An Observation

The bottom drawer of my filing cabinet contains all the student work I must keep for one semester: the final exam blue books and scantrons, attendance sheets, Excel printouts, testing center receipts, and the like. Today, to make room for this semester's must-keeps, I tossed all of the paper I had saved from the summer. Before I filled the trashcan, I went through the piles looking for items that should be shredded instead of trashed.

Over the summer I taught one group of prep students, folks whose placement scores indicated that they weren't ready for college-level work. Their blue books were mixed with final exams from the college-level students I had. As I sorted work into "shred" and "toss" piles, one thing I looked for was a social security number on the front of the blue book.

I tell students, as do their other professors, the student handbook, the nightly news—not to enter their social security numbers on anything, to substitute their student ID numbers on college materials. [Although the college went to a student number system of identification 4 or so years ago, paperwork all over campus is just now catching up.] During the last week of class, I must have warned them at least 5 times that they needed to protect their identities.

But as I was flipping through the blue books, I noticed that all but one of my prep students had written their social security number where the blue book cover asked for it! [Identity thieves would dance with joy after noticing the name, signature, address, and telephone number dutifully added.] In comparison, the three sections of college-level students had followed my directions and substituted their college ID number.

Most prep students believe that they do not need remedial classes, that the college is wasting their time and stealing their money. If I had the opportunity to meet that class one more time, I would explain to them that yes, they did need their prep classes. That semester of remediation was their last opportunity to fix bad habits that would ruin their future success in both the academic and professional world—namely acting before thinking about the consequences and not following directions.