Last Tuesday I attended a lecture on dystopia in film and TV series taught by a brilliant Turkish visiting professor, which was also attended by four other university professors, including the one who had invited the visitor. I won’t name the university, a renowned public university, but will note that the students (about 20?) are in the fourth year of a BA in Political Science. The talk was offered within a subject on cinema and philosophy. When the guest teacher finished his lecture, which lasted about 50 minutes, there was a question and answer session. After an awkward silence, the five professors started to ask questions, until finally a student joined the debate with a brilliant intervention. As I turned to listen to him, I saw the face of a girl sitting behind me in the second row, a face of desolate boredom. Sad, isn’t it?
In my time as an undergraduate student I was infinitely bored, but I used two strategies: either I didn’t go to class and studied the matter taught on that day on my own, or if I went, I gazed at the teacher from time to time with an interested face while I wrote down other things. My mother taught me from a very young age that you always have to be in good terms with everyone, even more so with people who sooner or later assess you. This is not hypocrisy but pure common sense. When it comes to grading, writing a letter of recommendation, or evaluating an application for a scholarship, teachers logically tend to value not only the academic results but also classroom attitude. The student who has been at least friendly and if possible very interested (ideally in all sincerity) always wins points. This is not about feeling good as teachers, but about valuing the student’s personality to reward those who are hardworking and participative, which is the whole point of attending university.
I am late to the debate initiated in December last year by the Prof. Daniel Arias of the University of Granada, when he published, curiously on his LinkedIn account, a long letter complaining bitterly about the bad attitude of college students. Arias titled it “Dear undergraduate university student: we are deceiving you”, a title which actually hides his very direct criticism of students and that he has recycled for the book he has just published, Dear Student: We Are Deceiving You (Querido alumno: te estamos engañando). I’ve read a couple of blog posts criticizing Prof. Arias, one of which doesn’t grasp at all what he’s arguing. Arias is not nostalgic for the Spanish public university of the past, with its classes of more than 500 students, but nostalgic for what it could be now that the groups are finally much smaller. I share his nostalgia for the present that could be but is not, without doubts and without ambiguity.
What all the teachers born in the 60s and 70s, who attended the hesitant Spanish public university in the 80s and 90s, complain about is that since the extension of compulsory secondary education (ESO) from 14 to 16, which left the baccalaureate with only two courses, the scheme by which the students who opted for the university were really interested and already well prepared for study has been broken. In the past, there were fewer teachers and more overcrowding in the classrooms, but there was also a much lower percentage of disinterested students. Today we have fewer students in each class because there are more teachers but the interest of 80% of our students is nil, adding to this that about half the Spaniards aged 18 to 22 attend university, which is not reasonable at all.
I believe that the lack of interest is due to two fundamental reasons. On the one hand, between the ages of 14 and 16, i.e. the first two years of ESO, students who do not want to study impose their disinterest on the rest, whereas when BUP (the three year high-school course followed by COU) existed, those who did not want to study could already start their professional training at 14 (you can start working at 16). By the time interested students reach high school, they have already lost two years of advanced academic training, and the two years they take before college cannot make up for that loss. As, in addition, the contents have been simplified, we receive students with a second-year high-school level in comparison to the times of BUP and COU. The other reason for the general lack of interest, without a doubt, are the social media, not so much because of what they are, but because of the time their use takes up and because they have drastically reduced the ability of students to concentrate in class and study. The loss of personal time for reading, watching quality movies and series, and conversation, has greatly impoverished vocabulary, comprehension and expression skills, as Prof. Arias rightly points out.
The girl with the face of utter boredom that I mentioned is symptomatic of a situation that is collectively everyone’s fault. Curiosity and intellectual effort are not socially rewarded, only physical appearance and so-called achievements on social networks (such as high numbers of likes or followers), and this is not an issue that only affects the age group between 18 and 22. In the media, there are no longer intellectuals, nor TV contests that reward knowledge (Saber y ganar survives in his corner of La2, but young people don’t watch it as we boomers and Gen-Xers used to watch El tiempo es oro, or even Un, dos, tres).
Like Prof. Arias, and like the vast majority of my peers, I feel that I cannot compete with TikTok, or with YouTube, which are corporate products designed to be addictive. I plead guilty to having publicly objected to students’ lack of attention and having invited them to leave the classroom and go to the bar given their total disconnection. I’ve left the classroom at least a couple of times, tired of no one paying attention to my lecturing, seeing those bored faces, and listening to conversations that had nothing to do with the content. I trustingly but foolishly assume that laptop screens don’t hide other activities than note taking, such as online shopping or gaming. In any case, whereas I understand that students bring their laptops to class, I can’t understand those who don’t use them or never take notes, and spend the class in a totally passive attitude.
This week I’m getting to know my new BA dissertation tutorees, and I’m really enjoying the meetings. They have submitted very interesting proposals, as it has always happened to me since the 2012-13 academic year, when we introduced the end of degree research paper. The question that assails me is why people like my brilliant tutorees don’t lead the rest in class. I have the suspicion that the level of university education is diminishing (in the 1990s I used to correct second-year papers that today would be master’s theses, I really mean it) because respect for the brilliant student is being eroded. Now that I’m enjoying the best moment of my career as a researcher, I’m resigned to the fact that my students aren’t interested at all in what I publish, but I think that classes aren’t more lively because the peer pressure to prevent teacher-student collaboration is greater. Students don’t ask questions, and so all are awfully bored; nobody wants to stand out before groups of peers that will look down on them because they can’t participate in any minimally intellectual conversation.
Perhaps we teachers make a mistake by simplifying the content of our courses and we should go about our business and focus mainly on the students who follows us. What holds us back, as Arias says, is that the university authorities control whether we fail too many students because a very high failure rate means opening groups for student repeaters. And, of course, student assessment of our work. This week I have asked the corresponding Vice-Rector’s office to rewrite the questions we use at UAB because they are useless to improve our teaching practice; also to prevents students who never attend classes from participating and, typically, leaving negative reviews. No way. Students who are satisfied just don’t fill in the surveys and these are becoming an opportunity to belittle us teachers, as if we were a commercial product on Amazon or TripAdvisor. I am not against teachers’ assessment, but this should be done using coherent and, above all, useful parameters. Undermining teachers’ self-confidence just doesn’t help.
Arias said in his letter and is saying now in his book that the deception the university practices consists of lying to students by offering degrees that are more accessible than they should be so that they can live in a comfortable bubble. And, I would add, not feel the widespread anxiety that has resulted in 20% of students at my university being diagnosed with some kind of psychological disorder. We, university professors, do not suffer the verbal and even physical violence that depresses our high school colleagues, but we are not robots, and I am tired of this idiotic assumption that we always go to class feeling perfectly balanced. The instructions we are receiving stress that we have to protect the mental health of the students, which is great but should not be done ignoring our own problems. No strategy will do. I’ve tried everything and nothing works. So the deception to which Arias alludes is on both sides: it doesn’t work for the students, and even less for us.
As I have commented many times here, teacher failure is especially noticeable in compulsory undergraduate subjects, but far less in electives, or at master’s and doctoral levels. The sense of failure is also much higher in a large group of anonymous students than in small groups or in personal tutorials. I attribute the drop in the teaching assessment in my compulsory second-year subject, as I have explained here, to the fact that in a few years I have gone from 45 students to 75 (this year). I don’t know them and they don’t know me. In any case, I am surprised by the rejection of personalized attention in the second year. This past June, I offered seven or eight students who had passed the chance to rewrite a failed paper to make sure they had acquired key skills. You can’t raise a final grade in university once it is awarded, but I offered to help. Only one student replied to my personal message. At least it was to thank me and tell me that she could not accept my offer for lack of time.
Arias offers as the main solution making the first years of university and vocational training more flexible so that students can change studies more easily, and insists on the idea that vocational training does train great professionals. A big problem is that the many helicopter parents have weakened the personal maturity of their children, so that we have young people coming to college without having taken alone any weighty decision in their lives (or even, as I have read today, showing up for job interviews with their parents). Perhaps it would be necessary to delay university entrance with a gap year used to work, either at home or abroad. Arias recommends using the American system of majors this and minors, whereby students can change majors mid-degree, but we are used to rather rigid undergraduate curricula. There are no majors here, although there are minors used as supplements (we teach, for example, a minor in German Studies).
The key factor, I end as I began, is the sincerity or impudence, depending on how you look at it, with which so many students demonstrate their disinterest in class. Perhaps this has always been the case, but, as I said, until the 90s there was a clear code of conduct according to which the student should be in class alert and taking notes. I’m sure that many teachers who were profoundly disliked never noticed it. Now, in contrast, the biggest obstacle to good teaching is going to class knowing in advance that even if it is just a girl sitting in the second row, you are going to see faces of absolute boredom, even when there is no way you can make a subject attractive. Someone wrote in one of my survey evaluations, ‘the class could be more dynamic’ and I can only say that I very much agree: my courses could be more dynamic if only more students asked questions and intervened, and talked to me so that I didn’t feel that I am all alone boring even the walls (an impression that can befuddle any teacher). I wonder what it is like for those who teach algebra or contract law, as it seems I happen to teach the Brontës, Dickens, and Victorian popular fiction. As Arias comments, I hope there are no bored students in Medicine and Engineering, for that will cost lives in the future.
See you in class!