There are some students who cannot be saved. It's a fact of teaching. Not everybody is meant to finish in the fashion that is established as the norm.
What do you do with a student who is so complacent and so comfortable with their current mediocrity that they sabotage graduation to prolong their stay in school?
The Van Wilder effect of finishing college in 7 years comes to mind. There should be some sort of study done on our students that describes how students sabotage themselves out of fear of success.
It sounds crazy but there is no other reason for some of our students to fail. They do so well until the very end and it seems like they simply do not want to advance that they are happy with where they are. The mere notion of success frightens some students to the point where they shut down and give it all up. It's better to deal with the familiar feeling of failure than deal with the unknowns that success brings (or maybe they realize that it's easier to repeat classes than to take newer or harder classes).
Sadly their desire to stay amongst their peers (who are graduating) is a shortsighted effort that cripples them later on in life.
But as an educator I am not trained nor am I equipped to deal with this type of psychological dependence (if you can call it that).
So what's the remedy? I don't have one. The school doesn't have one. The parents don't seem to have a clue. Perhaps our school Chancellor... Oh wait, birth control can't fix this either.
How would you deal with students who have this sort of dependence? Some schools counsel these kids out of their schools prior to graduating. Unfortunately, we have higher authorities (like state and federal government) to answer to so that's not an option for us as a public institution. What would Bill Gates propose? What would Bloomberg suggest?
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