The Costs of Completion by Robin G. Isserles

Author:Robin G. Isserles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Student Vulnerabilities and the Student Sensibility

I am trying very hard to portray these student stories without judgment. If anything, I reserve my criticism for the policies and initiatives that operate without a deeper understanding or appreciation for these students and their lives. We all come across students who seem to be deeply in the dark about what it means to be a college student and perhaps these are the most vulnerable amongst them. Such stories are expressed, quite often, around assignment deadlines.

At 8:00 a.m. on the morning the first assignment is due, five weeks into the semester, Laverne sent me a desperate email informing me that she still did not have access to Blackboard, our online classroom management system. She told me she could not find the website and wasn’t sure whether she needed to sign up for it in the main building. It was honestly shocking to me that this student, one who was regularly attending class, was so in the dark about a significant part of it. For the first several weeks of the semester, any supplemental readings that had been assigned, I put on Blackboard, meaning that she clearly had not done those. Nor had she heeded the directive on the syllabus, as well as the many announcements I made in class, about the importance of resolving any Blackboard issues. She found her way, and submitted a good first paper, but her grades and attendance were quite weak after that, and she ended the course earning a D+, just barely passing.

In another example, Geraldine sent an email asking if it was too late to turn things around to pass the class. She mentioned that she had not been able to access her emails, so she was responding several weeks after she had received a progress report. While her discussion board participation was quite weak, her graded work up to that point positioned her in the B range. She ended the semester with a B. While her earned grade was more than adequate, the fact that she was taking an online course with no working access to her email suggested that something was amiss in her attunement to being a student.

Risa was not a student in one of my classes but came to my office for advisement in the spring of 2015. Risa’s story is frustrating and indicates how the advisement process needs to be dramatically overhauled. She entered my office assuming that she was graduating at the end of the semester. After opening up the online scheduling software program, it showed that she still had not yet taken her remedial math class, which also meant that she had yet to take whatever college-level math class was required for her to graduate. During our conversation it was clear that she didn’t quite comprehend the difference between a remedial and a credit-bearing course. To have come this far in her schooling and not know this distinction was so chillingly disconcerting. Is it possible that she had been able to

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