Review of My Freshman Year –What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

Abstract

This book is the personal account of an anthropology professor who spends her sabbatical year as a freshman at “Any U”. While I am certain that many readers of this volume spend a lot of time trying to piece together the clues to the identity of Any U, the characteristics of the students at Any U are close enough to those of the students at the universities where we teach to make this volume interesting without searching for the real identity of Any U or Rebekah Nathan. When I selected this book to review, I hoped that the book would provide an extensive discussion of how becoming a student changed her teaching. Unfortunately, this is a minor topic in this volume but there is substantial information about today's students that can provoke changes in your teaching. Since the book explores the freshman year experience, those who teach only students in advanced courses in the major may not be as familiar with some of the characteristics of the Any U students as those who teach lower level non-major courses. Nonetheless, the snapshot of today's students and their approach to education should be entertaining and educational to all teachers. It should be required reading for any of us who pine for the “motivated” students that we used to teach. The book begins with freshman orientation. The experiences described should provoke a thoughtful look at how our programs are often designed and sometimes only useful for the “normal” student. In this case, the emphasis is on how silly some of these are for a “mature” student, but it is not a difficult jump to wondering how well our programs are suited to our increasingly diverse student populations. Laugh with the author, but think about how we can be more inclusive. Chapter 6 is entitled “The Art of College Management”. Here we get the author's take on time management and college or perhaps life management. The section on “Limiting Workload” should be required reading for all of us. Unfortunately, it has not yet provided me with the inspiration on how to get the students to manage the workload of other courses and dedicate their souls to my course. The last chapter of the book finally addresses how the experience as a student has changed her as a professor. Perhaps this would have been more enlightening if she were teaching something other than a “large” (90 students) introductory course. I, too, would probably have noted things that I had already been doing. She does briefly address “dumbing down” and presents quotes from students who valued courses that were tough or boring but gave the students useful knowledge. The single take-home message for me from this chapter was that I need to carefully think through the course/workload management strategies of my students and then design my assignments, point allocations, tests, and so on in ways that will provide for the best possible alignment between what I want them to work most on and what they actually work most on. If you quickly pass over the details that only an ethnographer cares about, this is an entertaining book that provides substantial insight into today's student. It will stimulate you to think about what you could do better to maximize the learning of today's students.