Rant

I suppose that I should talk more about my own class experiences for teaching Com 1020. I have had an average experience with it. Most of my kids do not respond when asked questions. The same four or five kids answer all the time, which in most cases would be great, but it gets to be monotonous. I find the material to be very simplistic and not challenging to me or the students. I think I am disappointed because thinking that this was a speech class, I had assumed that maybe, just maybe I would have gotten a group of talkative students. I guess I forgot that this is an introductory class. I by no means want to disparage my students, they all seem to be pretty bright individuals, but I think the culture of Bowling Green is to just send students out with the least amount of information possible. When I taught introduction to Popular Culture at BGSU, the standards were much higher, and yet I still felt that the young adults needed to be pushed more. Perhaps my judgment is clouded by the really high expectations my teachers had in undergrad. I am more in the line of thought that a lot of the students that are going to college are nowhere near prepared to be here and that we should challenge those that do have the skills to handle high levels of academic work. In my experience, growing up in a small farming community, everyone was being pushed to go to four year intuitions. Not everyone is ready to go to a four year University right out of high school. This is not to say that they should not go at all, but I think we should all find our own spaces rather than being coddled into staying at a school for years even though one is almost failing out. I know that many students here have full time jobs and have many other things going on in their lives, but at the same time, why does that mean that I need to lower my expectations? I had four campus jobs and I still managed to make Dean’s list most of my four years in college. I think that we can find all the excuses we want for these students just to make ourselves feel better about the level of participation we receive in the classroom. I would love to work at a place that was challenging and interesting. Why can’t I work with kids that are really interested in higher level theory? Who want to be there to be pushed to learn? I am not saying that we should just have a ton of busy work (like many graduate classes). I am talking about quality over quantity. I want to see people who really want to be here and are ready to be challenged to think in new ways. In my two years here, I have only seen a couple of students who really feel this way. On the other hand, maybe I am not looking in the right places and perhaps I am forced to teach silly classes that do not attract those types of students.