Why I don’t accept apologies from my college students
Those permanent records your teachers warned you about actually exist, but they’re flawed.
For the past few weeks, professors at my college have been helping students choose classes for the spring. In my department, we require students to actually meet with us, their academic advisers, and we talk about what classes they need to take to graduate on time.
On my campus, students’ permanent records are stored online. The website — with all the privacy protections you can imagine — includes particulars about the students, such as their grades and majors. What it doesn’t include is their stories. The adviser sees a Cin environmental science and a missing lab grade, but not the family illness that took the student away from school for weeks on end. Or you see the W (a withdrawal) but you don’t see that the student ended up having to add an extra job to an already-packed schedule. That art/math/philosophy class had to go.
You only learn the stories from conversations, and sometimes, you have to work for those. These students do not come in with excuses. They come in apologizing. Some sit with their head in their hands. They are carrying the world on their shoulders.
Off campus, the people of Killingly are arguing over who said what in regard to whether to open a mental health clinic for students, rather than the efficacy of such a clinic. Politicians have taken the recent bad news about cratering test scores and twisted it to suit their needs. The pandemic has been a boulder in the path of the country’s students, and it has exacerbated already existing racial disparities. The recent so-called “Nation’s Report Card” from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed Connecticut’s fourth- and eighth-graders’ scores dropped, but were still at least slightly higher than the national averages.
It’s hard to take comfort in that. I do not accept apologies because these students haven’t let me down. If I think it’s appropriate, I will share one of my collegiate moments of which I am not proud. I have several from which to choose, like the semester I never once attended my military sociology class. For years after graduation, I would wake up muttering, “I have to go to class.” Or I’ll tell them about getting the secondlowest grade on a photography midterm (a class I actually liked), and how I felt a little disappointed that I hadn’t distinguished myself by getting the absolute lowest grade. Or I’ll mention the C I squeaked by in a class I now teach.
That’s only a partial list, and I think you can see a pattern here, but I am old enough to understand that no experience need be wasted. My tepid college career actually serves me now. It’s easier to have compassion for a struggling or indifferent student if you were one, yourself.
I have roughly 25 students to guide (or push) through the process, and each session takes maybe 20 minutes, though it can go longer. Early on in the preparation process, students arrive with a list of classes, and a few even come in with an alternate list, which is impressive. We have time to chat about their semesters, and maybe their hopes and dreams.
And then we get to the end of the preparation period, when students who have gone down rabbit holes drag in with scarcely a chance of graduating, ever — or so they believe.
I reassure them that a mortarboard is in their future. The student wants to graduate. I want them to graduate. What do we need to do. (Mostly, “we” means “I,” and I need to fill out forms and make cases to the Powers That Be to substitute classes they’ve already taken for classes they should have taken.) The ultimate goal is to educate the student, yes, but also to get that student walking across a stage as the family cheers. So when a student says she’s pretty certain she should graduate in the spring, though she lacks two semesters’ worth of classes, I don’t say, “I’m pretty sure I was born an heiress. Who do I see to correct the record?” Instead, we dive into her options.
And when another student announces she is changing majors, and asks if she should continue attending classes this semester, I do not say, “Of course you do, unless you were born an heiress and don’t mind flushing the cost of an entire semester’s worth of classes.” I say, instead, “Now think about what you just said.”
As we talk, I stop seeing the permanent record, and start seeing the stories behind the grades and miscues and general coloring outside the lines. And I see a generation of young adults who are navigating waters unknown to all of us with — for the most part — grace and humor. I tell them we’ll get through this, permanent record be damned, and we turn to the classes for the spring.