Mañana cosa

During my first two years at NCU, everything I did seemed to endear me more and more to the students, which was a bit worrisome, because I honestly don't want to be popular with my students. Fortunately, that now seems to be turning the corner.

I don't want my students to like me too much right now. Rather, I'd much prefer that they like me ten or twenty years down the road. I want the more adult, mature, fully launched, professional versions of themselves to look back and say "Doyle made my life hell, but under his teaching I grew a lot more than I would've, if left up to my own motivation." This in some ways is a lingering effect of my years at SFA back in Texas. There, I taught a lot of lovable students, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of my daily interaction with them. Nevertheless, it was one of the least competitive four year institutions in one of the nation's largest states, and I told the students, very bluntly, at the very first meeting of each class, that I believed one out of three of them did not belong in college and were wasting their time. My classes almost always started with twenty-four or -five students, but a typical class would collapse down to fourteen to sixteen students as the non-serious ones dropped, and some fell to six or eight. One summer class made it all the way down to four students, whom I then tried to teach with just as much energy and enthusiasm as I would've for twenty-five.

NCU is very different. Many of the students here were raised right, which is to say that they set high expectations for themselves and thrive on being challenged, and that makes them a joy to teach. Others don't have that advantage, but do keep the focus where it belongs, so when a class speeds up and becomes difficult, they put the pressure squarely on themselves and do all they can to keep up. Students like that are the reason I teach: I do my best to come alongside them and give them support, and I've got a much bigger opening to make a genuine difference in their emergence into the world, which is more rewarding than a paycheck ten times the size of mine.

But then there are those, admittedly fewer than at SFA, but still a good number of students, who tell themselves lies and choose to believe them. They peg the degree of effort and risk that they're willing to tolerate very low, and then start looking for loopholes and opportunities to offload blame. I feel a great deal of compassion for them, because I know in how many cases they're using strategies they learned from their parents, and for which they've been rewarded with success for most of their lives. Still, no matter how much compassion I might feel, if I want to do my job the right way then I have to become the stone wall in their path and put a stop to their winning streak.

In fact, it's not terribly different from my years working with the two-year-olds in the nursery. Almost all were strong willed, but, on top of that, a few also suffered from extremely poor parenting. Even with the worst of them, if I said no, meant no, and made it stick, they soon learned that they couldn't get around me. Then, once we understood each other, their behavior would improve, and many of them grew to genuinely like me. College students have a lot more resources, a lot more tools, for the purpose of trying to escape my grasp, such as reinterpreting my decisions as lacking legitimacy. That means I'm generally not in their lives long enough to see the fruits of my efforts. Still, it's the first move of saying no and making it stick that is so vitally important. And for some of them, I'm not the first. But even for them, every exposure to that lesson supplies a fresh chance to decide to turn things around. And even if I wish I could be spared the immediate effects of butting heads with them, the knowledge of why it matters makes it worthwhile.

Some of what went on in the term just ended genuinely amounts to the palpable manifestation of my own shortcomings: I did, in fact, have a grumpy semester. I was struggling under some particular kinds of pressure and life stress that were bigger than what I can easily contain, and I took some of it out on my students. I do regret that; I've beat myself up for it pretty soundly. But much of the discontent I saw on my teaching evaluations was easily recognizable as students attempting to blame me for what they did to themselves. The down side of that is, if they're caught in that pattern, they're pushing back the day that they'll break through and understand what needs to change if they want to be successful or happy. But I don't worry about it too much, because that process never gets set in motion until someone finally digs in her or his heels and tells them "No," and I know I did that. If a few more people do it on this campus, then they have a good shot at changing their ways before they make it to their first job. If not, I'm quite confident a boss won't hesitate before teaching them some painful lessons.

Much of teaching is not about immediate results, not about instant gratification, but rather about setting in motion ripples across a body of water. The size of the body is invisible, and I can't even see how quickly the ripples are moving; all I know is that I did throw the stone. I know that someday, a quick aside I threw out in class may suddenly fall into place for one student with the force of a wrecking ball. I know that because I know what effect my own professors had on me. And I also know that imposing high expectations is a choice I've never regretted in all my years of teaching. I knew from the start that any approach, any choice at all, would please some students and make others unhappy. What I caught on to, just a few years into my teaching phase, was that my choice was making the hard-working students very happy, because at last someone was lowering the boom on their lazy, manipulative classmates, and that I was disappointing students who wanted to pour their energy into anything other than doing what they were capable of. That profile still gives me peace and satisfaction, even if occasionally I have to weather my share, or even more than my share, of complaints. Ultimately, these students are growing up, not down, and if I get out in front of them and expect more than they're currently willing to give, then I feel as though I'm on the right side of history. And a few years down the road, I expect to be a lot more popular with them than I am today.