Student Motivation And The Inconvenience Of Snow

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I’ve been reading Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World, in which she follows three US students who spend a year studying abroad in countries that have routinely scored high on recent PISA tests.  One student studies in Finland, a second in South Korea, and a third in Poland.  I’ll write more once I am finished, but one of Ripley’s chapters struck a chord with me the other day. 

Among the many issues Ripley explores is student drive.  One set of measurements on the PISA exams was a series of post-test questions.  The questions were a set-up because the researchers were not actually interested in the answers to the questions but in the question of whether or not students completed the post-exam questions.  This was their way of assessing drive.  Students from high performing countries like Finland and South Korea completed the post-exam questions in large numbers, and thoroughly.  Students from the PISA-ascendant Poland had the highest completion rate in the world.  US students had one of the lowest completion rates.  Large numbers just blew it off or answered in perfunctory ways.

As part of Ripley’s research, she interviewed many additional students, both US students studying abroad and foreign students studying in the US.  She found that all students reported high levels of praise in the US and low levels of freedom, risk, and failure.  US students were given every opportunity to avoid failure and were praised for even minor successes.  They also lived very controlled lives, especially in the suburbs.  There is a lot of structure and adult supervision in all aspects of our students’ lives, with many safety nets and myriad second (and third and fourth) chances.  According to Ripley, US students don’t try that hard or take that many risks (intellectual or otherwise) because they don’t have to.

Now we all know this isn’t true for vast segments of US students, more than half of whom are living in poverty, but for the kids wealthy and stable enough to be studying abroad, apparently it is.  This reminds me of the time I went to a screening of the documentary Race To Nowhere at ACT Magnet School in Willimantic.  The documentary argues that we should ease up on our best and brightest students, that we demand too much of them.  We had a Q&A after the screening, and the first hand to shoot up was that of a mother of a Windham student, who said, “I wish my kid had those problems!”

But why I thought of this was because on Monday UConn only cancelled classes before 10 AM.  Students otherwise had to trudge through the snow to get to the rest of their classes, and many complained about unplowed sidewalks and the general inconvenience of the day.  I was discussing this with colleagues from EO Smith who had brought their seniors to UConn for the day.

We all said it was ridiculous that undergrads were complaining that the sidewalks weren’t plowed.  I remember being an undergrad and there were no sidewalks!  That nice paved and well-lighted pathway across the green space of east campus was a dirt track that became a slough of despond by March, and you just had to put on your boots and muck through to get to class.  Part of the irony was that we were having this discussion in the food court over lunch.  We didn’t have the luxury of sitting in the food court and complaining about snow over decaf mochas back in the day.  Not only did we not have a food court with a coffee bar, we didn’t even have a weekend meal plan!  We walked to the supermarket that was where the Storrs Center is now—with its many restaurants and Insomnia Cookies, which delivers hot cookies right to your dorm room till 3 AM—and we bought groceries and walked back with the bags and then made dinner on hot plates or on the stove top of the communal panggangan that was in the basement common room, next to the communal washer and drier.

We all laughed at this because we knew we sounded a thousand years old, but I reminded everyone that my first class in the fall of 1987 was in Storrs Hall in a room with a fireplace.  I said, just imagine classes in winter back in 1908 when Storrs Hall was built.  Forget snow on the sidewalks.  Back then whoever got to class first must have had to split wood and start the fire!  They would have killed for a hot plate and a local supermarket.  Heck, they would have killed to have electricity!