Today I am reflecting on my students' apparent unwillingness to try hard. I don't like to be too judgmental in how I think about this. They have enormous competing demands on their time and energy. I know that some of them are not really sure they even want to be in college at all. But as I am grading final papers for English 1102, I wonder what they have been telling themselves this semester as they willfully chose not to do, or not to learn how to do, what they were assigned to do, often to a very large extent.
I'm not really willing to forgive this in assigning grades on this essay. We spent most of a semester writing one 10-page paper. Why should they pass that paper easily? They shouldn't.
What mystifies me, I guess, is what I did wrong - but is this the real mystery? Maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm just way too quick to assume that if they are not working hard, it has to be my fault. They make choices. They learn lessons. Maybe one lesson they can learn is that it really is possible to get a D on a paper that we spent all those weeks working on... or NOT working on, as the case may be.
I really, really wish they cared more about the quality of their work. It is painful to me to read a badly flawed paper that could have been so much better, if only the student had done the work I assigned. Gosh, it seems so simple when I write it down this way. They made their choices - now they have to live with the results. Ouch. Adulthood - it can be cold sometimes.
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