the above. And for that I am thankful, because it means that people still value the college setting and what I may have to offer as a teacher.

Over the past several years, I have tried to use my position as an educator to teach more than just what’s in the textbook. My “outside the box” methods lend well to giving students life lessons that will (hopefully) help them in their personal, professional, and academic lives. Sometimes the information is met with indifference, but others have responded positively.

There’s an old saying that goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.”

(One of my former students added something to that proverb: “True, but you can hold its head under the water until it drinks … or until the bubbles stop coming up.” Yikes!)

For example, I wrote in a past blog about the brainwashing that many people have undergone in our “everybody is special” society. (I even had my first “get off the Patch because you suck” comment). That is one of the first lessons I have to teach, because just about everybody in the class wants an A—I want to make sure that people understand that getting an A means you deserve an A. This is what is reserved for the BEST, not for the “I showed up and sort of paid attention” crowd.

The funny thing is that, every semester, I ask students what grade they believe they deserve for the class. And most students (surprise, surprise) believe that they should get an A for reasons that astound the mind. For those of you who think that I am kidding or being facetious, let me just rattle off a few student-submitted reasons for deserving an A in my class:

“I showed up to 70% of the classes and paid attention at least 50% of the time, so I believe I should get an A for the effort that it took. This is the most I have ever done for any class.”

“I tried really hard on every assignment. Even though you gave me grades that didn’t reflect all of the work I did, I still should get the highest grade because of my hard work.”

“I deserve an A because we need to get America back on track. Too many foreign countries are doing better than us because their students are getting A’s while we are getting C’s. So, why not start putting America on the right path by giving your students A’s so we can prove that we’re better?”

“I believe students should be graded on their potential. I know that I have a lot of potential and, if I really tried, I could get an A. So I believe I should be given the grade that I could earn to match my potential.”

Excuse me while I bang my head off of something for a few moments…

(BANG)

There, I feel better.

As I write this, I still have a few precious weeks of summer ahead of me, and I intend to enjoy every last moment before I split my time between my full-time job and my teaching job. Still, I am looking forward to this semester, because the thought of teaching someone something useful—either for use inside the classroom or in the “real world”—is something that continues to excite me to this day.

And the day that it no longer excites me is the day I leave the classroom for good.