(This is my 100th post – thanks to all the readers who have stayed with me thus far!!).
What is endsemesteritis?
Endsemesteritis is a disease that faculty and students at a university catch twice a year. It typically infects people when the final exams have to be made up, proctored and taken; when all-nighters are pulled by students before the exams and by the professors afterwards (to finish the grading before the registrar’s deadline); when projects have to be submitted and evaluated; thesis defenses have to be made and attended; service committees have to summarize their work, travel plans have to be put into motion (to finish packing in order to catch that international flight that you booked with only a day’s gap between the end of the semester and the break – this may involve grading electronic submissions from a major flight hub); when you already have one eye on getting ready for the next semester’s course which you have never taught before and for which you need to prepare the lecture notes; when holiday receptions and house parties have to be attended. It's a busy time, often followed by an exhausted prostration of both students and faculty.
The pace of the semester
The climactic pace of work at its end makes me think of the unforgiving pace that the academic semester sets for both the teachers and the taught. My commitments - to prepare lectures, post lecture notes and practice problems and solutions, make up and grade homeworks and exams, and maintain office hours - keep me quite busy. Quite often the penetrating questions asked by the students leads me to examine my own understanding of the subject and to uncover issues and topics previously unknown to me – the attendant trailing through the literature can absorb large chunks of time. But as professionals, teachers are expected to, and indeed can, take on that load.
Penalties for slipping
I am more often concerned about students who are pushed through an increasingly punishing pace as the semester gathers momentum. Quite often, I find that the academic system is geared to reward efficiency, time management and error avoidance, perhaps even more than creativity, intelligence, depth or persistence. I find the top grades often go to students who can organize their time efficiently, avoid fatal errors, and recover from mishaps quickly. A high GPA at the end of college is almost certainly an indication of good organizational skills, apart from anything else.
But I have seen, for example, slower, but solid, thinkers left behind by the breakneck speed of the assignments and deadlines. These students look promising in the beginning, ask great questions in class, initially hand in thoughtfully worked out homeworks. But towards the end,
the last few homework submissions from them may be missing or incomplete or carried out in haste. This may happen because of time demands made by some project which carried perhaps a greater number of academic credits, or some other competing course.
I often see students going around sleep deprived in the last few days of the semester from the intense pressure of their academic commitments. I consider myself a slow learner/thinker and remember being similarly overwhelmed in college by the required pace. I always felt I was playing a (losing) game of catch-up. I have also seen students who start the semester in stellar fashion and then – maybe they had a family emergency or caught a transient infection – go off the rails because recovering from that slip gets harder as time passes and the classes rush on.
Another way to teach and learn?
One wonders if some margin could be introduced for taking pause in the middle of the rat race and ‘recover’ these students. Unfortunately, the logistical aspects of the educational system seem to block this path: the added cost for prolonging or adding semesters to the academic degree, the uncertain availability of professors to be around to teach once the formal semester is over (many travel for research purposes), etc. seem to prohibit any chance of allowing ‘learning at your own pace’.
In fact, I have always been curious about the way courses are taught at university: certain topics at certain times during the day and the week, in units of an hour or so. I suspect some people learn better and more effectively when they are allowed large chunks of time around a certain subject, until they naturally lose interest and wish to move on to something else (essentially learning driven by natural curiosity).
I wonder how the learning outcomes would change if we took a single topic and discussed it for a whole day once a week. There could be a much deeper and more free-ranging exchange with the students, with all sorts of questions being asked, more space to emphasize the unifying principles, and more time to digest the material between successive classes. Maybe quantum physics on Mondays, classical physics on Tuesdays, etc. In the current style I often find myself obliged to go ahead with the course, where looking back at and making connections to the material already taught would be more beneficial.
Conclusion
As far as I know there is only one way around this problem: you have to survive your formal education and then become a professor (since they kick you out of school after your get your PhD, the only way to stay is to become an academic). Then you can ‘learn at your own pace’ and to your own satisfaction.
This was in fact one of my major motivations for becoming an academic. I often tell my students that the real reason they come to university is to educate the professors. Then I have to duck out before they ask me why they have to pay tuition in order to do that.
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