Student Priorities

On a lark, I went to this website:
http://howmuchdotattooscost.com/

Oh, my.  I had no idea tattoos were that expensive. 

Am I the only one who wants to have this conversation?

Student:  Mrs. Tucker, I don't have a textbook.  What book do we need.
Me:  It's the fifth week of the semester.  It's on the syllabus.  How have you gotten this far into the semester without a book.
Student:  I didn't have the money.
Me:  How much did you pay for that tattoo?
Student:  $700.
Me:  And you can't afford textbooks?

Granted, textbooks are expensive, often ridiculously.  But so are the tattoos.

I learned a long time ago that for most people in this country, money and affording are a matter of priorities.  I had a coworker who complained about $80.00 for taking her child to the doctor and getting a prescription but had no problem with spending $1000 for fancy office furniture that she didn't need.  People on food stamps have smartphones. 

So, it follows that students have the same values. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflecting on Reflection in Learning

Reflection is the subject of my next couple of presentations, so here are my recent jottings. Hopefully a reader can make some sense of them;however, the whole point of this post is that reflection can follow a structure but will not necessarily create a structured record. The reflection record will need to be reshaped to be palatable for a "judge" or "critic" or "instructor." Reflection tends to be framed negatively. If we dig too deep we will only find bad stuff; if we reflect on teaching practice, we will focus on what failed rather than succeeded. Why? Assessment focuses on finding the nonlearners and changing to get more learners, but it ignores that most of the students did learn, so why were there successes? Leads to burnout. Boud & Walker’s idea of validation not well developed but relevant. It is most close to critical thinking—testing it against other knowledge, theories, internal consistency, other data (other learner’s data) Ref
Read more

The LAST Word on Learning Styles

That title might be extreme, but this article nails it, plus giving some good links to other research. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/ What is mostly important here is that we do know what universally works in learning (time, multiple modalities, application rather than rote, spaced out study) rather than an overfocus on "what makes me special."
Read more

Lessons in Leadership Failure

This is the outline for a presentation I gave at Toastmasters recently. It was to finish a pathway in their curriculum, but it also my life. There is no lack of books, articles, magazines, and speakers about leadership. A quick look on Amazon shows there are X number of books with leadership in the title.  Ive even written one. But I would venture to say all of them have one thing in common: the writer thinks they are a good leaders and have this leadership things figured out. Although my topic today is leadership I don’t think I have it figured out and recently I learned a lot about failure in leaders and in myself as a leader.  I was asked to lead a large part of our accreditation. I’ve spoken on this before that it’s called a Quality Enhancement Plan, whereby the institution has to pick a problem and construct a specific plan to address it.  I’ve had a year not to reflect—or not—on how it went and what I learned about myself.  I could share  lot, but in the time I have
Read more