Preparing Students to Deal with Boring Instruction in College

In this troubling Education Week article, Mark Bauerlein (Emory University) addresses a troubling paradox: high-school students whose teachers work hard to jazz up classes with engaging activities may be unprepared to survive poorly-taught, boring classes in college. “Usually, when students start college, they have to take freshman composition, a course universally dreaded by 18-year-olds,” says Bauerlein, who teaches freshman comp. “Few of them enjoy grammar exercises or paragraph development or the revision process. And chances are they don’t easily relate to the readings… Many also have to take a math or other quantitative-skills course – subject matter irrelevant to students interested in the arts and humanities. Often, too, they face a U.S. history and civics requirement covering events and texts 200 years old and thoroughly alien to their job ambitions and leisure activities.” And many courses are taught using the lecture method, which is likely to put students to sleep. No wonder the on-time graduation rate is only 59 percent in four-year colleges and 31 percent in community colleges, with boredom and irrelevance cited as the major reason for early departure. 

Bauerlein’s conclusion: high-school graduates need more than academic skills to survive the general-education courses they must take in college before plunging into their major. They need a range of “soft” skills that will help them finish work they find boring, poorly taught, and irrelevant. Somehow, high-school teachers need to teach these skills, and Bauerlein worries that when high-school teachers bend over backwards to make courses relevant and interesting, they’re giving students the following message: “If you’re not interested in a course, there’s something wrong with it, and you needn’t bother.” His conclusion: “Boredom is not always something to be avoided. It is to be accepted and worked through.” 

[Is Bauerlein implying that high-school instructors should teach badly to prepare students for bad teaching in college? Surely a better conclusion is that students and their parents should demand better teaching in college before shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for tuition.  K.M.]

“Boredom’s Paradox” by Mark Bauerlein in Education Week, Aug. 7, 2013 (Vol. 32, #37, p. 31), www.edweek.org 

From the Marshall Memo #497