Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello and welcome. My name is Luke Stephens and I'm a tutor with Gordon
State Success Center. With me is professor Chad Davies who teaches
her at Gordon. Dr. Davies has been teaching students for 20 years and leads
several Success Center workshops each yea. My name is Andi Kirby and
I'm also a tutor at the Gordon State College Success Center.
We're together today to talk about some of the ways that college is different from
high school and how students can work to bridge the transition
more successfully. This video is the second in a series
that will help you, the viewer, aquire the tools that you will need.
Dr. Davies, thanks for being here. My pleasure. In your last video
you talked about college being different from high school and you uesed the analogy of
high school being more like a sit-down restaurant while college is more like a fast food place
where you do your ordering directly from the menu. That's right. Yeah.
So can you be more specific as to some of the differences
and how students can understand these. Sure, I think the first
thing we want to sort of talk about is that there are asumptions that get made
about the students in a college enviroment.
There's about three of those historically that lead to aset up
in college that is very different from highschool. So the frist thing is that we generally
assume students are well prepared to do higher level
work. And that kind of includes the idea that a student
is able to read material to gain knowledge.
The student is able to communicate
in written or oral forms well enough to make their ideas
clear. And the student is numerically literate at some level.
so that they understand numbers and what they mean and some of those sorts of things.
So, that's the first
kind of assumption we make. The second one is that we assume since college
is a voluntary thing, it's not mandatory, we don't make students come to
college, that the student is fairly well motivated
right? To be here. They have chosen to be here. They want
to be here. They are motivated to do what needs to be done.
OK. And then the final thing we assume, the third thing we tend to
assume about a student is that the student is fairly well disciplined. In other words
students who come to college have had to go through
or some of them would say maybe "survive" a leangthy
12 year process where they are given work and they have to go to classes
and they sort of have to keep up with things. And through that process the students
are going to develop a certain amount of self- discipline that we can count on
in establishing structures here at the college leverl.
So that they can be successfull.
Now if the student is deficiant in one or more of those areas, they are either going to have to
work harder, or they are going to have to do some background work
to get up to the college level and up to the college speed so that they can
be successful in those college level courses. So that's first set of things that I think you're
want to understand. So what's the first thing that you think a new student will notice in a college
as being different based on these assumptions. Well, the first big thing
I think that almost everybody--when I give seminars at the college I ask this question
from freshman students after they have been here for a couple of weeks--is
almost the very first thing that comes out, is how much less structure
there is at college then there was at high school. When you go to high school
high school is a very structured enviroment. Pretty much everyone gets there about the same time
around eight in the morning. Everyone stays until around the same time, about three o'clock
in the afternoon. Everyone goes from one class to the next class all at about the same time
usually in one hour chuncks. That time is very structured.
OK. There is very little free time
during that roughly seven hour period where
you're at school and usually it's around lunch time, right?
OK. Once the student leaves the school, unless they participate
in aftter school or extra cirricular acivities, that time
is very much there time. The student leaves the school and
they don't have to worry about too much--they may have a little homework they are taking home, but that
home work might only be at most an hour even.
And depending on the classes they are doing they may not even have that much
OK. When you come to college of course, it's
so different. Every student is basically
you know, on their own schedule, and that schedule is
so much less structured. Some students come at one time, some students
come at a different time--it's just very, very different.
So, that also extends to scheduling
structure, doesn't it? Yeah, it really does. I think the first thing is that
since every student has a
different set of goals here, every student is going to set up a different
longer and shorter term schedule. Somebody who
say wants to study and major in business is going to have a different set of programs
requirements than somebody majoring in psychology. So when we tell
the student in business that you have to take social science courses to fufill your degree
those students may take an economics class, whereas the psychology
students, those students make take things like sociology
or anthropology or something like that. They are both social science area courses, but
they are going to be a little different depending on the major. Now since that curriculum
is more flexible class scheduling becomes
very much more flexible. Each student builds their own schedule which means
that one student may take classes five days a week
a different may take classes two or three days a week
one student may take classes and get them all done in the monrning so they can get
to work in the afternoon or maybe do some homework in the afternoon so they can go to work in the evening
whereas another student may say, well look, I've got some kids an child care
responsibilities and so to get my kids off to school I can't really
do morning classes so maybe I'll look at something more toward the afternoon
And if it is a working student, they may take night classes, and the
thing is that means that each student is going to create a schedule
that works for them, their goals, their life, the things that are
going around those. So, that means that
each student has to build a schedule based on
what they are doing, not what their friends are doing, right?
Go ahead. And just because one person is taking a certain class, that doesn't
mean that it's the best class for someone else. Right. Exactly. It's kind of what we were talking about
there just a few minutes ago. This is why we have academic
advisers. Every student when they come to Gordon State will be assigned
an academic adviser. Very frequently those academic advisers will be
acdemic advisers with understanding or experience in their program or major area
And those advisers are going to give the student academic advice
so that the student makes good progress towards their
academic degree. Therefore it is really important that the student
follow those instructions. Instead of saying well
gee, I don't feel like taking a chemistry class. My friends aren't taking a chemistry class
I don't feel like taking a chemistry class because it doesn't fit into the schedule
very well necessarily, and the adviser says you've got to take that, it's probably a good idea
that you need to take that. So what's another difference. OK. The
second difference that is probably really
aparent after you get that first sense of the way flexability
happens is what I call time on task. The very different way
we structure time on task here at
Gordon State with a professor.
Now does this mean college classes require less work than high school classes?
No, actually it doesn't. And this is probably the hardest misconception
I think that folks who aren't experienced with the college enviroment have to break
Student comes here and they sign up for classes and they start counting
up the number of hours they are in class, and like I said, in high school you were there for 5 days
a week, you were there 7 hours a day. You were in class maybe 35 or 40 hours a week.
And you've come in and signed up for maybe a 15 hour credit load here and all of sudden you
look at and count out the class hours in your schedule and you say oh! I'm only in class 15
hours a week, college must not be as hard as high school.
Unfortunatly, that's a really big misconception.
So, can you give us an example? Absolutly.
Probably the best example for you to sort of wrap your head around
and I don't know so much in high school now how this works, but when I was a high school student for a long time in high school
there was this class called algebra 2 and you guys may have taken algebra
2. Algebra 2 you would meet 5 days a week
for an hour and you would do that for 36 weeks over the course of a year
So if you add up all that time it comes out to be about 180 hours.
We have a course at Gordon, somewhat similar, right?
We cover a little more material in a little more depth and then we ask the
students to apply that to more complex problems, because of course
we call it college algebra, MATH 1111. Now, college
Algebra is taught in a one semester format, so if we take typical one semester format
course, you are going to meet three days a week for one hour
each of those days and it's going to be 15 weeks. And that's only 45 hours.
And so,
that means what's going to happen is there's
every bit as much work because they are the same basic course
right? Maybe even a little more in the college course because we want you to be able to apply it to more
complex situations, right?
So that's a big difference. 180 hours of
high school vs. 45 hours of college. Right, so
the clas isn't easier. There isn't less material to learn. What we
have really done is started to push things out of
the classroom. So the students
still need to schedule time to do the work. Yes, exactly. We
assume that the student, based on the 3 initial assumptions we talked about, we assume the student
is going to be able to better schedule their lives, righ?
And so, we devlelop what we call, and this is just a rule of thumb,
What we call teh 3 to 1 rule. And the idea of the 3 to 1 rule is
for every 1 credit hours you schedule,
or you sign up for, you need to spend three hours a week on
that class. Right?
Doing the minimum things. The way that is going to work is one
of those hours is in the classroom and the other two are used to
study for exams and taking care of the homework and writing the papers... all of
the kinds of things you normally do to make sure the class gets taken care of.
If a student signs up to take 15 credit hours
the should expect and plan to spend 45 hours per week
on school related activities. Yeah. That's exactly the calculation.
Another way I tell students to or talk about this is
if you take a class, plan to spend
one hour per day working on that class outside
of a classroom meeting time. So can students take a day
off? That's always a great question right? And I always, you know,
I usually tell my students here is what you are going to do. Let's say you've taken
15 credit hours. You are taking 5 classes. That's a 15 hour load.
What I tell students to do is in that case you are going to
spend one hour per day in each of those classes six days per week and then take one day
off. I think that is probably a good idea to take one day where you don't worry about
school, you don't think about school. You get other stuff taken care of. There are other things in your life
but that assumes that you spend the other six days working
on your classes. Now some students might ask, but isn't college about having
fun? Oh, yeah, absolutley. There is certainly a sense in
college that part of the college experience is a lot enjoyment
and a lot of recreational activities and that sort of thing. And I don't think any of
us professors have a problem with students who really want to enjoy those things.
But if we look at this, if you signed up for those
five classes, those 15 credit hours, what you are probably going to do is on average take
about three classes on a monday wednesday Friday setting. You're going to take 2 classes
on a Tuesday/Thursday setting. That means you are going to spend three hours in a class
room with a professor. You are then going to spend 5 hours
One hour per class per day outside of class
That gets you to 8 hours a day, which is about, it's only a little bit
more time then you were spending in high school. You're going to do that five days a week
plus the five hours that are on either Sunday or Saturday
and what that's like is a full time job. 15 credit hour
load is about a full time job. That still leaves you plenty of
time in the day to do some other things, but make sure you get your
work taken care of before you do other things. One way that I sort of, you know, and I talked about
with our business majors is the idea of you can think
of your classroom meeting time as comitee meetings where you get together with other members
of the comitee to talk about all the work you're getting done and what you're doing. And, oh yes, I worked on
this and here is a progress on that and all that. The rest of the time
it's like you go back to your office, wherever you happen to study, and do
all the work you have to do to prepare for the next comitee meeting that you're going to have where
I'm going to give a progress report and here are updates from this guy and where are we at on this thing.
That kind of thing. So I think that's probably a reasonably good way
to think about that to where you create a balence when you are studying.
Well someone once told me that if you just get your work done you'll be fine in college.
It that true? You know it's funny that you mention that. I can remember
my dad and I when I was a high school senior sitting around our dinner table and my dad telling me
that exact thing. And I wish that were true, and it's not, unfortunatly.
Why not? I think
there is really a direct, a strong correlation between how
much a student works and how good of a grade they get but as a professor
I have no ability to measure how hard a student works. That's not
something I could do. Unless I was really creepy right? Set up a web camera
and they had to work at a certain place and it was like some 1984 George
Orwell kind of Hunger Games thing. Right? I mean
there is no way I can measure how hard a student works. And, you know, it may
only take you an hour to master a concept and it may take you two. I can't
measure any of that and it wouldn't be appropriate for me to measure that.
So instead what I can measure is what I kind of mentioned a moment ago
I can measure whether you master the material or not. If you master the material
that's great. If you don't master not so much.
So most of the grades in a class will come from exams?
Yeah, I mean there is going to be a series of assesments, but probably the what I call
the one hour exam is the most common form of assesment that
we have. You sometimes will have come in class work or some homework
You will ocasionally have in class papers or essays
A big thing in a lot of the humanities type classes is that you will have
out of class larger papers that you have to do. But in all
of those cases what we are focusing on as the professors is
measuring how much of the material
the student has mastered and have the mastered it at the right level.
Which is usually not hey, have you memorized a bunch of information?
It's can you understand what you've memorized. Can you apply that
to say solve problems, or critically think, or be creative, or
whatever the case may be. If a student can do that, they're going to get great grades.
No matter how hard they work. If a student doesn't master the material
at the right level, again, it doesn't matter how hard they work, they're not
going to get a good grade. As I said before though, there is a pretty strong correlation between
students who put in the time and how much material they master.
Is there anything else? I think at this point that should cover
the basics. Now there are going to be some specfic things we're going to talk about.
I think a little later, but we've got enough right now I think for folks to think about.
Maybe we can cover that in a later video. OK, well thank you again
and thanks to our viewers who have taken the time to watch these videos.
Look for more videos about how to make the most of your college experience
on the Gordon State College Student Success Center YouTube Channel.