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ON COURSE

How Do We Inspire Them?

Anxious students need confidence-building as much as they need an honest appraisal of their work

By JAMES M. LANG

I'll be turning 40 in a few months, and the approach of that landmark age has inspired in me an unhealthy level of reflection on the meaning of life and other important issues. So you can take all of what follows as the musings of someone who has been spending more time than usual lately fretting about his mortality, the shape of his life, and the fate of the planet.

The particular musings here come in response to Thomas H. Benton's column on teaching, "Hell's Classroom," in which Benton — the provocative alter ego of the English professor William Pannapacker — claims that we should spend less time coddling our students and building up their self-esteem, and more time offering the sort of honest and frank appraisals of their work that Gordon Ramsay offers on the popular television show Hell's Kitchen.

We do our students a disservice, Benton argues, by offering them nothing but praise and encouragement. Faculty members should have the courage to adopt "a style of teaching that demands excellence"; we should have the wisdom to recognize "that our students, beneath the surface, actually want more than inflated praise, permissiveness, and mediocrity."

I found myself depressed by Benton's essay, although I count myself as an admirer of his writing, and a devoted reader of his column. I don't want to take the essay too seriously — "Hell's Classroom" has its share of deliberate hyperbole, and seems often to have tongue firmly planted in cheek. I don't want to dismiss it, though, since his arguments strike me as consistent with other columns he has written that lament the current state of the college classroom and the academic world.

So instead of a point-by-point rebuttal, I will take the liberty of simply presenting my own reflections on teaching in response. And while it may seem like an extremely reckless enterprise to offer big statements about teaching to an audience of academics, I am going to risk it. If you're the type of person who greets big statements with skepticism and likes to chop them down to size — and, aren't we all? — start sharpening your knife.

Here goes.

When I look around me at the people I have come to know best — my parents, siblings, wife and children, closest friends, colleagues, and students — I see one thing that separates those who have been successful from those who have not achieved what they wanted in life: self-confidence. Successful people believe that they can accomplish what they set out to achieve. They have enough confidence in themselves to set goals and take steps to achieve those goals, and then to pause, regroup, and try again when they are met with obstacles or failures.

Unsuccessful people, by contrast, either never leave the starting gate because they believe they have no chance at victory, or turn back at the first hurdle.

Naturally, raw talent and ability play a part in determining how successful someone might be. People certainly may fail because they set goals for themselves that are beyond their reach. But I believe that happens far less than people failing because they don't believe they can succeed. In other words, and with all due respect, I believe that Benton has it absolutely backward.

In his article, he offers this paragraph as typical of the kind of response a faculty member might give to a student these days, instead of telling the student the hard truths about her inadequate work:

"The absence of conventional spelling and punctuation in your paper — while something we shall want to address at some point — certainly shows an abundance of creativity. Self-reliance is a good thing to have, but you may want to use some sources next time, too. Overall, your essay demonstrates considerable promise for even greater success in the future. Good job! I'm so glad I had the chance to read your work. B+."

Of course Benton's example exaggerates for comedic effect. But he does argue throughout his essay that we should err on the side of "calling students out" for their poor work, rather than cluttering up our responses to them with the sort of self-esteem building fluff we find in his sample response.

In other words, when a student turns in a poor piece of work, we should be brave enough to respond the way Gordon Ramsay responds to a bland dish: "This is terrible. You failed." (As Benton points out, we should probably eliminate the profanities of which Ramsay is so fond). Giving the benefit of the doubt to Benton, and the fact that we can't just kick people out of our courses for turning in a bad paper, perhaps he might want us to say something more to the effect of: "This is terrible. You failed. Work on X, Y, and Z and try again."

Obviously we spend most of our time and energy as teachers on the "Work on X, Y, and Z" part. We have to provide students with the knowledge and intellectual skills they need to succeed in our classrooms, and when they fail we have to point out the steps they should take to get back on track. So I certainly agree with Benton that we owe our students an honest assessment of their efforts.

Indeed, I am perfectly fine with a Bentonesque assessment of student work that includes sentences like: "You failed. Work on X, Y, and Z, and try again." But I differ from Benton, and from Gordon Ramsay, in that I have come to believe that the words we wrap around that assessment matter just as much as the assessment itself. My response to Benton's hypothetical student would be: "You failed, but I believe you can succeed. Work on X, Y, and Z and try again."

Of course we should not lie to them. We may have the occasional student who really cannot succeed at the tasks we have set for them, and those students deserve an honest explanation of that. But I have had very few students who were intellectually incapable of succeeding in my courses. If they can get inspired to put in the work, they will improve.

The question then becomes: How do we inspire them to put in the work?

Benton seems to suggest that that's not our job. We offer honest assessment; whether they take up our criticisms and improve is up to them. If they elect not to improve, they get kicked out of the kitchen.

Benton may just be more fortunate than I am. Perhaps he has never sat and watched one of his children break down in tears of frustration when she can't work her way through a difficult song on the piano. Perhaps he has never had a student in his office, failed paper clutched in her hand, say, "I'm just no good at writing." Perhaps he has never found himself on the precipice of some new stage in his career — writing a dissertation, interviewing for jobs, teaching his first class, applying for tenure — wondering whether he has what it takes to succeed.

But I have found myself in all of those situations, and I know that in each one of them, and a thousand more like them, the anxious pupil needed to hear two things from a teacher or mentor: "You can do it" and "Let me show you how." In my old age, I'm no longer sure whether I would rank either of those two statements as more important than the other one.

No doubt a small percentage of our students have been blessed with supreme self-confidence. But I believe they are the exception. Most students, like most human beings, need help in learning to believe in themselves. Teachers can provide that help. We do it in the ways in which we talk to students; in the praise we give them even when they have failed. We do it by helping them understand that success — in some shape or form — is possible.

I'll finish by offering a counterexample to Gordon Ramsay's unique pedagogical situation: my wife's kindergarten class. Anne teaches in a school with a large population of low-income families. Visits from state caseworkers, children arriving at school without having eaten breakfast, translators at parent-teacher conferences, abusive and screaming parents — all of those are routine occurrences.

Explicitly or implicitly, everything in the lives of many of her kindergarteners is telling them they cannot succeed. Their circumstances are coaching them to set their sights low, to give up, and to resign themselves to the kinds of lives they see crumbling around them on a daily basis.

Like every other kindergarten teacher in the world, Anne teaches her students to read, to count, to ask and answer questions about the world. Her students need those skills if they are to have any chance of moving beyond their tough circumstances. But they need more than just those skills. They need to hear the other things she tells them: that they all have special gifts and talents, that they are capable of doing wonderful things in the world, and that she wants them to do those wonderful things. And that no matter what they are hearing at home, or from fellow students, she cares about them and believes in them. They need to hear those words as much as they need the skills she has to teach them.

Are our students — are we ourselves — really so different?

James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2008). He writes about teaching in higher education, and his Web site is http://www.jamesmlang.com. He welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com. For an archive of his previous columns, see: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/on_course.


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