The Importance of Character in the Classroom (I)

The Marlowshpere (#16)

I ended last week’s blog “Texts, Lies & the Internet” with the following:

Part of the professor’s role (any teacher for that matter) is to keep raising the bar. Does a line from British poet Robert Browning apply: “Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” If we accept cheating and plagiarism as a way of college student life, we will end up with a generation that perceives doing as little as possible and relying on others to do the heavy lifting is the way to get ahead and get through life.

Of course, it isn’t.

 And there’s more to the story.
The Role of Character

Toward the end of the 1995 Rob Reiner directed movie “The American President,” actor Michael Douglas, playing the President of the United States Andrew Shephard, enters the White House briefing room and addresses a packed room of journalists. His ostensible motivation is to respond to accusations and innuendo by rising Republican presidential candidate Senator Bob Rumson (played by Richard Dreyfuss) regarding his “character.” The root cause of these public political barbs is the deepening relationship between the widowed President Shephard and lobbyist Sydney Helen Wade (played by Annette Bening).

In his presentation to the gathered journalists, President Shephard makes the following statement:

For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being president of this country was, to a certain extent, about character, and although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I’ve been here three years and three days, and I can tell you without hesitation: Being President of this country is entirely about character.

Shephard’s identification of character at the core of his role of leader of theUnited Statesis one that not only applies to international, national, state, or local politics. The role of character is at the center of the classroom experience. Character is not just an important issue for teachers, it is also at the core of student behavior in the classroom setting.


“Hey, Dude”                           

I am motivated to articulate the importance of character as an integral part of the classroom experience—as much a critical element as course content—not only because of what I wrote about in my last blog, but also because of an experience with a student in a television journalism course I teach.

This particular student showed much promise at the beginning of the semester. The early work reflected some skill and adeptness. My expectation was this student would earn an A or at least an A- as a final grade. Somewhere towards the middle of the semester, during a one-on-one classroom discussion, this student referred to me as “Hey, dude,” as if I had given the student leave to become familiar with me. I immediately admonished the student with the requirement that I be referred to as either Doctor or professor. At the end of the semester as I was determining final grades, I was surprised to see from my records that this same student had not completed the required final project.

Just at that moment there was a knock at my office door. It was a friend of the student. He was holding in his hand a smart drive with the student’s final project on it. The surrogate student’s expectation was that I would accept this and that would be that. I asked where the student was. He replied, “She had to go on vacation with her parents.” I requested the surrogate student print out the script (my rule is “No script, no review, no grade”) and meet me in our television lab to view the final project. When I joined him he had printed out the script. The piece was not up to the student’s usual standards. This student did not get the grade I had expected to give her. She had not shown respect by presenting the piece herself. The piece was almost two weeks late, and the quality of the final project was below expectations. Upon learning of the grade I had submitted, the student wrote an email to me pleading for a higher grade.  It was not granted.


Technology and Student Behavior

Is this an unusual occurrence? Or is this incident representative of a larger attitude on the part of students? Is the multi-decade history of the 30-second commercial and the 22-minute sitcom to blame for students’ expectations that problems are solved quickly and that success can be achieved without much effort? Has technology, such as the ubiquitous Internet, the cell phone, and the television remote, created the impression that success is just around the corner? Have the plethora of diet books and programs and self-help tomes encouraged the expectation that if you just buy this book, program, or “pill,” all will be well? Has pop culture created the impression that if you just wear clothes with some celebrity’s name on it, you, too, will achieve notoriety?

Perhaps it’s time to make a small but relevant shift in our teaching. Perhaps the time has come to infuse the importance of character into our formal and informal meetings with students, whether collectively or individually. As teachers we have all had the experience of meeting a student whose character is evidenced by a drive and ambition to succeed, i.e., to do the work, to not cut corners, to go beyond the syllabus, to strive for something higher, to realize Robert Browning’s line from the 1855 published poem “Andrea Del Sarto”: “Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Somewhere in these students’ backgrounds the meaning of character, as in fortitude and perseverance, was forged. As teachers we need to encourage and motivate all students to adopt these character traits.

For each course a student takes, he or she can expect to receive at the very least a syllabus and a statement of classroom performance standards. There’s usually a textbook or, at the very least, a reading list. The issue is not so much about how well a student does or does not do on tests or papers. The central issue is about character. How will students respond to the challenges presented? How will students adjust to the standards articulated by the professor? Will the students respond? Or will students merely formulate a plan to deal with the course material throughout the semester so that the end result is a “good” grade?

The conclusion in next week’s blog.

Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
June 25, 2012

© Eugene Marlow 2012

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