mrbadger wrote:....So why is it, year after year, I have this same 'I've left everything till the last minute and now I'm stuck because I didn't come to the lectures or do any work and I don't know what I'm doing' crap?
How many times a night do you have to tell your stepdaughter that "it's time for bed" just to make her stop whatever she's doing and realize she has to wake up for school the next day? How often do your stepkids do things that don't make sense and surely don't demonstrate that they have any sense of personal responsibility? Do they make "bad decisions" or "childish mistakes?"
And somehow this is my fault? Or they seem to feel it should be.
As it should be... You should not have put that cookie jar where they could reach it. Why did you make the sun come up so early in the day? Don't you realize that the most important thing in their life is Justin Bieber and if you keep them from worshiping him, they will actually, for realz,
die?
...So it's not all bad, but I do get so fed up with trying to figure out how to get through to the kids who won't do the work till the last minute.
What may seem like "the last minute" to you seems like
the perfect time to work on this, since I really want to do this other thing, right now, and then I want to go do this other thing, too, and need, desperately, to go with my friends to do something else and it's going to be so great and surely it won't be any problem at all for me to finish that boring work assignment for that professor that has no clue how stressful and hectic my life is right now and doesn't understand all the obligations I have...
So, what's the answer?
They are adolescents.
The human brain doesn't really become an "adult" brain until the early 20's. Even then, there are a lot of outside distractions for an early-adult to cope with that they have never encountered before.
An adolescent brain doesn't cope well with situations that require good decision-making ability. It's inclined to take risks and enjoys doing so. It has a lot of difficulty with "planning" things and it often does not do a good job of realistically and objectively running cause/effect and reward/punishment scenarios in order to come to a decision or to plan a process. "Logic" to an adolescent brain is largely circumstantial and it finds it difficult to actually define it due to many age-related, social and physiological factors that, in truth, don't have anything to do with what it's considering.
Do you want to pick a crewmember to leap through the hatch into the vacuum of space in a faulty spacesuit so they can re-align the antenna so the rest may live when its likely they will surely die?
Pick an adolescent and they will enthusiastically leap, not fully understanding the risks - The eternal optimist. Who... doesn't survive long in "the real world."
And, let's say you did that. What would the adult members of the crew think of you? They'd think you were a "monster", right? They'd likely think that anyone who would allow an adolescent to engage in such risky behavior is a terrible person, since everyone with any sense
knows that adolescents aren't normally capable of logical reasoning and avoiding pitfalls and risk-taking behavior.... right?
But, they're supposed to leave their gradeschools and, with usually not more than a "student handbook" expect to adopt graduate-student behaviors overnight?
/sigh
You don't have to push them out the airlock, you have to keep them from leaping out of it!
That's the first part of the answer - The majority of your students are likely to still be adolescents and still under the strain of having to cope with adult-like responsibilities armed only with a hunk of squishy meat that hasn't yet finished deciding what it is going to become and is ill-equipped to do much else than pay attention to eating, pooping, sleeping, trying to make babies and feed its constant need for stimuli.
I also think that adults often forget their own body of experience when examining the actions of young people.
"Why didn't they realize that was a bad decision?"
Because - They've never made a decision like that, before. They've never encountered that situation. Their library of experience is limited to a few small, tattered, periodicals and pamphlets, most of which no longer apply to any experience they're likely to encounter. It's the first time they've "fallen in love," the first time they've been in a position of leadership in their social group, the first time they've ever encountered people like that, the first time they've ever "been in charge" of their own life, the first time they've been able to choose to stay out all night and party or... not.
As old, crotchety, "get the hell off my lawn" adults, do we remember all of those "first times" for ourselves? Not likely. (Well, some, like "first loves" are hard to forget. But...)
When was the first really bad decision you ever made? What was it? And, how do you judge just what made it a "bad" decision, using your values today or those you considered at the time when you were making it as an adolescent?
How "important" was that bad decision? I don't mean "the worst one" you ever made, I mean the very first one. If someone had told you that it would have long-lasting consequences that could follow you around for the rest of your life... Well, did anyone tell you that and did you, at the time, truly realize that may be the case? Or, did you think that no matter what happened, the sun would rise tomorrow and you'd go to school, eat your lunch, and play with your friends again at recess?
So, we've got adolescent brains with little or no practical experience in dealing with situations and variables that will have long-lasting consequences, sometimes on the course of their very lives.
And, they aren't responsible enough to study every night, show up for every early-morning class, engage enthusiastically and studiously in self-guided learning activities?
Questions lead to solutions, so no answers would be complete without proffered solutions.
1) Incorporate the relatively recently acquired knowledge of human neurological development into our scholastic programs, particularly in early and late adolescence. In various times in Western civilization, children and adolescents have been treated both as "little adults" and "blank slates" with sometimes horrifying consequences. In short - We do not have a good history, judged by "today's standards" when it comes to dealing with children. By today's standards, again, we suck at it. Truly. We now have the tools that prove, beyond a doubt, the differences in the adult, adolescent and child brain, if not function, at least in capability and requirements. We must take heed of the knowledge revealed and plan accordingly.
2) Entering college/university for many children is akin to a bird having its cage door opened for the very first time. Free! FREE! Free??
How many children have engaged in self-directed study before entering into the "adult world" of true academia? How many children have been taught
how to study? Sure, they have studied, but by-and-large their sum total of experience in true "studying" has been subjected to only a limited number of "pass/fail" situations, where they are left on their own to figure out a process that actually "works." And then, they're moved into another subject, where previous successful self-directed processes are not necessarily suitable for that area of study. When presented with mathematics, the student that excels in history may not have realize that the path to success in mathematics is... "doing" instead of "observing."
3) For most adolescents, this period is their true introduction to adult-like life. For many, they will be making their own decisions regarding how they spend their time, how much they dedicate themselves to study and how much energy they will put into this entire process which will, of course, effect the
rest of their lives.
"Oh, you're not familiar with hand-grenades? No worries! Here's a blue one, a yellow one and a red one. Pull the pin on one of them and set it at your feet."
We, in my opinion, do not do a good job in preparing children for this point in their lives. Sure, we stress how important it is, but in doing so we're much like Trump:
"Oh, it's very important. So important. You can't believe how awesomely important it is. Very important."
"So, what do I do?"
"Oh, your decisions are so important! Very important. Unbelievably important! Importantly."
...
Students need to be better prepared before entering the adult world of academia. I don't mean in their knowledge of applicable subject material, but in the knowledge of "how to adult." Further, they need experience in doing so and need to have their solutions critiqued. They need to have experience, in safety, in planning their study habits, making long-term, practical, decisions, again in safety with little true consequence, and they need to learn how to examine themselves, their own thoughts, and to apply what they know of "reality" in order to determine whether or not they've correctly examined a decision and come to a reasonable one.
Not easy, of course. We suck at the whole "building children" thing, by
today's standards. (We have lofty expectations of ourselves, don't we?)
But, we keep the same old models, insist that no matter how they fail to provide what's desired, we continue to doggedly pursue them.
And then, armed with their little adolescent brains surrounded by a stew of emotional goop, unfathomable responsibilities and primal hormones, under assault by every new experience and under the constant pressure of "importantliness", they're thrust into the adult world and expected to make logical, reasonable, rational decisions and are expected to always sufficiently handle the responsibility of planning the rest of their lives on their own, with their newfound... freedom.