Here is my list of unsolicited advice for college students, based on my past few years of teaching.
1. Early to bed, early to rise. It sounds crazy when you're in college, but being asleep by 11 and up by 7 is really good for you.
2. Take advantage of office hours. Don't use them to talk about your personal problems or personal life, but to talk especially about course-related material with your professors. Ask them specific questions about material covered in class, about papers you're writing, about tests you're preparing for. Believe the answers you might get.
3. Use proper e-mail etiquette when communicating with your professors.
4. When you work, work. When you play, play.
5. Learn to shut off the distractions and just work, or just reflect, or just do something that doesn't involve distractions, particularly of the electronic kind.
6. Pay attention to the syllabus.
7. Stop thinking you turned out fine. You haven't turned out yet. You still need to simmer in the oven a bit before you really know how you "turned out."
8. Eschew presentism. The past is at least as interesting as the present. The medieval period is relevant. Antiquity matters. Old is not bad.
9. Read. Read, read, read. Learn to read things that are long, several hundred pages long.
10. Find a way to get off campus and be with people who are not 18-22, in college, etc.
11. Don't start putting your things away when the professor is still talking.
12. Come to class a little early if you can and review your notes, and prepare your mind for what is coming.
13. You are in college to learn. The best learning happens in the classroom, at the library, when you are studying, when you are reading, writing. Important learning also happens in clubs and activities, but that kind of learning is not as important. I know that you think it is, but it really isn't. I know that glitzy college brochures tell you that it is, but it really isn't.
14. Sesame Street was wrong. Learning and having fun are not the same thing. Learning can be fun, but often it is not. It can be, must be, strenuous to be meaningful. Learning is especially not entertainment. The two are nearly antithetical.
15. You are in college to work. You should put in two hours outside of class for every hour spent inside class. Sometimes more, especially if it's in something that's a weak spot for you. This means that a normal fifteen-credit course load will turn into a 45-hour week. This is not unreasonable. It still leaves much time for activities, clubs, part-time work, personal time, social time, etc.
16. Date. It isn't done much anymore, but that doesn't mean that's ok. You will never have as many opportunities to be around people with similar interests and of a similar age again. Get to know many people. Date.
17. Don't drink alcohol until you're 21, and don't get drunk. This probably sounds radical to some people. It is not. Therapists' offices are full of people who are dealing with the effects of alcohol in their lives. Alcohol kills your brain cells, which you are in college to build. What you do under the influence of alcohol, or what you fail to do, may haunt you for a long time. Alcohol can multiply regrets.
18. To write a good paper, you must start working on it well before it is due. You must read it and re-read it and make changes.
19. Dictionaries can be a treasure. Learn to use them correctly. You probably think you know how to use a dictionary, but you probably don't.
20. Have opinions. Don't be afraid to think something and then to express it. Forget what your classmates think. When you read something, you should form an opinion of it. Come to class ready to talk about things you've read and to say what you think about it. Approaching things with indifference can become a really bad habit.
21. You want nothing to do with pornography. You have no idea how much it can destroy those who meddle with it.
22. Vote. Read up on the candidates and issues and vote. You may think you're too busy, but that is ridiculous. Our fourteen-hour-day ancestors were busy, not you. Your future self-- ten, twenty, thirty years down the road-- will be busy, but not your present self. Indifference is a disease, apathy a canker.
23. Television is really dumb. If you have not realized this, then you have missed out on something important during your four college years.
24. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert exhibit bias on their shows. If you have not realized this, then you have missed out on something important during your four college years.
25. Racism and sexism are all around. They are not struggles that have been conquered in the past.
26. Stop referring to your college as the Harvard of the (fill in the blank). Don't try to make your college sound better than it is. It is what it is. You don't need a fancy college bumper sticker on your car to have value. Your worth is great no matter where you go to college.
27. Dress. This may sound radical, but your clothing says a lot about your attitude. Pajamas, sweat pants, jogging shorts and the like say "I don't really care about this class and I lack sufficient respect for my professors, my fellow students, and the overall learning process."
28. Texting and Facebook have their place, but it is a small one.
29. Professors giving bad grades to students "they don't like" is largely a myth. Bad grades usually accompany bad work, not bad blood.
30. Nourish your spiritual life. Go to church, synagogue, etc. Read from the holy books. Figure out what you believe, and live it.
31. All those people who told you around high school graduation, "Don't ever change!" were wrong. You had better change, or else you will spend the rest of your life with the limited capacity of an 18-year-old. And you can't face 50-year-old problems, or even 30-year-old or 25-year-old problems with the limited capacity of an 18-year-old. You are in college to learn things you did not know and to grow and become better, and that is a good thing. 18 is fine when you're 18, but not when you're not.
32. Don't ask your professors questions that can easily be answered by looking at the syllabus. Questions about when office hours take place are among the most offensive in this category.
33. Your professors don't spend from 9-5 in their offices. They may be at the library reading or researching, at home on their computer typing, grading, and creating lesson plans, at conferences or symposia, at lectures around the university. They do many things outside of the classroom that are important factors in making the inside-the-classroom experience better.
34. Go to stuff. You think you don't have time, but that isn't true. Go to lectures, concerts, plays, exhibits, art museums, and so forth. Take an active role in your extracurricular cultural life.
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9 comments:
You are such a fuddy-duddy, dude. This is all great advice, I admit, except for the one about television, but isn't it all the advice that many students are trying to escape? This advice seems so measured, so useful, pragmatic, and systematic. It reads like a Renaissance conduct book. These are not really criticisms, just challenges upon presentation as I see them, but I am challenging you to rewrite this list in a language that doesn't make it sound like you are a parent but rather a revolutionary thinker. Even if you don't do that, though, I am going to start giving this out to my students at the beginning of class. You cool with that? I may alter a few things to better fit my persona. Are all these off the top of your head?
Aargh. I just wrote a long reply that didn't send. Is this working?
Ok, it's working. The gist of my comments is this:
1) Yes, it's fuddy-duddy. I just put down what I got off the top of my head, without any attempt to polish. Reworking it would probably be beneficial, but I just wanted to get it out of my system first, even in raw form.
2) The problem with advice, especially the most desperately needed kind, is that it will likely go unheeded, dismissed as stodgy or irrelevant. The prophetic mode has always faced this problem. (Not that my post is anything like the prophetic mode, but this is something I'm reminded of in this context).
3) So yes, I agree that a reworking is in order. But I don't agree that students are trying to escape this stuff. Escape implies a sense of running from something. So there has to be an awareness that that something exists. When it comes to e-mail etiquette, office-hour protocol, electronic distractions, and even pornography, many if not most of my students would be confused and mystified that anyone thinks there is even a concern about any of these things.
4) And I am mystified that you, the very antithesis of stodginess, would have any interest in passing along some of this, but you are of course free to do so. Especially if you jazz it up, change the rhetoric to revolutionary. In fact, if you do that, then I want to pass THAT out to my students. This is all assuming sincerity, of course, and not sarcasm.
This is response 3: Things like email etiquette, pornography, et al. are indeed new items of moral scrupulousness for most students, which means that an argument needs to made about them before the rule (or advice, as the case may be) is distributed. So, as a teacher, it would be prudent to somehow present an argument about why electronic distraction is ________. Cause for concern comes from a moral presentation, and that is increasingly out of the bounds of our specific class instruction. Is that why you tell everyone to go to church?
To response 4: You are right that I am not that stodgy in your view, but I am in the view of many that walk my building. I feel like your advice is all correct, no sarcasm necessary, but it ought to be presented as part of "decorum," which is more one of my central concerns. These are the questions each undergraduate needs to ask herself: Where are you going? Why are you going there? What happens there? Why is that important? What is your place in that? How much did it cost? What is the short term benefit? What is the long term? How "should" you act in that place? How do you act in that place? Why the difference? All these questions point to the reasons that they are at college, and the reasons that your advice is so good.
I just read the advice to my office mate, and he agreed with everything you said, including the one about attending some religious worship, both on a secular humanist level (the benefit of critical thinking) and spiritual level (the benifit of having an experience you won't get elsewhere). So, there you go.
I came across this in the middle of my first semester of college. I thought it was really useful and valuable. And I realized that even though I hadn't read this list before I started college, I hadn't been a half-bad student.
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