To the student who broke my heart

Dear Lenore,

When you pleaded to enroll in my already-full online general education course last year, I welcomed you and walked you through the late registration process. When I noticed a few days later that you still hadn’t done the required preliminary assignments — a syllabus quiz and a personal goals inventory — I sent you a concerned note, reiterating key policy about due dates and grades. Your reply came yet a few more days later, explaining how overwhelmed you were by work and school, but assuring me in the strongest terms that you had found a way forward.

It never happened. For the next month or so you occasionally posted to the discussion board or hurriedly completed a quiz. Your work was so sporadic and haphazard that you barely earned any points. When I reached out to you again, pointing out your poor record and encouraging you to talk to an undergrad advisor to determine a realistic path to graduation, you assured me you would. You said you would do everything possible to earn a passing grade in my class despite your admittedly ragged start. But you didn’t. You made a few more fly-by contributions and sent another pleading note just before the final project was due — there’s nothing I can do at this point, I replied — but still nothing changed. I was haunted by your name on my roster, like the odor from last night’s fish dinner, but you were gone.

I don’t write this letter to make you feel bad, Lenore. As I told you more than once, I know what it’s like to both work and be a full time student. And I meant it when I said there’s no shame in failure, and that the critical point is for you to meet your own goals and not my expectations. In most ways, you are not even that unusual. Every semester a couple of students almost immediately begin to fade away. It’s not even the apparent earnestness of each of your epiphanies, the passion of each new promise, that keeps you foremost in my mind. I’ve known plenty of other silver-tongued, well-intentioned students who failed almost before they began.

What makes you special, Lenore, is that you returned to my same class the very next semester and gave a repeat performance. The very same one. The late enrollment, the late work, the heartfelt apologies and promises. In each message, you were newly reformed. “This time will be different!” you actually said more than once. And I replied with the same urgent missives, expressing concern and restating policy — some emails actually recycled from the previous term — wincing when I saw your growing line of zeros in my grade book.

Understand, it’s not that I’m angry with you. I was, certainly, irritated at times, but also amused as one gets in the punch drunk hours of a very long flight. It’s not merely that I was disappointed in you either, though, of course, I was. Rather, you proved your power to buy your way into a pedagogical relationship with me — the university will apparently continue take your money — despite your repeatedly erratic, self-destructive performances. I may be the professor, but you remind me of how little control I really have. You may lie to me, string me along, and for some stretch that will always feel too long, I’ll come along for the ride. I’ll do it partly because it’s my job, but also because I still long to believe your pretty promises and to be part of the catalyst that leads you to change your ways.

Instead of saying goodbye, then, Lenore, which is what I’d planned when I began this letter, I’ll stop pretending. I’ll close my letter honestly, in a way that most likely reflects the reality that actually informs both our lives: See you next semester.

Sincerely,

Your professor

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Obliger students and questioner professors: The four tendencies in the college classroom

According to popular self help author, Gretchen Rubin, most people have far more trouble meeting inner expectations than the expectations of others. For most of us, she says, climbing out of bed at five a.m. to hit the gym is much more doable when there’s a buddy or a trainer waiting for us than when it’s “merely” a promise we’ve made to ourselves. This “obliger” tendency is not a problem, explains Rubin, so long as one works with the tendency, exploiting its strengths, rather than against it. So, an obliger is far more likely to commit to a gym routine if she arranges to go with a friend, gets a personal trainer, or takes a class in which others will be disappointed by her vacant spin cycle.

I focus on obligers here precisely because I am not one. As a “questioner,” I can generally meet both inner and outer expectations so long as I believe I have good reasons for doing so. I have, then, been baffled for years by students, colleagues, and friends unable to complete tasks or meet goals they seem to sincerely want to achieve. Like lots of questioners, according to Rubin, I have been less sympathetic and less effective than I might have been in dealing with these folks. It is, apparently, a downside of questioners that we do not have tons of patience for those who fail to be compelled to action simply by the force of what they themselves perceive to be good reasons and powerful evidence.

“They know how important this is. Why don’t they just do it?” Whether it’s about quitting smoking, completing a thesis, or simply showing up to class, arrogance and ignorance about what motivates people — and not just what motivates oneself — can mean missed opportunities to support others’ success. This is especially obvious when it comes to online students.

I’ve known for some time that online classes are the kiss of death for students who are not good self-motivators. They enroll, poke around a bit, and then seem to forget that they signed up. Guided by my own intuition, as well as experts’ advice, I have transformed myself into a cheerleader for my online students. This morning, for example, I will send out yet another message with deadline reminders and carefully worded messages of sincere confidence and expectation. On their graded work, I will state how eagerly I will be awaiting more of their perspective the following week. I’ve been emphasizing such “outer expectations” for a while and now have a clearer sense of why it helps.

If Rubin is correct, most of my students are not like me. Having a bucket full of “good reasons” for doing the work — it’s expensive, they need the course to graduate, they’ll feel crummy if they fail — motivates some, but not most of them. As a questioner, I too am happy when my work gratifies others, but, for me, this is icing on the cake. In fact, I find that getting lots of deadline reminders or out-of-the-blue encouragement can feel condescending. But to the students who will most struggle with online education, those who flail because of the lack of immediate accountability to real others, concrete strategies to motivate them, to replicate social ties and accountability, may well be critical. And, of course, such outer expectations can take on all sorts of forms, e.g., structured group projects, scheduled discussions posts, etc. Pedagogues of online education have outlined various strategies to do just this.

My point here is less about pedagogical practice than about highlighting how a lack of mindful self-reflection can lead one to be less skillful with others, including one’s own students. I am, surely, not the only professor whose questioner tendency has made student procrastination and failure to persist so incomprehensible. Of course, the systemic causes for this are complicated and no one is suggesting it can all be solved by a simple personality quiz. But what I’m finding is that focusing a little more on accountability structures and motivation is paying off handsomely in both my online and face-to-face classrooms. Paradoxically, being more responsive to my obliger students has required greater awareness of my own questioner nature: Now that I have good reasons for adapting my teaching style, I am eager and willing to do it.

Is online teaching a path to enlightenment?

My greatest challenge with online teaching has had little do with the obvious difficulty of adapting to the technology. Sure, the first couple of times I bushwhacked my way through, wrestling with features like the maddening grade book set up, drop box restrictions, and feedback release conditions. There are, to be sure, a million and one logistical curve balls to be negotiated, complicated workflows that must be etched into one’s brain because they will never make intuitive sense. But, by far, online teaching’s greatest challenge and opportunity for me has been as a venue for self-scrutiny and reinvention. Perhaps this is just a long way of reiterating that I’m fascinated enough by the link between mindfulness and online teaching to write a blog about it.

So, while my posts are rooted in my practical experience as an online instructor, they are not primarily about online teaching as such. As I explained to a reader recently: “My interests come down mainly to three things: self-reflection, intentionality, and conscious transformation.” Far from being a grueling slog, then, I find online teaching to be tinged with pleasurably narcissistic introspection, like the indulgence of taking a personality quiz in Psych 101. And I’ve learned I must cultivate this kind of curiosity about teaching work if I am to continue to be good at it year after year. Studying my experience of teaching through the lens — microscope, telescope, and kaleidoscope — of mindful self reflection keeps it alive, authentic and interesting to me. This apparently practical business of teaching online, then, is, is, for me, a wormhole into a realm that is satisfyingly and sometimes unnervingly psychological and spiritual.

I’m Buddhist (and existentialist) enough to see that the bare facts of impermanence and death both sculpt and contort our lives. I accept that, in large measure, we carefully construct our ultimately rickety professional and personal identities to serve as bulwarks against angst and despair. No wonder, then, that the seismic changes in higher education have often felt like assaults against the professor’s very sense of self. Whatever the societal devastation being wreaked by the ongoing devaluation of higher education — and it is catastrophic — it has also deeply rattled those of us who have formed our identities within its walls. It took me ages to develop the expertise and poise of a compelling, effective classroom professor. What an insult to have this stripped from me in the name of progress! Teaching online, then, isn’t just a tech heavy, but otherwise benign, modality shift. For many of us — teachers and students — it can radically displace our basic sense of competence, worth, and purpose.

It’s an open secret, of course, that losing the plush or dreary comfort of one’s identity can become a doorway to richly transformative, previously unimaginable futures. I write these posts, then, not primarily as an online teacher offering practical pedagogical advice, but as a professor leveraging the changes in my profession to nurture personal growth. Online teaching is, after all, merely one potential vehicle to where most of us really want to go, a place of service, sure, but one that also satisfies a deeper hunger. If there are a thousand ways to kiss the earth, then here in this futuristic, sometimes dystopic, present, teaching online is surely one of them. If we overlook this invitation, though, then we are like the guests at a great banquet who, having eaten their fill of appetizers in the foyer, never make it to the feast at all.