A Question of Ethics

“A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.”   ~ Albert Camus

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics this week because I had my students reading an essay that flat out said that students arrive at college these days lacking ethics, so it’s something that needs to be taught. This was in terms of the enormous plagiarism problem we face in schools these days–that students don’t have a sense that stealing, at least stealing of this sort, is wrong.  That’s true, we do have a problem, but no ethics?

 

 

I thought my students would be outraged, but this wasn’t a part of the essay they brought up in their comments. I was ready for my students to attack the author, but no one said anything.  Amazed, I pushed the question, and asked what they thought of the statement.  To my amazement, they all agreed with the author, far too nonchalantly, I thought. One young man even said, “My generation is basically screwed.  Parents aren’t doing their jobs.”  There were nods of agreement, and a number of students added stories and gave insights.  I was proud of them, because obviously they are paying attention.  And this insight and commentary tells me they absolutely do have ethics, perhaps not fully developed yet, but they clearly have a sense of right and wrong.

 

 

One student, one of my very bright ones, added that because I was older, my ethics were more firmly established, so it’s easier for me to live by them.  She’s right, of course, but I also think I had a more finely tuned sense of guilt when I transgressed at their age.  I never knowingly plagiarized when I was a student, but when I did transgress–skipping the reading, being late on a paper, skipping class–I did feel guilt. Misbehavior was always a struggle between “what will I gain vs the guilt I will feel.”

 

 

This lack of ethics obviously worries me.  I don’t mind shifting ethical standards, but missing ethical standards is a problem. I am positively irked each year when my employer has me attend a mandatory one-hour training on ethics. I am taught that I shouldn’t lie, cheat, steal or undermine people.  Um, I got that when I was 8, I think. I was telling my students about it, and the same bright one from above said, “Well, you’re obviously observant enough to know why they have to have that course, right? You can’t blame them.”  Yes, sadly, I am aware of the why.

 

 

Since I’ve come back to America almost seven years ago, I’ve seen more and more to upset and worry me.  I am very much heartened by the students I teach who have finely tuned ethics and values.  But I have to say they are in the minority.  What has happened in this country?  My students who blamed parents obviously are on the right track.  Teachers also got part of the blame, both from students and from the author of the original article. We allow poor behavior to go unchecked, so we are tacitly giving approval.  Well, not me, of course. If I suspect it, you’re going to hear about it.

 

 

But something to think about, to worry about, and hopefully to change.

Learning a Cornerstone

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

So begins one of the shortest yet most powerful presidential addresses in American history. And this year, it will be 150 years old. And younger generations don’t know a word of it.

The bulk of today’s post is by my favorite guest blogger, my cousin Dolores, a very aware and involved woman.  You can tell we’re related sometimes! Today she sent me this email, so I’m sharing here because it’s important.

Ken Burns, famous producer of some outstanding documentaries, was a guest on Morning Joe this morning talking about a new project he has put together celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.  He set up a website that you can access –www.learntheaddress.org  – & he has an incredible array of people each speaking a sentence or two of the speech….every living President does it, in addition to a varied group of well known celebrities.

He talked about a boys school in Putney, Vermont – all of their students are dyslexic & he said each & every student has memorized the speech.  He also said one of the saddest statistic is that 83% of college graduates do not know one word of the speech!!!  Unbelievable.

November 19th is the anniversary of that speech….might be a wonderful idea if every parent and grandparent, aunt, uncle, etc. accessed that speech for their loved ones…..explained it, give its context, & ask their children to learn it!!!

Infant Nation

My students are currently reading Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” one of my favorite Emerson pieces. Ironically, I didn’t even assign it to them–the department did.  As I tell my students, I’m not a fan of Emerson’s style, but what he has to say? Wow!

Rereading the essay, I’ve been struck by how very relevant it is in 2013.  There’s one line I particularly wanted to talk about today:

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”  Taking in stride the 19th century use of mankind to mean all of us, this is pretty much what I see every single day of my teaching career.

I teach at a college. I do not teach at a high school or lower because frankly, I don’t like having to deal with children’s recalcitrance. And I don’t like spoon feeding information.

But American society treats young people like children far into their adulthood. We know this is getting worse. Just google “extended adolescence,” read and weep.

My students have been infantalized throughout their k-12 educations, by teachers and parents alike, and information is spoonfed into them. They no longer take responsibility for their own learning, but worse, they don’t like to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Emerson would despair.

I despair.

We have crippled a good chunk of a generation with all the good intentions in the world.  Maybe. But what if the point of infantalization was to create a generation of sheep more easily manipulated than many generations that went before?

I have been told, point blank, that I must change the standards I set for student behavior, lower them, because this is what we do now.  The Transcendentalist in me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s as good a label for me as any other, roars in pain.

I am calling for a revolution. It’s not just our government that needs to be changed. Our whole society needs reform. I’m not saying go back to some “good old time” in the past. I’m saying look at the mistakes we’ve been making and change. Change radically.

We are too married to the old ways of thinking and the old dead forms of authority.  It’s time to take bold measures. As Emerson says: “It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; their property; in their speculative views.”

I say, “bring it on!”

Points to ponder, I hope. And in the meantime, take a look at “Self-Reliance.” It’s a doozy.

 

Helicopter Parents and Hothouse Flowers

For a while now, I’v e been threatening to write about the state of education in America.  Well, I’m geared up and actually have some time.  But before I start writing about the schools, I have to say something about the people the schools service: parents and children.  And from the title of this blog, you can probably tell I don’t have great things to say.

For those who haven’t heard the terms, these are the new descriptors for today’s parents and children.  Helicopter parents are parents who hover around their children, and in the process cushion every blow, ward off every potentially painful situation.  Helicopter parents are the ones who are up at 2AM “helping” their kids with school projects, helping being code for doing the kids’ projects.

Hothouse flowers are the kids who result from helicopter parents.  They are beautiful, pampered and do just fine in the rarefied, protective environment of their hothouses.  But once they are exposed to the harsh realities of life, once they meet any kind of hardship, they give up—they fall apart under pressure.  When I was a kid this kind of kid was called a brat who was spoiled rotten, but there are so many of them now they have a less “damaging” moniker.

Before I get too far into this, I do want to say that not all parents and kids fall into these categories.  In my experience, I find on many levels these roles are class markers.  My students in NYC community colleges are pretty uniformly free of helicopter parents and most are not hothouse flowers.  Their parents tend to be working far too many hours to have time to hover—these kids are more likely to be latchkey kids who’ve been working for years before they get to college, even if they are still only 18.  As a result of this, I find this group much easier to teach.  Sure, they have terrible study skills and know nothing about how to succeed in college, but that can be learned more quickly than learning to lose a sense of entitlement.

As a college professor, I get to avoid parents for the most part.  Once a kid is over 18 it doesn’t matter who’s footing the bill.  The kid is an adult in the eyes of the law, and I’m not allowed to discuss certain topics with parents.  And it’s usually only in cases of extreme emergency that I ever really deal with parents on classroom issues—when a student is in the hospital, parents will call to tell me, but that’s it.  I love talking to parents at school events like plays and sports games, but that’s strictly social chit chat.

But friends who teach at higher ranked private schools than I do have horror stories to share.  At one school, the rule about plagiarism (stealing the intellectual property of someone else and claiming it as one’s own) are clear.  If your teacher catches it, there’s a mandatory meeting between the student, the teacher and the dean.  A friend called one student on the carpet and before the meeting got a call from the dean.  The student’s parents and their lawyer were demanding to attend the meeting.  Now I don’t know about you, but if my son told me he was in trouble for plagiarizing in school, my response would not to be to bring in the lawyer.  It would be to metaphorically (if not physically) hit said kid upside the head.  How dare he cheat!  But not these parents (who sadly are not the only ones).  No, these parents are teaching their kid if you break a rule and get caught, make sure you bring in help to bail you out.

The subtext of that lesson is: it’s okay to cheat as long as you don’t get caught.

Now really, the first time a kid gets caught plagiarizing, the penalty is a slap on the wrist—a scary meeting with the school authority to throw a little reality into the seriousness of what they are doing and that’s it!  Helicopter parents don’t want their kids to face consequences that might hurt them down the road, but that means the kids aren’t learning the lessons they need to learn.  But the lessons these parents are teaching are much worse.

The bottom line is if you don’t let your kids fail when the stakes are low, how will they handle failure when the stakes are much higher?

And schools are feeling the pressure from these parents.  All of my syllabi are very clear on plagiarism.  If you do it in my class, you will fail.  Depending on the level of offense, you will fail either the assignment or the class.  Well, two students were caught cheating on their midterm.  My first response was the throw them out of the class permanently, but I rethought that and decided that both would get a Zero grade on the exam.  I thought that was more than fair considering I had repeated my warnings against cheating right up to the moment of the test being given.

I mean, really? Do I have to tell someone that it is wrong to cheat on a test?

Well, the head of my program, the one who has to take the flak from parents and higher ups, “recommended” that I just deduct 20-30 points from their exam grade because a zero would be rather harsh.  So I did.  Both failed the exam by a few points, but a grade in the 50s doesn’t quite damage a final grade as nicely as a big fat zero will.  In another school, I was talking to my dean about failing a student who was totally unprepared for the level of work we were doing in class.  I was told that I could not fail that student.  End of story.  That student was to pass.

And people wonder why I am disgusted with my life’s work.

Hothouse flowers are funny to have in class though.  They provide cynics like me with endless hours of entertainment.  Students who miss deadlines expect me to accept their work no questions asked.  When they receive grades they deem unacceptable, they demand the right to do it over.  When they fail quizzes because they did not do the required reading, they want “extra credit” work so that they get a good grade in the class.  Ah, the laughs I get from these demands.  My favorite is when they are failing through sheer laziness, so they drop the course.  That way they don’t hurt their GPAs.

Grades are also a bone of contention with hothouse flowers.  They are above average in every way, so they deserve above average grades.  In fact, I have yet to find a student who considers him or herself average in any way.  In fact, while I’ve been away, Americans have become a country of extremes—above average students (according to my students, a B- is a bad grade) or failures.  A C grade means average work.  There are no averages, no C students, any more.  Well, I actually give students C grades.  As a result, I am known as a “really hard grader” (that’s the kindest way to put it).  Often it’s not put that nicely.

Oh, on a whole, we teachers do give C grades.  But while C used to be the biggest grade group in a class, it’s now a much smaller percentage. (Remember the old bell curve grading standard?)  I would say the B grade has become the “new average” with more and more teachers trying to give a B- instead of a C+.

Grade inflation is something that academics have discussed since I’ve been a teacher, 21 years now.  Even top schools recognize that an A today is not what an A was 30 years ago when I started college.  An A grade is still hard to earn from me, but they are easier than they were years ago.  The most movement comes in the B-C-D range.  I know that papers that would have earned a C- from me when I was a newbie (still using the standards of grading that had been used on me) are now earning a B-.  I’m not proud of that, but departments try very hard to use grading norms so that the departments’, and in fact the college’s, grades are on a par.

Recently I gave a senior in my class a C on a paper.  I thought the C was a little high because there were not seven sentences in the entire three page paper that did not have some kind of major grammatical or spelling error.  I really thought that was unacceptable for a college level paper, and part of me wanted to make the student do it over, but I decided to let it go.  See? Standards really are dropping.

The student was enraged.  Couldn’t understand the C.  Had never gotten a C in college level work before!  When I pointed out the reason for the C and mentioned that I had originally wanted to fail the paper, the student really blew.  Who did I think I was? (Somewhere along the line many students have started treating professors like staff.  That doesn’t sit well with me.  At all.)  I was hated for the rest of the semester, and I’m probably still hated to this day.  Such is life.  All the other professors had also let it go, but even worse, had given much higher marks.

scariest part of this story, though?  This student was an education major and has just completed a first year of teaching at a public school.  And the student teaches English.

Next time: what’s up with America’s teachers?