My Freshman Year- What A Professor Learned By Becoming A Student by Rebekah Nathan is about a college professor who investigates college students’ lifestyle in their freshman year. There has been many times when college professors have assigned a great deal of work and expected it to be due in a short period of time. To the professors, they may think a week is enough time. However, to students like myself it looks to be only two or three days. As college students, especially in our freshman year, we have a lot of pressure. We have about three to four classes, school activities, and of course, our own personal lives. Sometimes college professors may fail to remember that this is a point in student’s lives where they have a great deal of responsibility but little time to cope with the new circumstances. There is peer pressure, lack of concentration, and so much going on all at one time. Many times professors wonder why students cheat, be rude, less motivated, careless of their work. A college professor Cathy Small goes by the pseudonym name Rebekah Nathan in attempt to see what it is really like to be in a college student’s place.
Rebekah Nathan is a cultural anthropologist in her mid-fifties. In order to do her studies on college students, Rebekah returns to her old college, AnyU to register as a college student. She states that she would only tell people more information unless they asked her what things she plans to do at the university. Her response would be to teach and do research. Before she returned as a “college student,” she went through mock questions with her friends so that she would be prepared to answer questions from people that would try to meet her. Although her answers were not entirely true, they did buil...
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...kay and when cheating was acceptable. One person said, “Excuse me, but there are worse things to do than cheat on homework.” (Nathan, 125) She noticed that over half of the students who responded thought that cheating depends on the situation or circumstance.
Bibliography
Nathan, R. (2006). Welcome to "AnyU". My freshman year: what a professor learned by becoming a student (pp. 7,8,11). London: Penguin Books.
Nathan, R. (2006). Community and Diversity. My freshman year: what a professor learned by
becoming a student (p. 54). London: Penguin Books.
Nathan, R. (2006). Academically Speaking. My freshman year: what a professor learned by
becoming a student (p. 105). London: Penguin Books.
Nathan, R. (2006). The Art of College Management. My freshman year: what a professor learned by
becoming a student (pp. 119,125). London: Penguin Books.
In the essay “College Pressures” by William Zinsser, Zinsser speaks about the pressures and anxiety that plague college students, all the while wishing that they had “a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step.” Referring to the 1979 generation of college students as “panicky to succeed”, he lists four of the following stressors for college students.
In Paul Toughmay’s “Who Gets to Graduate,” he follows a young first year college student, Vanessa Brewer, explaining her doubts, fears, and emotions while starting her college journey. As a student, at the University of Texas Brewer feels small and as if she doesn’t belong. Seeking advice from her family she calls her mom but after their conversation Brewer feels even more discouraged. Similar to Brewer I have had extreme emotions, doubts, and fears my freshman year in college.
Two professors of different backgrounds, Mike Rose of California, and Gerald Graff, of Illinois, discuss the problems college students face today in America. Though similar in slight variations, both professors view the problem in different regards and prepare solutions that solve what they feel to be the heart of this academic problem.
That stomach churning feeling of guilt for many seems to appear as a small price to pay when completing an act of academic dishonesty. Colleen Wenke wrote an essay on cheating eighteen years ago called “Too Much Pressure”. In the past fifty years, the number of students who admit to cheating has increased fifty to seventy percent(Gaffe). Many people wonder what leads the students to make this unjust decision. Today, the reason for a rise in cheaters is because of how easy it has become, leading many students to the false conclusion that they aren’t breaking any rules; It is simply viewed as a shortcut to success in the classroom and beyond.
Phillip A. Whitner and Randall C. Myers The Journal of Higher Education , Vol. 57, No. 6
Coming to college as an adult, we have many expectations and preconceptions of what college will or will not be. The expectations we have can influence our college life for the better or the worse. My experience since starting college has been an interesting one. People have misconceptions about college because they do not know what to expect. After doing some research, I have concluded that there are three major factors that are often misunderstood about college life. The first is the financial aspect of college. Second, is the relationship between the professors and students. Third is time management. These three factors play an important role in why people are afraid to go down the path to college.
In Jennie Capo Crucet 's essay, “Taking My Parents To College,” Crucet describes her own experience as a freshman college student who was faced with many challenges that were unknown to her, as well as the cluelessness of what the beginning of her freshman year would look like. I felt like the biggest impression Crucet left on me while I was reading her essay, was the fact that I can relate to her idea of the unknown of college life. Throughout her essay, she described her personal experiences, and the factors one might face as a freshman college student which involved the unknown and/or uncertainty of what this new chapter would bring starting freshman year of college. Crucet’s essay relates to what most of us
In a society where a collegiate degree is almost necessary to make a successful living, the idea that a student cares less about the education and more about the “college experience” can seem baffling. In My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, Rebekah Nathan, the author’s pseudonym, tackles the idea that academics are less impactful on a student then the culture of college life. Nathan, a 50-year-old cultural anthropologist and university professor, went undercover as a college freshman for a research project. From her research, she hoped to better understand the undergraduate experience by fully immersing herself in college life. To do this, she anonymously applied to “AnyU,” a fake acronym for a real university,
Tagg, John. “Why Learn? What We May Really Be Teaching Students.” About Campus. 2004. Print.
Situations of cheating have seemed to become more and more commonplace when the student is bored by the subject material, poor teaching and or feels they have no use for the knowledge. Kohn even states in his article, “cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.” This infers that if a student were attending a school interested in learning about art, the student maybe more inclined to cheat in a business accounting class due to the fact the student would find the subject material irrelevant to them and their future. Students seem to be less inclined to cheat and it “is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor”” (Kohn). To simplify everything mentioned above; students are inclined to cheat in school when they are disinterested in the subject material and or are overwhelmed by in assignment or finally the result in a poor teacher. Everyone who has attended school can relate to this in some way or another, most people do not want to retain knowledge they have no interest in or use for in their
Modern students face many pressures for academic success. They are often unwilling to disappoint their parents or spouses. Some fear that not cheating will weaken a student’s ability to compete with their peers. They rationalize their unethical behavior, unwilling to accept a poor grade, consequently justifying cheating as the only means to that end.
Nathan, Rebekah. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Print.
Nathan, R. (2005). My freshman year: What a professor learned by becoming a student. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Measured by recent surveys, cheating has reached epidemic proportions in high schools and colleges. In a survey of 21,000 students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, 70 percent of high school students and 54 percent of middle schoolers admitted that they had cheated on an exam. That is up sharply from a study cited in "The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next," edited by Urie Bronfenbrenner and others.. That study found that 33.8 percent of high school students used a "cheat sheet" on a test in 1969. By 1989 the percentage had risen to 67.8. Furthermore, 58.3 percent of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5 percent did so in 1989.
The belief that college professors are getting soft and students are getting lazy is not a new idea. These thoughts have been progressing towards their current state since the late 1980’s. Brent Staples believes that many college departments, especially those in the humanities, shower students with higher grades in order to keep low-demand classes at the minimum enrollment. “As a result of the university’s widening elective leeway, students have more power over teachers” (Edmundson 153). For example, at Drexel University, and many universities across the country, they are doing away with tenure and more and more professors are part-time, and have no security in their job. This leads to professors tailoring their instruction to what the student, the “consumer” wants and needs.