An open letter to the professors who discourage students daily:
Students understand the rigor of college. It is pounded into our heads the day that we begin our freshmen year in high school. We expect the rigorous speed of the courses and the difficulty of the exams when we begin that chapter in our lives.
I am beginning my Sophomore year and there is something that peeves me: professors that are attempting to motivate students but rather, they are tearing them down.
I have had my fair share of professors who truly care about their students and want to see us succeed, but it is alarming the amount of professors who are trying to scare us out of a profession with statistics. I have encountered far too many of that second kind. Telling us to look left and then to our right in a class and then telling us that only one of the three of us will remain by the end of the semester will scare the living daylights out of a freshman. Sure, going into the medical field, business, fine arts, etc. takes endless amounts of work and dedication, but how you motivate those students is not by telling them that they will never make it to the end of their current field of study.
I have realized this issue more and more as my time in college progresses. So much so that I overhear students in my classes saying how they are switching to other majors because they cannot deal with the negative thoughts anymore and that they will never get into medical school, so why keep trying? These ideas haunt me.
All our lives we are built and being encouraged to think of the future. Where are you going to school? What is your major? What are you going to do with your degree after you graduate? Who are you going to marry? When are you going to have kids? This is an endless cycle of never reaching the point of a destination in our lives. This is not a bad problem because we need to be looking forward in order to start building upon the next chapter now, but what happens when a professor totally crushes a students’ dreams?
When your class is so hard that fifty people fail or a hundred of your students drop the class, should that not be a hint that you are not doing something correctly? When high school students think of professors, they see people who are going to help them reach their ultimate destination. They do not think of professors as people who are going to change their course entirely.
Professors are in place to build our knowledge and to help us pave our paths to success. They should be edifying us instead of terrifying us. They should be encouraging that we be well-rounded students instead of focusing on that specific professors’ class 24/7. I am not inspired by you telling me that students normally get thirties on the first exam, I am inspired when you tell me that you love the course of study because it allows you to help others in countless amounts of ways.
Sorry for the rant but I have seen too many students, including myself, be discouraged by these individuals who are supposed to be having a positive impact on our lives. Please just show us some love. Show us that with the correct amount of passion and determination, that we will go wherever our adventures take us. Build us up to be the next generation of leaders, do not discourage us into a job that we are not passionate about by scaring us into it.
Sincerely,
A stressed and hardworking college student
