Last spring, I was able to play a minor role in our theater department’s production of Pride and Prejudice. I had one line consisting of two words, and I was a dancer in the two scenes that required dancing in the background. In the midst of rehearsals, students would often either forget that I was there or that I was a professor, so I was able to see and hear them in ways that faculty members seldom do.
In some cases, I heard comments I would prefer not to hear as a professional, especially ones concerning my peers, so I would often drift away at that point. However, there were two insights that I gleaned from this experience that I’m not sure I would have gotten otherwise, or at least not to the same degree.
First, students these days are busy—much busier than I thought they were, and much busier than my generation was in college. Even those of us who were minor characters in the play had to be at almost every rehearsal for most of the time, which was between two and three hours, depending on the night. In the two weeks leading up to the production, especially in the week ahead of time, we were often there for three to four hours a day. The students who served as costumers or stage managers had to be there even longer, arriving before the actors did and leaving afterward, not including the meetings they attended throughout the week.
On top of that, many of the students were also involved with a series of scenes that were going to be performed in the weeks after our production closed, serving as either actors or directors, sometimes both. So they would often have rehearsals after ours ended, beginning at 10 or 11 p.m. Those who were in a lighting and set-design class would tell me about working on their projects at 3 or 4 a.m., as they all had to share time on the light board and that was the only available time for them to do anything.
I have only mentioned their theater commitments, but many of the students were not even drama majors, so they had other obligations as well. Some were in Greek clubs, others were involved in honor societies. Two of the women played rugby, so they had afternoon practices, as well as games almost every weekend.
Many of the students also had jobs. My university is a private institution with a large population of first-generation college students (roughly 40 percent), so they are often struggling to pay tuition every semester. I have even had students who honestly could not afford textbooks. They have to work even if they would prefer not to, just like so many other students across the country.
Like many institutions, we require students to complete 20 hours of community service each semester. Because I teach at a church-related university, students are often involved in local churches, too. Some of them take part in student government or local politics, while others work as teaching assistants in their departments.
Needless to say, none of them talked about playing Halo 3 for hours on end during their free time.
All of that information connects to the second insight I had during the play’s production, which is that students today do not study as much as my generation did in college. Even though I worked 35 to 45 hours a week in various jobs as an undergraduate, and carried a full course load, I still had long blocks of time to do my schoolwork. I would go to the library in the afternoons if I worked at night, or vice versa, and spend hours reading a novel or working on a paper for a class. I would use time on Saturday to sift through articles and books for research papers and projects, even if I had to work a six-hour shift later on. I seldom had to read books in snatches or write papers in between customers at the grocery store where I worked (though I did read a few books there, most notably Great Expectations, which almost everyone had a reaction to, by the way). But most of the time, I could find a long stretch of time to just sit and digest the work I was dealing with.
Students today, with their many and varied commitments, just do not study that way. When they were not on stage, they were working on their homework in the wings, as they had to be ready to go on stage when necessary or to move furniture on and off. Only one other student could come downstairs, as I did, and actually focus on his work. The rest would have laptops with them, and they would write a few sentences, then go on stage and deliver their lines before exiting to write a few more.
They took the same approach to reading, although the only reading they could do during performances was online, as it was too dark to read a textbook offstage, though a few of them tried anyway. It should come as no surprise, then, when we read essays that do not quite cohere or see responses to a reading that miss a key and obvious point.
The best example I saw of this approach to studying was what our assistant stage manager did one night of our performance. She had rushed downstairs during intermission, then come back up to complete her night of work. I asked her what she was doing, and she explained that she was working on a quiz. It had been posted online, and it had to be completed by sometime that evening. So she went downstairs during the intermission to read the question, then spent the second half of the performance thinking about how she would answer it. After the show, she went home, wrote out the answer, and posted it. All of her thinking about the quiz happened while she was managing the second half of our performance.
As professors, we often have the idea that students sit down, read the assignment, think about it, then write out a response—one action following the other, which is how we would proceed.
However, our students simply do not have the time (or perhaps the inclination) to approach their assignments that way. Instead, they grab whatever they can, whenever they can, and make their responses as coherent as possible in as brief a time as possible. Knowing that this is the way they work causes me to be surprised when I see work that is intelligible, not the other way around.
Now some faculty members may argue that students should simply be less involved. If they have to work, they should cut out some extracurricular activities and focus on their academic work. That approach is certainly the one I took in college, but our students are not in the same position as I was. When English majors ask me for a letter of recommendation, I tell them that it will write itself if they’ve been solid students in my courses, been active in our English honor society (which I sponsor), and have worked in our department’s writing center or as a teaching assistant for one of our composition courses.
However, none of them have only done that work, as they know that much more is required of them when they apply to graduate school or go out on the job market. What I mention is the bare minimum, and they know that it is because they hear their peers talking inside and outside of class. They feel they must be competitive, as the woman on their right is president of the student government while the man on their left is doing an internship in a local politician’s office.
I’m not sure how my newly acquired knowledge will affect my teaching, or whether it should. There is no way I can make students give up some extracurricular duties or block out long hours to focus solely on their homework. I suppose I could simply give them fewer assignments so that they can focus more time on each one—aiming for depth rather than breadth. Or I could focus my teaching on skills, with the idea that students could then apply those skills to new knowledge after they graduate.
Neither approach satisfies me much at all, nor do I think they would serve our students well. I will have to keep thinking about how I can teach students whose lives are so unlike mine in ways that give them what they need to succeed in this brave new world.
