Making accommodations isn't always 'kind' (uni)

[Jourdain11]

I'm interested in knowing general opinions on this. I would accept that the last few years have been tough for students, and UG finalists in particular have had their full course horribly disrupted. But I am struck by how the accommodations made for students have really not helped them, in a large proportion of cases. I work in a uni (London Russell Group, competitive and highly-rated) and the number of students who have requested deferrals and so on for MH reasons is huge. In my role, I pushed back a bit and said that we shouldn't be advocating this as a way of dealing with any level of pressure and anxiety. In some cases it was absolutely necessary, but in others I felt that it was just becoming a pattern or a way of buying more time.

Ultimately, in the careers many of these graduates will go on to have, they will have to work to deadlines and deal with pressure, and part of the uni experience is providing preparation for that.

We now have students who are very upset because they cannot graduate with their peers, who are very anxious because they've deferred half their year's assessments to a one-werk resits period and feel they will not cope, or who are just disappointed that they haven't completed the year and have uncertainty as regards progression. Plus those who have now come to see assessment as an absolutely terrifying and insurmountable thing because we have agreed that they clearly weren't capable of sitting their exams, when they probably were.

Overall, I feel that we need to be encouraging coping strategies and empowering students, rather than encouraging them to opt out on the most tenuous rationale. But some of my colleagues would consider this to be virtually heresy and I'm not sure how we're going to get out of this place we have found ourselves in.

All the best and positivity

As for seminars and tutorial groups, they're small groups anyway, so you'd have a mix of some groups F2F and other groups online, so again, no extra staffing needed.

Others have already addressed the problem of specialised teaching where there’s only one group.

But, this year and last we had an online group and in-person groups for large modules. Students were to declare which they wanted at the start of the semester; the online group was intended for CEV students, and a tiny number of international students still affected by travel restrictions. The great majority were expected to attend in person.

By halfway through the semester the online group was overwhelmed with requests to transfer into it, as students decided they didn’t want to have to travel in. It maps perfectly onto the declining attendance we saw pre-covid as the semesters progressed. And they were pissed when told they couldn’t transfer halfway through. Students want it both ways but universities can’t cope with that.

How about getting back to fully face to face lectures, seminars, working groups, etc which is what the majority of students want? Or does it only work one way?

We've been teaching in person since last September. My department is a lab-based subject so in fact we were face to face from last May - as soon as we were ALLOWED to by government legilsation.

Predictably, the student newspaper (not The Tab, which s a rag worse than the Sun) ran a front page article about how utterly AWFUL it was that lectures were back to in person, because they had to get out of bed to go to 8:30am classes, and couldn't participate at their own convenience, and all sorts of other made-up reasons.

I'm not sure how far the student newspaper reflected the views of my students: they seemed overjoyed to be in live seminars, even though we were still masking up at the time. They were utterly lovely, actually.

But I thought the student newspaper front page complaints article was really telling of current student tendencies as a cohort to thrash about to find stuff to complain about.

Our student newspaper is like a complaints column! It's a pity it isn't more representative. Very dominated by a small group of voices.

Totally agree.

In general I think uni is terrible for mental health and that most of the staff don’t care / understand the causes. I went from a happy outgoing teen to miserable, lonely, drinking huge amounts of alcohol because I was constantly being handed free drinks (and making terrible decisions as a result).

I wish more people had a year out, or that our culture wasn’t so contemptuous of the idea of going to a local uni while living at home. Or failing that, I wish that staff had better training on mental health.

Now there are plenty of people on the thread saying we aren’t sympathetic enough, and it’s like they think we have never had any mental health issues ourselves or any experience with this. I’ve been teaching and doing pastoral support for students for about twenty years now, and I’m more than familiar with helping support students with serious mental health and pastoral issues. And this new culture isn’t like that at all. It’s something very different, and really concerning. I know I sound like I’m just complaining, but it’s dismaying to me that despite every effort to support students it’s like that’s actually counterproductive, and I think we should be changing tack on this soon before the culture gets even more entrenched. It isn’t doing this cohort any favours at all.

Yes, @theclangersarecoming I think your post is really perceptive.

And I would also point out to the parents saying we're unsympathetic on this thread, that during the pandemic, we had to absorb all the student anxiety, listen to students complaining about being online (it was the bloody LAW, what do you think we should have done?) and I had one student swearing at me and telling me I didn't know what I was doing.

But there was NO pastoral care or back up support for teaching staff. My university gave us an extra 'rest day' once, but didn't actually remove a day's work from our workloads! It was a joke.

In my discipline, we had to re-conceive our modules & courses from scratch, in order to convert a part lab-based course into online offerings which still met our approved learning outcomes. We had family worries, our own health at risk (for the last 2 years I was not certain I would see my mother alive again - I know others who lost parents - whatever age you lose a parent it's very tough).

But certainly in my Department (and throughout most of my highly-regarded Russel Group university) we soldiered on. And unlike our students, didn't mention our concerns or take out our worries on the students.

I know from colleagues that lockdown 1 was absolutely horrendous, the workload was unreal and the hours put in were beyond reasonable. I was having chemo so was not working, and it sounds like I had a positive holiday by comparison 😅 Certainly I returned to the workplace in a better state than some of my colleagues!

Some Unis went over and above the legal restrictions and made life a lot harder for their students than it needed to have been.

I live on the edge of a big student house (privately rented) area in my town. I KNOW from the noise of loud music until 2am and my observations of groups of students outside their houses throughout lockdowns that students were breaking the government laid out COVID rules about socialising.

Added to which, the weekly university email to all staff & students repeatedly emphasised the government rules about mixing households. I heard (from the inside) that the University Registrar was getting merry hell from all the public health people in the town about the ways that students mixing were spreading C-19 in a town which otherwise had ver low levels of infection.

It's why, when given the choice before I was vaccinated, as someone over 60, with a couple of underlying health conditions, I taught online. I wasn't going to trust my health to the actions of possibly quite irresponsible students.

I’m another who disagrees .

My mother was diagnosed with frontotemproal dementia last month, moved into a home .

My dad’s moved 2000 miles abroad .

My gran died last week .

My uni are phoning me daily Mon-Fri, have helped me to defer a year and have given me endless support pastoral, academic and financial - I’d be bloody lost without them .

@Jourdain11 For me, I think the 2nd full lockdown in January 2021 was the hardest teaching term of my entire career. It was announced so suddenly, with only a few days' notice, and we were all looking forward to going back into the seminar rooms and lecture theatres.

Depths of winter, and a government that clearly had no idea what it was doing. And angry anxious students who took it out on us teaching staff.

So far I am on P9, sorry, had to prioritise work.
Let me make random comments. MN regulars even get snide anti Thatcher reference in here.
I would suggest that the miners led by Arthur Scargill were early Snowflakes. They only wanted to have jobs in an industry that was unprofitable produced a product that could easily be replaced that ensured they didn't have to go to another town or re-skill.
Comparisons with WW2, as difficult as it was many of the survivors were able to build friendships through the adversity they suffered. That was denied during covid. They developed resilience which helped them to start businesses
Those born after about 1960 were the first generation who did not almost automatically do better than their parents. In my family 4 generations from servant to artisan to house owner to me house owner and business owner. DC nurse and soldier.

I went from a happy outgoing teen to miserable, lonely, drinking huge amounts of alcohol because I was constantly being handed free drinks (and making terrible decisions as a result).

Seriously @CharlotteOH just what do you think academics should do with a student who makes stupid choices and suffers the consequences?

What would have helped you then? And - hand on heart - would you have followed through on the advice? For example, would you have practiced "think the drink through" each time you were offered a free drink? Would you have established a pattern of sleep hygiene and physical & mental health self-care? Exercising properly each day, setting a regular sleep pattern, eating well to fuel & nurture your body?

I am there to teach my subject (in which I'm a leading expert internationally). My skill is in taking my research and re-presenting it to engage students, to facilitate their learning about this specific aspect of my broader discipline, to introduce them to new ideas, and to help them think their own new ideas.

I'm not there to therapise them!

Working class children might not have done those things; they would have had the life experiences available to them. Which may well have included study and work and leisure pursuits.
what they wouldn’t have had is complete and sudden cessation of all the experiences and interactions that had been an intégral part of their lives to date, which provided them with the chance to develop life skills, networks, connections, resilience.
im really surprised at the stubbornness of the refusal to engage with the impact this has had on teenagers and adolescents. It feels like guilt. If we acknowledge we have to feel responsible and we don’t want that. So, we blame them. Rather unpleasant

Could we just acknowledge here that the academic staff in departments were not the ones making decisions about accommodation, extra-curricular activities etc? The senior management of the universities had to do that, at great speed when the first lockdown was declared halfway through one academic year, and then had to try to plan ahead for the next academic year at a point when the future was extremely unclear. It's hardly surprising they got it wrong in some cases. The leadership from the government was far from stellar, as we all know.

I used to work as a lowly administrator in a university. It was abundantly clear that most students (and their families too, I expect) had no grasp of university financing, and why should they? They were unaware that decades ago the government provided most university funding from taxes, supplemented by tuition fees paid by LEAs for undergraduates out of the rates. The LEAs also paid maintenance grants to undergrads which were easily enough to live on if you were sensible, without any need to take on a part-time job (this was my experience, anyway), so you could concentrate on your academic work. All of this was affordable because the number of students going onto higher education was tiny. At this point some students might have graduated with a small overdraft, but nothing like the huge paper debts they have now.

Then New Labour decreed that 50% of the population should go to university and instead of a massive increase in taxes/borrowing to pay for it they decided to make the students pay, but to give them low-cost loans to do it.

And lo and behold, within a very few years, almost all central government funding for universities had vanished. I believe there's a block grant for their capital funding for STEM courses, and some funding for NHS-related courses, and that's about it. Students and their families have to cough up or take out loans for both tuition fees and maintenance costs. Students far more often have to work alongside their studies. The loans aren't all that cheap any more. You start repaying on a lower salary than of yore. Etc etc.

It's not universities' fault that going to university is so expensive now, nor that jobs you used to be able to secure with a handful of O levels or CSEs now require a degree. It's also not their fault that successive governments have failed to beef up our vocational education and training so it's a really good and rigorous alternative to an academic route. There are some excellent apprenticeship schemes but there aren't nearly enough of them.

Students and their families see themselves as consumers, as customers, and we all know the customer is always right, so feedback and league tables have taken on a ludicrous amount of importance for university management.

I also think the government has utterly failed to explain to students and their families WHY they thought it would be beneficial for more students to go to university. It wasn't so they could have a terrific time for three years playing sport and using the bar, gym and so on. It was so they could carry on with their education and develop all sorts of transferable skills that they could then take into their working lives and benefit the economy.

We used to have a higher education system that was the envy of the world. I'm not sure that's the case any more.

Quite. Some people here are being wilfully very stupid.

If we’re talking about developing life skills, @TullyApplebottom , why were all my students sitting at home telling me that at least they were getting meals cooked for them by mum and dad? I didn’t hear a single one say: “Well, I’m here and mum and dad are working from home, so I’ve learned how to cook a few meals so I can look after mum and dad while they work”. Or even, I’m helping homeschool my siblings which is a good skill to learn? Or helping with community efforts at food hubs, delivering help to housebound people and so on, like many people in my village were doing? They all told me they were bored at home being looked after!

Neither did most of them stop socialising - in fact lots told me that it was nice being at home because they were getting a lot of time to spend with old friends from school. Several went on holiday.

That’s all anecdotal, so maybe there were tons of students doing all of those things (none of which are beyond the wit of a late teenager). But certainly none of mine were.
And all of those things would have offered the experience and life skills you talk about. (And not getting the full middle class uni experience for a year is hardly great privation. It’s not like they were fleeing a war zone or being shelled by Russian troops.)

Do you think you might be taking some throwaway remarks a little too seriously?
you seem quite resentful of the students you teach. No one was going on holiday or socialising with school friends during lockdown unless they were breaking the law. Those who were able to go to university had highly abnormal, restricted experiences. I do wonder if some resentment here isn’t getting in the way of acknowledging that yes, this might have had an impact.

No-one has said there hasn’t been an impact (though I can tell you the impact is much greater on primary age and disadvantaged children compared to university students). But does that mean that a whole year later students can’t be expected to hand in a dissertation or project on time?

I don't really think covid is the cause of this change in students, it's just exacerbated it.

I think it comes in part from their school experiences before university which are increasingly lacking in any rigour, even for the most successful students. Most of them don't actually read books. In part from constant immersion online which accounts for a lot of their poor social skills and lack of general knowledge. And also from, not so much a sense that the world is getting worse, but from a kind of nihilism - they actually don't have any deep sense of meaning or that things matter.

To go back to the original post, most of things that are being discussed are not ‘kindness’. Kindness is essentially between two individuals, often with some degree of spontaneity, often with a degree of personal cost to the benefactor. Kindness is offering to take someone else’s trolley back to the trolley park because you can see they have mobility problems, even if you yourself are tired and a bit fed up with shopping. Kindness is the ambulance man insisting on carrying my husband’s overnight bag , even though he seemed to have half a hospital on his back already. Kindness would be listening to someone unburdening their troubles, even though they are actually quite boring, and you are busy.

One of my friends at University lost her mother in the middle of the second year. I don’t think that the college made an particular arrangements for her to defer her course, or not to do her essays. What I do know is that for the rest of that term, she never had to make her own bed, or do her washing, or queue for coffee at breakfast. We did all that to make her life a bit easier, and to show that we minded.

What most people are discussing, and what a disturbing number of posters are demanding, is not kindness. It is mandated indulgence , and it comes at a cost to the rest of the institution and its members which they do not necessarily approve.

I object to your comments. They are quite nasty really. The snide suggestion that I've excused my son whilst blaming his Uni and employers is insulting. You've no idea how I've parented him. Or are you one of those people that believe poor mental health is always to do with poor parenting? If you are I've got news for you.....

I obviously know it was his responsibility to speak to the university. I can't believe you thought you needed to tell me that. You even went to the trouble of using italics 🙄. How patronizing. He didn't want to and that was his choice. I was making the point that if universities do offer extra help to students they need to do it carefully and need to be mindful how it impacts the whole cohort. Or do you think giving the students needing extra time the exact same exam as the other students two weeks later is a good idea when the pass mark is moderated in line with how well the whole group preforms.

No one at my sons university or at his workplace would have any clue how much he struggles sometimes. It's desperately heartbreaking to see your wonderful kind hardworking son suffer like he does sometimes. Still, it's 'nice' of you to say I'm making excuses for him and that I'm not doing him any favours when you've NO IDEA of how I've raised him and how I've supported him.

@GoodThinkingMax

I hesitate to type this post, because I am of the boomer generation, and I just know that the sky is going to fall on my head, BUT I took three academic A levels in 1974. English Literature, French and History. I sat five 3-hour papers and read about 20 books for English, including S level for which there was no preparation. I sat three papers and an oral in French, and two three-hour/four question exams for English and European history. I am generally helpful and so when my DS's friend asked me to read his final diss in European history (on Napoleon's campaigns through Europe) I did. And frankly my A level extended essay on George Eliot had clearly involved more and wider reading. He could have read Bernard Cornwell's Peninsular War novels and had more fun and a better understanding.

@TullyApplebottom I have zero guilt. I have all through this thread acknowledged that undergraduates had some additional challenges because of the pandemic and some of them will have been unhappy.
But I know lots of people had it hard. And lots had it much harder than middle class undergraduates supported by families. I remember reading about foreign students queueing up to get food from a charity in the first lockdown as their families were no longer earning money to send it to them, the places they were working closed and the students were not allowed to fly home. I also read about migrants with no recourse to public funds struggling to feed themselves as where they worked closed and I knew personally of a teenager with complex needs in additional pain because her therapies were stopped during lockdown.