Read on for a peek into my former life as a full-time faculty member at a for-profit career college. Enjoy. —Carol, October 1, 2013
Everyday I go to my job at the career college and whine about teaching adults how to type. We call it keyboarding, but it's typing. Just like you learned in high school with the IBM Selectric, we teach students how to figure out what fingers go where on the computer keyboard. It's not the only course I teach, but it is by far the most complicated to grade. And the most tedious to teach. (I use the word "teach" very loosely here.)
Students majoring in the various programs approach keyboarding differently. The paralegals and business admins are into it. They take to the keyboarding software like dogs take to soup bones. They attack the list of exercises and documents with gusto, competing with themselves and each other to type the fastest with no errors. The Medical Assisting students, on the other hand, balk like donkeys when they find out on day one that their expected goal is a smoking 50 words per minute (wpm). They would much rather socialize than do anything so pedestrian as typing. And if they can't talk with one another out loud, they will talk via their phones. While they are sitting next to one another.
We also teach the medical assistants how to use MS Word to create documents. They are positive they will never use Word on the job. They assure me that there is no need for them to learn how to type properly formatted memos, letters, or reports... They say, all we have to do is enter weight, blood pressure, and temperature! Why should we sweat over learning how to insert a 5-column, 10-row table? The horror!
This term I have three sections of keyboarding. Each section has at least three levels—keyboarding 1, keyboarding 2, keyboarding 3 (for paralegals and business admins), and medical keyboarding. Every student moves at his or her own pace. I roam around the lab, peering over their shoulders, watching for the inevitable moments when (1) the software hiccups and tosses a student out of the program, (2) someone has failed to save a document properly and blames me, loudly, (3) a student has minimized the keyboarding program in order to check email, or (4) a faster student has logged in as her slower friend so the slow student's timings won't look so pathetic.
You can ask anyone who teaches adults, especially adults who attend a career college. The students are there for one thing only: to do just enough to pass each class, graduate, and get a job. They don't care about learning for learning's sake. Knowing just to know has no appeal for them. They constantly weigh the costs and benefits of any effort. They look at me through narrowed eyes whenever I give an assignment: I can tell they are calculating the cost of not doing the assignment. They factor in a multitude of variables, in spite of the fact that they can't do basic math. How lenient will I be, what are my deadlines compared to other teachers' deadlines, how much time is there until the due date, what else is due, what are they doing on Friday night, will turning in the assignment late affect their grade... in the blink of an eye, they have it figured out. I watch them put the assignment sheets in their notebooks. They might as well be tossing it in the trash.
This isn't academia, this is vocational college. People come to schools like ours to get job skills so they can be promotable or employable. As soon as I expect them to embrace knowledge for the sheer joy of learning, I know I'm setting myself up for a pre-meditated resentment.
