Donald Hiscock | Articles | Community College Week

Community College

An office in which I could swing at least three cats end to end, a computer clever enough to make toast (although I never quite worked out how to make this happen), a staff lounge with a leather sofa and deep pile carpet, and they called this work.

Landing up for an exchange year in a community college in Michigan after a career spent in the dark recesses of further education in England, I felt like I had entered paradise. However much my new American colleagues complained about their lot, I couldn’t help thinking that they don’t know how lucky they are when it comes to resources.

Maybe I was being deceived and my midwestern campus was a verdant paradise unlike anywhere else in the country. For a while I thought my daily walk across campus was the most idyllic workplace stroll I could imagine. How I loved the smell of pine in the morning. No one warned me about winters in this neck of the woods and just how bloody cold it would get. But that’s another story.

Rolling lawns, big trees and solid buildings. I was on a film set. My experiences of entering campus back in England are ones of dreariness and frustration, especially trying to find a parking space. This is no problem in Michigan mate; they give you a numbered bay. Shame they couldn’t manage valet parking, but you can’t have everything.

But plush buildings and state of the art information technology are only part of what makes teaching in an American community college an adventure that turns my English colleagues green with envy. People still keep asking me if I enjoyed my year off, as they sarcastically refer to it, or tease me about having to be trained in how to use a photocopier again.

But the main part of my experience was the teaching, and the reason why I undertook my American exchange. But my colleagues refuse to accept that it could be any harder than in England. It wasn’t easy, but they are right. It just wasn’t as difficult as it is over here. I’m not criticising your system. I can only praise it, as I do any system that makes one’s working life tolerable.

So what are you doing right and we are doing wrong? Aside from all the obvious differences over funding and the resources that I have already mentioned there is a different expectation of the teacher.

Let’s get serious for a moment. What I enjoyed about the college in Michigan was the way I was able to get on and teach. It was what I was expected to do and to do it well. In fact, in my first semester I found myself taking part in a quality review exercise that meant the students graded me. The process was rigorous but fair.

I am not saying that we don’t have a system of inspection in England. We do, and it is tough. One of our favourite complaints is that too much is expected of us outside the classroom. If we could just get on and teach and be given the time to prepare classes things would be easier. We are always filling out forms and producing evidence about our retention and achievement. Keeping students on roll and somehow getting them to achieve something is the expectation of the administrators.

I know what you are thinking, that this guy is whinging about the same things as you lot have to put up with on your side of the pond. You’re right. But you’re also wrong. From my limited experience – and I took in a few conferences and met lots of teachers – you have more freedom to get on and teach. How many of you are nationally accountable? How many times a year does your government change the rules and get you to teach to a different specification?

So I enjoyed this feeling of autonomy, I enjoyed creating my own syllabus and setting assignments that I thought were appropriate. But the bit that was hard, and it is probably because I come from this culture of strict accountability, was the assessment. This was another thing, like the Michigan winter, that people kept quiet about. They wanted me to discover it for myself. When I heard folk agonising over their grading I must admit I took a rather lofty view. But then I found out.

You will know what I mean when I mention the term grade challenge. It sounds like the name of a TV game show, and in a funny kind of way it is a game. But blimey it’s a tricky one, and I am glad that I don’t have to be a contestant anymore.

Sure, students complain about their grades in England, but I can usually wriggle my way out of any sticky situation by referring the aggrieved to the mark scheme or comments made by an external moderator. But in Michigan, and I assume it happens all over the country, there was a kind of grade obsession that drove students to extraordinary limits.

Nothing actually got nasty, but there were implicit threats. It was more a case of being charmed, being bribed almost. I was slow at first to realise what was going on, so in my first semester I must have seemed like a soft touch. And come to think of it that probably explained why there was a waiting list to join my classes later in the year.

After handing back grades I saw students in my office who ran through a range of details about their personal lives that I was supposed to take into consideration and duly up their grade. Some of them wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Jerry Springer show. It was a mass pleading on a drip, drip, psychological level.

So I am sure it must affect how you teach students. The last thing you want is conflict. Maybe when deciding on a grade it is safer to go up than down. Anything for a quiet life. I got worn down by the hounding, the phone calls at my house. This was the delivery of education on a purely personal level. There was no one there to hide behind. Their future was in my hands. And by the time I turned in my grades to the college office at the end of that first semester my hands were well and truly shaking.

I am still slightly worried today back home in England that I graded people on a subjective level, especially the grizzled ones who lived out in the woods and carried hunting rifles in the pick up trucks. I wasn’t going to mess with them. Clearing up the blood from the deep pile of my office carpet would have put the college to considerable expense.

However, I am safe now. My students in England are at the mercy of external examiners. I am on their side, or so I tell them. If they want to argue about their grade they can pick a fight with some faceless administrator a hundred miles away.

The experience of assessment may have been a nightmare, but in the words of Simon and Garfunkel, Michigan seems like a dream to me now. A sweet one. Happy grading.

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