A College Professor Finds Out What It’s Like to Struggle in Class

“We all complain about our weak students,” says Laura Browder (University of Richmond) in this Chronicle of Higher Education article, “– their slacking off during group work; their bizarre inability to comprehend simple directions; their disorganization; their need to tell us how smart they really are, despite appearances; the way they sometimes put their heads down on their desks.” Imagine Browder’s chagrin when she saw herself exhibiting these same behaviors when she took an intensive course in Russian last summer. 

She enrolled in the University of Virginia’s Summer Language Institute so she could translate her Russian grandparents’ letters and documents from Soviet archives. Browder was optimistic as she plunged into the nine-hour-a-day course because she had learned Danish as a child and was a good memorizer. But from the very beginning, things did not go well. The students around her were 20 years younger and weren’t having much difficulty, but to Browder, the work seemed impossible. “I was freaking out,” she says. “I had no idea what was going on and no idea how to begin fixing it. As a somewhat lax English major, I had never really mastered basic study skills. Being a professor required a very different skill set. And now my deficiencies as a college student were coming back to haunt me.” 

In the early weeks, she found herself behaving as some of her worst students had in her own classroom:

• She told the professor the work was too hard for her.
• She goofed off in class, talking American politics with another student rather than constructing a Russian dialogue, and her group had to fake its way through a class presentation.
• She stayed up too late doing her homework and came to class exhausted.
• On some days, she was so confused and overwhelmed that she misunderstood the teacher’s directions and came to class unprepared.
• She constantly fought the urge to say she was smarter than she appeared to be.
• Her heart sank when another student asked her incredulously, “You still don’t know how to do that?”
• “And in the late afternoon,” Browder says, “all I wanted to do was put my head down on the desk and let the teacher’s words just wash over me.”

But with lots of help, she began to cope. The professor told her that people learn languages at different rates, and if she didn’t keep trying, there was no way she would make progress. “That obvious truth proved to be the best and most comforting piece of advice anyone gave me about the process,” she says. 

Other women in the course expressed sympathy and showed her their systems for taking notes. She stopped sitting next to the student who couldn’t understand her difficulties. Browder’s 13-year-old daughter helped her buy the right school supplies. She raised her hand often, and although she made mistakes, she improved. She went to office hours, made flashcards, memorized the 96 possible case endings for regular nouns and adjectives, and devoted Sunday afternoons to studying. Gradually, she stopped feeling like the worst student in the class.

“Later in the summer,” says Browder, “during the optional 7:30 a.m. translation hour, we worked our way through some samples of my grandparents’ Comintern personnel files. It was thrilling to feel that – with a great deal of handholding – I could read them.” In her final oral exam, she started to recite the 12-line poem she’d worked hard to memorize and after three words, her mind went blank: “At that point, all I could do as laugh – and then stumble my way through the rest of the poem. As a teacher, I would have assumed that a student behaving as I did simply hadn’t bothered to learn her poem.” 

In the end, Browder passed the course; she translated 15 lines of a Chekhov story and delivered a short talk about her grandfather in Russian, complete with a joke in the final line. “Most of all,” she concludes, “I experienced firsthand the disorientation and panic of a freshman – as well as moments of intellectual excitement. Whatever happens, I will never look the same way at a student with her head down on the desk. I’ve been there.” 

“My Summer As a Bad Student” by Laura Browder in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept 27, 2013 (Vol. LX, #4, p. B16), no free e-link available

From the Marshall Memo #504