Category Archives: Teaching & Higher Ed

I have become increasingly aware of how my institution values being busy over being productive and effective. This is especially true right now, during advising and registration.

The amount of time required to manage an always increasing number of advisees—meeting with them, answering follow-up questions, helping solve residual problems— takes away from doing pretty much everything else. Like teaching. Or helping a student with an internal research grant application. Or grading papers. Or writing grad school recommendations.

Worse, the emphasis is on scheduling, approving graduation applications, and solving problems with our online registration system so there is little time available for actual advising. You know, career goals, and such, the things we should be doing when we advise students.

So, we are very busy with advising, but I would hardly say that we are being effective. The good news is, registration ends this week so we should be able to get back to work!

Recently a student asked me for an answer to a question on an assignment she was doing in my ECG Assessment class. I tend to answer questions with a questions, so I asked her, “what do you think the answer is?” After some discussion she came up with a response. Which was wrong. And she replied, “just kidding.” She wasn’t kidding, and she didn’t know the right answer.

This was far from an isolated incident. When a student answers a question incorrectly in class or  in conversations outside of class, the most common response is “just kidding.” I first noticed it years ago, mostly from female students. Now I hear it equally from male students. I even hear it from other “adults,” most recently when an acquaintance didn’t remember what grade my son is in—”just kidding.”

It’s as though being wrong is so unacceptable, it is turned into a joke. The message seems to be “I wasn’t wrong, I was joking, and I knew the right answer all along.” The problem is, most students who say this really don’t know the right answer.I worry that this lack of ownership will prevent students from identifying weaknesses and missing opportunities to fill gaps in their knowledge.

So, now when I hear a student say “just kidding” I say “no, you’re not just kidding, you’re just wrong, and that’s okay.” Then we work to find the correct answer.