College Today, cont'd.

I tried to comment on Dani D's comment on this post, but it wouldn't let me comment--only edit the post. So I'm posting to comment on the issue she and Trevor raised about the role and import of extra-curriculars in college today. Since our youngest daughter is a high school senior and her school was cancelled today and now for tomorrow as well due to weather, she is "lost." Now, this is odd to me. She used to use spare time to read (voraciously) for pleasure. But as a dual-enrolled HS senior taking classes at UNI as well as rehearsing for the Spring play, and working parttime at Porter's Camera, her days go from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm and sometimes later. She has apparently become addicted to this crazy every-minute-accounted-for schedule, so that she no longer seeks the free time out that allows her to read (or even to write). This is scary to me. If she's accepted to one of the top schools she hopes to attend in the fall, I'm fearful she'll be like many of the students I get in IS101 in their first term of college: they're so used to having their days filled up with scheduled activities, they don't know what to do with their "free time." They certainly, in most cases anyway, don't use it to study, at least judging from their performance on class-based appraisals. And apparently a good deal of time is spent socializing in one form or another -- whether it be XBoxing to binge-ing, the inability to handle the transition is too often the sad story of those who are among the 45% who allegedly make slight progress in academically-related skills during the first two years of college.

Now, this situation is a bit different than the one Trevor and Dani are describing. They're talking about students, I think, whose days are patterned like theirs: booked from morning to night with classes, student senate, work-study, play or choir practice, performances, etc. with precious little time left that might be called "free." I know their pattern is not uncommon for many students at Wartburg. Just try to schedule a meeting for a May Term group or a honor society with a dozen students during the term. Faculty are the same way: no time works for everyone. In our visits to college campuses starting last year with our daughter, we discovered that the very best schools had class schedules that required less in-class seat time than Wartburg by far. In fact, two of the highest ranked schools had first years taking only three classes per term rather than four. The time in class was far less per course than here; the limits on students per class were at 14 or fewer and the reading and writing requirments were higher as well. The idea was that class time would NOT be used to repeat what was in the texts, a wise policy in my view, and students would be expected to assume a lion's share of the time ensuring their own learning agendas were addressed in the class discussions. There was clearly an "ethos" in the air that said "this is how we do it here" and we're proud of it.
One of those schools, Sarah Lawrence College, by the way, does not give grades for classes. Rather they use the written assessments that the old Chrysalis program at Wartburg did. And yet the workload and the ethos were so proudly anchored in a sense of challenge and rigor, grades were seen as superfluous if not insulting.

What I want to suggest is that maybe Wartburg's ethos is a bit out of whack. I am not against extra-curriculars. I went to college to play basketball, not to study political science. But I am amazed at how little "free time" our students (and often faculty) actually have. And I'm curious: Are we somehow afraid that, if left to their devices, the faction that can't make the shift to college because they have too much free time on their hands is watching opportunties slip by because they are not ready to be free any meaningful sense. If they were, they'd be availing themselves of the reading they're not doing or the study groups they're not forming. But they think to be free is to party and play XBOX--or so it seems. Likewise, for some, like our daughter who has been conditioned to have every moment of every day filled with somekind of obligation or scheduled activity, how are you supposed to learn to be free? If there is a part of all the busy-ness that is aimed at perpetuating habits in school, it's no wonder our first two years are having so many adjustment issues. Young people aren't apparently used to being free in any meaningful sense and so some react by overdoing it with scheduled activities that are indivdidually valuable, but added together, take a toll on academic progress; others who haven't know real freedom try Eric Fromm's "escape from freedom" by overpartying and dulling the pain that accompanies guilt over irresponsible choices one isn't used to making. In either case, it's a source of drag on what this school could be if we had more of the ethos that here is where community norms require that I hold up my end of the bargain in sustaining a genuine learning community worth its name and its commercial cost. DT