To expect that would-be final year degree students ought to be able to communicate?

[drcrab]

I get a call this morning from someone who purports to be a student going into her final year. She didn't ask for me, didn't tell me who she was, didn't tell me what year/programme of study she was on.... And proceeded to ask me these garbled questions. I didn't know in what context she was phoning about.

I had to interrupt her a couple of times to ask who she was, why she was ringing etc. When she finally told me who she was, I said 'oh I remember you... I approved your change of programme etcetera' to which her reply was 'oh uh yah'. No thank you.

WTF? Do these same 'students' expect to graduate with a 2:1 or higher and earn pots of money immediately? And this from a university that's rather highly ranked.

[adelaofblois]

Older academics having a moan? 100 years ago Cambridge folk thought youngsters not being literate in Latin and Greek marked the end of a university education, 20 years later that the war had corrupted young men so they spoke black slang, listened to jazz and used umbrellas rather than putting up with the rain, in the 1960s they were all garbled long-haired louts, in the noughties that they couldn't do anything expect in text speak.

And you know what? Literacy rates in this country are higher than they've ever been, even my parent's generation turned out thousands of kids into manual labour with no writing skills at all. Academic work in most fields is astonishing in its depth, people who would have walked into lectureships years ago spending years on the sidelines. And most of those people have indeed entered university 'functionally illiterate' in academic registers of language, but have sodding worked at it and sorted it out. Just look at Yr3 undergrads on leaving as compared to Yr1, and also remember how much academic maturation happens in the final year.

The only folk who can't write are the employers demanding universities can't teach it, and folk who use upper case letters after a series of dots even though it's the same sentence.

[LRDTheFeministDragon]

Oh, come now adela, not being literate in Latin is serious shit.



Or rather, at least it actually has a bearing on academic study, unlike a nice phone manner, which has a bearing on how good you'd be as a receptionist.

(I am sure I'm guilty of capital letters after dots myself ... and probably all sorts of other bad things. I also teach my students that I'm fallible, funnily enough.)

[InstantAtom]

YABU. The problem is with failing literacy in schools. Take non-university students of a similar age and you'll find exactly the same.

[NormanTebbit]

Maybe she had a hangover

[Kladdkaka]

ProfessionallyOffended, I might take a leaf out son's book. I need all the help I can get.

[ProfessionallyOffendedGoblin]

I think you will find that developing S&L in schools has rather fallen by the wayside over the last couple of decades as the governments improved everything. Being able to communicate clearly through speech was a lot harder to test than spelling and arithmetic.
So it became a tiny, contracted part of the curriculum.
I still think that telephone manners and talking to people clearly and effectively is something parents ought to be in charge of teaching their children. It's a life skill.

[LRDTheFeministDragon]

What 'failing literacy in schools', Instant?

I sincerely doubt anyone who actually 'failed' literacy at school makes it to university without having a truly exceptional genius to balance it out.

[ProfessionallyOffendedGoblin]

Your DD has AS?
I've done the wardrobe thing with him too.

[Kladdkaka]

Was that question to me? If so, yes she does. We all do, we're House of Aspie.:o

[adelaofblois]

Yeah and my posts were annoyingly full or errors too.

Am impressed you are literate in Latin and Greek. I can read both but composition, no way.

I always found one of the joys of teaching undergraduates was actually watching the ones with the totally off-hand social skills produce good essays, or finding the moment of real thought in something which was comprehensibly written but by no means academically phrased. Finding some common ground in the study we shared despite the huge social gulf between us.

Not really outraged, just think if drcrab is really going to get all uppity about this she is going to be one very unhappy camper and lose sight of what is good about teaching.

[ProfessionallyOffendedGoblin]

'We all do, we're House of Aspie'

I don't have any traits. I'm very much the odd one out in my house.

[LRDTheFeministDragon]

Oh, no, adela I'm not, I was piss taking! I can read Latin and Greek but my Greek is in no way fluent.

Fuck, I feel like a fool now.

I was just amused by your post - you are right, people have been moaning about falling standards since the year dot and I reckon if Socrates had written things down we'd have a school report moaning on about how useless Plato was. So it goes.

I expect I will get less idealistic about teaching when I'm more experienced, but I love seeing people who don't think they are academic, or who have to overcome problems or gaps in their schooling, suddenly learning that they are bright and they can do it all ... it's great.

[LRDTheFeministDragon]

Cross-post.

cat, you say 'should': but if students can't do these things, don't we have a responsibility to them to tell them they're not up to scratch, and ideally to help them? I reckon if a teacher has failed a student further back in his or her schooling, and it's something I can put right, I should.

[adelaofblois]

It's certainly what I miss most, even though I get to watch younger ones learn now.

Experience in the profession suggested age had nowt to do with it. There were postgrad TAs who felt like drcrab and 70-year-old professors who felt like you. In fact, I reckon, the professors are more likely to do so because they have some sense of perspective.

[ProfessionallyOffendedGoblin]

Teacher failed student?
Not parent failed child?
The OP isn't talking about complicated academic skills, just being able to express and explain themselves clearly over the telephone

[LRDTheFeministDragon]

That makes sense actually - one of the nicest people I've come across as a student is my professor, who completely overlooks my awful spelling and suchlike.

Btw, it is nice to see you around - your name is familiar.

[drcrab]

Uppity? Oh dear.

This was one of the few times I've started a thread on here (or anywhere else on mn for that matter). I've had many a good experience with many students and believe it or not I've had v good feedback from them too including those that I've given a good bollocking over bad learning attitudes who surprised themselves when they came out with a first and attributed/dedicated their first to me (with their parents weeping tears of joy).

I concur with everything break said. I will probably encounter this young lady when term starts. Let's hope it's a better encounter for both of us.

[LRDTheFeministDragon]

POG - true, they're not complicated skills. But not everyone learns skills in a nice linear way, starting with the easy ones and getting to difficult academic stuff. It's quite possible, these days, that a student of 20 or so has never really needed to use the phone in a formal situation. I can't remember when I last did - email is much more common. If no-one has said 'look, you should do this, this and this', she won't know. And if you're a teacher you're in the business of helping people out with what they don't know.

[adelaofblois]

As ever, doesn't the problem revolve around what universities are for and hence what you expect of students?

I wanted my students to be able to understand an audience and occasion: to get the difference between a seminar chat, a lecture and an academic presentation; to write in discipline-appropriate terms; and to grasp how arguments could be put forward. Along the way they probably learned as well to speak clearly, to write grammatically, to investigate and absorb information. And all that was helpful to them when they went for jobs, or so they say.

But I wouldn't expect them to have a good phone manner, because their course is not about phones. Or to address me politely because that wasn't part of it either. And so it was really none of my business if they did, and certainly not my business to teach it at the expense of the discipline they were there to study. And the idea of not accepting them onto a course because they couldn't do it, why should that happen?

But mainly the kidz, at all levels, r gr8, imo.

[LRDTheFeministDragon]

Wot u sed.

[drcrab]

Adela- the acceptance onto a programme thing was an aside. Completely nothing to do with her phone call. I was just recalling that the first time I had anything to do with her was then.

As for the time spent during classes: yes I agree that in the course of their journey at university they are there to learn about their discipline. Nowadays however with the bandying of the big word 'employability' it appears that as part of university education we need to also make sure that they are employable. If we are then to look into the factors that employers think they need in anyone that they recruit, then apart from technical skills eg knowing the theories or the law or whatever, they also need to know how to write/spell/present themselves appropriately and within the latter, perhaps phone skills and email etiquette will make a difference.

[drcrab]

LRD just out of curiosity when would you have pointed out that she should have done this, this or this if this student had rung you and was incomprehensible for the first few minutes?

I tried to do that by 'interrupting' her and establishing some facts like what's your name? Why are you calling? Could you send an email detailing all this? Have you made an appointment? And only after all these questions did I manage to establish some sort of sense of why she was ringing.

[working9while5]

Perhaps she was intimidated when calling you and fluffed her lines?

[LRDTheFeministDragon]

drcrab - face to face, in class, to all of them is best IMO. That way no one person feels targeted, and it saves time as they all get brought up to speed.

I do think working has a good point about her maybe being nervous, too.