[The Lone Ranger]

I'm grading the final lab exams in my introductory Human Anatomy & Physiology class.

For a question which asked the students to identify the left ventricle of the heart, one wrote "Brain." On another question, asking them to identify the corpus callosum of the brain, a student wrote "Aorta."

If those were only a couple of isolated instances, I wouldn't be so desperately wanting to tear my hair out right now. I can only assume that -- knowing that the final exam would cover the Cardiovascular and Nervous systems -- a rather significant percentage of the students simply memorized (or attempted to memorize) a list of terms that they thought would be relevant, and then applied them more or less at random on the exam. That's the only possible explanation I can think of for why someone would identify part of the heart as the "brain" or part of the brain as the "aorta."

Once again, I'm confronted with the heart-breaking reality that a very significant portion of the class has evidently learned nothing at all during the past several months.

And more than half the class failed to turn in their final homework assignment at all. True, it's not worth a whole lot of points, but to fail to turn it in at all speaks volumes about their dedication to learning the material. Especially since all they have to do is read the assigned chapters in their textbook and fill in the answers.

But then, that would mean actually reading the textbook -- something I'm absolutely convinced that probably at least half of them do not (and will not) do.

But you can be sure that a significant portion of them will soon be sending me outraged e-mails demanding to know why they failed the course. It's tempting to write back and ask, "Where is the surprise here? You failed every single exam, and didn't even bother to turn in the final assignment. Why are you surprised that you failed the course?"



President Obama has recently been talking about how we need to make it easier to get a college degree in this country. On the one hand, I'm in absolute agreement: in my opinion, there's absolutely no excuse for the fact that many poor and middle-class kids will never be able to attend the college/university of their choice, because they can't afford to. It's shameful, in fact.

Everyone who wants to attend college -- and who can and will do the work -- should be able to. Period.

On the other hand, we really have oversold college, I think. Every day, I'm forced to deal with the fact that a significant percentage of our college students simply cannot or will not do college-level work.

But the Administration (here I'm talking about the Administration here at the college, not the Obama Administration) relentlessly pressures us to keep our "retention" rates as high as possible, and to get as many warm bodies in the seats as possible.


But the fact is that a lot of these kids should not be in college. There's no shame in that. A lot of them demonstrate absolutely no interest in learning anyway, and are clearly interested in getting a degree only because they see it as a necessity for getting a halfway-decent job. And some of them are apparently incapable of doing college-level work.

We really need some proper sort of vocational training in this country. And we need to stop pretending that "everyone" can -- or should -- earn a college degree. It just winds up frustrating an awful lot of people, students and instructors alike -- not to mention saddling an awful lot of students with loads of debt.





I really wish I didn't hate this place so much ...