“The Young Are Rude Today”:
Reflections on Distance-Delivered CoursesIntroduction
In Amanda Cross’s “Murder Without a Text,” a college professor makes the following observation: "The young are rude today; anyone who teaches undergraduates can tell you that. They are not so much aggressively rude as inconsiderate, as though no perspective but theirs existed" (130). While I am certainly not as bitter as the character who expresses this sentiment, I can’t help but admire the way she sums up a problem I encounter frequently. In so many classes, there are certain students who feel that they deserve more time and attention than their peers, that their work needs to be given special treatment, and that they shouldn’t be held to the same standards as everyone else. I am frequently perplexed and frustrated by students who think, for example, that when they have a great deal to say in an oral presentation, they should be able to cut into the time allotted to the next student. Likewise, if they have little to say, they expect their classmates to take up the slack. Such students are not aggressively rude—they don’t usually interrupt others when they are talking, they don’t openly put down their classmates—but they are certainly inconsiderate. Furthermore, they are often more difficult to deal with than those who are aggressively rude. A student who interrupts the entire class can be told to shut up, but teaching respect to a student who is dismissive of others is more challenging.
“Murder Without a Text” has helped me realize that this inconsiderateness is to be expected, and “The young are rude today ... ” has become my mantra whenever I find myself seething about inappropriate behavior. I remind myself that these students aren’t bad people; they are simply egocentric.Background on Online Classes at DSU
This paper is primarily a narrative about my experiences teaching online. But the narrative actually begins before my first online teaching experience. Before I even started teaching online, I began to worry about how rudeness would manifest itself in the online environment. I had interviewed all of the other DSU instructors who had taught 101 online, and their stories terrified me.
The stories varied, but the one thing they all agreed on was that online students are rude, rude, rude ... ruder than the students in even the most hectic traditional class. None of my colleagues was quite sure why this was the case, but one theory was that, because this was the first college class for many, the students simply had not learned what kinds of behaviors are considered appropriate in college.
One of my colleagues even urged me to avoid using WebBoard, an asynchronous discussion board, because that kind of technology "makes it too easy for students to act up." She said that once an inappropriate thread begins on WebBoard, it will gallop out of control.
I found her advice disturbing. I had already realized, of course, that I wouldn't be able to use precisely the same teaching techniques in an online class as I would use in a traditional classroom, but group work and class discussion were not activities I would give up easily. Such activities promote reflection on the texts students read and produce, and many theorists believe such reflection is critical. As Joel English explains, "Reflection on the reading, writing, and learning processes might well be our students' key to understanding their writing processes and to growing as successful writers." Thus, I tried to determine how best to set up a WebBoard area so that students would not be inclined to engage in the rude behaviors my colleagues had described.The Class Charter
I considered simply giving my students a rubric of participation standards, even though ordering anyone to be polite seems a bit counterproductive. Then shortly before the fall semester began, I was reading through our textbook, The Longman Handbook, and I found Anson and Schwegler’s class charter assignment. The assignment is designed for a traditional class, but it appealed to me:In groups of four or five, draft a “class charter,” that is, a formal statement outlining the principles, purposes, or rules that you think should govern your class. Before you start drafting, discuss the roles, goals, forms, and characteristics of this writing situation. Which members of the class do you need to address? In what ways might their values or interests be similar or different? (6-7)When I read this assignment, I suddenly realized what should have been obvious to me all along. I needed a class charter. There was no reason that the key to a successful WebBoard was for me to be dictatorial; indeed, I should try to empower my online students in the same way I would the students in my traditional student-centered classrooms. I speculated that if, early in the semester, I had the students talk about how they wanted to talk—and be talked to—I might be able to avoid at least some of the rudeness problems that my colleagues had experienced. I hypothesized that the WebBoard could work like Daedalus interchanges I had once used in computer-assisted classrooms, where a student or group of students would bring the discussion back on task whenever others started to digress.The Fall Semester Brings an Unexpected Problem
One of the early WebBoard assignments I made last fall was based on Anson and Schwegler’s class charter assignment. The first student to log on was Tiffanie. Tiffanie saw her job as “class cheerleader.” She started by saying, “Hi! It’s me! Tif! I really don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this assignment! But I want you all to talk to me! I’m really excited about this WebBoard because it should be FUN!!!”
I was rather taken aback by Tiffanie’s post because it was so ... perky. But even as I worried that Tiffanie saw the WebBoard as a toy, not a tool, I was glad that she had set a friendly tone. It’s hard for most people to be rude in a friendly atmosphere.
As the semester wore on, I noticed that the conversations tended to be ultra-polite, friendly, and very, very superficial. They all took on the same tone as Tiffanie’s opening post. The students weren’t engaging critically with the assignments because they were keeping discussions at the “fun” level.
Since many students tended to be more critical when completing other types of assignments, I suspected that one of the problems was that there were simply too many voices at once on the WebBoard. Extroverts like Tiffanie regularly jumped in early and made superficial comments that set the tone for the rest of the WebBoard conversation. Thus, students who might have ideas with more substance remained silent. In short, the problem I was having was the opposite of the problem that I had feared: Students were being too nice—not too rude—to be productive.
In some ways, it was a lovely problem. I felt confident that with some modifications, I could make the WebBoard much more productive the next semester.New Problems in the Spring Semester
But the spring semester brought its own problems. To counteract the problems of the fall semester, I determined to put the students in small peer groups for most WebBoard assignments. I thought that if I required the students to discuss things in small groups before a group spokesperson posted to the WebBoard, they might come up with more incisive comments—just as students in a traditional class often function better when they work in small groups first and then reconvene as a full class.
This did seem to have the desired effect. The WebBoard discussions in the spring tended to be less superficial than the WebBoard discussions in the fall. However, this result could also have come about simply because I happened to end up with a more serious group of students in the spring. But whatever the reason, I was pleased with the first WebBoard posts that showed up when I gave the class charter assignment.
The first response came from Amy, Mark, and Jenny, who wrote:Participation should be based mostly on how helpful the critique of a paper is. It is important to get as much help from peers as possible so you can improve your paper. If a critique is done quickly and carelessly, it is not going to help very much. If more time is taken and a lot of thought is put into helping with problem areas in a paper, it would be considered good participation. If it is just done quickly to get it out in a specific time frame, it isn’t doing much good.It is difficult in an internet class to be able to communicate as much as is necessary in group projects. If you want to express an idea, you have to write emails back and forth. Participation is also about being able to express these ideas as best you can over emails.
One thing that particularly pleased me about Amy, Mark, and Jenny’s comments was that they immediately tried to look at the “big picture.” Whereas students in the previous class had looked at participation as WebBoard work alone, Amy, Mark, and Jenny all talked about other aspects of class participation. In fact, they actually failed to mention the WebBoard. Their post was soon followed by one from Erin, Daniel, and Karen, and they did talk about the WebBoard:
In an Internet course, classroom participation is certainly much more difficult than in a “normal” classroom situation. As students in this Internet course, we feel that there are definite ways to improve this condition. First of all, participation on the WebBoard is a must. This is the one of the few opportunities that the students have to interact with one another and the instructor. Also, Internet courses require an extra amount of time than a regular class.Students must be willing to put in extra time in order to accurately complete all assignments and other necessary parts of the class by the appropriate due date. Even though some of these assignments are not graded if completed, the student should demonstrate genuine effort in each piece of writing. They also must have the necessary people skills to present constructive criticism without being too offensive or the opposite, too passive. Finally, since the class is a writing class, the students must portray respectable writing skills. They should have the ability to apply a number of the concepts learned throughout the course in their own personal writing.
After these first two posts, I thought the class was well on its way to developing a good rubric for class participation. Unfortunately, when individual students tried to follow up on these posts, things fell apart. Instead of talking about the most important ideas expressed in these posts, students tended to hone in on classmates’ casual remarks. For example, many of them reacted vehemently against the second group’s simple statement: “Students must be willing to put in extra time.” It turned out that many students had signed up for an online class because they thought it would be easy, and they were horrified that they might actually have to do more work in an online class than they would in a traditional class. The WebBoard discussion deteriorated into a gripe session about how they shouldn’t have to work very hard, and I shouldn’t expect them to submit things by particular due dates. I should be easier on them because they were in an online section, and I shouldn’t hold them to the same standards as students in a traditional class.
I tried to respond to these assertions as tactfully as possible, but when I did, another problem developed: As soon as I entered the conversation, even if I was only asking students to give me more information, more explanation for what they were thinking, the thread immediately shut down. No one wanted to talk back to me. Whether this was because they figured that I would get upset and mark them down, or because they figured my word should be final, or because of some other reason, I’m not sure.
Still, I was able to glean enough good comments from the posts to compile a class charter—or participation rubric—for the spring semester. But I wasn’t as happy with it as I hoped I would be, largely because it took longer to compile than I wanted and students had lost interest in the initial discussion.Conclusions
Clearly, I am still a relative newcomer to teaching in an online environment. Still, my experiences with the online classes, and with WebBoard in particular, have led me to several tentative conclusions, conclusions that might help others think about distance education. Like Cynthia L. Walker, I am working to "keep my mind open to new possibilities and attempt to step outside my safe face-to-face world and explore the unlimited potential that Distance Education provides."
First, even though students may sometimes fire off WebBoard posts without much thought, a professor has to be extremely careful about how she presents her own comments on a WebBoard. If students feel they are being “corrected” on WebBoard, the discussion may shut down. Of course, there are times when the discussion would have shut down even if the professor had not contributed, and that leads me to my second conclusion: The time frame for WebBoard discussions needs to be fairly short. I had initially wanted open-ended WebBoard discussions that would allow students to keep going back and thinking about points made earlier in the semester. However, the momentum on any WebBoard discussion seems to die out fairly quickly. Besides, if students chat in small groups before posting to the WebBoard, by the time they have posted comments for the whole class to read, they have pretty much exhausted their thinking on the subject. Even if the professor feels that the students have just touched the tip of the iceberg, the students may honestly believe the topic has been exhausted.
My third conclusion is one that deserves a bit more discussion than I can really get into here. Professors must try to identify any outside forces that are impeding my students’ work, and minimize them when possible. A few weeks into the spring semester, I got a phone call from a teacher in a high school where one of the so-called “Fast Track” students was enrolled. She wanted me to know that she had given my student an extension on the assignment that was due that day. I was furious that she would undermine my authority as she had, but that is a story for another paper. The important thing to note for this particular paper is that sometimes there are outside forces that affect students’ participation in an online class, and while we may or may not be able to control these factors, we need to try to be aware of them so that we can do “damage control” when necessary.
Finally, there is much the professor can do to try to set an appropriate tone for WebBoards (and other chat utilities). This does not mean she needs to set forth didactic rules or dire warnings. Indeed, it may be best to give students a great deal of the responsibility for proper WebBoard behavior. However, the professor who is willing to delegate such responsibility must be willing to accept that some discussions may be more superficial or simple than what she had hoped.Works Cited Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers. 2nd ed. NY: Longman, 2000.
Cross, Amanda. “Murder Without a Text.” Ed. Sara Paretsky. A Woman’s Eye. NY: Dell, 1991. 114-35.
English, Joel. "MOO-based Metacognition: Incorporating Online and Offline Reflection into the Writing Process." Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments 3.1 (Spring 1998): http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/3.1/features/english/bridge.html.
Walker, Cynthia L. "So You've Decided to Develop A Distance Education Class..." Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments 6.2 (Fall 2001): http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/6.2/coverweb/de/walker.