Feeling Blue

It's that time in the semester: students either panicky or missing, rarely meeting deadlines, needing extraordinary questions/prompts/prodding/provoking/shenanigans in order to contribute to a class discussion.

Why? Maybe our semesters are just too long.

Or another possibility: unintentional [?] undermining. Here's what a student told me:

This guy is in my FYC course and wanting to write about the assessment test scores needed to get into various writing courses. He thinks the scores are too high (we just recently had to *lower* our scores to match up with other MnSCU colleges). He's in the dental assisting (or maybe dental hygiene) program and doing fine. "My teacher likes me so I'm getting good grades," he said. [I've typed out his sentence exactly as he said it: note the coordinating conjunction.]

"My teacher doesn't know why I have to get good grades in English -- the scores don't matter for us because writing doesn't matter in our jobs." [These words are almost exact; I'm paraphrasing, but the *teacher* is the one who said that writing didn't matter.]

WTF? I mean, can't we *college professors* recognize that writing has value in any profession? Or perhaps some of my colleagues are not really college professors, something I've long suspected: they're trainers at best, smiley-sticker awarders more like it.

I work so hard to combat the education myths circulating in our culture: just showing up to class is not going to result in an automatic A. Showing up is an opportunity to learn, to show what you've learned, to try wrestling with tough topics and new ways of thinking.

Of thinking.

It'd be so nice if my campus peers [?] would value thinking.

*Sigh*.