Helping freshmen acclimatize to college (opinion)

As students enter college over the next few weeks, we who teach them must recognize that in many ways, traditional-aged freshmen react to their first college experience in the same way as students. sixth-graders do this in their first year of college.

Of course, I don’t mean that 18-22 year olds behave like 12-13 year olds all over the place. Beginning students are certainly more sophisticated than sixth graders, and their emotional maturity is more mature as well.

Nonetheless, there are some similarities that we need to keep in mind when teaching our new freshmen upon their arrival on campus. This perspective can help us maintain our sanity, strengthen our patience with our learners, and help these newcomers acclimatize and become an integral part of the college community.

I taught seventh and eighth grade English for 14 years, four of which were at a small rural Illinois college / high school and ten at a middle school in downtown Houston. At that time, I observed this phase of life transition from childhood to adolescence. I also started teaching part time for my community college. After a few years, I started having eighth graders in my freshman writing classes at college. And I have noticed a number of parallels between students starting in college and those starting in college.

The sixth graders are no longer children, but they are certainly not adults. The adults around them, parents and teachers alike expect them to behave like adults, but they don’t yet know how. Adults want these students to be more independent, but when they try to act independently, they make mistakes and are criticized for it. So sixth graders come back to childish answers because that’s what they already know.

Likewise, many students are no longer adolescents, but neither are they fully emotionally mature adults or experienced professionals. The adults around them, parents and teachers, expect them to behave like adults and scholars, but they don’t yet know how. Adults want these students to be more independent, but when they try to act independently, they make mistakes and are criticized for it. The first years therefore come back to the reactions of adolescents because that is what they already know.

In practice, this all means that although they differ in age and maturity, the two groups share similar challenges and problems.

A changed physical environment. For sixth graders, the transition to college is quite dramatic and traumatic. Fifth graders are always in the same room with a teacher and the same group of children all day. Each student is assigned a desk for their books and supplies. The class goes to recess, lunch and assemblies as a unit.

However, sixth-graders often have to move between multiple rooms during a three- to five-minute transition period to see another teacher and attend classes with different students, changing throughout the day. Seating can be assigned, but students do not leave their personal belongings in the same seat or desk after the course is over. Instead, they have a locker in a hallway – another stressful stop during the short transition period. Students are not expected to stay together during lunch or assemblies. Likewise, freshmen come from a high school environment typically consisting of a single building and are now expected to roam a college campus across acres of property with classes in various locations.

Different academic expectations. Sixth graders come to meet the expectations of a teacher in a situation where they now have to deal with several different instructors, each with different demands regarding lags, behavior, homework, quizzes, group work. and other factors. Likewise, the first years of university must face new and different requirements in terms of attendance, handing in homework, reading exercises and work for information (no grade), schoolwork outside. of lessons, use of time between lessons, etc.

New social environments. Since they have already spent most of their time with a teacher and the same students each year, the circle of friends of sixth-graders can be quite small when they enter college. There, however, several elementary schools often combine, creating a much larger student body. Likewise, the old circle of friends of college freshmen may be much smaller than the college or university population, with students of different ages, ethnicities, economic backgrounds, and nationalities. varied. Add to that the new freedoms that freshmen have by being away from home for the first time, and social life offers strong competition to study hard for class.

More academic independence. Students in both groups have to do more work on their own. Use time between and outside of class, get help from tutors, study with classmates outside of class, work with classmates during class, complete homework and hand it in on time, ask for help when they need it – all of this can be difficult for sixth and early grades.

More difficult courses. Schoolwork gets harder in the sixth grade and gets harder every year. Instead of relatively simple exercises like pairing pictures and numbers and completing tests, students are increasingly required to demonstrate more complex applications of the knowledge they have mastered. Likewise, college no longer requires simply the levels of basic knowledge and understanding of Bloom’s taxonomy but rather the levels of application, analysis, synthesis, and assessment. The more andragogical teaching and adult learning strategies of the case method, Socratic dialogue and confrontation also engage students in higher-order thinking to which they are not accustomed from their previous high school studies.

A shift from external motivation to internal motivation. The sixth graders are motivated more by external motivation than internal motivation: I clean my room because mom told me rather than because I want to; I do my laundry because mom told me; I mow the garden because papa told me; I do my homework because my teacher does the homework and my parents do me rather than because I want to learn.

Likewise, freshmen are motivated more by program deadlines than because they want to do the job on their own. It’s the difference between learning the material for score / grade and learning it just for fun. It is the difference between teachers’ reminders and memory for themselves, between the desire for a high GPA and the desire to learn content and skills.

New study habits. Their experience in elementary school conditioned sixth graders to do homework before leaving school so that they would not have homework, except perhaps for special projects. Likewise, the previous Kindergarten to Grade 12 experience in the early years of college often allowed them to do less work outside of class and seek additional credit points without studying much. Many might improvise or pretend to make their way through class time, and still “do it” and “do well” in their class notes. But in college, they increasingly find that they have to devote more time to study outside of class to get the best grades and learn the material. Procrastination is always at work on homework, but the consequences can be more painful than they are used to from past experiences. Underestimating time management for academic work is a major pitfall.

Teaching suggestions

Teaching first and sophomore college students can be frustrating because we professors say the same thing semester after semester, student after student, and they just can’t seem to get it. But it goes with the job. Each semester brings us new students who have never heard it before, and they need to hear it in many voices for it to permeate. We ask too much if we expect them to think and behave like the more experienced third and fourth. – one-year or graduate students who know their way and who have accepted the new expectations.

Another consideration for those of us who teach in college is that it’s more about working with non-academics to turn them into academics than trying to help immature people grow up. We expect the early years to be as interested in the subject as we or our graduate students are rather than acknowledging that they are newbies yet undecided.

So what are we going to do? We should:

• Absoutely not treating our first and second year students as if they were sixth year students. But we have to look at this period of their life, the first two years in college, as a predictable, expected transition stage and help them navigate and not stress about it.
• Be patient with the continual parade of student requests for information already in the program or displayed in the learning management system, for additional credits, for accepting overdue work, to offer 1,001 apologies for not doing so. not complete an assignment, etc. Their previous schooling preconditioned them to these default habits. Do not give in to such requests, but help students face their choices and the consequences that flow from them.
• Be clear and stick to higher expectations so that students, too, can come to see them as worthy of pursuit – and ultimately realize that they can set higher expectations for themselves. themselves. Completing homework before the due date is good career practice and a valuable work habit that lasts well beyond college and schoolwork assignments.
• Encourage students in their abilities to build self-confidence and work with them on areas in which they are weak.
• Encourage them to take on the challenge of more difficult academic work and show them how to accomplish it in a practical way that has visible results.
• Help them be more aware of the need to adapt to change and how to improvise solutions to new problems.

And rest assured that they don’t stick around for the first few years. The first few years experience how college works and progress from there, succeeding in ways they can’t imagine – and, in fact, in ways we can’t imagine either.