Education - getting your money’s worth
Are you someone who hates wasting? I am. We eat leftovers. I’m constantly turning off lights, adding water to the bottom of the soap, milk to the last of the salad dressing, you get the idea. I love a good deal and really have to restrain myself when there’s a good BOGO because I can be tempted even when I don’t need it – just because it’s a good deal – which makes it not a good deal. I always want to get my money’s worth.
One of the most ironic things about my life is I grew up to be a teacher and go to school my whole life, specifically, an English teacher. The first thing that makes this ironic is I used to quit school all the time. Growing up, my family lived across the street from the elementary school I attended and so whenever school wasn’t going particularly well for me on any given day, I quit and went home. For years, if another student commented on my mis-matched clothes (I liked to get creative and mix it up, and swap out what my mom laid out for me after she left for work), my extremely hairy legs, or I just didn’t really feel like going back to class after recess, I’d just hide in the huge drainage pipe on the playground when everyone else went inside and then sneak across the street to hang out with my dog and read books in my room. Never one time did anyone mention the fact that I wasn’t there for the afternoon. Of course, I had to pay attention to which shift my stepdad was working because I could only do this when he was working days. He was home when he was working swing-shift and sleeping on the graveyard shift. Then, when I was in seventh grade, my sixth-grade teacher had recommended me for the language arts challenge program in junior high. The challenge teacher didn’t agree that I belonged and made my mom take time off work to come to a conference where she told both of us, “she is not gifted or talented and doesn’t belong in this challenge program. She’s an over-achiever and knows how to work hard but doesn’t belong here. I can’t kick her out, but I recommend she move down.” It didn’t fill me with academic confidence and the junior high was too far from home to quit, so I decided to stay to prove her wrong. Finally, the last ironic thing about me going to school every day for my life is the fact that I chose to be an English teacher. My English teacher for my sophomore year was perhaps one of my least favorite teachers of all time, even worse than the seventh grade challenge lady. She was prissy, way over dressed for the occasion of teaching high school and mailed it in with the lesson plan of having us write thought slips for her to read aloud every Friday. But, after 15 years teaching high school and college English, I now work as an academic advisor at a small liberal arts university, and I love it. Partly because despite the ironies of quitting school several times a week for the first several years, being told I don’t belong, and not having English teachers I connected with, I love school, learning, and everything that goes with it. As a student and even more so as a teacher, I am dumbfounded when students don’t go to class, don’t do the reading, don’t do the work, and otherwise take a pass on the opportunity to learn.
My colleagues and I discuss this phenomenon all the time. We read the educational research that tries to understand how and why some students thrive and others don’t, what students need to be ready to learn, what fills or is missing from their invisible backpacks that enables or makes it difficult for them to navigate the complicated educational systems – particularly at the higher-ed level, what kinds of social and systemic issues are impacting their ability to succeed, what familial supports they need, what kinds of emotional and mental health concerns are preventing them from being fully present and able to engage in learning – the list is very long. Of course, not every potential support or detriment is present for every student. In one of these conversations, one of my colleagues said she was talking with her husband about a student who was not showing up and he said, “education is one of the few things where we don’t try to get our money’s worth.”
And yet with all of the considerations listed above that make engaging in learning difficult, his statement really struck a chord in me, I think because I am always trying to get my money’s worth, and I so love learning. I work at a private college where tuition is rather steep. Students and their parents are paying close to $36,000 a year for a college education. Many are taking out considerable loans. What made his statement ring so true is I frequently hear students tell me the reason they are falling behind in their classes is because they don’t go, they don’t do the reading, they don’t do the work, or they didn’t study because they were distracted by friends, phones, games, or they just aren’t motivated to do the work. This one really gets me. They talk about wanting to find their motivation like it’s on a shelf at Bartell’s down the street. When I hear a student tell me they chose to take a nap rather than go to class, my mind quickly figures out the cost of that nap in tuition wasted. But more than the tuition wasted, I am always struck by the missed opportunity to learn, to become better at thinking, better at solving problems, better able to understand themselves, others, and the world they are moving into.
To make this point, at the last orientation for new students I conducted, I had one of my colleagues sit in the front of the auditorium while I was presenting. He had a full meal from Chick-Fil-A. I asked him to make a production of laying it all out. The fries smelled delicious. He opened the chicken sandwich and carefully spread the special sauce all over the bun. He opened another package of sauce and dipped his first waffle fry and ate it. Then he thumped the straw on the table to push the paper down enough to be able to pull it from the wrapper before putting it in the dark, sugary drink. He slurped some up and set it back down before taking his first bite of the warm, tender chicken. He ate three bites of the sandwich, two more fries, and then carefully wrapped it all back up and threw it away. Of course, the students were paying absolutely no attention to what I was saying. I mean, they were trying, but they were so distracted by his eating. That is until he threw most of it away. Then they weren’t even trying to pay attention to me at all. One of them interrupted to ask, “why did he just throw that away?”
“Ah, I’m so glad you asked!” I answered. I turned to him and asked, “Robert, why on earth would you go to all the trouble of driving to Chick-fil-A, paying good money for a meal, carefully preparing to eat it, take only a few bites, and then throw it away?”
To which he said, “I dunno.”
That really got them. I asked, “does anyone know what I was talking about when Robert threw his food away?”
One student had the gist, “something about going to class.”
“Yes, exactly. The importance of going to class. As you may have guessed, Robert is not just eating and throwing away Chick-fil-A in front of you while I’m talking for no reason. What are your thoughts about what you just saw?”
The students were catching on. They were horrified by the waste of something so valuable to them as a Chick-fil-A meal. Then I made sure to make clear that college is not for everyone and not required for a meaningful life, but if you’re going to enroll in college and pay for what you, your parents, or the loans you’re taking and will have to pay back whether you get a degree or not hope will lead to meaningful work that will support your life, then taking a nap instead of going to class, not doing the reading, not doing the work, trading Netflix or TikTok or your video game of choice or fear of failure rather than asking for help is like throwing away that meal you just paid for. If you are going to pay for it, please, for God’s sake, get your money’s worth. I understand the challenges and barriers that make learning and showing up very difficult, and we have all kinds of resources to help with those: nearly free counseling, academic life coaching, free tutoring, free research assistants, etc. I want them to show up to learn not just the specific content of each class, but learn how to think, how to communicate, how to solve problems. These are the skills that transcend subject matter and will nourish their lives; they have mine.
