Home is So Sad

In Henry James' short story The Jolly Corner, the main character, Spencer Bryden, comes home after having spent 30 years abroad.  His parents are dead and a builder has offered him good money for the family's New York townhouse.  Bryden finds himself compulsively going through the old house night after night in the days before it is to be demolished.  One evening he encounters a ghost, but not just any ghost.  It's the ghost of who he would have been had he never left New York all those years ago. I've always been struck by the idea that there are ghostly selves of who we might have been had we married that person, taken that job offer, moved to some other city. 

Perhaps, however, there are just as many ghosts if you remain.  Take me, for example. I never intended to spend the bulk of my life in the city where I was born.  It just turned out that way.  Most of the time I am glad I am where I am, but sometimes I do run into the ghosts of who I used to be. 

In fact, it's nearly impossible for me to drive across town without running into a dozen mnemonic tombstones: here is the house of a kid I knew in high school, there's the corner where I used to buy a soda on the way home from work, and there's the apartment building where I once dated a woman.  I remember drinking champagne with her on the sofa and listening to Louis Armstrong records.  

I'm not sure how to convey this sensation to those who don't feel it.  It's a little like coming back to the home you grew up in and finding that your parents haven't changed anything.  It's the same decor they had on the day you went off to college or got married: the 1970s lamp, the avocado-colored refrigerator; even that goofy pen and ink drawing you did in high school is still hanging in the hall by the steps.  It's so odd to think  that it's all still there and hasn't changed.  After  all, you have changed so much since then.  Now imagine this same feeling but multiplied by 500 and spread out across an entire city.  That's what I mean.   The longer I live here, the more these ghosts crowd around reminding me who I used to be. 

Sometimes I think it would be wonderful not to live in the city where I grew up.  Then all those ghosts and memories could just erode into the sea and disappear.  Of home, the late British poet Phillip Larking once wrote,

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

I have always liked certain lines like "Long fallen wide" and the way the the poem trails off with "That Vase."  I imagine it's empty.

Xenophon's Cliff

In Anabasis, Xenophon recounted his role leading 10,000 Greek mercenaries back from a failed mission to oust the Persian king.  Harassed, outnumbered and finally cornered in Asia Minor, he drew up his weary troops to fight, positioning them with a sheer cliff immediately at their rear.   When one of his lieutenants questioned the move, Xenophon pointed out that their position made it clear to both the men and the Persians that there would be no running away.  We either fight or... 

In other words, Xenophon was choosing not to give himself a choice, which is not always a bad idea.  I've done it a few times.  I'll want to reformat a course but know I'll likely procrastinate once summer comes.  So I list all new texts on the Spring requisition form.  Now I have to change the course.  There is no choice.

On a larger scale this is where my institution is right now.  Last year we voted to adopt a new core curriculum.  We gave ourselves a year to design new courses around new core outcomes.  The deadline for proposals is September and it's only now that a lot of my colleagues are waking up to the fact that we have a cliff immediately behind us.  We either change or...

And we academics don't like change.  Indeed, there's an old joke in higher education that goes something like this:

Question: "How many academics does it take to change a light bulb?"

Response: "Change?  Who said anything about change?"

In any event, the Persians are coming. 

Struggling Through Stupid

For the past two weeks I've gone fly fishing three or four times for smallmouth bass on a nearby river.  Other than some fingerlings and chub, I've not had much luck.  More than once I've felt like a fool.  But I come home, read up on the subject, go back to the river the next day and am foolish again. As with any complicated thing, there is this stage of stupidity  you unavoidably must get through.  

When I was younger I took up a lot of projects and pastimes but dropped them when they did not come easily: musical instruments, martial arts, writing short stories, drawing...  The list is long and a bit wince-inducing.  Now that I'm older I find that I don't mind the obligatory stupid stage.  It's fun and oddly pleasing to figure it out. 

I wish there were some way to impart this to my students, many of whom have a learned helplessness about learning.  In my Humanities sections I'll have them reading texts that are often over their head.  Last spring, for example, I had them look at Frances Bacon's "Idols of the Mind."  In class more than one admitted that they didn't understand a word of it.  "I tried to read that," one young woman said, "But I guess I'm just dumb or something because I couldn't make heads or tails of it."

"Never mind that," I told her.  "Just read it and we'll talk it over in class.  I promise you'll get something out of it."  And she did.  Indeed, more than one student wrote in the final paper that Bacon's Idols and the scientific revolution were among the more interesting subjects we discussed. 

My son's going through a similar struggle with his viola lately.  His nightly practicing is accompanied by stomps and muttering under his breath whenever he muffs a note.  I keep telling him it's okay to stink, but not okay to give up.  I'm not sure he sees it that way.

One of these days I'm going to catch a smallmouth, and when I do I'm going to use the best advice I ever got about fly fishing.  A guy once told me, "Whenever it goes right, you'll be really anxious to cast the line in again, but don't.  Just stand there and think about catching that fish.  Figure out why it worked this time and not the 500 other times you tried.   Learn that one thing.and you'll go from zero to knowing at least one thing."

Striped Whistlers*

This last weekend, the Times ran a story about a student who graduated from Ohio Northern University with loans and debt totaling $120,000.  The young woman was working two waitressing jobs and her mother, who co-signed the loans, had taken out a life insurance policy on her daughter just in case something happened and she had to eat that debt.

The story also featured some eye-opening data about student loan debt and some disturbing trends.  For example, 45 percent of students borrowed to finance their education in 1980.  Today, 94 percent are taking out loans.

Far be it from me to dismiss the high cost of higher education, but the "sky is falling" tone of these articles (there have been several of late) belie the truth that it's still possible in this country to get a degree without encumbering yourself with insurmountable debt. 

As the Times article pointed out, fewer than 3 percent of students borrow more than $100,000 and the average debt is $23,500.  That's still a lot of money, but at my institution the average debt is around $15,000, which is less than the average for my state's three public universities.   In other words, there are places where you can still earn a four-year degree while owing about the cost of a Honda Civic.  Not so bad when you put it in perspective.

And although it's not popular to say it, a lot of the blame for the high cost of education can be attributed to the consumers of the product, who have come to expect private en suite rooms, state of the art workout facilities, fully-wired high tech campuses and full service dining halls complete with vegan options.  Moreover, the debt explosion has been compounded by the defunding of state aid programs and the entry into the market of politically-connected for-profit institutions that entice marginal and unsavvy students to run up obscene amounts of debt.  Lots of little non-profit colleges like mine are good stewards.  We still offer good degrees at a reasonable cost.

So is college expensive?  Yes, there's no denying that.  Is it still possible to get an affordable private college education?  Yes, but you would hardly know it from all the hand wringing going on out there.


* Midwestern slang for farmers in bibbed overalls who let out surprised whistles whenever glancing at a price tag.

A Cock and Bull Story

Well the big boys have finally decided to plunge into the on-line education field.  Harvard and MIT announced this week that they will invest $60 million to put free courses on-line.  This will be something more than the camera at the back of the lecture hall yawners you can download on I-Tunes U, or the University of Phoenix's cost effective ram and jam approach.  No sir, this effort will harness all of the latest whiz-bang doo-hickeys.  There will be true interactive capability, testing and even the opportunity to receive a grade, although not a diploma or credit toward graduation.  Apparently, this is the distance learning game changer we've all been waiting for.

Of course claims that technology would revolutionize education were made when radio took hold in the 1920s.  It's what they said about TV in the 1950s.  And, sigh, it's what they said about wiring every classroom in America to the internet back in the 1990s.  But this time it's different.  Really.  This time it's tantamount to the invention of the printing press. 

Okay, sure.  Whatever.

Don't get me wrong.  On-line educational technology actually does solve problems.  Two of them, in fact.  It decreases the cost and labor of storing information and it minimizes the time and distance constraints of imparting it.  Unfortunately we keep conflating our improved methods for addressing these problems with actual student learning.  So what if the academic literati at Harvard or MIT can teach and interact with a class of 10,000 for free?  At the end of the day, will the students perform any better as a result?  Or will the inherent difficulties of teaching and learning remain the same as they ever were?  David Brooks, a writer I seldom agree with, actually makes the operable point:

The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper.

Online education mostly helps students with Step 1. As Richard A. DeMillo of Georgia Tech has argued, it turns transmitting knowledge into a commodity that is cheap and globally available. But it also compels colleges to focus on the rest of the learning process, which is where the real value lies.

See? Step 1 is a snap.  It's that damned Step 2 with its concern for  "real value" that proves a toughie.  That said, these gadgets probably will transform higher education.  They will do it in the same way that the internet eliminated the need for a travel agent to book your flight.  In other words, we solved the problem of access to information but did nothing to improve the quality of air travel.  In the end, we will only make it harder for small institutions like mine, where we actually do care about our students' personal growth and development as human beings.

In my first-year Humanities course (taught the old-fashioned way), I have the students debate two views of progress in the 18th century.  On one side of the debate are the views of Condorcet, who foresaw an unlimited potential for human progress, thanks in no small part to the increase in universal education that was beginning during the Enlightenment.  On the other is the satire of Jonathan Swift, who reminded his readers that technological progress should never be confused with moral progress. Indeed, it generally makes us more effective in exercising our natural vices.  I mean the internet hasn't done much to bring the global village into harmony and understadning, but it's been a godsend to the porn and gambling industries.

So I ask my students to imagine that Swift and Condorcet were brought back to life today and allowed to assess who was more accurate about the the progress of humanity.  Surprisingly, my little I-phone-sporting technophiliacs are of one mind:  Swift was the more prescient.  Another 18h century skeptic, Laurence Sterne, once asked, "Tell me, ye learned, shall we forever be adding so much to the bulk and so little to the stock?"

Sterne's Tristram Shandy.  Good book.   It's a far better cock and bull story than this latest news.

Tap, tap, tap...

One of my earliest memories is standing in the driveway outside my childhood home pondering the oddity of time: how it just moved in the one direction and how arbitrarily we measure it.  Of course I didn't put it in  those terms back then.  I was simply tapping a stick on the concrete and thinking how each moment between taps had happened and now was gone.  Days were a special concern to my five-year old mind.  I wondered what it was like for a day to wait billions of years to come into being, and then be one that wasn't particularly memorable.  How disappointing. 

I'm still struck by the arbitrary ways we mark time.  I read recently about an ancient South American Indian society that had three separate calenders, including one based upon the position of the planet Venus.  That sounds odd until you recall that our own society has multiple markers of time.  We have one cycle that repeats every seven days, another tied to a solar orbit that repeats every 365 days and is quadrennially adjusted. Then, just to be interesting, we have a base ten system that counts off units of ten, one hundred and one thousand.  Oh, and this time framework arbitrarily starts running backward about 2000 years ago.  See what I mean?  All systems for marking time are weird.

And then there is the academic calender with its semester starts and stops.  I finish my twenty-first academic year next week.  That's forty-two semesters, six-hundred seventy-two weeks, and a lot of fifty minute periods.  Here's how my semester will end.  I will stow my cap and gown in the backseat and drive away from a convention center on either a stormy or idiotically beautiful Saturday in late April.  I will come home.

Done, another year.   I have measured out my life in syllabi. 

So it's time to take stock.  What is there to say for this semester?  The senior capstone seminar went well despite that I taught in a cavernous lecture hall.  The Liberal Arts once again cheated death and survived my annual prosecution of them by a vote of 18-3.  The students in the seminar were a lot of fun .   I struggled, however, in my Humanities course, which had a rather frightening attrition rate.  I lost about five students.  They just vanished.  And the first-year honors seminar was one of the more unusual combinations of personalities and abilities.  Still, there was growth and development.    All in all, a mixed bag of a semester.

Well, so long Spring 2012.  Hope I haven't left something important in you.   Tap, tap tap...

Hieronymo's mad againe

The one thing you must never do in a classroom is lose your cool.  Whatever annoying student behavior is creating a loss of confidence in your career choice, you simply cannot freak on them.  Yesterday I came close, though.   In my Humanities section we were discussing the impact of Freud on the arts in the early 20th Century.  I thought I had a pretty good plan, too.  I laid out Freud's ideas on the unconscious, we were going to watch a short video on Freud's work, and then apply his ideas to James Joyce's Evilene and Eliot's Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. 

Ten seconds after I began the video, one student whips out a cell phone and scrolls through messages.  Another starts updating a planner, and still another starts doing homework for another class.    I counted to ten to get my anger in check and then strolled to the rear of the classroom.  I leaned down and, in a measured monotone, I whispered, "Put the phone away and please don't do homework for other classes in my class."  We finished the exercise and before dismissing them I made a short speech about classroom courtesy. 

I didn't lose it, but it sure has been eating at me since.  It makes me wonder how students would react if I were to just tune them out when they came for an advising appointment or a scheduling change.  Or how about this?  I am teaching a lesson and then just stop to check my text messages for 15 minutes while they sit there. 

The thing I've always hated about teaching is that I have to play by the rules.  Them, not so much.  

Okay, cathartic rant over.  Breathe deeply, place smile back on face. 

"Now then, how may I be of assistance in your educational journey today?"

Grade Grubbers

There are two types of grade grubbers.  The first I like and even admire in a way.  These are the last minute--holy smokes--the semester's almost over and I'm tanking variety.  They have been lousy students all semester, but somehow, with two or three weeks to go, they pull themselves together and manage to land their hind ends just the other side of the C line. As a chronically-disorganized wool gatherer,  I identify and empathize with these students. 

The second type drives me to distraction.  These are students who have already earned an A, yet they obsessively contest every single point and become little syllabus lawyers.  Unfortunately, this is the point in the semester when both varieties of grubbers show up.

Ye gods, I loathe grades.  I would abolish them if it were in my power.  They corrupt the entire point of education.  In their place I would prefer a combination of instructor and student self-assessment.  In an ideal world, I would be given a set of students for a year.  I would meet with each one and we would craft a set of learning goals that we could both focus on over two semesters.  In place of a letter or a GPA would be a brief, narrative description of the student's progress on his or her learning goals and a statement of what still needs to be done.  Call it a performance review.  

I know, I know, there are a thousand reasons why this would never work in higher education.  It takes too much time. How would students transfer to other institutions?  What would grad schools look at for admissions?   People do love their numbers.  It doesn't matter that they are meaningless.  My dream system, on the other hand, would place the focus where it needs to be: on growth and development.  It would actually reflect the evaluative methods most people experience in their professional careers.  Better still, it would eliminate end-of-the-semester grade grubbing.

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Field notes from a late, late, late adopter

To put my late adoption into context, let me just admit one fact up front.  The year is 2012 and I only in the past week got a cell phone.  Yep, that's right, a cell phone.  I am the latest of late adopters.  I have never texted or tweeted.  I've never Game-Boyed or Wii.-ed.  I don't even know if these things can be made into verbs.  For heaven's sake, I have never had cable TV.  Once at friend's apartment years ago, I was mindlessly flipping through the channels and I muttered something like, "Good heavens, there's an entire network devoted to cartoons?"

He just gaped at me and said, "You never change, man."

He was wrong.  I do change, but at a glacial pace.  And my pace has recently begun to speed up.  Unavoidably, ineluctably, all of the new media platforms that people have been living with for decades are insinuating themselves into my life.  Me, the tardiest of late adopters.  In the last year alone I've found myself imbibing in streaming video from Netflix, free podcasts on I-Tunes and audio books from the public library.  And now I have this object that I've feared for years in my pocket.  It gives me more ways of distracting myself than ever before.  Indeed, the world is suddenly teeming with diversion.

What I find disturbing is the death of the empty afternoon, of being alone, of moments when you are thrown back on yourself in what Wordsworth called a "wise passiveness."  Indeed, Wordsworth's fellow Romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay Nature, "I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars." 

But do people stare at stars alone anymore?  Everywhere I go people are staring into tiny screens to stay in constant contact with their on-line society.   Heck, why sit passively watching the birds in the backyard when you can fill that empty space with Angry Birds?  An article in this week's Sunday New York Times Magazine (which I read the old fashioned way) makes this point about the pointlessness of cell phone games better than I can.  The author, Sam Anderson, argues that

Stupid games... are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits.

Distraction?  Compulsion?  You might say people today are filling up the cracks of their day with--well--crack.

Missing Persons

Every semester I have students who vanish.  They don't call, they don't email.  They just go poof.   Often, too, their disappearance happens with no forewarning or signs of academic distress.  Good students are as prone to disappear as poor and indifferent ones.  One day they are there and then...  gone.    Sometimes the other people in the course will ask, "What happened to that guy?"  Most of the time, however, they say nothing and the course sails on. 

If a student disapparates in the first few weeks, I just assume he dropped the class. If this happens in the middle of the semester, I assume illness.  What's odd is when a student goes missing at the end of the course.  I've had them disappear with less than two weeks to go.  Once I had a young woman (who was ace-ing the course) fail to show for the final exam, which was heavily weighted enough to sink her.  She didn't skip the final or misread the exam date in the syllabus; she just vanished.  Even odder is when students reappear.  You walk into class, look up and there they are. 

"I need to talk to you about what I have to do to catch up." 

"Catch up?  You've missed four weeks of class."

A retired colleague told me that she always played along and let reappearing students turn in late work, take the final, or attempt whatever they promise to do to make it right.  They never follow through and end up failing anyway.  Besides, she  said, they might be crazy.  The safe play is just to smile and make nice.

Most of the time you never find out why a student disappeared, but every so often you do.  I had a guy this semester who showed up twice about two weeks into the term and then vanished.  Saw in the paper he's now in jail. 

Mystery solved.

Just You Wait

A while back I came across a strange study.  Researchers were examining failed suicide attempts.  These were people who actually went through with it, yet for one reason or another the attempt didn't work.  Maybe the gun didn't go off, or the rope broke, something.   The point is that these folks fully intended to kill themselves.  Only a fluke prevented it.  What I found oddly disquieting were their actions immediately after their failed attempt.  Most did something mundane: they made spaghetti,  they vacuumed the rug or went in to work.  It was as if they said, "Huh?  That was weird."  Then they continued on with their life.  Maybe the dark place you have to be in to attempt suicide is just a mood.  It  passes.

I've been thinking of this study lately.   Last Tuesday was perhaps the worst day of the year at work.  A project I had been working on with colleagues collapsed.  Feelings were running high and--to top it off--I stunk it up in the classroom, which always makes me feel bad.  I felt lousy all Tuesday evening.  Couldn't sleep, couldn't keep from rehashing it.  But by late Wednesday afternoon things were looking up.  I just had to wait it out.

I've also been thinking about Vincent Van Gogh.  Many years ago I read his collected letters, some of which were addressed to his brother, Theo, who also aspired to be a painter. Unfortunately, Theo was beset by paralyzing doubts about his own talent. In response to these doubts, Vincent wrote the following letter in September of 1883:

Theo, I wish painting would become such a fixed idea in your mind that the problem of "Am I an artist or am I not?" would be placed in the category of abstractions, and the more practical questions of how to put together a figure or a landscape, being more amusing, would come more to the fore. Theo, I declare I prefer to think how arms, legs, heads are attached to the trunk, rather than whether I myself are more or less an artist or not. I know sometimes the mind is full of it, which is only natural. But look here, brother, even if our mind is now and then full of the problem, "Is there a God or isn't there a God?" it is no reason for us to commit an ungodly act intentionally.

In the same way, the matter of art, the problem, "Am I an artist, or am I not?" must not induce us not to draw or not to paint. Most things defy definition, and I consider it wrong to fritter away one's time on them. Certainly when one's work does not go smoothly and when one is checked by difficulties, one gets bogged in the morass of such thoughts and insoluble problems. And because one gets sorely troubled by it, the best thing to do is to conquer the cause of the distraction by acquiring a new insight into the practical part of the work.

I am reminded of this letter whenever I feel like a failure in the classroom or at work. I remind myself that the thing to do is to keep working, to keep looking at the practical aspects of the job, just get back to work.  It's pity that Van Gogh, an eventual suicide, didn't follow his own advice. 

In reality, no matter how dark it seems, we're all just a few minutes away from spaghetti or housework.

Ah cha cha cha

There are days when you have your "A material."  There are days when you wing it and everything comes together.  Then there are days when you realize you're just giving them the old song and dance.  Today was the latter.  Discussed the value of aesthetic awareness in the senior capstone and I was using a lesson plan that has only really worked once (the first time I used it).  Every other time it's tanked.  Nevertheless, there I was at 9:30 this morning giving it another lousy trod on the boards.

Then--oh sweet suckosity--I had to talk about Romantic poetry in Humanities 102.  I knew I was doing the cha-cha as I read the opening lines of Song of Myself and found myself relating  it to--of all things--Kantian epistemology.  But there I was on stage. The students had no idea what I was talking about, but the show must go on, right?  So swing-step, dip, sliiiiiiide. 

I won't even get into my tired slog through Frankenstein at 1:00 pm, or any number of institutional crises in between. 

Ye gods, dance, teacher boy, dance.  

Little Boxes

There's an exercise we do on the first-year honors seminar each year while reading Emerson.  In his 1839 "American Scholar" address at Harvard, Emerson called for a new kind of intellectual, one whose primary influences would be direct contact with nature, the mind of the past and an active and engaged life.  The aim for these new American brawniacs would be to undertake "daring sallies of the spirit" that would lift all of humanity with fresh, original thinking.

So each spring I ask my students how we might construct a university for such people.  I have them get into groups and brainstorm ideas for Man-Thinking University, an institution dedicated to turning out non-comformist original thinkers.  Most years the students come up with interesting ideas.  Man-Thinking U would be located in a pristine natural setting.  The first few months would be spent building one's living quarters.  Students would even devise the curriculum, select their own projects and there would be no grades.  The students themselves would determine when they were ready to leave. 

This year's batch of honors students didn't seem to grasp the nature of this exercise.  They kept saying there had to be grades and testing.  Otherwise no one would hire the graduates.  My simple exercise in re-imagining the educational system just bombed.  They didn 't get it and couldn't imagine any way to learn other than rank, rate and graduate.  Education was some expert evaluator checking off a series of little boxes.

So the next day I walked into class and handed out a slip of paper on which I had written the following: "I have lost my voice.  You will just have to conduct the discussion of this essay on your own today.  Take turns leading the group and be sure to involve everyone."

For forty minutes they discussed the text on their own.  Everyone participated.  Then with 10 minutes left in class I miraculously recovered my voice and asked them to evaluate their efforts.  How well did they do?  What would have made the discussion better?  What would happen if they chose what to read next and assessed their own efforts at understanding it?  Could they do it without an evaluator?  Could they do it without an expert?   In fact, what would happen if they started determining what was important and what they wanted to know?  

One or two of them finally began to grasp the Emersonian notion of the self-directed learner.  One said, "I wouldn't mind going to college at a place like that."  Another even came up with a university motto:  At Man-Thinking U, the slogan isn't "think outside the box.  It's "Dude, there is no box."

Day of the Dead

It's the Friday before Spring Break, which means my classes will be half populated at best.   And you can forget about anything after 2:00 pm.  This place will be still as death. 

After break, too, everything about the semester will have changed.  My institution wraps up early.  We're done before the first of May; thus, students coming back from break tend to lean into the finish line.  They can feel it.  I've mentioned it before, but it's always struck me as disorienting that the academic year ends just as the world is awakening again from winter.  Another year, another year, shot in the rear...

Was this what you expected
All those years ago?
Aprils gliding by
On Kindergarten
Lawn-kissing snow,
Skies effortlessly blue
And adolescent restless?
The twenty-first,
Count ‘em.
Granular rings,
Middle-aged misgivings.
Latest in a series
Of psychopathic springs,
Each violently alive
And pressing its
Proud green belly into the knife.

BTW, the wonderful photo is by Bethany Helzer: http://society6.com/bethanyhelzer/the-blue-room_Print

Checking Out

One always has to be careful with generalizations about student behavior.  Often times we professors are just flat wrong about our students and why they are the way they are.  For example, I was wrong last week about a student who has never seemed very engaged in class. 

I had tagged a short note to a returned assignment, asking if the student and I might meet to map a strategy for ending the term on a positive note.  The student hung around after class to talk with me, but three seconds into our discussion there were tears.  The poor kid is working too much, worrying too much and freaked out by the idea of failing.  I had no idea.  What I took to be a lack of interest or commitment was actually panic and nervous exhaustion.

So you never know.

There's something else going on this semester that I can't figure out.  And I want to be careful in drawing any conclusions.  For some reason, students have begun getting up in the middle of class and walking out.  They don't say anything.  They just leave.  Sometimes they are gone for up to 15 or 20 minutes and then they walk back in and sit down.  It isn't that students have never done this before; it's the frequency that I have begun to notice.  I've never had it happen so often. At first I thought they were just going to the restroom.  Then I wondered if they had set their phones on vibrate and were taking a call.  Sometimes I wonder, though, if some new kind of attitude about acceptable classroom citizenship is being born.

Here's what I mean: I often see people in grocery store lines talking on their cell phones through an entire transaction. Occasionally I'll ask clerks if it bothers them when this happens.  They always tell me it drives them nuts.  I saw this occur only last weekend while buying a pair of pants.  The clerk told me, "It's like I'm not even a person that they are expected or obliged to interact with." 

Increasingly, I feel like that clerk.  I'm there in the classroom, standing right in front of students and doing my job, but they are scrolling through text messages, walking out to attend to other tasks, filling in planners or maybe even doing homework for other classes.   They seem oblivious to my presence or any expectation that they might want to affect even a minimal pretence of courteous attentiveness.  For them, being in a classroom has become like standing in checkout lines. 

Then again, you never know.  I could be wrong about this.