Being the "lower performing" student

I don't know what your school calls "it" but I think every school has some sort of euphemism for it.  Most of them are all well intentioned.  That's not what this post is about though.

I will be honest, I have never been in that category as a student.  Never.

Thus, when I enrolled in a second masters degree program and I was conditionally accepted as long as I got a B in my first two classes, I thought, "Meh, easy! I haven't gotten below an A- in a class since... maybe ever."

I think I have worked hard in school, but I also had very few barriers to my success.  I was not diagnosed with a disability.  I grew up with English as my native language.  I always had a bed to sleep in and food to eat.  At the time that seemed normal, but I know that really made me pretty privileged.

Thus when I was working on my first grad assignment for this program after school on a Friday from 3:30-11:30 PM, AND not really experiencing any success, I was thrown off a bit.  Yes, I had perhaps waited until the last second to do it (it was due at midnight on Friday), but I surely thought 8 hours would be enough time for a first assignment.

I turned in something.  I knew it wasn't correct.  But it was SOMETHING.  I know how to play school and turning in something is better than turning in nothing.

The next morning at 8AM the next assignment was released.  It wasn't looking any more promising.  Again, I think I didn't understand 1 out of 10 of the words in the assignment prompt.  Generally, that's not a good sign.

Nevertheless, fast forward another 6.5 days and I still found myself on a Friday night at nearly midnight after a week of teaching submitting work that was not great, to the instructors.

This pattern continued each week.  I was given very little timely feedback so I had no idea how I was doing in the course, but my gut told me it wasn't good.

At one point we had a group project where I was paired with 3 other people: one person working on his PhD in computer science, one from industry, and another grad student at the school who majored in CS.  I was relieved to have other humans to talk to but also felt very out of place.  I was the only female in the group.  I was also the only person of my ethnicity in the group.  I was also the only person who had no (or very little) formal education in computer science. 

Normally, I am the "take charge" person in the group.  Sometimes, to a fault.  I would rather see things get done well than hope that someone else follows through.  But, here, in this group, that was not happening.  I started the meeting, I took notes, I helped construct the agenda, I asked questions, I proof-read documents we were turning in, but I did very little (read: "none") of the programming.   The night before our project was due (8 AM on a Saturday), my group was working on it.  I had finished all the proofreading; programming was the only thing that needed to be done and I had no idea how to contribute.   It was near 1:00 AM when I told the group, I was tapping out.  I told them I was going to bed but if they need me to proof read or update the documents, to let me know.

It felt gross.

I wanted to help the team but I couldn't.  I did not have the skills I needed to help.  It was just laughable to think about how I would help them.  In my mind, the most likely result would be that I would mess up some section of the task unknowingly when trying to help.  They were up until 6AM working on the task.  I know they were up that late because I woke up at every group text message between the remaining members.

The rest of the course followed the same progression of "Panic! Do your best. Submit with fingers crossed. Repeat."  Feedback was so delayed that I had no idea how close I was to the "B" that I needed to continue.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue.  AND, if I wasn't close to that B, I didn't want to spend any more hours on a Friday stressing out about a task.

It wasn't until 2 weeks past the end of the semester that I got my final grade.  It was a B.

That B says that I learned what agile development is and how to make a UML diagram from requirements gathered from a user, but those things weren't the most important take-aways for me.  Here is what I REALLY learned:

1. It is not any fun being the "lower performing" student.
   

Ok, there are some sub-lessons-learned from that, including:

1. Soft skills enable hard skills.  When I didn't know 10% of the words in an assignment, I knew how to google them.  I believed I could chip away at it.  I knew if I could figure out this one sentence, that would allow me to do one part of the task I was assigned.  I have pretty high self-efficacy, which allowed me to be as successful as I was.  But again, I never was that low performer.  Had a run into things I didn't know how to do before, of course, but was it this frequent, never.  Those small stumbling blocks I had occasionally faced in my past enabled me to keep going in this course.  What I don't know is how to get students to be able to have this persistence.  I had to deal with this reality for one semester.  Imagine that being your reality for 10 years of schooling.   I don't think I would be interested in picking up a pencil during math class either.  Why bother.  I am not advocating for lowering the bar for students but we cannot keep hitting kids with the bar - that's abuse.  
2. It might not be that the low performer doesn't care, it is just that they don't know what to do.  I think as teachers we have all had those students who just don't really do their work in group work tasks.  They don't appear to do the cognitive mental lifting.  They may even seem actively disengaged or distracted.  In reality, they might not know what they can do.  This was certainly the case for me.  I wanted to help so much on a group task but it was not within my reach.  I did what I could but this still took a lot of initiative from me and also a belief that I could participate in an effective way.  I have had a few heart-to-heart conversations with students to get them to participate but to be honest, I don't give them concrete things to do often enough.  I also am not sure if I am ok with them participating in superficial ways like I did.  We want them to be integral to the team, but if a student is far behind, then what?  I think as a teacher I can be more concrete with my expectations and be more thoughtful about how each student participates.
3. Broadening the definition of "smart" still falls short of being inclusive.  In Knowles and with Jo Boaler we talked about assigning competence as a way to increase equitable teaching practice and access to the content.  The idea is that if we think of being "smart" as just getting the answer quickly, we are not allowing students multiple ways to show their "smarts" - we need to recognize the more subtle ways of being "smart" in a classroom.  That happened once in my group where we choose one person's diagram to tweak and the group choose mine.  It did feel pretty good when they choose mine, but that was probably the highlight of my contributions.  Thinking about it, if someone told me, "The way you documented our meeting in those notes really helped our group stay on task" or "That's a great question, that makes me think XX..."  that may have helped feel better about the course - had that come from the instructor, I probably would have felt really great!  But I still didn't have success with the core content.  I know CS (like math) is more than just programming, and I would still rather have strong soft skills than strong hard skills, but I was there to learn the hard skills and I don't think that happened. Connecting to the classroom, I think this is rough to change.  Recognizing "smarts" in multiple ways is a short-term fix.  Long term, the fix is more complicated. 
4. Support networks.  Yeah, they matter.  I joked with my sister that I should have been dating a computer science guy this semester - we would have had a lot of quality time together.  It is true, I would have learned a lot more with a trusted friend/mentor to help me.  The instructor was unavailable to the extent I needed them.  At one point, I could not figure out why the software wouldn't let me "run" a program.  Literally the "run" button was grayed out - I couldn't click it!  I googled it and tried 100 different things.  I then called a friend's boyfriend who worked in industry.  I went to his house and he was able to fix it.  It took him 5 minutes.  It took me at least 2 hours of research and I was still unsuccessful.   There were several times where I found myself banging my head against a wall for too long before calling this friend to have him fix it.  These weren't even content related really, just things I didn't know how to do yet.  Our students come with a variety of support networks and it influences what they are able to do on a daily basis outside of class. 

Overall, I am glad I took the course.  It was certainly an empathy builder.  I also learned things I can bring back to my classroom content wise, but I think the real sticking points were these last four.  In some ways, being the lower performer is tougher psychologically and intellectually.  Having empathy is a great place to start, but not a great place to stay.  These take-aways have given me some good next steps, but there is still a lot I am unsure about.

Finally, for the record, I took a semester off from the grad program now.  I am hoping to re-join in the summer or next fall.