Thread: What ever happened to personal responsibility?

I can tell you that this attitude starts before 6th grade. I can only imagine how bad the entitlement issues are when they get to COllege.

My Profs never called me, when I was having trouble. If I Screwed up it was my fault. Give the kid the number to a tutor.

Good luck.

Better start checking your faculty handbook- if you have one.

Does ANYONE value personal repsonsibility any more?

Based on what I've seen in my 9 years of high school teaching, no. And in my semester as a community college adjunct, I learned what the price of that was- students too irresponsible to complete a course, too illiterate to really be a college student, and to be honest, too illiterate to have graduated from high school.

My opinion- this mess is caused by a lack of certain things in public schools:
1. Discipline that eliminates disruptive students from the school, which would remove the baby-sitting function, place the onus of discipline back where it belongs, on the home, and free up the teachers to do what they actually get paid to do, which is teach.
2. Unwillingness to completely abolish things as social promotion
3. Too much focus on the self-esteem of students- sometimes it is best to say "that wasn't good enough" or "that is unacceptable"- the truth is the truth, and it will sometimes hurt- which is a better lesson than, "no matter what you do, however lazy, awful, or selfish, you're still great".

I could go on, but that is in my opinion merely the tip of the iceberg. Hope the deck chairs are neatly stacked.....

Too much focus on the self-esteem of students- sometimes it is best to say "that wasn't good enough" or "that is unacceptable"- the truth is the truth, and it will sometimes hurt- which is a better lesson than, "no matter what you do, however lazy, awful, or selfish, you're still great".

JohnBoy, no truer words were ever written! Let me add one more thing to your list (although it's already inherent in your list): Pansy adults who have no integrity and cave when anyone makes the slightest whimper. I think this is one of the main problems with the system. All adminstration cares about is appeasing the whiner. They don't seem to have any respect for teachers or any professional integrity themselves. They just solve the problem in the most expedient way possible without even trying to do what's right. When I was a kid, the adults stuck together. If I got in trouble with a teacher, it was MY fault, not the teacher's. Now, parents rarely if ever stick with the teacher. My kid plagiarized? It must be the teacher's fault: she didn't explain it well enough. My kid cursed and acted rudely in class? Well, the teacher is treating him/her unfairly.

Why isn't this something that the Teacher's Union gets involved in?

Why isn't this something that the Teacher's Union gets involved in?

Where I live, we don't have one. And the professional integrity is one I should have added- Thanks for pointing out the oversight.

JohnBoy, I think you need to buddy-up with the next president so you can be the next secretary of education and exact these changes. I truly believe we need to start kicking them out if they refuse to learn and do everything to prevent others from learning. I don't mean kick them out for a day or two, I mean PERMANENTLY. Then perhaps parents will start parenting.

Let me know which candidate you befriend so I know which one to vote for... 8)

JohnBoy, I think you need to buddy-up with the next president so you can be the next secretary of education and exact these changes. I truly believe we need to start kicking them out if they refuse to learn and do everything to prevent others from learning. I don't mean kick them out for a day or two, I mean PERMANENTLY. Then perhaps parents will start parenting.

If only I could...but that would mean giving up my cart and my job doing something useful as a history teacher to people that can't read.

My wife is a nursing instructor. She refers to this as entitlement. If a student shows up to class and makes all their rounds at the hospital…why fail them?

Every semester, either she or one of her colleagues gets “accused” of failing a student. There have been students who show up at the Dean’s office with all their class work and are a gasped to have failed the program. The fact that a student was about to give the wrong medication to a patient (there are VERY strict guideline and procedures to prevent the actual incidents from happening) doesn’t seem to compare to the fact that the student had perfect attendance.

In my case…I took a knife from a student who planned on using it on me and another student. I had several witnesses (including my boss) observe me confront and take the knife from the student. When I called home I got grandma (the mother lived with grandma and grandma was on the emergency card) and asked her to come and get her grandson.

The mother called back furious that I spoke to the grandmother (she was out "getting smokes"). She came in and “wanted your (my) job!” In the end the student was back in my class the next day with a box of cookies for me and the class. His “consequence” was not standard district policy but rather…he had to rake leaves for 30 minutes a day for two weeks…under my supervision.

It’s about entitlement now…show up and get the prize. You were stopped from giving the wrong meds...oops! Bring in a knife and don't have childcare...grab a rake. It’s your birthday…get the day off! Not in the mood to work…maybe tomorrow!

The end game of this will be when these students get to college. College is a privilege and not a right of passage.

Afterthought...For next year’s open house I am thinking of asking the parents to answer one question:

How do you see your student? Child _____ Pet _____

I know it’s wrong to ask but it will help me better prepare for the future…(no...I won't be asking the question...but I wanna)

Otto13

lynmen,

I think all of your respondendts (is that a word?) pretty much nailed it on the head.

I'd like to add that we are now an "Everyone's a Winner" culture, which may play into this problem to a certain extent. For example, when kids play little league (out of diapers up to Junior High), EVERYONE gets a trophy even if your team won every game or no game. If you "participate," you get a trophy.

Factor political correctness (Offend no one) into this mix too.

I commend you for bringing up this topic.

CSW

When failing students file formal complaints against professors, in my experience part of the issue is money. Simply put, if they fail or drop, they may have to pay their financial aid back, and I hear some can even lose it forever. To get out of this predicament, they need to find a good reason to get the class wiped from their record, and if you're the professor, that good reason is you. Generally, I have never had a student file a grievance because they were flunking. They usually write these odd, incomprehensible, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink complaints from which nothing can be discerned other than that the student is angry. I'm surprised, but I have only had one racism complaint filed against me, and I was the fifth victim of that particular student, so even the state civil rights commission just brushed it off. In any case, the other students of the same race came right to my defense.

In my experience no student who has actually asked for help has ever complained that I was not available. Many students complained that I refused help to them, but none of those had ever requested help. In fact, I cut my availability down, because I found that being amply available didn't stop the complaints. One semester, when was available for at least an hour before every class and for unlimited time after, and over the phone and by e-mail, and every student who asked for help got a LOT of help, and I even actively LOOKED for students who needed help, I still got several complaints that I refused to help the students, and that wound up on my personnel evaluation.

Once I got into trouble because a student wanted me to recommend a good study partner. From the back of the room, I whisperingly pointed out to her the students who really had a good command of the material. I guess it's a big no-no to say in class that some student or other is doing above-average work. Evidently it implies nowadays that all the other students are "stupid". I was really in the doghouse over that one.

Sometimes these problems go away at college, but at many colleges they don't. The problem remains at colleges that (1) lower their admissions standards to make their number (whether racial or financial), or (2) use student evaluation of teaching surveys to make personnel decisions. If the college lowers their standards enough, they get students who don't understand why they are failing and who think grades are personal. There is no established scientific way to interpret teaching evaluations, so many good instructors get booted because they got low scores. However, a few studies (not many have been done) have shown that there is an inverse correlation between the professor's evaluation scores and how much the students actually learn. Some ambitious students realize this on an informal level, and one actually told me that she deliberately looked for professors with low evaluation scores, because they were the most demanding and taught her the most. It's sad that more administrators don't realize this.

If you're a new professor, you may be dealing with another factor too. I didn't believe this when one of my own profs told me about it, but as an adjunct I noticed it at one college after another, and with other profs. That is that in the first two semesters, students know you're new, and many will try to train you not to be demanding. If your department head sticks with you and rides out all the complaints in that first year, your reputation gets around, the students self-select, and most of the complaints stop. However, if there's another instructor teaching another section of the same class, and he teaches it Mickey Mouse, and then after some years stops teaching it, students who wanted his Mickey Mouse class will flood into your class, and the hysteria may start all over again. The pattern is that when you have a demanding instructor and a Mickey Mouse instructor teaching the same courses, Mickey becomes the benchmark.