🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
At the start of the spring quarter, I stand in front of a room full of students. It’s a general education class and the most popular course I teach: The Art of Conversation from Plato to Fallon to Facebook. Gen Z’s have a reputation for being socially inept and conversationally illiterate. They’re accused of being social-media junkies who spend their time staring at their phones and won’t look people in the eye. That may or may not be accurate on a grand scale (I suspect it’s not), but the students who typically enroll in this class aren’t like that at all. They’re talkative and engaged—with me and each other.
On the screen behind me is projected the syllabus. I guide them through it, explaining what they’ll be expected to do to get an A in the class. “That’s the goal. I want you all to get an A.”
They stare at me—some of them with eyes askance, doubtful. Others are visibly dumbfounded. I’ve gotten this response from students before.
They may not know about the bell curve, but they’ve been at the mercy of it. The idea is that some students fail, most get C’s, some get B’s, and a few get A’s. This has never made sense to me. Shouldn’t the measure of my success as a professor come down to how many of my students earn A’s, showing they’ve done the work and have a working knowledge of the material?
Not so in academia, where the bell curve is often expected and maybe even a self-fulfilling prophecy for everyone involved. If I taught with the bell curve as my model, that would be the result. Education researchers call this the Pygmalion Effect: positive expectations create positive results; negative expectations produce negative results. Assuming that most students won’t perform exceptionally well creates a culture of failure.
“You’re smart,” I say, “much smarter than you may think. And talented. And fully capable of getting an A. Here’s how you get an A in my class.” The students still looked puzzled or mystified or suspicious.
I walk them through what I expect (attendance, participation, discussion posts that show they’re doing the reading, lots of revisions of their essays showing the steps they took to complete their work, attention paid to topic sentences and structure). They have to meet specific standards.
More importantly, they have to know what to do when they can’t meet these standards, i.e., tell the professor, ask for help, or use the university’s resources. They also need to understand that struggling and failing aren’t the same thing. Struggling is part of being in school, part of being in life; it doesn’t mean something’s gone wrong.
When the class ends, a business major says, “I’m excited. I didn’t know what to expect. I like that you’re so…honest.”
As the students leave, they thank me, looking me in the eye, already defying the stereotype that Gen Zs also have no manners and can’t express themselves and can only scroll on their phones.
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