Dear Auntie Siobhan: My Students Don't Care, So Why Should I?

Dear Auntie Siobhan,

I am a senior high school teacher who took a 5-year break from the classroom only to return in 2007.  Boy have things changed!?

I have been dismayed many times by the students lack of "engagement" towards actually WORKING and LEARNING.  I consider myself an "in tune" teacher, who incorporates current issues into my lessons regularly.  It seems that even the most interesting subjects/assignments don’t "get" them.  I often hear, "Miss, why would I bother to ‘work’ when I don’t have to and can still pass?"

I have tried many ways to get them to understand that a good work ethic will bring them satisfaction and serve them well in life, yet they still only do the bare minimum and rarely take any responsibility for what they produce.  This is quite disheartening for me, and I’m at my wits end to find a solution….PLEASE help me!

Generation X

(who wonders why she returned to teaching in the first place!?)

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Dear Generation X:

It can be terribly frustrating for adults to look at teenagers and see them, apparently, wasting potential and opportunities.  (Any parent of a teenager will have a lot to say about this.)

Those of us who teach adolescents and young adults often find ourselves flummoxed: why don't they care about the things we care about?  Why don't they see that knowledge and effort are more valuable than talking about hockey or passing notes about their classmates?

There seem to be many theories as to why - the adolescent brain is different from the adult brain; there are evolutionary advantages to adolescent rebellion; teenagers are simply "immature."  The longer I teach teenagers, however, the clearer it becomes to me that they make decisions in exactly the same way that adults do.

We all want the same thing: to be happy.  However, adults and teenagers have very different ideas about what will bring happiness.

I wrote a post about this on my own blog a couple of years ago.  What follows is a condensation of that post, but you can find the original post, titled "Adolescent and Adult Decision-Making Processes," here. (The original post was adapted from a response, written while I was doing a developmental psychology course, to a section of R. Kail et al’s Human Development: A Life-Span View.)

Like adults, adolescents and emerging adults weigh their options, consider the consequences of each possible course of action, and choose the alternative that will most likely bring the most desirable results.  (What are the possible outcomes?  Which of these outcomes would I prefer?)  The difference lies in what adolescents and adults find desirable; also, adolescents may be less clear on real outcomes than adults are.

If a teenager has to choose between a party (or garage band practice or a night with her boyfriend) and her homework, sometimes the homework will lose – the consequence of attending the party is more immediately desirable than that of completing the essay, or maybe the consequence of not doing the readings is ambiguous.

The same goes for their behavior and engagement in class.  Which is more fun: completing a grammar exercise or talking to the hot girl behind me?  For some students, "fun" is not the biggest priority (or they simply don't like the hot girl much), but for many, the hot girl wins.

Whenever I'm irritated about students who don’t seem to care how they do in my course, I remind myself of what my priorities were when I was an adolescent and emerging adult.

When I was in my early twenties, for example, I began my B.Ed. during a summer session, and at the same time fell madly in love with an irresponsible young man.  I was serious about my long-term goal of becoming a teacher, and had always been a focused and dedicated student.  However, the dizzying experience of being so enamoured of someone, particularly someone so very un-adult in his attitudes, caused me to regress to an adolescent frame of mind when it came to making choices.

Every morning I had to decide whether to leave the object of my desire alone in bed while I went off to class.  It might have been a difficult decision - my morning phonetics class was interesting, and full of material and activities that I knew would be valuable for my career - but he made it easy: going to class was an obligation, he explained, and fulfilling obligations was lame.  Along with all the other desirable consequences of staying in bed, that rationale, and my concern that he not think of me as lame, tipped the scales.

I’m sure that my phonetics teacher, seeing me wander in forty-five minutes late every morning, perceived me as rude, egocentric and lacking in drive, but for me it was simply a question of priorities.

The “B” I received in that and other courses I did that summer caused me all sorts of problems, including putting me out of the running for a number of scholarships, but at the time, those kinds of consequences seemed so far off as to be irrelevant.  It was only years later that I understood the impact my actions had had.  (And, as it turned out, regretted them, but if the story of the boyfriend had turned out differently, I might have felt it was all worth it.)

It may be our job to point out some of the consequences that our adolescent and young adult students are overlooking.  But naturally occurring disaster may have to be the teacher in some cases: failing an assignment or a course may be the only outcome a student truly understands. If they see clearly that the undesirable consequences of a certain behavior outweigh the rewards, the behavior may change.

For a high school teacher, this is problematic, because schools take many twists and turns in order to prevent students from experiencing natural consequences.  In Quebec's high school system, like many others, it's very difficult for a student to fail a course, even if he doesn't fulfill all the requirements.  So if there are no real consequences to doing what one likes instead of doing what the teacher asks, and if the benefits of doing what the teacher asks are not otherwise obvious, why would a student do what the teacher asks?

Some students are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated: they want to get good grades, they want to feel the satisfaction of working hard, or they truly enjoy the course content.  We can do everything we can to engage the other students: we can talk to them about what would help them individually, and try to meet them where they are.  We can try to speak to their interests, to make learning "fun," and otherwise try to give immediate gratification to grab their attention.  But there's no way to appeal to everyone all the time.  Some students, sometimes, are not going to do the work.

It's possible that years from now they'll look back and regret that they didn't try harder.  It's possible that they'll look back and will see that they did in fact get something out of your course, although they didn't know it at the time.  And it's also possible that they'll never think of your course again and will never believe that anything useful came of it.

As teachers, we need to accept this.  We do our best.  We care about our students, we try to reach them where they live, and we try to help them in every way we can.  In the end, though, we can't make their choices for them, and we can't take their choices personally.  If our professional satisfaction is based on things we can't, ultimately, control, then sooner or later, we're going to have to leave the classroom.

The priorities of the teacher and the priorities of the student are often different.  If we can come to terms with this fact, we can enjoy the little breakthroughs we make and feel satisfaction in the learning we actually see happening.  But if we dwell on all the ways in which we are less than ideally successful, we're going to be very unhappy, and less effective, in our jobs.

Image by Sanja Gjenero

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Do you have a question for Auntie Siobhan?  Write her at siobhancurious@gmail.com, or visit her blog, Classroom as Microcosm.