I suppose that the end of the regular season is an unusual time to be thinking about this, but for a couple of different reasons, I’ve been thinking about the advice that I would give to incoming college students. Having no children of my own, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of knowing three youngsters who will be entering college in the fall. I’m not really in a position to give them advice directly, but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it.
There are other reasons as well. Every year, our department holds its annual Fall Teaching Conference the week before classes start, and one of the things we do to prepare for that is to settle on a theme, a point of emphasis for the upcoming year. Last year, for obvious reasons, the theme was artificial intelligence. This year, I was struck by an essay that came out in the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of months ago. Emily Isaacs1 writes that “It’s Time to Start Teaching Your Students How to be a Student,” where among other things she notes
It’s no secret that a lot of students are coming to campus unfamiliar with skills, habits, and behaviors that are necessary to succeed at college-level work — both basic things like the importance of meeting deadlines, paying attention, and being respectful in the classroom and more complicated skills like knowing how to annotate readings (to retain meaning) and cope with time-management problems2.
I don’t know that we’ve made a final decision, but I’m leaning towards the idea of making “How to Student” this year’s Fall Conference theme. The idea would be to spend some time talking about the tips and strategies that we’ve all developed for addressing this problem. And so, naturally, I’ve thought a bit about how I’d answer the question of what students should know.
I’m sure that there are entire books on the topic, so I’m going to restrict myself here to three specific pieces of advice, ones that have stuck with me over the years. I should probably also mention that, from my earliest days as an English major to the present, my experience is mostly with reading and writing intensive courses in the humanities. So while my advice is fairly discipline-agnostic, it’s fair to note that my own priorities are different than they would be if I were teaching lecture courses for Physics, say.
Don’t Wait
When I was a sophomore in college, my roommate’s sister died in a car accident, right at the start of finals week. Needless to say, I spent the next several days with him, at a time where normally I would have been writing my final essays for my courses. But the most vivid memories I have of that time is having to visit my professors at their homes (remember that this was pre-email), explain the situation, and ask for an extension. They were all very understanding, but that didn’t stop me from being mortified.
And from then on, I pretty much resolved that I would never put myself in that position again. It would vary from course to course, but the habit I carried with me the rest of the way through college (and on into graduate school) was not to wait until that last week to think about (or start writing) my essays. Here’s where my advice skews humanities: in a lecture course with a final exam, it would be rare to be able to take that exam halfway through the course and ace it. But the same is not true of courses in the humanities. You can walk out of the course on the second day with an idea for your final essay, and there’s a good chance that it’ll be viable.
So I began approaching my courses that way—no one in particular taught me how to do this, but it always served me well. When you get to the final week of a course, finding a topic is almost always a panicky “what the heck can I write about?” But if you attend every course meeting and ask yourself what you found interesting, what you’d want to know more about, why things did or didn’t happen a particular way, what else this idea reminds you of, etc., there’s a really good chance that you’ll find a topic that actually engages you. Ideally, you won’t want to wait until the end of the semester to start it. I remember vividly taking a course on Japanese Religion and Culture, and one day, in class, I was just struck by how much of a role humor played in Zen Buddhism (unlike other religions), and I ended up spending the next month writing a 20-page essay on the topic3.
This is how writing is supposed to work. In a recent installment of Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow, as he does from time to time, talks about his “Memex method.” Taking notes in public, he explains, creates this great reservoir of potential topics:
The things I've taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution.
This is something that’s challenging to explain to students who haven’t experienced it, and perhaps even to some of my colleagues who think of their role as predominantly informational. At the risk of sounding a little overoptimistic, I hope that my students come into my classroom with a certain amount of curiosity, a willingness to follow up on something they read or hear that engages them. That willingness makes it much easier to do a semester’s work along the way rather than all at once, right at the end of things.
Overtitle
That first section was longer than I’d planned, but in some ways, my other items are part of the broader theme of investing a little attention in the short term in order to reap long-term benefits. This is one that a lot of teachers complain about, but I’ll be honest—I spent a long time doing the exact same thing, until I finally trained myself out of it. And that’s the habit of naming my files the shortest possible, most momentary thing. In my archives, I probably have 50 files called “syllabus.doc.” And every semester, as I download the essays my students submit, my desktop will be coated with identical “Final.docx” files.
My rule of thumb now is that, if there’s even the remotest chance that I will share a file with anyone else, it’s just easier to put my name or initials in the title and to take the extra 5 seconds to provide context. For the vast majority of my course materials, I include course number, semester, year, and then the specific document name. It may seem excessive to have a folder called “WRT308 W23” with a bunch of files inside it that duplicate that in their filenames, but it saves me the trouble of renaming the files if I share one or more of them later.
And if I’m a student worried about whether or not my professor can find my paper, I’d much rather have them searching for “Brooke_final_wrt308” than having to open up every document called “final” to see if it’s mine. This is an exponentially bigger deal when a student comes to me a year or two later, to ask for a letter of recommendation. If I can search for and fine their files by last name, it makes things so much easier.
Learn to Email
The prevalence of email had a huge effect on the day-to-day operation of academia. I grew up during a time where faculty office hours were fairly significant—I remember visiting my professors’ offices regularly in college. Outside of those hours, phone calls were the only other channel of direct contact, and I lived through that time as well. When email became an official channel, it displaced those others, as well as adding a layer of “on-call” sensibility to academia. I will sometimes have people email me late at night or on weekends, expecting instant replies or resolutions. I’ll also get emails that struggle to find the proper degree of familiarity/formality for the occasion, and I know that there are folks out there who think this is what “learning to email” is about.
But what I’m talking about is spending time with the application itself (I use Gmail, and Outlook to a lesser extent), and understanding how it can make one’s life easier. Back in the old days (2000s), there was a real emphasis on productivity tips, ways to approach email less as an undifferentiated inbox and more like an organizational tool. For me, that’s meant thinking about the functionality of features like folders, filters/rules, and Gmail’s tabs to pre-sort my email in ways that make it easier for me to cope with it. Things like
setting aside a separate tab for newsletters, so they’re not piling up in my inbox
using rules/filters to move all of my etail notifications to a single folder (and purging anything there when the information (delivery date, e.g.) has expired
snoozing meeting announcements so that they pop back up the day before I need to pay attention to them
using “schedule send” for things that I want to get off my plate but don’t need to put on others’ plates immediately
I keep a folder of all of the official announcements I send out as Chair, making them very easy for me to find and reference later if I need to
None of these are especially “power user” sorts of moves, but each of them makes my experience incrementally better, and allows me to use my email inbox as a rolling to-do list that does a pretty good job of keeping me on track.
Maybe more crucially, even though there are probably better tools out there, the fact is that most colleges and universities will continue for the foreseeable future to use email as a primary communication channel—the energy and time required to change this would be monumental. My guess is that most incoming students, though, see email as an outdated, somewhat opaque system for old people who didn’t grow up with social media. (They’re not wrong.) They’re also unlikely to spend time on their own figuring out how to use its tools more effectively. Unfortunately, most of my colleagues are equally unlikely to realize that they’d benefit from something like this.
I’ve spent most of my career exploring and testing a lot of platforms, and matching them closely to my needs in the moment, my pedagogical goals, and their organizational affordances. I used to blog about this process and to do annual reviews (and revisions) of the suite of tools I used. And despite all of that activity, if I had to guess, I’d say that my email client is probably my most valuable platform, and has been for the past couple of years. (Some of that is the way that many other platforms will wax and wane fairly quickly as they get absorbed or fail to find a consistent funding model.) So at the risk of sounding old, I’d say that learning how to use an email client well is a crucial piece of the college experience that doesn’t get enough attention.
And that’s really all I’ve got today. As I was writing these, I thought of probably a dozen more things to say, some of which might even be worthwhile. I do think that reading and writing in college are substantially different, for instance, but that’s (perhaps) a topic for another time. More soon…
I’m afraid that this piece is paywalled, but I’m happy to share a copy of the article if you’re unable to access it.
Isaacs goes to explain that “Those of us who already possess such habits and skills were explicitly taught them by adults at some point in our lives,” which I don’t necessarily agree with. I think she underestimates the extent to which past generations acquired them by osmosis from a school culture that was more monolithic prior to the internet. I’d hesitate to say that it was better or worse, but it was certainly different, and I do agree that we can no longer expect students to just “pick up” these habits of mind.
I even remember titling the essay “Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy.” I have no earthly idea what I said or the grade I received on it, but I was so proud of that essay.