Are the "kids" alright?
I asked her if she had any more classes to teach. She had one. And then she had a parent-teacher-conference at the end of the day.
When you read that, you are perhaps thinking that it is a progressive school in India where parents meet with teachers and discuss their children’s abilities, achievements, and shortcomings. And, yes, there are a few schools that do that.
When I was in school, at least the years that I clearly recall, there was no concept of a parent-teachers meeting. The only time my father—always my father, and never my mother—knew anything about school was when he had to sign the progress report card. My mother couldn’t even be bothered to look at the report. She always wondered what I did because she had never seen me study, she told me in one of our conversations as adults, peers.
The parent-teacher-conference at the end of the day intrigued me. Because, she is not a high school teacher, nor an elementary school teacher. She is a college professor.
“At a college?” I asked her absolutely mind blown.
“Yes. And not even for undergraduates.”
She was going to meet with the parents of graduate students!
I asked her if this was special to her college. Nope, apparently many good colleges do this.
India in 2024 is beyond my wildest imagination.
In the years that I was teaching, the trend was very clear: More and more students came across less as full-fledged adults who recognized that they were responsible for their own lives and more as teenagers even when they were out of their teens.
“Scholars” in psychology even affirmed this as normal by throwing in a new phrase to describe this protracted teenage behavior: Emerging adulthood. That is, while childhood quickly gives away to adolescence, it is one heck of a lengthy adolescence prior to real adulthood.
Universities, including the one where I worked and from where I was laid off, were all too eager to accommodate these teenagers who were dragging themselves into adulthood. But, at the same time, federal laws mandated that we treat these emerging adults as legal adults.
I have had my share of phone calls and emails from parents concerned about their sons and daughters, asking me about how their children were doing. And every time I had to politely remind them that under the law I couldn’t discuss their children with them, and encouraged them to directly talk with their children.
Universities, like mine, went all out to help these students who were stuck at age 16, as if they were singing the song from The Sound of Music but with different lyrics:
I am 20 going on 16, am totally confused
Totally unprepared am I, to face the real world
I need someone older and wiser
Telling me what to do
I am 20 going on 16, I’ll … depend … on you
It is a vast “student life bureaucracy” at universities that employs full-time staff to coordinate all kinds of activities for students who depended on them. There are student workers who are hired to assist the full-time bureaucrats. And the typical argument is that there aren’t enough of them! Of course, the cynic in me always felt—but never voiced it—that encouraging this dependency is awesome job security for the student life bureaucracy.
All this in a world where the worry is that kids were not being kids and are growing up too fast, losing their innocence in so many different ways before they could understand the ramifications of their actions. Alcohol, sex, porn, whatever ... everything apparently happening way earlier than what parents prefer. Yet, college students are “kids” who need a vast student life bureaucracy to help them!
The irony, the bitter and tragic irony, is that against this backdrop, plenty of professors were/are willing to bend over backwards to make sure that these legal adults will be treated as kids! I never did. At every possible instance, at meetings in emails, I would even annoyingly clarify to colleagues who referred to “kids” that we engaged with legal adults who weren’t kids.
I refused to treat students as anything but adults. I told every class that they were legally adults and, therefore, they were responsible for the consequences of their actions. If they skipped class, if they came unprepared, if they slept in class, if they didn’t do the assignment, well, unless the circumstances were absolutely extenuating, it was up to them to deal with the results. I was not their guardian nor a policeman.
I suppose one student figured that this was the best deal ever. He was always on time to class, and a few minutes in, he would put his head down and start sleeping. Once he even started snoring, and a few students looked at me with big smiles. I told them not to disturb his sleep!
By now, you surely have guessed that I was not popular with students, yes? Heck, I was not popular with faculty either 🤣
Every once in a while, a student would appreciate my way of engaging with them. They were students who dealt with the world as adults, and not as whiny teenagers. Invariably, they were also the ones who kept in touch with me throughout their college years and, some, for a few years even after they were done. One continues to engage with me, and you too, as a subscriber here.
It is bizarre that the old country has parent-teacher meetings for college students. In the adopted country, it is almost like foster parents, which the academy sometimes refers to as in loco parentis (instead of a parent) who work with college students.
But, thankfully, it is not my problem anymore. It hasn’t been mine for more than two years!