WWMKD?

For those of us who teach very large classes (my Intro Environmental Science course has about 650-700 students each year, and my Natural Hazards class is bursting at 150 students), it can be a constant challenge to think of each student as an individual. I think we can agree that everyone in academia is big on maintaining a mutually respectful environment in the classroom. But how this can be done effectively, if we know our students as a nameless, faceless mass?

Professors use a wide variety of tricks to get past this problem. I know of someone who teaches courses with hundreds of students (Intro Biology), and has the students make name-plates that stand on their desks at each lecture session. She then attempts to learn all of their names, and connect them to their faces…! At my age, I’m sorry, but I am way past being able to learn several hundred names and faces each term. That simply won’t work for me.

Instead, I try to focus on always being conscious of the HUMANITY of each individual student. I actively remind myself that “students are people, too.” Each of them has a mother and a father, and some of those moms and dads are pressuring their kids in not-always-healthy ways. Each of my students has a work schedule, health issues, family stresses, assignments for other courses, trouble sleeping, relationship problems – whatever it may be that takes their attention away from my course, or clouds their thinking from time to time.

It is probably MOST difficult to remember that “students are people” when you are answering the same stupid question for the 10^th time. Yes, I said “stupid question,” even though it’s not politically correct. In my opinion, contrary to popular belief, there ARE stupid questions in this world. For example, consider the following: I use i-clickers in my class (I’m not a complete fan of them; more on that in a future posting, perhaps), and one of my students once asked me, “Can I use my i-clicker at home?”

Let the full weight of that question sink in for a minute, and I think you will agree that it IS possible to ask a stupid question.

I answered that particular question with extreme patience; that is my practice. After all, what do I know about this student’s life…? Maybe he didn’t get any sleep last night because he works a graveyard shift. Or maybe he’s got a lot on his mind because he just got kicked out of his house, or his mom is dying of cancer. There are many reasons why people ask not-very-brilliant questions from time to time. I make sure that my answer doesn’t make my students feel that THEY are stupid, although I might gently hint that the question itself could have been better thought-out.

To help me remember the life pressures and humanity that lies behind each student’s classroom face, I carry around in my head a screening tool that I call WWMKD?, which stands for, “What Would My Kid Do?”. For those who don’t have kids, or those whose kids are still little, this will obviously be difficult to apply. But my oldest is now 21, so for the past five or more years she has been a pretty good analogue for my students. This does not mean that I treat my students like children, nor that I think of them as if they were my own kids (please, no!). It just reminds me that each one of them is an individual young person (for the most part), with the same types of pressures and concerns that my own children are facing.

So if my TAs and I take more than a week to hand back marked work, in my head I can hear my kid (and therefore my students) saying, “Mom, why hasn’t my prof posted our marks yet? I’m so worried about my grade – I won’t be able to sleep until I find out what I got on that paper.” I think about how I would feel, as a parent, to know that my kid is losing sleep over this, and I try to hustle our processing of the papers as much as possible.

If I am tempted to give a very weighty assignment at a time when I know students will have other course work due, I can hear my kid saying, “Mom, I can’t stay up any more to finish this assignment – I’m just too exhausted.” And I think about tweaking my scheduling just a bit.

If I am losing patience with answering yet another of those not-so-brilliant questions, I remember how complicated and daunting this institution looked to my own child when she first started as an undergraduate. I try to give them just a bit of leeway, since I know that they are still working at conquering the complexities of university life.

I don’t think this WWMKD approach harms my “bottom line” in terms of maintaining high academic and behavioral standards in my courses. Just as for my own kids, I never pass up an opportunity to remind my students that clearer thinking, better efforts, and higher-quality work is always desirable, and pretty much always possible no matter what pressures you are facing. But it helps me to remember that none of us is perfectly brilliant or brilliantly perfect all the time, and we all – even students – have burdens to carry.

Barbara Murck is a Geologist and Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science at the University of Toronto, Mississauga as well as a Wiley author.