Hold On

The teaching of post-adolescents is a study in flexibility.

To really connect with them, you have to be ready for nearly anything — at any time.

You have to expect disappointment.

Set up a meeting with them, and they might or might not show up. Plan an event (during class, but especially outside class) and you can count on some not being able to be there — unless you impose severe academic penalties for absence.

Innovate, and you will find confusion (legitimate or feigned) and resistance.

The cooler and more insightful you make your assignments, very often the less cooperation you'll get. Sort of an inverse proportion of connection.

Schedule a guest speaker who has enormous renown in your academic discipline — a giant among her peers, someone doing you a huge favor for showing up without charging thousands of dollars — and students will ask if they have to show up. (A variation of "is this on the test?")

True, there are legitimate excuses. Some students really do work 2-3 jobs, commute an hour or more to get to campus, and carry enormous numbers of units each semester to get through their education fast. (Same tuition if you go slow as if you speed it up.)

But those are the exceptions. Many undergraduates in residential settings are doing college as part of a leisure experience. You don't want to know what they're so busy with that they can't do the work you're assigning.

Some — tragically some of the really bright ones — juts don't care (for a variety of reasons) and the more you try to get them to, the less they do.

There are ways to adapt.

You can reach into their lives and get so creative that you pull them out of their lethargy and turn the lights on. You bring a meat cleaver and an apple to class and chop it on the table up front. You make the teaching pertinent to daily life. You wear yourself out getting personal with each student to awaken their sense of want-to. Jaime Escalante did it in "Stand and Deliver." And he ended up on a stairwell face down with a heart attack. Nobody knew he was there. It wasn't on the test to know.

Or you can go the other way.

You can become Kingsfield in the now-ancient film "The Paper Chase." In that movie, about law school students, the prof at the center of the story cares nothing for the women and men seated in the big lecture hall before him.

When a student comes late to class or answers ineptly, he goes beyond not caring. He publicly disdains the student — as a warning.

A student known as Mr. Hart comes to class unprepared on Day 1. Kingsfield berates him first for not speakng up. Then he humiliates him for not knowing the facts of a case that was in the readings posted on bulletin boards around campus. Before opening his academic jaws, to turn to other students in the class, he holds up two hands. "This is a shroud," he says to the lecture hall. "A burial shroud. For Mr. Hart."

Later, he calls Mr. Hart down to the front of the class — right in front of his elevated podium.

"Mr. Hart, here is a dime. Go call your mother and tell her there is serious doubt as to your being able to successfully become a lawyer."

Kingsfield dares his students to measure up, but expects them to fail. Some will defy his expectations and breach the barricades — clawing to success just to spite him. But they will probably never win his approval. Nobody can. He represents the unreachable heights of academic achievement in the legal profession. It's a legendary arrogance.

But that movie was made in the 1970s — a time when the vestiges of the privilege-only system of American higher education was still part of the academic landscape. It has all but disappeared in an academic economy and online learning world where teaching must become more approachable and where professional privilege has been eclipsed by the encroachment of institutions, in the U.S. and overseas, that offer students what they need fast, cheap and in ways that accomodate their foibles.

Students still have to go to class, pass tests, turn in papers and projects that measure some standard of excellence. But the long-building questions about what makes for achievement have become larger. And there are fewer students to go around. Colleges and universities (and departments) want students — need them. They disdain them at their peril.

So we teach. We adapt. We persuade. We cajole.

And when those students don't show up or don't cooperate in group projects or innovative approaches to learning, we steel ourselves.

To really survive, we focus on the ones who showed up, who did more than we required, who stuck around after class to talk more about what we brought up in the session.

The temptation to stop caring is great.

Do coaches waste energy on the bench-warmers? (I was a bench-warmer.)

Student volition cannot be programmed.

Scripture says Jesus, at times, marveled at how slow his followers were to get it.

But He never gave up on the laggards — like Peter, like James and John, like those with whom He walked (probably very slowly) down the road to Emmaus. Talk about totally missing the point of an illustration.

Like our Lord, who likened it to the pursuit of sheep, we keep at it.

Because when we can't anymore, it will be time to find something else to do.