Jon Morrow from On Moneymaking just did a guest post on Brazen Careerist about why he regrets getting straight A’s in college. He lays out pretty clearly what he did, what he got out of it, and why it wasn’t worth it in the end. Some of the comments on the post had a definite pent-up rage undertone—I’m not entirely sure why. Were the commenters feeling threatened by Morrow’s ponderings about his own life and the decisions he’s made (which I’m fairly certain had nothing to do with them)? Who the hell knows.

I understood where he was coming from, even if the cranky commenters didn’t. And I can back him up in saying that being obsessed with your college GPA to the detriment of your actual life is unnecessary. As he points out and as I’ve said before: unless you’re applying to some highly competitive grad school program, an exquisite grade point average isn’t something anyone important will ever give a rat’s ass about.

I did the same thing Morrow did: I studied all the damn time and was focused to my very core on getting the highest score on every lab write-up, assignment, quiz and exam. I had an amazing physics instructor once who was smart, tough, unsmiling, and told us on the first day of class that she didn’t believe in extra credit so we shouldn’t waste her time asking for it. She expected us to learn the material well and to do the work she assigned, end of story.

And then she handed back our first set of lab reports and told the class that one student had gone above and beyond what even she expected and she had therefore gone against her twenty-year no extra credit policy and had given this particular student several extra points. This turn of events did not amuse her, and she stood over me and stared me down while announcing this in front of my glaring classmates. The grade-obsessed perfectionist half of me was supremely proud and was jumping up and down (on the inside) with delirious joy, thinking “Oh, hell YES! I kick ASS!” The normal half of me thought, “Crap. Now they all hate me and think I’m a freak.”

Which I was. Physics Class Me occured when I was working on degree # 2 and was ditching my infant daughter, my husband, my friends and any semblance of my life in order to devote every waking moment (of which there were quite a number as I rarely slept) to achieving academic success. Necessary? Yes, if I wanted to get into the program I was so focused on. No, if I had taken a step back and gotten my priorities straight. Unconsciounable? Absolutely. I ditched my child for about the first three years of her life because I couldn’t just let go a little (unclench) and get a few B’s.

Lest you think the perfection obsession was limited only to the New-Mommy-Staggering- Under-the-Weight-of-Parental-Responsibility Me, I have another sparkling example of School Obsessed Alexa. I had two weeks left of my senior year at Evergreen. There are two important bits in that last sentence: (1) normal people, if they are capable of unclenching, can usually find it within themselves to do so during the last two weeks of senior year; (2) I was at Evergreen, where obsessing about academic perfection is dumb because there are no grades.

Anyway, I had just returned from a photography road trip and had a lot of printing to do in the darkroom before my final project was due to be shown. My then-boyfriend, now-husband asked me to go away with him for the weekend to the San Juan Islands. His friend is a pilot and had offered to fly us there. How romantic. I knew that what my boy really had planned was to propose to me. He had set up this whole thing, his friend was willing to fly us, he had a ring, etc. I played dumb, pretended I just thought he wanted to go waste a weekend of printing time at a bed-and-breakfast, told him I loved him very much and it was a very sweet gesture, but I needed to stay home and rack up as many printing hours as possible in the darkroom before my project was due. I’m usually a very forthright and honest girl (I have no filter between my brain and my mouth, so I tend to say everything the moment I think it), so it’s fortunate I held back and didn’t say, “I’m too busy with school to get engaged to you this weekend. Better luck next time, pal.”

Isn’t that awful? I’m such a bi*ch. I cringe when I recall that stunning moment. For the record, he proposed after I turned in my project and hung my show. We’re living happily ever after and I’ve since learned my lessons regarding life vs. school and I’m a much better mom, wife and friend because of all the learning I’ve done (read: cringe-worthy moments have carved me into a real person).

School is good and working hard is commendable. But the pursuit of perfection to the detriment of your real life is usually not worth it. Find some sort of balance. Minus the crystals and granola. Unless that’s your thing.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Daniel W. Barwick has an interesting essay up on Inside Higher Ed pondering class size and student learning. Classes with a few hundred students crammed into an auditorium are not conducive to student learning but are a more efficient use of college real estate, course scheduling, instructors and teaching assistants. Classes with a decent teacher-to-student ratio mean a better learning and teaching environment, but smaller classes mean more sections. A higher number of sections necessitates a more complicated course-scheduling and classroom-reserving dance. So what are colleges to do? What’s the perfect class size? Barwick points out that while everyone agrees smaller is better and bigger sucks, no one has actually done any research to figure out what the optimum number might be. And since I can’t imagine that the number of people seeking higher education is going to dwindle any time soon, it’s a question worth delving into.

Here are some excerpts from Barwick’s essay:

When faculty here engage in periodic discussions of workload, class size arises repeatedly as a factor that leads both to the success of our students and, unfortunately for faculty, to the need to teach many class sections. (Obviously, the smaller the average class, the more individual class sections are needed to teach the same number of students.) Inevitably, the discussion is cast as a struggle between having high-quality student learning and increasing class size, with the underlying assumption, accepted by all, that these two are mutually exclusive.

Even those who suggest that increased class size is acceptable for particular sections and subjects do not normally argue that students will learn more in these inflated sections; rather, the argument is typically made that the current standard for student learning can be maintained. In all cases, however, the underlying assumption is unchallenged: Large class size is a “problem” that needs to be minimized or mitigated, because smaller classes are better.

Setting aside for a moment whether this assumption is true, it is worthwhile to review how this assumption came to be. The transformation of higher education in the United States during the 20th century is probably a familiar one. Speaking very broadly, in the early part of the century college education was reserved for a much smaller group of people than it is afforded to today. Those who went to college were largely people of privilege and/or perceived intelligence, and for economic or cultural reasons most other people did not attend college. Following the Second World War, the GI Bill allowed (and encouraged) many to attend college who otherwise would have difficulty attending. The number of students increased, colleges grew to accommodate the growth, and the opportunity to go to college was pushed farther and farther into socioeconomic groups that previously were not traditionally college students.

Anyone who doesn’t think this is a good outcome, I would suggest, is nutty. But the transformation brought with it a set of changes, and one of them was a growth in the size of college classes. We see this change in its most extreme forms in the large universities that host Introduction to Psychology or comparable subjects in large lecture halls that seat 300 students. There isn’t even a pretense that one teacher can effectively teach such a large set of students or that the arrangement is ideal; the teacher is equipped with a fleet of teaching “assistants,” and often the class is divided up into smaller sections for part of the weekly instruction, with the smaller sections taught by the assistants. The assistants often divide up the grading as well. Such situations are accepted as a necessary evil that accompanies the large university. I’m not going to argue in favor of such arrangements; I think the educational value of such a classroom setting is dubious when compared to some of the alternatives.

But does this mean that small class size is always desirable? What is fascinating about this question is how little serious effort has been expended to answer it. The truth is that given the importance of educational quality, it is noteworthy how little work has been done to establish whether increased class size in itself is always a detriment.

The current tension between large classes and educational outcomes is an inevitable outcome between two incompatible ideas: Large-scale education delivery using methods designed for small-scale instruction. Educators know that traditional teaching techniques and large-scale instruction are incompatible, but shy away from examining radically different teaching methods because maintaining the status quo is easier than implementing massive change in their day-to-day teaching methods.

My purpose in this essay is not to defend large classes. My purpose is to demonstrate that a decision to offer large classes or to avoid them requires a much larger set of commitments that are rarely discussed. You’d think that large universities would be heavily invested in finding new ways to teach large numbers of students while increasing student learning, but they’re not. You’d think that the current demands of higher education would have driven substantial research into methods of increasing learning while increasing class size, but it has not. What is needed is for those schools and communities that would benefit from the results of such research to fund it and to encourage it. The research may or may not be fruitful, but like any research we cannot know this before we begin. If we are to serve tomorrow’s college students by producing better and better graduates, if we are to charge tuition increases that perpetually exceed inflation, and if we are to continue the noble cause of expanding the circle of those who attend college, that serious research needs to begin now.

Posted by Alexa Harrington