Apathetic excuse

By Mohammed Sheriffdeen
Photos by Vaikunthe Banerjee

Student apathy in our system of secondary and post-secondary education

I have been a TA in the biology faculty at SFU for the last year-and-a-half. In my time on the job, I have worked in both first- and third-year classes and, while I would hardly describe myself as a seasoned, veteran educator, I have nonetheless observed a worrying trend with my students. The capability of every student obviously varies (based on personal abilities, capacity for communication, willingness to seek help, or their work ethic), but an overarching disinterest and disregard for the material is almost palpable: it often appears as if the students quite simply do not care. They are not unconcerned with passing the course, but with fully comprehending the material? Understanding higher-order concepts and their application to other disciplines? Learning anything outside the realm of examinable? No, no and no.

It is difficult to set a finger on the exact point when this apathy kicks in, but it is there. I am not so far removed from being an undergraduate student that I am unable to relate to or recognize the syndrome myself. My first thought was that this attitude was limited to first-year students who had not become fully acclimated to the demands of university courses; however, I have observed this apathy remain in those in their third year. It would be easy to say that such nonchalance is unique to this generation, but it goes deeper than that. Instead of encouraging innovation or creative analysis, our passive secondary school system places an emphasis on standardized testing that evaluates recall. It is breeding a generation of students whose approach to education is compartmental and results-based. Students are conditioned to group knowledge into two categories: “What do I have to know to pass the exam?” and “Irrelevant.”

The Sage on the Stage

The classic method of lecturing has been documented for over 800 years, and persists despite being decried by progressives as archaic and non-functional. Why make instructors imprison students in a windowless classroom for or up to two hours while reciting a bunch of text off a slide? In his Time article “Why Long Lectures Are Ineffective”, Salman Khan of the Khan Academy asserts that students are only capable of paying attention for short bursts that decrease rapidly with time. So why continue with this system? Would it be more functional to engage students in a one-on-one manner? Most significantly, why do lectures have such staying power, and why are they present at virtually every level of education? Larry Cuban of the National Education Policy Center calls lectures a product of “historical inertia,” but justifies their existence as flexible and adaptable to teaching techniques. In a 2011 blog post, his discussion on the matter is hinged on the apparent success of the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) technique, wherein teachers quiz students on information as it is presented, and continually prod until they stumble upon the right answer (or break down in tears, presumably). Unsurprisingly, this effort has its drawbacks. It is virtually useless in a classroom packed with four hundred fidgety, bored, and nervous students. Furthermore, any TA or Professor in a smaller classroom knows that its success is not guaranteed. The classic set-up that separates and isolates a teacher from their students creates a hierarchy where the students are subjugates. The instructor has the ability to pick individuals and place them on a hot seat, thereby limiting the meaningful scope of interactions and potentially embarrassing individuals. The ultimate drawback is that students are more hesitant to independently join discussions and shrink into their shells where they are unchallenged. Each individual assumes themselves on the bottom of some mythical and imaginary totem pole, unable to stop the class to request clarification, lest they bring the whole thing to a grinding halt for everyone else. Self-starters thrive in this system, but not all students are equally accommodated. This growing divide, rooted in the lowest levels of education, slowly reaches tragicomic levels.

The Disconnect

Freelance artist Brian Cronin has a wonderful style of illustrating progress, using trees to separate characters at either end of a spectrum. The trunks, branches and leaves obscure the intermediate image while doubling as strict borders separating the old from the new; his images often look as though the panes of two separate comics have been spliced together. An illustration for a Technology Review article entitled “The Crisis in Higher Education” depicts the progress made in access to education over the last hundred years: an individual stands at the base of a towering evergreen, banging out mathematical equations on a chalkboard, whilst another is perched on a branch, at least a hundred feet up, tapping away on a laptop. But the man at the base of the tree, fervently scribbling on the chalkboard, could easily represent today’s educators, anxiously trying to reach through and engage their students whose heads are (in this image) literally aloft in the clouds. Unable to maintain focus on the task at hand and too nervous to raise a hand, these students drift away, lost to the educator. But what’s the biggest issue?

They are not engaged. They may be scared of it. They may not know how to do it, or they may lose interest completely.

This mindset rapidly manifests as apathy, and once this barrier is established, it is impenetrable. Students do not go to tutorials when they are not mandatory. They do not do homework assignments when they are not mandatory. They do not read book chapters that are not mandatory reading.  There is little interest in learning for the sake of learning, for refining and developing their intellect or expanding themselves. The same question has been asked consistently in every single tutorial and lab I have ever instructed: “Is this going to be on the exam?”  In the summer of 2011, I conducted a tutorial for a third-year class that was at 1:30 in the afternoon. On the first day of class, when I alerted my students that attendance not mandatory, 25 people showed up. Through the rest of the semester the average group size topped out at five. On three separate occasions, I cancelled tutorials when nobody came. I was a new TA at the time and initially took it as a damning reflection of my own teaching skills. What had I done wrong? I tried to make

the tutorials as interesting and informative as possible. I tried to make them fun. When I addressed my concerns with the instructor, she waved a dismissive hand. “It’s not your fault. That’s just how they are. And I guarantee you the ones who never came to class will be coming up at the end of the semester begging us to change their grade.” There’s the rub: students are trapped in a box that they don’t know exists, and they’re tragically indifferent to its presence.

Standardized Testing

Standardized testing is, to put it bluntly, a functionally useless evaluation of a student’s intelligence. Students who fail to hit upon a set of pre-determined points in their answers suffer, as the tests cannot holistically assess a student’s capacity for logical dissection, dissemination, and evaluation of material. Multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short-answer questions are made-to-order, rigidly evaluating a student’s ability to scribble down notes, memorize them with flashcards and coffee, and spew them back out on the page, leaving them behind as they walk out of the exam hall. The obsessive focus on grades eliminates cooperative learning, pitting students against one another to commit their textbooks to memory. It is a system born of convenience, but deleterious in two ways: it does not challenge students to think in broad spectrums, and it hurts students by assuming that all questions have answers. Not all questions have answers. Science is particularly maligned in this regard. Science is a beautiful, abstract field; the more we learn, the less we know. It requires just as much ingenuity as a creative writing class. But it is portrayed as a bunch of boring stuff in musty old books, discovered by a bunch of dudes who died hundreds of years ago.

 We have low standards

I like to think of a university as a factory: each student enters as a mess of pieces, tools, and oil in buckets, unfinished articles. Universities are by design breeding grounds for an exchange of ideas and the generation of higher functioning human beings. We should be chasing ideals and goals that are lofty and challenging instead of taking “easy” courses to boost our GPA.

That is what our contemporary system boils us down to: results-oriented people without goals, flipping to the end of the book to find out what happens without experiencing the peaks and valleys of the story. This false sense of expectation is engendered in students from their youth — they expect to be gifted a road map, compass, and directions, both in labs or lectures. They expect the material to be spoon-fed to them. However, as a TA, that is not my job. It is rare to come across a student who is engaged by the material and genuinely fascinated by it, by the rhythms and mystery of the universe we live in, the cultures and languages that divide us, the complexities of natural systems, and the human mind itself.

The way material is presented is not challenging: it is a compendium of unexciting facts and figures, definitions, and vague concepts that need to be neatly memorized in isolation. The curriculum fails to engage on an emotional or visceral level, and thus passes through a student undigested. Students might say, “It’s a bunch of useless crap I’ll never have to know again because I’ve already passed the course.”  If that is what education is, then what’s the point? Who cares if you know what the digestive system looks like if you are uninterested in using that information to enhance human perspective? Learning is not a job. It is a privilege, an opportunity for each individual to further the collective of human knowledge. But it is not portrayed as such by the vast majority. Most see it as an obstacle to overcome in pursuit of a piece of paper that reads: “This person has functional intelligence and is capable of rote memorization.”

Our standards are too low. Getting straight Cs is not a challenge. It barely requires an effort. Of course, that may not be the case. Your GPA may be a 4.0, a 3.67, or a 2.48. But what does it really say about you? It does not make a distinction between the gifted, hyper-analytical, and exciting minds of the future, and those simply capable of successful cramming. It is a devalued blanket statement that, in our hypercompetitive global job market, is essentially useless.

Fine-tuning the system/ “Education is overrated”

Graduate courses benefit from smaller class sizes, seminars, open-air discussions, and groupthink, which are refreshing and stimulating. They encourage the sharing, processing, evaluation and argumentation of disparate viewpoints. This is a student-based teaching model, one that lower levels of education are sorely lacking. A shift towards electronic teaching and student-run seminars at the secondary level may elevate students’ interest, focus, and comfort within large groups, fostering co-operative learning at a young age. Understandably, this system may not be useful to university classes of mammoth sizes. A lovely idea floated by the Khan Academy suggests to deliver of lecture material outside the classroom by making it freely available to students (which it already is) and spending class time re-enforcing ideas within small groups split amongst numerous instructors (or an instructor and multiple TAs). In adjunction to discussions, students could be encouraged to dissect the material with their peers in an equal-opportunity environment, while working on case studies or problem sets relevant to the curriculum.

The emphasis on grades must be relaxed, removing the fear factor from education and the resulting slant towards compartmentalized studying. I have been told by multiple professors that grad school grades are irrelevant; what really defines an individual is the quality of their work, their ability to construct and phrase arguments and troubleshoot situations while generating novel solutions. A few have taken this stance further. One of my instructors made a rather stunning point to me, which I aim to paraphrase as accurately as possible. “Education itself is overrated. Nothing separates a PhD student from one who has taken his Masters. All it means to me is that you’ve spent a few more years studying some esoteric thing you may never apply in your professional life,” he said. “What I’m after is a mind: a mind that challenges what is presented, a mind that is analytical and actively seeks problems, a mind that does not look at a bunch of facts and takes it as gospel. Life is not a test. You do not get a job simply because you pass a test.”