We don’t have to be the unyielding taskmasters we have learned to be

On my train commute one evening this semester, I had a Zoom meeting with a student whom I had never seen in class.

I have learned (admittedly, by doing it wrongly in the past) not to pre-judge and, sure enough, her answer to my gentle question about where she had been brought tears to my eyes. With elderly, sick parents and a sibling suffering from a long-term illness, she was working to support four people, including herself. She had tried and failed to complete this subject four times already.

"Let’s fix this," I said. We spent the meeting planning how to get her through in those circumstances, enabling her to take that step towards her dream of becoming a teacher.

But there are many other steps and, when she thanked me at the end of the meeting, I was struck by her remark that I was the only university teacher who had asked about her situation and taken it seriously.

I hope this cold indifference is in the process of thawing. After all, colleagues everywhere have been learning a lesson similar to mine: that students missing classes, or falling asleep in them, are more likely to be working hard and suffering than staying out all night drinking or dancing.

Part of the reason is the increasing pressure students place on themselves as they intensify their investment in their own human capital in an ever more competitive world. It is also about higher education expansion, which has drawn many more students, from more diverse circumstances, into our classrooms but has not delivered the levels of staffing that would allow us to give these new types of student the sympathy and flexibility they need.

Indeed, academics too have been pressured to become ever more productive. We have flipped classrooms, built new efficiencies into larger classes, redesigned assessment and marked essays at a pace that courts hearing claims of wage theft now recognise to be highly improbable. Amid such a maelstrom of activity, it is not surprising that no one noticed that my student needed help.

Still, we ought not to let ourselves entirely off the hook. The history of schooling shows that even as a succession of progressive reformers made high-minded calls for education for all, a popular “school story” genre coalesced around shared classroom experiences of shame and humiliation.

I think it was Ichabod Crane, the schoolmaster in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, who first taught me that teachers were supposed to be punitive. Born into a home with few books that would be considered literature, as a small child I devoured my father’s 1950s Illustrated Classics, in which the actual texts were abridged into comic book-style speech bubbles. Having clarified with my dad what “et tu, Brute?” meant in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the next line I remember asking about was “spare the rod and spoil the child”, the biblical maxim subscribed to by Crane.

Punishing students, according to Irving – and possibly the Old Testament – is what makes Crane a good teacher. Indulging them, by contrast, “spoils” them. And we see evidence of the ongoing popularity of this view all around us in academia. We see it in procedures for applying for an extension on assessment tasks that are themselves traumatic; in automated admission rejections for “ongoing conditions” such as cancer; in blanket policies that paid work is no reason for special consideration, regardless of financial circumstances; and in thoughtless comments to those needing help that suggest they “don’t belong here”.

It starts well before students get to university, of course. So, like abused children, they approach us when they have a problem with excessively humble apologies, pre-worded acknowledgements of their supposedly terrible failures, and fervent promises that they will “take more responsibility” from now on.

And many academics reinforce such anxiety. Even when flexibility is granted, it is often accompanied by threats of reduced marks, greater future surveillance or, at the very least, tellings-off for poor time-management. It is as if we feel we are lowering academic standards when we accommodate difference.

Perhaps we even fear we are being complicit in producing a generation of lazy workers. But how hypocritical we are, I often think. After all, few of us are likely to submit our own work on time. If keeping to deadlines is a key skill that education is supposed to inculcate, how come – as anyone who has edited a book or special issue knows – it hasn’t been assimilated by our doctorate-holding colleagues?

Yet unlearning the “tough teacher” persona is not easy. For my part, I find that I need to actively remember to set aside a “rehearsed” version of being a teacher and to build a new one, in relationship to my real students and their real lives.

In this case, it meant being very flexible with the student’s deadlines. In her circumstances, many things inevitably went wrong – family illnesses, mostly. But by staying engaged throughout, she was able to submit everything, eventually. And she passed.

Hannah Forsyth is an associate professor in history at the Australian Catholic University.