School’s out for the summer.
This hardly seems the time for students to be reading up on how to interact with their college professors, but maybe they need a leg up.
Those who need to read “Say This, NOT That to Your Professor,” probably do.
Author Ellen Bremen, a West Seattle resident and teacher at Highline Community College, knows whereof she speaks.
“As time passed,” she says in the introduction, “I noticed changes in the way students were communicating. I saw students all over campus staring at their phones and texting, rather than engaging in conversation while hanging out or waiting for class to begin.”
Bremen recounts some of the problems her students were manufacturing: “A late paper, an absence, a failing grade. And I found myself going, ‘What, what, what?’ in my head over crazy things students would say…, Bottom line: Students’ communication was changing, and not necessarily for the better.”
Some of the clueless statements Bremen recounts:
•“I didn’t get my paper done. Can I turn it in late?”
•“Why did you give me a C grade? I thought I did better than that.”
•“I missed the last two weeks. Can I still pass this class?”
•“Ugh. What you’re telling me to do requires too much work. Can’t we make this easier?”
•“I couldn’t get your paper finished because I had a paper due in another class.”
Bremen supplies examples, with 36 case studies, of how things should be spun — the basics of more positive human communication.
In the good, old days, people had Emily Post to guide them on the finer points of etiquette. In this connected age, we have primers for the young on how not to come across as idiots before their bettors — that’s the easy take on Bremen’s book.
But parents who might read Bremen’s book should think again and remember what it was like to be off to college for the first time, unsure of one’s place in the big world.
Then there is the intimidation factor: Somehow talking to a professor is different than interacting with a high school teacher. The college setting is a petri dish incubating clumsy communication.
Beyond the book’s campus utility, it’s a nice, little reminder for anyone else on how to relate to others at work or play and, as Emily Post implied, let someone else play the idiot.
“Say This, NOT That to Your Professor,” by Ellen Bremen, MA. Paperback, 262 pages. $9.96 on Amazon and BN.com; $7.99 on Kindle.