When I was in my early years of teaching, you would have very different experiences depending on which semester you were in. The fall semester you would get classes full of students with relatively good attendance records, who would turn in papers on time, and generally were enthusiastic to be at college and were interested in learning about the material. It didn't seem to matter the particular subject -- the fall semester was generally the good one, with better retention in the classes (a drop rate of less than 10% usually, but almost never as high as 15%) and higher final grades. The spring semester, on the other hand, would have almost double the miss rate, double the drop rate from already smaller enrollments, and lower average grades. Your evaluation marks would also be lower in the spring, too, and I know this because my dean always took great pains to point out to me that I was not communicating as well with my students, etc..
You just knew that spring would be less satisfying an experience for both you and for your students, for a variety of reasons. But that strong differentiation seemed to have gone away perhaps ten years ago or so now. There are still slight saggings in the spring, but generally things are better now, and the two semesters would be more comparable. Until this year. Something has happened this year and I am not completely sure what it is. Follow me below the galactic spirals for some thoughts.
I don't know what had changed, whether it was the weather or the classes I taught or the mood I had when entering the classroom, but things have been different for the past decade of so. Although classes were smaller, I didn't have a 20-25 % drop rate from the beginning of the semester to the end of the tenth week (the last day to drop classes at my university). I would regularly have really exciting classes filled with excited students (although there really is not going to be anything better than watching the announcement of Mubarak resigning in class on that day (live coverage from Cairo) in a class on Cairo -- lightning will not strike two times in that regard). But the spring has not been noticeably weaker than the fall. Until this year, and I know from talking to colleagues that some of them have noticed it as well.
What is going on? I have a few theories but none really explain it all. One is that we have had a really rough spring semester meteorologically. It has been cold and snowy. While cold is not terribly surprising (although it is depressing), so much snow has been rough. It has also been grey. These things affect mood, and my university is unfortunately apparently above average in depression-affected (diagnosed) students. Sometimes it is hard to get out of bed when it is cold, grey, and icy and/or slushy. Even for the people who do not have anything working against them. Yes, the weather is often lousy here, and it is not the best place for pothole-repair, plowed streets, etc., and very few people here seem to shovel their sidewalks (although my neighbors have taken care of me this year and I only once got out there before they had already done both their sidewalk and my own). So it is a pain to get to campus if you live off campus. If you are suffering from depression, the push to get up and out, to follow through on projects, is just that bit less, and if something like Seasonal Affective Disorder is added into the mix, perhaps it explains a bit of a drop in regular attendance.
This also has been a bad season for the flu, and accompanying respiratory distress. I got the flu and I had a flu shot. The same was true for my colleagues. Many of us lost a week of classes (mine was over with before the semester started, but I had the lingering exhaustion and cough; others were not so lucky and their influenza hit in the midst of classes). Students did too. Some emailed me with a bit of their confusion and frustration showing through: "I never get this sick" "So I have this temperature and my roommate says I shouldn't go to class if I am over 100 degrees" and "I really didn't want to cough/vomit/spread my germs to everyone else by coming to class." And when you get hit for a week or so, it is hard to get back into things. You don't have the energy and you are already starting from a deficit.
Those two things are different and worse than the situation the past several years but there are other things that defy such clear explanations. I have students going through senior-itis really badly. It is not that we have not had majors or they are not doing well, but they are worried about the quality of their work and therefore want to have more time to work on it. This pushes everything back and piles it up. And it makes more pressure further down the road. I don't really understand why anyone would do it (unless one has been sick during the run-up to the deadline). Postponing deadlines just means that everything comes due in a shorter time frame. But more than in many years I am getting requests to make exceptions, push back deadlines, etc.
One other thing that has been different this year is the complaint about the amount of work that is needed for preparing for an exam/writing a paper/reading the assignments. A colleague in another school said that she thinks our students sometimes do not think it is important to actually learn things, because they can look things up on their phones, etc. So someone preparing for an exam doesn't have the practice of learning facts, names, events. And when asked to do so, our students don't really know what to do. So why is it lining up this way this semester? I asked her. She said she thinks it has just reached critical mass. They don't anymore know how to memorize anything, so anything you ask them to memorize is requiring them to do something that is very difficult, and they aren't used to doing this and probably aren't used to doing these hard things. This has a bit of a "what's the matter with kids today" ring to it, and wouldn't explain why this spring and not the fall, but it may explain why on a slide identification and comparison exam several students lost points not because they didn't or couldn't write about the slides (in part at least) but because they didn't know the images they were seeing. If you don't recognize something (or ones very much like it) you won't have much to say about it that will be useful.
I also could be responsible for some of the instability in my own classes; I am serving on a national board, so had to miss almost a week of class to go to their conference, then a month later I missed another half a week for another conference. The third conference was last weekend and I gave a paper; I didn't stay for the whole conference because I didn't want to miss any more class. Although I have had such a crazy semester it seems to me that I have been more on top of grading this year than several previous semesters. But that has its good and bad points, too. There is no disguising a bad grade if you are getting back papers and tests on a timely schedule. But it isn't just people who are in my classes; I have gotten messages about other students from colleagues (along the "are there problems with this student in your classes?" or "here is an update on X or Y. who was in your class last semester/is your advisee/etc." Across the board there are issues for several students with attendance and on-time completion of assignments.
I don't know if this is reassuring or not. No it isn't just me. But leaving notes on exams or sending emails to students along the lines of "Please come and talk to me" or "Would you like to talk about your study methods -- I can help with suggestions" or "You did well in previous classes but this material is tripping you up -- come and talk with me about this" isn't helping either. Someone in my department said that she thought they knew they were doing badly and have just pretty much decided to ignore it. While it might not be the strategy I would pick, it is at least a conscious one and in its way a more affirmative one than not knowing something is wrong.
Have you noticed anything substantively different this semester or is it just me?
And to get us through the (suddenly cold again) weekend, here are Paul Lynde and Dick Van Dyke: