This past week I was confounded by a number of student athletes lamenting to me personally and/or on social media about how much they "hated school." It made me so sad.
But it also got me thinking.
It got me thinking about an address I heard José Antonio Bowen, President of Goucher College, give a few years ago about how weird it is that we, as professors, love school. Not much of the regular population does. That was confirmed for me by the echoes of "I hate school" I kept hearing our first week back. And I *do* like school. I have been here my whole life!
And it also got me thinking about a book I read last summer: Susan Blum's book I Love Learning; I Hate School, published by Cornell University Press. In her book, she outlines that the myriad of services, financial and Registrar, are bewildering to students. I can't do much about that. But she also notes that students are bored in class.
I know we could (and some do!) say, "Well TOUGH. It's their job to be in school and they better find a way to get interested." Or, we could yammer on about "this generation..." as if really there were better students before. Mark Carnes, in his book Minds on Fire, published by Harvard University Press, notes several passages from the eighteenth and nineteenth century in which professors lament the same things I hear from my colleagues today about students not probing more deeply, not reading enough, not thinking enough. On and on.
I can't do anything about the systems that are in place that are bewildering, esoteric, and not user-friendly to our population of college students. But I can make my classes more interesting and more engaging.
This blog is devoted to helping faculty think about ways to create more active and engaging classrooms and ones that still ask students to learn content. But in the activities I have developed, they also work with different people, solve problems, communicate ideas - all skills that employers say that they want newly hired employees to be able to do - without sacrificing content of the discipline of art history.
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