Think back to your first month of college, regardless of whether it was this year or 30 years ago. Were you prepared? Did you feel competent among your classmates and friends?
Yesterday Patrick Higgins made a comment that struck me as a perfect way to assess whether schools are adequately preparing students for the rigors of college - he mentioned the survey he’s giving to all of the students from his school who just completed their first year of college. This seems to me the perfect way to determine if the students from your school are actually READY for that wild world of academia - if I had a school, I’d be jumping all over this!
Back to that question - was I prepared for college? Academically, definitely. Overall? Nope.
Tim Walker egged me on and egged me on to write this post, and I first balked because when I write about something I’m really passionate about I sometimes have a hard time conveying my true feelings - the rationale is all THERE in my head and has been for so long that it’s hard to get it out. Here’s my stab at it, one of a multi-part attempt to get my head around the issue -
My friends and I weren’t prepared for college for one simple reason - we were lacking time management skills. Sure, some of us had “Life Skills” classes in high school, but it didn’t prepare us for the complete and utter openness of the college experience. We went from being scheduled every single minute in high school to having a college class schedule, but WAY too much “open” time.
Who’s fault was it?
The high school I attended was on the quarter block system, which meant that teachers used the 90 minute periods to teach a long-ish lesson and then we worked on our homework in class with peers. Helllllllloooooooo reality the minute we hit our first university course! There was no time to work on homework in class and there was also no parent scheduling our afterschool time or weekends. How about those gaps of time on Tuesday mornings from 9-12:30 when I didn’t have class? I was NOT prepared for that! The last time I wasn’t working or going to school on a Tuesday morning must have been the summer after 8th grade!
I also wasn’t prepared for the ability to just not go to class - sure, some professors penalized us for not attending, but back in high school we were given the threat of being arrested if we skipped too much school - they scared us into attending! Also, our parents were held accountable for our actions - they were notified if we didn’t attend class and expected to take action.
Fast forward 3 months and it was ALL on us.
As Patrick mentioned polling students about academic skills they felt they needed for success in college, I immediately thought - but what about LIFE skills? Are we preparing our students (and own children) for life after us? Are we preparing them to make the choice about going to class and to assess how much free time is too much free time?
As we schedule our children in activity upon activity from the moment they are born, are we doing more harm than good?
My intention is to avoid this with my own children - I want to minimize the number of activities they’re in and help them learn to manage their OWN time. What to do with a free weekend? Homework or play? I want the consequences on THEM, not me. The only way to learn from mistakes is to be held accountable for them. I learned this the hard way in my college health and phy ed class where I earned one of my 2 C’s - it was the easiest course EVER, but I didn’t go to lectures because they seemed pointless and I could get the material from the textbook. Huh, turns out they took attendance.
I suffered from my own bad decisions - I think we as a society need to start letting our students and children learn just a few things the hard way.
Stop scheduling, stop cushioning the blows.
And now I head out the door for a 3-day trip to my hometown where I’ll see some high school friends - I look forward to discussing their experiences from that time period now that we’ve had a *few* years to process it all……….
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A threefold Amen to everything you said.
Time management is the single most important determining factor, in my experience, for success or failure in college. I’ve had students who were very intelligent and highly capable end up washing out because they wanted to go home every single weekend, play varsity athletics, hold down 2+ part time jobs during the week, and be in a Greek org at the same time as they carried 18 hours of classes. They washed out because, quite simply, there are only 168 hours in a week and about 42 of those are spent sleeping, and they just find themselves overdrawn at the time bank.
That’s why I wrote this post with a handout a couple of years ago and I give it out to my freshmen every year:
http://castingoutnines.wordpress.com/2007/08/14/where-does-the-time-go-2007-version/
I think the link to the handout might be busted, but the gist of it is in the article. I can relink the handout if people are interested.
Robert Talberts last blog post..What’s wrong with curricular uniformity
Glad if I helped incite this post, Kate! :)
I think your observations here are germane for many of us. In the transition from high school to college, we go from an over-structured world to one that’s probably, in many cases, *too* unstructured. For many of us, it’s not until we get to the world of work outside of college that we really start to grasp what it means to take full responsibility for ourselves.
By the way, “time management” skills and “academic” skills and “life” skills . . . they’re ALL the same skills. We parents should take pains to ensure that our children are learning these skills — as and when they’re capable of it — as they mature.
I would have been prepared if I’d gone to college after my junior year of HS: my senior year was a joke, lacking challenge or substance. Admittedly, I was overly interested in fun and partying, but I got in that habit partially because I didn’t really have to work or focus in 12th grade. Consequently, I have begun to think that 12th grade should be a transitional year with more vocational training for those not headed to college, and more college classes for kids heading there.
Kate,
Great post, and I am glad you pulled something from our terse ramblings on twitter. In light of this post and the conversations surrounding it within the network, we really put some thought into what we wanted to know from our former students. We included questions that got at the heart of what you are asking here: were you prepared for the “unstructured nature” of college life? But also, we want to know some data about the types of thinking they are doing in college v. the types of thinking they did in high school classes: did we prepare you as a critical thinker?
Overall, we have a lot to learn from our former students. I am hoping that asking them the right questions will get us closer to being able to prepare them for future success in all areas of their life.
Kate, this is exactly what Jim & Charles Fay of the Love & Logic Institute (http://loveandlogic.com) have been teaching for years! It is always a good idea to give kids some freedom & choices to let them learn some good decision making skills.
A kid who has grown up with parents and teachers who didn’t plan every detail and provide a rescue in every crisis will be much better prepared for life than a kid who has had a perfectly smooth, paved path laid down for them by someone else.
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