The Student Affairs Blog

Self-fulfilling prophecy? Excuses for failure

You've heard the joke about the college students who after an evening of partying missed a final exam, claiming a flat tire. The professor told them they could make up the final on the following day.  At the final, the professor placed them in separate rooms, handed each of them a test booklet and told them to begin. The first problem, worth 5 Points, was on the subject matter. The next problem was worth 95 Points. It asked: "Which tire?

A NY Times article highlighting ego protection and lowering of expectations suggests that some students protect their failures and lack of achievement through self-handicapping. Excuses ranging from "I didn't buy the textbook" to "I overslept" are just the tip of the iceberg as students engage in self-defeating behaviors that evade success. If allowed to continue unfettered, self-handicapping behaviors become workplace headaches, characterizing individuals as unreliable very early in their careers.

During the spring semester, I meet with first-year students who were not academically successful during their fall semester. Many of these students were early identified as not performing to potential, and were monitored for intervention opportunities. I wish I had a nickel for how many times I have heard "the professor hates me", "I don't understand the teaching assistant", or "I lost the syllabus". Instead, I develop a schedule of advising appointments with students who frequently rely on excuses versus making a genuine effort at academic achievement. The task becomes helping these students recognize how their actions or inactions define them. Utilizing a discussion on responsibility is a positive beginning to the semester.

What does it mean to be a responsible student?

• If you are responsible, you are reliable. 
• If you commit to enrolling in class, you will complete the required assignments. 
• If you are responsible and you have an assignment, you will do it on time and to the best of your ability. 
• If you are responsible, you will think about the consequences before doing something. You won’t do anything that will jeopardize yourself or your college career.
• If you are responsible, you will be accountable for what you do, and you won’t make excuses or blame others for your mistakes. 

Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.   ~~George Washington Carver

Student Affairs and the Bad Economy

December is a time for me to sit back, pick up the phone and call many SA friends I've neglected since school started. Unfortunately the conversations this year are unnervingly more depressing than before, and the main topic on everyone's mind...The economy.

"This is the worst budget crisis I've seen in my 20 years of working in student affairs." - Phone conversation with SA Director in WA.

In case you haven't heard the U.S. economy is hurting and every day a news article is written about the impact it's having on higher ed.

"Arizona State University, anticipating at least $25 million in budget cuts this fiscal year — on top of the $30 million already cut — is ending its contracts with as many as 200 adjunct instructors." - The NY Times

"Take the UW. The university's endowment fell by 14 percent in the year ending September, to $1.9 billion. The UW spends about $95 million of that each year on professorships, scholarships and other programs — money which may now need to be trimmed back." - The Seattle Times

"Harvard has sent a letter to its deans saying that the university’s $36.9 billion endowment fund lost 22 percent of its value in the last four months and could decline as much as 30 percent by the end of the fiscal year on June 30." - The NY Times

The irony of bad economic times is college enrollment generally increases.

"There is also student demand, which has been skyrocketing. Last week, the UW announced 1,100 more sophomores, juniors and seniors stayed in school this year than had been anticipated, probably because of the worsening economy. Emmert says applications for the 5,500 freshman slots could shatter records this year by reaching 25,000." - The Seattle Times

Most articles I've read talk about the impact on faculty and administration, but what about the SA Departments. How are you handling the downturn?

SA budgets are generally either:

1. Operational - based on the institution and/or state budget
2. Activity Fees - based on a per student / per credit enrollment fee

How is each budget fairing right now? Are operational budgets being hit the hardest because of massive state budget cuts? Are activity fees going up due to the increased enrollment? Or are activity fees hurting as well because they now have to service a larger number of students?

The economy is hurting almost everyone, but educational institutions have to deal with it in their own unique way.

"We can adapt to changing spending environments, but we are not like a business," Jenny said. "We can't just cease degree programs that students have already enrolled in." - The Seattle Times

How are you managing now?

They Don't Know What They Don't Know

Students and new staff members will frequently ask me about surveying their students.  They often seem very matter-of-fact and self assured that they've found an answer to one of their pressing programming  issues:  what to present on campus.

It makes sense at first glance.  Wondering what to program on campus?  Ask your students!  Brilliant.  And wrong.

Here's the problem with surveying your students in order to plan your programs:  They don't know what they don't know.

The vast majority of the students on any campus are blissfully unaware of the universe of student activities programs that are available.  They don't attend APCA and NACA conferences.  They don't read Student Activities Journal, Programming  or Campus Activities magazines.  They don't even read this blog.

They essentially have no idea of what's available in the marketplace.  They don't know what they don't know.

Ask them what bands to book, they'll tell you "My Morning Jacket" or "Fall Out Boy."  If you ask about comedy, they'll tell you Chris Rock or Dane Cook.  Odds are, your campus can't afford those acts.  Or at least not all of them.  So you haven't gained much from your survey.

But more importantly,  my original premise:   They don't know what they don't know. 

Ask your students:  would you like to stick your hands in different colors of hot, molten wax?  Really?

Yet we've all seen students at conferences line up for hours, waiting to produce their very own "Wax Hands."

Ask your students:  would you like to see a ventriloquist?  Really?

Many students may not even know what the word means.  Yet we've all seen students rolling in laughter over Dan Horn, Jeff Dunham, or Taylor Mason.

I often liken entertainment surveys to asking children about dinner.  If you ask the average child what he or she wants for dinner, they'll tell you what they know:  they want a Happy Meal.  And if that's what you always give them, they never learn to appreciate more exotic food like broccoli or sushi.  Don't we all know college students whose diet consists of burgers and chicken strips-- because it's the only food they learned to like?

Take your co-curricular duties to heart.  Remember that you serve an important teaching function on your campus.  Avoid a regular diet of "Happy Meals" for your students.  Book some unusual programs, events that aren't even on the students' radar.  Your students-- and your campus-- will be better for it.

Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty as seen in Student Affairs

As Erik Bates discussed in his prior post, there is an assumption in student affairs that we are above impoverished populations; that we only see the privileged students who are well on their way to success. Yet there is a back channel that defines many of the students we enroll. A story that frequently is unknown and can be the cause of academic distress and ultimately attrition of our students. How do we serve the students who are trying to do everything they can to make a better life for themselves? A life they may have never seen?

The following is excerpted with permission from the scholarship application of one of my first-year students:

Neither one of my parents went to college, nor did they graduate from high school. My mother had me 5 days after her 16th birthday. My dad is a laborer, so he never made much money. I have a brother 4 years younger than me, somehow we still had a childhood. Then the major problems started. My parents were both alcoholics and battled drug addiction with my dad ending up in jail. My brother and I both were taken from our parents and put into a foster home. Luckily we were allowed to to move in with our grandmother, but with no steady income, we were moved to another foster home. Then we were again sent to live with our parents. Somehow dad went to jail again and then we moved in with our other grandparents. When dad got out, he came to find my mom and us. Together, their addictions got worse and it broke off our relationships with nearly everyone. Mom left and dad stuggled to keep the up with rent at a house we got next to our grandparents. Dad got drunk just about everyday. I was forced to take care of my new one-year old sister. I remember missing a week of school to stay home and watch her since she was too sick to go to daycare and dad wouldn't stay home. I still kept my grades up and took honor classes that year. I didn't have one grade lower than a B. Mom came back to live with us and it was all good, until one night. Dad pushed mom and I jumped up and ran into the room to break up his actions. I was scared of him my whole life and now I stood up to him and was ready to take him on. I stopped dad from doing any more and I got my little sister. The cops were called and both of my parents were arrested that night. I made the decision to move back to our grandparents with my siblings.

First-generation students with high financial need are a staple of many college campuses. We in Student Affairs need new plans of action to serve students for whom there is no outward expectation or preparation for the investment in college. With tuition costs and student loan debt soaring, we must meet the needs of these students through academic support and engagement while inspiring them to complete a degree. We need to keep trying.

This post is part of Blog Action Day.

Stress? Keeping Your Head Above Water

It's near the middle of the fall semester for many campuses and there's a chance you are feeling that pinch of stress. That feeling that we have bitten off more than we can chew and overcommitted ourselves. Again. The feeling of a schedule becoming out of control that may require snorkle gear if we reply to one more email request.

Stress raises our adrenaline, resulting in increased heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. These increases make bodily organs work harder. A little stress is good and keeps us on our toes. But over the long term, too much stress can lead to illnesses such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke.

The MBTI Blog discusses our stress as an In The Grip experience, or being forced to react contrary to personality preferences. Usually my recognition of being in a Grip experience arises when I am counseling a student with school anxiety and realize I need to take my own advice.

In my first-year seminar, we discuss the symptoms and effects of stress and ways college students can alleviate stress through planning and organization. For a bit of fun, we encourage students to add more stress to their lives with a few of the suggestions below:

♦ No matter where you are going, always leave for the appointment at the time you should be arriving. On the way there, drive, walk or ride your bike no further than two feet from the car or person in front of you.

♦ Don’t pay attention to your body. If you feel yourself becoming over-stressed and tired, ignore it and keep pushing yourself.

♦ Make a special effort to take note of the irritations in your life and blow them out of proportion. Be resentful and hypercritical, especially toward yourself.

♦ Refuse to take action on nagging problems. Procrastinate, worry, and whenever possibly lose sleep over them. Blame other people for all of your problems.

♦ If you’ve been sleeping less than 4 hours a night, consider eliminating this activity altogether.

Stress Management Tips offers great information, games and exercises to introduce to your students. Me? I'm practicing a little deep breathing until finals week.

What causes you stress? Do you have a favorite stress reliever?

Should I have a Facebook Account for my Class?

 

Once upon a time, Facebook used to be a student only playground as it was a closed system. But ever since Facebook opened up to allow anyone and their cat to have an account, well maybe not their cat as it's hard to be a fake person with a fake name on Facebook, many academic professionals have been signing up and experimenting with using Facebook as an academic tool.

 

   

Recently I read an article about how a teacher from the University of Maryland uses Facebook to get in touch with her students. She explained that with everyone on Facebook it was much easier to remember names and faces. Since Facebook is not a school controlled site it kind of sets an atmosphere of neutral grounds, allowing the students to experience a more casual interaction with teachers, enabling them to be more open with their communication. Due to the fluidity of personal information shared back and forth on Facebook, a certain level of familiarity is developed quicker than could be during precious classroom time.    

 

Not everyone is in agreement. There are many teachers that do not see a benefit in using Facebook for their class, some say there’s no classroom value in it and that it might even be an avenue for accessing inappropriate material, others suggest that it only adds to the many distractions in class. Many school districts agree and block these sites from school computers. Some unfortunate byproducts occur from this however; faculty computers are also blocked, students discover proxy sites, IT hires more personnel to block proxy sites, students access the sites from their cell phones. 

 

 

The article concludes with saying, Facebook can be an excellent virtual medium for building and maintaining real world social connections within a class, but only when it’s used informally and everyone understands its purpose and limits. 

 

 

Where do you stand on the issue? Do you use Facebook in your job formally or informally? Are you worried about TMI with your students? Do you separate your personal and professional online profiles?

 

 

Social Network Identity 101: Lesson Plan

Updating a presentation on social networks for my first-year seminar is my focus this week.  In past years, Facebook has been the primary topic and I have posted about it here. This year I will add a top-10 list of online identity considerations from technology/online media guru Chris Pirillo.

1.   It goes on your permanent record. Forever.
2.   Be mindful of your privacy.
3.   Don't trust implicitly.
4.   Own what you do.
5.   Engage. Leave comments.
6.   Be respectful, be respectable, and be respected.
7.   Be yourself.
8.   Watch out for flame wars and name calling.
9.   Learn how to communicate.
10. Remember that your future employer, spouse, and neighbors are all watching.

Do you discuss Social Network Identity with your students?

ChaCha.com and the New Age of Digital Cheating in the Classroom

Classroom cheating has taken a new digital turn. An article about a free cellphone service called ChaCha caught my eye last week. Text any question to 242242 and ChaCha promises to provide the answer to virtually any question within minutes, be it math, science, politics and even directions to the nearest café, they have the answer.  Go ahead try it now!

 

ChaCha has a hired network of 25,000 “friends” to help anyone with any question. Imagine the possibilities, imagine the benefits…imagine the repercussions.  A lot of academics are a bit alarmed that some students might use this new service for cheating in the classroom. ChaCha claims that when they created the service cheating was the last thing on their mind.

It doesn’t really matter what the service is for, I’m pretty sure they only had good intentions, the thing is it can be used for cheating, “digital cheating” that is. So what can be done?  Banning cellphones seems to be out of the question. Most schools have no restriction regarding cellphone use so it’s up to the professors to lay down the law.  A professor at Rowan thinks it’s no big deal, if a student wants to cheat, ChaCha is not the only way, there are what you call conventional cheating methods i.e. cheat sheets, copying from neighbors and the like. But does that mean we’ll let these students use the ChaCha service in class?  Ed Burns a professor from Delaware says otherwise, if the student’s cellphone goes off inside the classroom the student is asked to leave and marked absent for the day.

 

Digital cheating or conventional cheating?  Can you believe this? Students now have a choice!  I agree with the idea that we should not focus on the source of cheating materials, or trying to put a stop in the advancement of technology, but instead make our students learn about classroom integrity, the value of NOT CHEATING. It will be much easier to teach your students not to cheat rather than to employ ways and means of protecting them from cheating temptations.  We should not be alarmed that the number of students who admitted cheating digitally increased some 15%, we should be alarmed that these students had the gall to admit that they cheated.

Digital cheating is not so cool anyway, testing the ChaCha service showed that out of 6 questions it only got 3 correct answers, that’s a 50% accuracy rate.  If I were you and you have racked your brain but still can’t remember the answer, take a guess, guessing it will probably give you a 50% chance that you’ll get the answer right.  What’s cool is you didn’t cheat :)

Mission Impossible? Making a Statement

Earlier this summer Del Suggs challenged us to create contemporary mission statements that address why we do things. Sure enough, upon examining the missions of my scholarship and exchange programs, I found dusty and tired lists of the services provided, but not much about the benefit. The statements were certainly not representative of the active, evolving organizations or the students in them.

I struggled for weeks with rewriting why we do things in order to convey a new message of the vibrant nature of our students and goals. I found the best inspiration at a summer staff retreat. The homework exercise required writing a personal mission statement. And BAM. That's what it took. My struggle to define program mission statements had been hampered because I needed to define myself.

Helpful resources were found here and here to point me in a new direction for crafting a personal statement. By redefining self and the values that shape my work in student affairs, my program mission statements found new life and purpose.

Facing mission statement impossible? Try looking within.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't. --Richard Bach

Do you have a personal mission statement? How does it enhance the work that you do?

Using the Five Whys

"The Five Whys" is a method of distilling the true cause/effect of an issue.  Simply put, it involves asking the question "why?," and then asking "why?" of the answer.  The pretense is that if asked five times, that simple question will take you to the heart of the matter.

When I first heard of the Five Whys, I was told it was an ancient Chinese technique.  Later I learned it was neither ancient nor Chinese-- it had been developed by  Sakichi Toyoda at his automobile company to aid problem solving.  Whatever the source, it's a useful tool.

A quick example:  My car won't start.  Why?  Because the battery is dead.  Why? Because the alternator isn't working.  Why?  Because the belt broke.   Why?  Because it was worn out.  Why?  Because I didn't follow the maintenance schedule. 

So the root cause of my car failing to start is my own neglect of the required maintenance.

The concept is to peel back the layers of an issue, and get down to the true problem or concern.  But is also works in helping to determine a purpose.  I like to use it to analyze a situation, condition, proposal, or issue.

It's especially useful in developing a purpose or mission statement.  While assisting an SGA to create a mission statement, I began by asking them why the SGA existed.  "To be the voice of the students" they replied.  Why?  "So the administration will know the students' opinion on important school issues."  Why?  "So the school can better meet the students' needs."  Why?  "So more students can get an education."  Why?  "So they can become successful productive citizens."

So the SGA's real purpose is to help students become successful graduates.  That's a totally different idea and more powerful purpose that just being the "voice of the students."

While it may seem a little hokey, and the number five is pretty arbitrary (could be three, could be six), it does seem to work.  Maybe looking at the path we've come will make the path ahead seem more clear.

The next time you're faced with a decision, issue, or question try the Five Whys.  You might just get down to the "heart of the matter."