My worst student

She had issues: ‘Too many blacks and homos’

I believe in the cultural studies “project”. And I persist in the belief - contrary to evidence - that universities can change the world. I want our classrooms to capture the extraordinary, passionate, enthusiastic and imaginative, rather than the ordinary, boring, banal and beige.

Teaching cultural studies was the greatest privilege of my life. Course after course, year after year, tutorials were filled with radical, challenging, stroppy and fascinating students. But there was one student who was a shocker. “Nicole” enrolled in a large first-year cultural studies class. She ridiculed me. No problem. She attacked other students. Problem.

I asked her to come to my office and chat about her studies. I probed that she seemed somewhat uncomfortable. She spat her reply: “There are too many homos and abos in that classroom. They smell weird. I don’t want to sit next to them. But there are so many, I can’t get away from them. And you seem to be supporting them. You must be a homo as well.”

I took a breath. My concern at this expression of overt homophobia and racism was flooded by…disappointment. I had a film running in my head of universities as places of acceptance that can provide a model for other institutions in society. Instead, sitting in my office was an agitated bundle of discrimination, enrolled in a cultural studies course. And I was her teacher.

Howard Zinn captured for me the best of what a teacher can be. He welcomed conflict. He welcomed argument. I decided to follow his example. I told her that - because we are exploring cultural studies - we would put her problem into our work. I would not identify her to fellow students. She had a right to privacy and her own thoughts. But we would discuss her “issues” in the next session.

At the start of the next lecture, I stated that a student had complained there were too many gay and black people in this course. This person did not like sitting next to them. I asked everyone in the classroom to pause, use everything we had learned so far in cultural studies, and consider a response to her complaint.

The auditorium was chaotic. The room exploded with sound. But I encouraged them to drill below the emotion and consider a solution. The group decided that an individual had a right to their views, but they did not have the right to discriminate against others. This student must not label, judge or undermine other people in the class. The group resolved that racism and homophobia are unacceptable in lectures or tutorials because of the damage to other students. They were pleased with themselves and applauded their resolution.

“Nicole” came to see me soon after this volatile teaching moment. She was smiling, pleased that I had taken her “complaint” about “the homos and the abos” seriously. She would “put up” with them for the semester. Problem solved? Not really.

This was my worst student. But the denouement of this tale betrays an even more worrying twist. “Nicole” left the cultural studies degree at the end of the semester and entered a teacher education programme. She is now a teacher. I often wonder what I could have done differently in that aching moment of racism, prejudice, denial and discrimination. Did she carry this hatred of others into her own classroom, still “smelling” differences?

Tara Brabazon is professor of education at Charles Sturt University, Australia.

Help The Weak: You’ll help them all

To paraphrase an ancient Greek proverb: call no one your worst student until you have retired. In fact I was lucky, and throughout my career, I never really had a student from hell. Nevertheless, I did have plenty of students who failed to respond to my teaching methods as I would have hoped.

Immanuel Kant advised that one should gear one’s teaching towards the large majority of students in the middle of the ability range. He argued that the very best students didn’t need teaching at all, because they were perfectly cap-able of learning for themselves. As for those at the bottom end, they were so incorrigibly hopeless that there was no point in wasting effort on them.

The first half of his advice is a much-needed corrective to those who hold that the sole function of universities is research, so that the only reason for teaching undergraduates is to bring on the next generation of university researchers - and the devil take the rest.

But the second half of Kant’s advice is more questionable. By coming to university at all, students have made a major commitment in terms of time and money, and it is immoral simply to write off the futures of a minority who don’t take readily to the teaching provided.

Despite the academic habit of grading students on a single linear scale, there are many respects in which a student can be good or bad; and characteristics that earn high marks on one course might be heavily marked down on another.

One of the challenges teachers face is to identify why certain students fail to achieve what is expected of them, and to devise ways of helping them to understand what they need to do, and how to achieve it. This requires treating them as individuals instead of delivering one-size-fits- all instruction - a varied and personalised approach essential for teaching to be a stimulating and rewarding profession.

To give just one example from my own experience. As a teacher of philosophy, I naturally laid great stress on students’ independent and critical thinking, and gave fail marks to those who didn’t display it. Paradoxically, some of my worst students (at least initially) were the most docile, in the original sense of “easy to teach”. That is to say, they had performed well at A level because they accepted what they were taught without question, memorised it thoroughly, and made all the right points in their exam answers. But they were completely at sea when expected to think independently. One of the most effective ways of getting them to develop their intellectual imaginations was to make them write dialogues instead of traditional essays. Not only were they unable to find relevant dialogues to copy from textbooks or on the internet, but they were forced to think of different possible positions and arguments for and against them, and to carry the debate through, with replies to replies.

In short, finding ways of helping the weakest students is key to improving the learning of all, and to making the teaching process more fulfilling.

George MacDonald Ross is senior lecturer (retired) in the School of Philosophy at the University of Leeds.

Stressed, anxious: more teaching support needed

I have never used the term “worst student” and I find it unhelpful.

It’s always a privilege to be involved in a young person’s development. Yes, some students can be more challenging than others when it comes to helping them realise their full academic potential, but experience has taught me that difficulties are usually cyclical and easily resolved.

In the first year, students need to adapt to the paradox of new freedoms but higher intellectual demands. This can be more difficult for students who are not middle class, or who have been used to being top of the class but now find themselves in the bottom half. They need and deserve a little extra TLC.

Then there is the “lastminute.com” bright student. Students in this category can become jittery and demanding as finals approach, wanting constant guidance and hints about papers. They can enter hyper panic mode when they realise there is a risk of being awarded a 2:2 in front of their long-suffering, deep-pocketed parents on graduation day. Managing that pressure and handling the tears can be hard.

What worries me is that the current job market, student debt and working long hours to earn money while studying full time, are producing increasing anxiety and frustration among our students. This is sad to witness. I have seen an upsetting increase in depression among male students in particular.

Until recently, I had never had a bad experience teaching in more than 15 years. Then, like buses, two came along at once. So if I had to choose a “worst” undergraduate student, it would be the undergraduate who was clever but did no work. So far, so harmless. But this was combined with a pathological tendency to hide from the looming reality and a massive sense of entitlement to a first. It was hell for me and for my support team.

At postgraduate level, someone bullied a seminar group, was negative about everything and terribly insecure.

My lack of experience in dealing with such cases meant I had few strategies to fall back on. But this then became a positive. I made contact with the London School of Economics’ Teaching and Learning Centre and received excellent advice. I felt I was not alone. Since then I have signed up for the teaching blog and have given my teaching a bit of a makeover. Also I have learned to turn to my support team for help with upsetting cases requiring special care. Thankfully, we can quickly refer students to the school’s counselling services and to workshops targeting areas such as stress management and building up resilience in the classroom.

When students miss deadlines, and then have to explain why this is happening and admit personal problems, I have learned that it is helpful and constructive to refocus quickly on their intellectual interests. The student then understands that - no matter what else is going on - I see them first and foremost as a person who is with me to learn, to get a degree and then move on, as a person of whom I have high expectations, and that I am interested in what they think.

Student stress, anxiety and expectations are set to rise further, requiring more attention to developing tailored teaching, support and examining packages. The disincentive for lecturers is that excellence in teaching rarely translates into promotion under the tyranny of the research excellence framework and the alpha-male model of career progression.

Joanna Lewis is lecturer in the history of Africa and the British Empire, London School of Economics.

Forget the ‘best’, the ‘worst’, the ‘second-class mind’: teaching is about becoming, not being

Recently, we heard of a former head of Somerville College, Oxford, who described a former student as having “a second-class mind”. Maybe Margaret Thatcher was a “worst student”; maybe just “ordinary”.

Now, I hold no candles for Thatcher and her intellectual capacities one way or another; however, I find it objectionable that any student is classed and categorised in this rather condescending and patronising way. It is the fixed and essential stability of such classification (“my ‘best’ student”; “my ‘worst’”) that is wrong. Teaching is about transformation, about becoming and not being; and there is no teaching situation without an opening to such dynamics. This, of course, is one reason why we might be suspicious of the panoply of “teaching quality” assurances: they depend on the false belief that all pedagogical dynamics can be controlled, their energy “contained” and restrained under quality descriptors. While there are always difficult pedagogical relationships, it is only then that we find how interesting - how unpredictable and uncontrollable - teaching actually is. Indeed, in one way, every good teaching relationship is “difficult”, for the task is to enliven students to the point where they start thinking things that make one’s own position difficult to sustain. To judge a student “the worst” is to assume the stability of one’s own intellectual certainties: a recipe, in my view, for bad teaching. My task as a teacher is to disconcert such certainty, wherever and whenever it occurs. When I hear a student suggesting that they are “on top of” an author’s writing, I worry - and start teaching again, to make the work more difficult, to free it from classification; I do the same whenever I find myself judging a student’s participation in the pedagogical situation. The task is to make it difficult. This way, we avoid the crass essentialism of condescension, and we allow teaching to happen.

Thomas Docherty is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Warwick.