Glug, glug, glug. Yak, yak, yak.
They drink. We talk. And the quandary remains: how to address Penn State’s drinking problem.
We, their neighbors, would like the Woo people to see the error of their ways. We want them to recognize that they share a neighborhood with us and to accept our desire, nay, our right, not to be disturbed by late-night ruckuses or dismayed by property damage when we greet the world in the morning.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Knowing it ain’t gonna happen, the hard-headed realists among us are calling for legal and extra-legal remedies: steeper fines from the state and steeper academic penalties from the university.
Sure. The problem with enforcement-centered approaches, though, is that they’re predicated on arrests, and the chances of the police catching most late-night revelers in the act of snapping a fence post or howling at the moon are not good.
Of course, penalties are mostly supposed to serve as deterrents: If the Woo people know that running wild through the streets may lead to getting booted out of school or incurring the wrath of their fine-paying parents, they may become more temperate in their habits.
Ah, but as the hard-headed realists have pointed out at the many meetings I have attended, deterrence presupposes an ability to consider the consequences of one’s actions. A person who is on his second or third can of Four Loko does not possess this ability.
So if appeals to their better natures aren’t going to work and threats of punishment aren’t going to work, what’s left? My answer: make school harder.
College students party with such gusto in part because they view their undergraduate years as a last hurrah. Party now because once you have to be at your post at 9 a.m. ready to make, market or trade those widgets for the next eight hours, you flat-out will not be able to drink late into the night.
Implicit in this line of thinking is that as a student you don’t have to be anywhere early most days, if ever, and you’re not going to have to work all that hard for all that long throughout the rest of the day. One of the dumbest moves Penn State has made in the years I’ve been around here has been the “student-centered” shift away from morning classes.
The argument that early classes conflict with late-adolescent biorhythms is a bizarre one if only because most kids have been getting up for school somewhere between 7 and 8 a.m. their entire lives.
And if the argument is that students won’t come to 8 and 9 a.m. classes, the rebuttal is the same: They showed up when they were in high school, didn’t they?
And why? Because attendance was compulsory.
I didn’t take attendance when I started teaching. That’s baby stuff, I thought. These kids – OK, their parents – are forking over all this dough to come here. If they want to waste the money and forego exposure to my modest expertise, it’s their choice and their loss.
Besides, who wants to look out at a sea of surly sleepyheads who are present only under duress? I’ve even heard colleagues cast voluntary attendance in terms of pedagogical challenge: Their job is to make their classes so entertaining that students want to be there.
I see things differently now. First of all, not taking attendance sends the unmistakable message to students that what goes on in the classroom isn’t terribly important. It’s what enables them to ask that most maddening of questions when they’re absent: “Did we do anything in class yesterday?”
Incidentally, allowing students to add classes two weeks into the semester sends the same message. Oh, they can catch up on the readings and whatever assignments they missed, but those first couple-three introductory lectures? Gone, but no biggie.
The second reason for an attendance policy is that it’s inherent in the idea of credit hours. When you register for a three-credit course you are registering for three hours of instruction per week. Getting credit for those three hours begins with actually being there in the classroom.
Fine, the attendance-optional instructors may say. You want to take attendance in your own classes, go right ahead. But I contend that students construe the existence of any attendance-optional classes as proof that attendance doesn’t really matter (if it did, everybody would require it) and therefore, instructors who take attendance are petty tyrants.
Make ‘em all come to class, I say.
Next week I’ll talk about the need to make school harder by giving students more work. The argument so far: More morning classes and compulsory attendance will do more to discourage binge drinking than zealous law enforcement on the street and stiffer penalties imposed by the courts, the legislature or the Office of Student Affairs.
Earlier Coverage
