OT: Classroom protections

Dear Mrs. C******,

As I was trying vainly to start the next phase of the packing process this afternoon, the phone rang. The second after I answered, when you asked if you were speaking with Dr. Michaela* Servetus, I could hear the pain in your voice. And when you told me who you were, I knew exactly why you were calling, and I began to crumple inside. I gave your daughter, S, an F in my introductory course this spring, a course among the certification requirements for all of the social studies teachers in the state, and one that our campus’ demanding education degree requires be taken in residence. Budget cuts and research leaves mean it won’t be offered here next year at all. S’s failure, apart from being a sad fact in itself, is thus also a serious setback. I never fail a student who completes all the coursework. Your daughter didn’t manage this feat, but I couldn’t tell you that, because federal law prevents me from discussing her grades with you unless I have a written release. I told you that, and you said you knew.

You’re not the first parent of a student with a learning disability to call. Usually these calls frustrate me — parents used to interacting with schoolteachers sometimes treat me as if I am obligated to respond to their demands. “I’m calling to tell you what my son is going to need from you,” those conversations start. That’s not how it works here. The “child,” now legally an adult, submits paperwork to a campus office that generates a letter that tells me how I am required to accommodate his/her needs. I sigh inwardly when I read these letters. Even students without disabilities find my classes hard, and I can’t imagine what torture it must be to listen to five hundred pages of The Wealth of Nations as an audiobook, or how doing so could really help anyone write an essay about it (for instance). I wonder how someone who can’t concentrate for 75 minutes to take an exam will be able to do it for the 150 or 225 minutes routinely mandated by some of these letters. But I follow the letters to the letter. First, because I believe that students are entitled to receive the help they need to succeed, and the letter protects their rights. Second, because the letters protect the student from any prejudice I might have — I never learn what the student suffers from, only what help he must receive. Third, because they protect the integrity of the classroom. I want the grading to be fair to all students — those with learning disabilities and those without, something that should go without saying. But there’s another reason. Often, the accommodation doesn’t really address the disability in a way that helps the student all that much, and I occasionally end up having to justify myself in response to grade challenges. Accommodation most typically allows the student to pass — usually not to get an A — but in our educational world, all students are supposed capable of getting an A. Following the letter protects me legally. Uch. All these people between me and the student already in this situation, and the parent wants to insert herself? One might be inclined to think that we need less protection, not more.

But I couldn’t get annoyed with you, Mrs. C*****, because your voice shook so dramatically. You said you were calling because it took your daughter two days to admit to you that she had failed. You said she had begged you not to call, but that you were convinced that you needed to talk to me, to tell me what kind of student she really is, one who works hard and sometimes struggles, but not one who gets Fs. Within three sentences you were sobbing and I was struggling to hang onto my own composure. You told me that you have five children, and that two are severely autistic, and that S has had a hard adolescence, that she’s struggled hard to get anywhere at all. You mentioned her ADD, and the fact that a formal recognition of this problem that would get her classroom accommodations costs more than you could afford. That doesn’t surprise me, and I suspect that you also can’t afford the actual drugs she needs, because she told me in February, after her first bizarre failure to submit required work, that she was trying to get back onto a drug after stopping it for awhile because it was so expensive. The drug she mentioned isn’t usually prescribed for ADD, and I wondered if ADD is just a shorthand that you share with teachers to avoid discussion of a much more serious problem. You said you just wanted me to understand.

You said you weren’t asking me to change the grade. Of course you were, Mrs. C*****, but I couldn’t hold it against you, because what you really wanted changed was so much more profound than that. I don’t think this conversation was really about the grade. You were unloading your grief about a situation that’s persisted for years, a daily life that’s probably full of worry, where joys, I can imagine, are hard-won and all too fleeting. I think you wanted to tell me that you want a world in which your beautiful daughter could share all the skills and talents that you can see because you know her, and I didn’t, because I don’t. And that this grade is just a piece of evidence that says the world is not like that. It says that all the legal protections in place can’t give your child certain capacities demanded by the modern world — among them an ability to concentrate at what people only thirty years ago would have considered an unreasonable intensity — and all our efforts to even out the playing field can’t make things good for students who come from disadvantaged social backgrounds, whose parents can’t pay for tutoring, for private schools, for individual instruction, for educational evaluations that generate classroom accommodations. It says that the general inequities of life — the simple fact that some people are faster thinkers, easier interlocutors, more adept writers, better cooperators than others — can’t be overridden or made meaningless with a law. And I was the one who rubbed your nose in it this week. I was the one who told you that you can’t protect your daughter from all of this stuff.

What I would have said, if S were not protected by FERPA from my intensive scrutiny, and from her mother’s fears: S seems to be a sweet young woman, because she’s got a shy smile and she’s almost totally silent; she comes across as a little bit fey. Even when called on in lecture, she never answered. She never turned a single assignment in on time, nor according to the mandated format. She took the maximum allowed absences in the class, which killed her quiz average, and despite failing both the first two essays, she did not take advantage of the supplemental instruction sessions that the university pays for for those who struggle in the class, which was specifically geared toward helping students deal with the writing requirements of the course. When she came to office hours to ask for help, it was possible to have a coherent discussion with her only with great difficulty. I was never sure she understood or processed what I said, and long pauses were more frequent in our conversations than outbursts of ideas or insight. Sometimes it took her ten seconds to respond to a question, as if she simply couldn’t process what I was saying at a more typical speed. I tried to take her by drafts through the second essay, and she made some progress, but the level of educational deficit S has to combat in reading, writing and critical analysis is not something that can be surmounted in a single paper, let alone a single or perhaps even several semesters. She submitted the final paper, with the wrong accompanying components, late, in a format that neither I, nor my TA, nor our IT guy, could open. Since we couldn’t read her work, we couldn’t pass it.

As I experience her now, S is not ready for this university. My introductory course is challenging, but it’s not all that different from the challenges she is going to face as she progresses. This is not to say she doesn’t belong at any university, but if she is to succeed here, she will need not only the right medication, but also intensive tutoring to make up her educational deficits. Various things I can’t discuss further made me suspect that S was admitted via the ten percent rule, and not because her qualifications were truly compatible with what we expect here. We see this a lot — students from poor districts who aspire to be engineers who have to take basic math classes that simply weren’t offered in their schools competing with others who had extensive, advanced math instruction in other, wealthier school districts. How to even it out? But in this case, it’s another protection fehlgeschlagen; the very law that’s supposed to guarantee your daughter’s access to the state’s premier institution is setting her up for failure, because she just can’t compete here. She was possibly a quiet star in an impoverished school district, the kind of school that often rewards behavior as much as intellect — and that guaranteed her a place here — but it can’t guarantee that she will pass.

Federal law protected me from having to say all that and Mrs. C***** from having to listen to it.

What I actually said: Mrs. C*****, this is one grade in one class in one semester of your daughter’s career. It’s not a judgment of her intellect, her perseverance, her character, her uniqueness, her value as a human being. It is solely a numerical evaluation of her performance in a particular setting in comparison with seventy-nine other students enrolled in the course who were confronted with the same challenges. We don’t grade for effort at the university; we grade for outcome. How well can you absolve the task put to you? That’s all I can do — I can’t give the student who needs six hours to do the reading a better grade than the student who takes three just because the course is much harder for him. Would you want someone to be hired as a teacher because she tried hard? Or because she succeeded? Those two things are related but not entirely the same. Of course, Mrs. C*****, I can imagine that this is upsetting to both of you, but she shouldn’t give up. Perhaps covering the material against with another professor will do the trick. A lot of this was a lie, in the sense that the grade also reflects the long term pileup of precisely those inequities Mrs. C****** wants to protect her daughter from: socioeconomic status, varying instruction, organic differences, educational experiences. The numerical evaluation of people who can’t compete is not fair. It’s just punishing. But it seemed to help Mrs. C*****, and she started calling me Professor Michaela before she ended the call. I hope she felt better for at least ten minutes.

What I wanted to say, had we not both been protected: Mrs. C*****, protect your daughter. Take S out of this university and put her in a cheaper community college, where she will get the more elementary instruction that she needs right now and at which she could more conceivably succeed. Help her build some self esteem rather than exposing her to constant embarrassment and/or confusion here. After a year or two, see if a return to this campus is really a possibility. In the meantime, use the tuition savings to get her an official diagnosis to generate a classroom accommodation. Consider helping her to find a career path that emphasizes practical and task-oriented employment rather than reading and writing. Protect her by loving her for who she is, not just in the sense that you see all her wonderful potential qualities, as you do already, but also in the sense that you look honestly at her real capacities and help her to take advantage of them.

And the last thing I didn’t say: Mrs. C*****, I’m so sorry that I couldn’t tell you even more. I wish I could have said that I waited with bated breath every time an assignment was due in hopes that your daughter would submit it, submit it correctly, and had she managed both of those, that something in the assignment would merit a grade of at least D+. I wish I could have said how discouraging I found her office hour visits to me, insofar as it was obvious that she would work hard to do as I suggested but there was little chance that she could put all the pieces together in time for an essay, even with an extension. I wish I could say that my inability to intervene in any way that would help students like your daughter is one of the things that has made me want to stop being a professor. Every time I fill in the “F” bubble on the grade sheet in a situation like this, I get tears in my eyes. Neither of us can protect your defenseless daughter. Let’s be honest: we can’t even protect ourselves.

Sincerely,

“Prof. Michaela”

*Actually, Servetus doesn’t have a first name, but of course I do. “Michael” was the Christian name of the historical Servetus.

~ by Servetus on May 27, 2011.