I know you think they will learn more if they do so.

I know you think they will learn more if they participate in discussions.

But your goal is for them to learn things. You might even hold out hope that at least some of them might get excited about your subject.

Is giving marks for attendance really going to help you achieve that goal?

Are there real consequences for not attending or participating?

If you dock marks for not attending that is not a consequence. That’s a punishment (or withholding of a reward for a desired behaviour).*

A consequence of not attending would be that it would be harder to learn the material and do well on the assessments of what you’ve learned.

If students can do well on the assessments without attending class, the problem is not with the students.

In fact, if that is the case, the decision not to attend is rational.

*One of my pet peeves is the way the word “consequences” gets used to describe punishments. For example, getting arrested is not a consequence of smoking marijuana. It’s a punishment.

What value does your lecture or seminar add?

Does your lecture give students an overview that makes it easier to understand the readings you have assigned? Does it introduce material not in the readings?

Does your seminar provide a safe environment in which students can test out their understandings of the material and develop their skills in using the new material to make their own arguments?

Does your online forum do this?

Do you work through practice problems or sample analyses to assist students in learning the process that you want them to learn? Do you provide low-stakes opportunities for them to try it themselves before they have to do it for a mark?

Do you have practice problems on your course website that help students with this? Why should students who don’t feel like they need that help be required to do those practice problems?

Is it clear to the students what the lectures and seminars are meant to provide and what they are meant to do outside of class to advance their learning?

You can’t force students to learn

You can only provide the context in which learning might happen.

When preparing your course, know what you want students to learn (“learning objectives”) and evaluate every decision you make based on how it will either help them learn or assess what they have learned.

Make it clear to students what you expect and what they have to do to do well in your course.

Then focus on your part. And let them do their part (or not).

Marks = assessment

Or do they?

Are you using marks for behaviour modification?

• Do you give marks for regular attendance?
• Do you give marks for “participation”?
• Do you give marks for anything else that is not a measure of having learned something?

If so, your marks are not all about assessment.

They are rewards in a behaviour modification scheme.

How do you react when I put it that way?

• Does it make you squirm?
• Do you get defensive?
• Do you want to resist that descriptor?
• Do you feel like that isn’t the way you want to be described?

Well, stop doing it.

I have more posts up my sleeve on related issues.

You can subscribe in a feed reader or by e-mail. (If you don’t know what a feed reader is, I won’t think any less of you. That’s why I have the e-mail option.)

You work in an environment that values autonomy.

You value autonomy.

You feel like you should be able to do things yourself.

Humans are inherently social

We live in groups.

We work in groups.

We have complex divisions of labour.

We are dependent on others for many things

You probably don’t grow all of your own food, build your own house, find your own fuel to heat that house, get your water from a natural water source and purify it to make it safe to drink.

You are already part of a complex division of labour in which other people’s work supports your daily existence.

In your working life, someone else recruits the students, deals with the administrative issues around registering them and making sure that their studies will be recognized by others. Someone else has provided facilities for you to work in, with the appropriate technical equipment (even if that equipment is just a whiteboard at the front of the room).

Powerful cultural discourses value autonomy and independence

Despite these facts, there are powerful cultural narratives that value independence and autonomy.

These narratives tend to downplay or even obfuscate the extent to which we are interdependent.

These narratives have influenced your own core beliefs.

Your gremlins whisper them to you. They sometimes shout them when it looks like you are doing something that doesn’t fit.

You are not a dupe

Just because it’s cultural doesn’t make it easy to resist or change.

Culture is pretty damned powerful.

Don’t beat yourself up for valuing autonomy and independence.

Don’t think it should be easy to ask for help.

Start small

Experiment with asking for help.

Start with things that don’t get the gremlins too riled up. Tell them you are experimenting. You are going to try this and see how it goes.

Treat every ask as a learning experience. You are learning about how to ask for help. You are learning about what kinds of things you can ask for help with. You are learning about what kinds of things you are better off doing yourself.

You are a unique individual

The things you will find most helpful to get other people to do will not be the same as those your friend, your colleague, your mother, or your neighbour gets other people to do.

Don’t start with something that feels like you should be able to get help with because other people don’t seem to find it weird.

Start with something that you find relatively easy to let go. Something that you aren’t going to want to micro-manage if someone else is doing it for you. Something that needs to be done but you aren’t very invested in doing for yourself.

Take notes

If it helps, get a notebook where you can take notes.

Write down what your gremlins don’t like about particular help requests.

Write down what went well.

Write down what went badly.

Be specific. Remember, it might be that the person you asked for help wasn’t the right person, not that the task wasn’t the right one to delegate. Only experimentation will give you the answers.

You are a researcher. You can do this.

There are no deadlines.

The point of these experiments is to make your life less stressful.

You are trying to figure out how to do your job well and enjoy other things in life.

Your capacity is finite.

You are trying to figure out how to do more of the stuff that you really value and also get enough rest, eat well, etc.

Good luck.

Autonomy can also be one of the not so great things, too.

If you are working really long hours and feeling overwhelmed with everything you have to do, you might have gone beyond autonomy.

Help is available

Do you know your librarian?

Do you have any funds to hire students or other support?

Are you familiar with your Teaching and Learning Support Centre?

Do you know what your departmental administrators can do for you?

Do you know the name of the IT support person assigned to your department?

Are you familiar with the range of student services available?

Does your university provide a counseling service for employees?

Finding out what support is available to you is the first step in making your workload more manageable.

You will still have a lot to do. But you will have a better sense of the limits of your job description and whose job description includes that stuff you don’t need to be doing.

At an individual level, plenty of unemployed PhDs are wondering how they ended up in such a precarious labour market position and why no one warned them.

If you are considering a PhD, here are a few things you should consider about the people giving you advice.

Chances are no one has even considered what you might do with your PhD

That’s right.

In my experience, very few academics give much thought to the employment prospects of their students.

Sure, when considering the course as a whole, and especially when writing copy for the web site or a recruitment brochure, they might give some thought to what students might go on to do with a degree in their area.

And many academics care about the success of individual students.

Academics usually don’t have any more information about the wider labour market than anyone else. And our knowledge of labour market conditions is always greater when we are looking for work than when we are ensconced in a relatively secure position.

Academics are not alone in this. An engineer friend of mine recently told me that when the high-tech sector started to collapse he realized he hadn’t updated his resumé for about 7 years. He only realized this at the point when he, personally, lost his job even though he was not in the first round of layoffs.

Assume that any particular academic’s knowledge of careers is limited. It certainly is not at the front of their minds when they are talking to you about the possibility of entering a PhD program.

What are they thinking about?

If they aren’t thinking about your career prospects, why would they recommend that you consider a PhD?

Your intellectual strengths as abstract qualities

A professor might recommend that you consider graduate study because they are impressed with your intellectual abilities and think you would make a fine researcher.

They might see a bit of themselves in you. They have had considerable satisfaction in their own educational and career path and thus recommend this as something you might also enjoy.

They might even see the potential for you to make important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the field.

Their own interests

Many academics find teaching graduate level courses more intellectually stimulating than teaching undergraduates.

Graduate students that they supervise may be an important part of their intellectual community. Colleagues tend not to be working in the same areas and graduate students can provide a community of intellectual peers with whom to have in depth discussions about their (and your) research.

In some disciplines, graduate students are essential to the research success of academics. Graduate students assist in the collection and analysis of data, and co-authored papers are a staple of the professor’s own publications list.

In all cases, they want to recruit the best students they can. If a professor is being enthusiastic, take it as a compliment. They tend to be fussy.

Their institutional interests

Departments and universities that have graduate programs are more prestigious. Universities have aspirations and the development of graduate programs is often part of the plan to achieve those aspirations.

Departments sometimes resist these developments but they are not the final decision makers. Once programs are established they are then required to recruit students.

Every student comes with dollars attached, whether tuition fees or government funding or some combination of the two. Balancing departmental budgets often involves recruiting certain numbers of different kinds of students.

Actually, most academics won’t have this stuff at the front of their mind either. In fact many of them really dislike thinking about the budgets at all. Every job has aspects we don’t like but have to do anyway.

No one else knows what is right for you

No one is trying to intentionally mislead you.

In fact, many academics are conflicted about the various interests at play and worry about the prospects for their graduate students.

The “right” response to these conflicts is not obvious. No individual is responsible for the structure of the system.

You have to look out for your interests

Before you can evaluate your options, you need to know what you want and need.

You won’t be able to wave a magic wand and have all your needs and wants met.

But knowing what you want and need is the only sound basis for evaluating various opportunities that arise, and for selecting activities that might create opportunities.