Professors: get in touch with students
By Hannah Leifheit and Kristen Busch
We like food, we like sex, we like loud music, we like beer, we like sleep, we like snow days.
Wait a second, some of these things don’t apply to you? Do you not like loud music? Or beer, or sex? Is it possible that we as Earlham students are not all the same? Are we not all some quivering mass of bodies that are simply drawn to the same likes and dislikes with no space in between our gyrating sweaty ideals and dreams?
Huh. Maybe that also means that we don’t all throw our syllabi out at the beginning of the year and lounge about on the Heart instead. That is not my life, nor is it the life of my friends and other students who also struggle with their work at Earlham.
A number of professors on campus seem to think that our lives start and end in their classroom. Yes, we are here to learn, but some of us have baggage that comes with the price of the learning that Earlham offers. Often that baggage makes it near impossible to jump through the hoops that we are given.
Everyone handles that work differently, everyone has different amounts of it, and some don’t have any work. For me, getting all of the work done is a struggle, and I know I am not the only one who feels this way.
Professors have told me that part of college is figuring out what you need to do and what you want to do and choosing between the two.
Some professors understand, some will meet with students weekly to help them get their lives on track, other professors are unable to arrange their office hours around students who have track meets, an elementary school class that they teach, a program that they run, a meeting with the mayor.
Some faculty members don’t know, and it’s you that this article is for. It’s to urge you to get back in touch with your students so you can stop complaining about how they never do the reading and instead speak with them and find out why.
Maybe your class is too big to get to know everyone, so try what some of your colleagues do. Have the first homework assignment be to list commitments that might conflict with class work.
Give the option of a one-onone meeting if the student wants to explain more about their schedule. Don’t freak out. Your whole class won’t try to crash your office hours because we aren’t all the same, remember?
But some of us will come up to you and tell you about all we do. We’ll let you know what we are struggling with in the hopes that you can help us or give us some extra insight as to how to lighten our heavy load.
Because you can help, you can make a difference. Meet with those students, talk to us, reason with us, and respect what we do for your place of work and the city you may live in. Please respect us. We do a lot here and most of us can’t leave at the end of the day. Our workday is sometimes 15-plus hours.
Through taking little steps, hopefully all our lives can get a little easier, or at least a bit more pleasant.
I am one of the lucky students who have recently been blessed with a bevy of understanding and involved professors. But this is recent and many others aren’t as lucky as I am. So try to know what some students are up against when we are trying to get all of our homework done.
We respect you and stay up until 3 a.m. reading the 150 pages you assigned because you told us we might have to read it twice to really understand it, because we want to understand it. And that’s part of why we came here right?
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