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This weekend, we attended a get-together with some friends and friends of friends. Among the latter group was someone who works as a substitute teacher in a couple of local public high schools. As she told stories, I realized again just how jarring the transition to college can be for students who attend right after high school.
She said that, as a substitute, she’s specifically barred from actually teaching the students any material. I don’t know the rationale behind that, though I could guess. Instead, her job is to ensure that the students are present, accounted for and supervised. After that, the classes become versions of what we used to call study hall.
The moment that caught my attention was when she mentioned that students use the presence of a substitute teacher as a cue to take a bathroom break. Bathroom breaks are strictly rationed—they have what sounds like a pretty complicated system of quotas and passes—and students have to sign out of class to take them. Only a few students are allowed out at a time, in the name of preventing what she euphemistically called “shenanigans.” The time between classes isn’t nearly long enough for students to both use the bathroom and get to class, so they’re actually prohibited from using the bathrooms then. (Apparently, the teachers have a period of bathroom-monitor duty.) The students are only allowed to use the bathroom during class periods; they’ve figured out that periods with substitutes are the ideal time, since they won’t miss any actual instruction. So the periods she covers feature a long line of students signing up for bathroom passes in sequence.
I had to admire the students’ insight into the system. They found a sort of loophole. The substitute herself seemed impressed at how thoroughly they’ve figured it out.
But I was also struck by just how different the first weeks of college are. Here, there’s no such thing as a hall pass. Faculty don’t have bathroom-monitor duty. There’s no formal study hall. In between classes, students are on their own. We provide places to hang out and/or study and encourage involvement in campus clubs and organizations, but students really can make their own decisions. Going from hall pass workarounds in June to being utterly responsible for their own decisions in September must be at least a bit disorienting.
Prior to COVID, we found that students who take many online classes in their first semester are likelier to drop out than students who don’t, even if the second group takes online classes in subsequent semesters. They need a period in person to get the hang of college. I had thought the issue was forming an attachment to the institution and developing a friend network, and those probably do play roles. But the relative structure of on-site classes, as opposed to online, may reduce the sense of vertigo in moving from such a regimented system to such an open one so abruptly. Once they’ve made the adjustment, online courses don’t exact the same cost in terms of attrition that they would have in the first semester.
I don’t remember high school being quite as regimented as all that, but it was a different time. My cohort came after the duck-and-cover drills, but before the active-shooter drills. The relative—compared to now—openness made the transition to college somewhat less jarring. As high schools have become more controlled, the transition to a much more open setting is probably that much more difficult.
The last couple of years have been a strange exception in many ways. As the cohort that lost years of high school to COVID comes through college—or doesn’t—I hope we remember to look closely for object lessons in helping students succeed. Natural experiments of this scale are blessedly rare; it would be a waste not to learn from them.
So I’d like to thank the friend-of-a-friend substitute teacher for teaching me something that should have been obvious. She was right.
