"It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care..."

(This post has been brewing for a while; sorry about the lengthiness...)

As most of us have experienced and have mentioned at the last TF meeting, classroom behavior, distractions and lack of focus seem to be the largest barriers to effectively communicating, well, anything. This lack of focus and motivation also seems to be reflected in the class grades and district graduation rates. That said, I wondered if the students in Ms. Hardy’s classes were aware of these two significant indicators and what their general attitude toward school was. I was half expecting a response resembling the line from Office Space I quoted in the subject of this post, so put together a small survey to try to get at the answer. A sheet with the following questions were distributed to all of Ms. Hardy’s chemistry and physical science classes (not just the ones I’m in):

What grade are you in?
What is your favorite class?
Do you think doing well in school is important?
Are you happy with your performance in school?
What percentage of students do you think graduate from YPSD schools?
Do you think you’re going to graduate from high school?
Do you want to go to college?
Do you know the difference between a bachelors, masters and PhD degree?
What do you want to do after high school / college?
What’s your favorite song?

I received 86 responses, which constitutes a response rate of about 73.5% of the total number of students in the classes surveyed. Most of Ms. Hardy’s students are sophomores and juniors, though there are a few seniors scattered among her classes. The most popular class was science, in general, followed by lunch/none. The other survey answers are summarized in the table below The range of responses to the question about the YPSD graduation rate was from 15-100%, but the average guess was 65.74%, less then 1% away from the actual rate of 66.3%. This reminds me of something I heard from my statistics teacher in high school about how if you have a jar of jelly beans and ask a group of people to guess how many are in the jar, the individual guesses will not tend to be very close to the actual answer, while the average will tend to be very close to the actual answer, given a large enough group.


I was heartened by the nearly unanimous support of academic achievement and desire to attend college, though the disparity between those who think doing well in school is important and those who think they're doing well perhaps indicates a long-term motivation but a lack of a short term motivation (since I believe all of the students in my classes are fully capable of doing well).

I found the responses for after high school / college aspirations to be pretty interesting. The most popular goal was to become a doctor of some sort (including veterinarians and psychologists), followed by making money. I was almost sort of glad that someone mentioned the general goal of “making money” (though I hadn’t hoped this generic desire was quite that popular), since I found a very germane chart from the department of labor statistics.


I sorted through the list of goals and attempted to assign a minimum level of education associated with each particular profession. For “money”, I semi-arbitrarily assigned a minimum of a bachelor’s degree. One student who listed “money” also stated the specific value of $600 million, for which I thought at least a professional degree sounded reasonable. Given these assumptions, 63% of the students had goals that required at least a bachelor’s degree.

About 58% of the students said they knew the difference between the different types of college degrees, though I think the true number may be lower than this, since one student who said he/she knew the difference also included an incorrect explanation. I had explained this at the beginning of the last semester, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that first presentation didn’t exactly make an indelible impression on them. Given that many of their long-term aspirations would require a higher degree, I think I’d especially like to reiterate this point when I present the results of their survey.

I tacked the favorite song question on to the end of the survey because I wanted some ideas of what to use for demonstrating the Ruben’s tube I had mentioned in a prior blog post. I hadn’t stated on the survey that the song had to be appropriate for school, because although I had anticipated a lot of the songs wouldn’t be usable, I still wanted to know their favorite songs regardless. However, after sorting through all of the responses, approximately zero of which I had heard of before, I found that about four or five of the 86 suggestions were remotely appropriate for school. In fact, I was sort of shocked by some of these songs, and showing the printed lyrics to some of my friends provoked various horrified expressions. Doubly disappointing was, not only were they almost universally explicit, they weren’t even explicit to any particular ends; that is to say, a lot of the rap songs I listened to didn’t seem to even be about anything, but really just a five-minute string of offensive phrases. There were a few I found mildly amusing, but they were in the minority. In the interest of full disclosure, I am definitely not a rap fan (in fact, it may be one of the only music genres I actively dislike); however, trying to as objective as possible, I’ve come to the personal conclusion that Lil’ Wayne is an awful, awful, embarrassing excuse for a rapper, which makes me wonder why he’s so popular among the students in my class. I suddenly have new found respect for Emenem and Mos Def.

Anyhow, seeing as my original plan of using student suggestions for the Ruben’s tube demo isn’t really going to work, I’ve decided that I’m going to use this musical gem that was called to my attention the other day: The Ypsilanti Theme Song (The play button is at the bottom of the article.) Apparently this is the official Ypsilanti city song, selected by the city council in 1983. Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time… At least the synthesizer break in the middle of the song should produce some nice standing flame sine waves.

The two classes I’m in at Ypsi are first and third period, so I usually help Ms. Hardy with lab prep or work on presentations during second period, but the other day one of the physical science students came to third hour about fifteen minutes early (I think she had come to school late), so I discussed the results of the survey with her. I had mentioned the large disparity between the percentage of students who believed doing well in school was important and the percentage that were actually happy with their school performance. She proceeded to enumerate the difficulties she and her classmates experienced in their neighborhoods that were impediments to succeeding academically. She asked me at some point if I grew up with both my parents. I told her yes, to which she replied (to the best of my recollection),

“Well, no offense, but it’s a lot different growing up with just a mom, or like some of these kids without even a mom. People in my neighborhood aren’t always telling you that you can succeed and do well. They usually tellin’ you that you ain’t no good and you ain’t going to make nothin’ of your self.

Both my older brother and sister are mechanical engineers now, and they gone and succeeded in life, but now when they come back to the neighborhood, everyone thinks they a couple of snobs now. ‘Oh look at them big shots now. They forgot where they come from. They think they so special!’ “

The more she spoke, the more it sounded like she was trying to convince me that my line of inquiry was a futile endeavor, implying that this was the way things were and there was no point in trying to do anything about it. I asked her if she thought my survey and what I was trying to achieve from it was a waste of time. She quickly changed her tone and said, no, it was definitely worthwhile and that she thought many people in her class had probably never been asked what career goals they have and hadn’t really connected day-to-day class activities and achieving those long term goals.

The original focus of this project was originally to use some sort of student generated data to support why things like paying attention in class, following instructions, etc. are important (i.e., “You have all acknowledged that you want to do better in class, so here is an easy way to improve.”). Though I was already aware of the impact of the students’ lives outside of school upon their academic performance, given this student’s emphasis on life outside of school, I think I’ll broaden the scope to include a student discussion about what they think success is. Essentially, though there was almost unanimous consensus about the importance of college, I’m curious as to whether they responded that way because that’s simply what is expected in an academic environment and if they might have any different responses when asked to answer in the context of their own upbringings. If people in this particular student’s neighborhood look upon “white” success with disdain, what are some alternate definitions of success?

Today, Ms. Hardy started the new semester with an emphasis on rules, what they are, why we have them, and what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate classroom behavior. I was glad to see that she was taking a somewhat harder line on recording behavioral infractions—this is not to say that I’m glad that she is being strict for the sake of being strict, but that I think she is making an effort to be consistent with enforcement of the rules. For the most part, even during a free collaboration period, the class was quieter and more attentive than usual. Hopefully this will stick and be reinforced by my presentation of survey results and discussion of class goal setting on Wednesday.