Lynn: Too late, I already quit teaching. I live for that lightbulb-over-the-head moment and I do try to get through to my students that they are all smart enough to do this, because I firmly believe that. Once you crack that open, they learn like mad. But the nuts just got tougher and tougher to crack, until I finally got tired of trying. I mean, honestly, how do you teach any mathematics to a student who honestly believes that a person with an advanced degree in mathematics and years of teaching experience is just expressing her “opinion” (which is just as valid as his) on how the chain rule should be used? How do you teach a student who thinks he already knows it all and is just attending your class as a formality? How do you reason with the pre-med major with a B+ who thinks he ought to get an A because, well, pre-meds by definition get A’s and how many problems he got right is irrelevant, I should just set the curve so all the pre-meds get A’s? These students have all defined their school experience as something that precludes actual learning or performance, and until you can persuade them that there really are things they don’t know and can learn from you, they have rendered themselves incapable of learning. Sometimes that doesn’t happen before the end of the semester.
Honestly, sometimes the only thing that gets through to those students is getting a real live F, because they just don’t believe they can fail until they do. Better that they get that failure signal from me and it costs them a few hundred dollars to retake the class, than that they get it from employers, landlords, and bill collectors later on.
