I was perplexed when the student gave me her excuse for missing a weeks worth of classes at the beginning of the college's fall semester. She was 18 years old and one of around 100 students I had that semester.
She came up to me after class and apologized for missing class for a week. She explained to me that she had to go home for a week because she missed her mother and was homesick. She wasn't sick. She didn't have an emergency. She was simply homesick and wanted to go home. I had never had a college student give me that excuse for an absence.
She left college for a week because she was homesick!?
I filled her in on the material she needed to catch up on. As I walked back to my office I mentally criticized the girl. College students are expected to be mature, take care of themselves, and be independent of their parents. I felt the girl was very unprepared for real life if she stopped going to her 5 classes because she missed her mother. When a student misses class and needs to catch up (assignments, exams, etc.) it is an inconvenience to the teacher because they have to take time to catch the student up. Under certain circumstances it is acceptable to miss school but to miss for being homesick was not one of them.
After I had time to think I felt more compassionate.
I began to think of the culture many of my students were coming from. The college was in South Dakota surrounded by towns with small rural populations. It was common to meet students who came from towns with less than 100 people in them. Because many 18 year old college students came from rural homes they were unprepared for living in a bigger city away from their families.
In my three years teaching at that particular university I remember students who couldn't function their first semesters at college. Because they were sheltered growing up in small rural towns they didn't know how to take care of themselves when they moved away to college. For the first time in their lives they didn't have someone to tell them to go to class, how to study, and were responsible for taking care of themselves. Students from places with bigger cities and more urban environments have completely different experiences than rural students.
My Own Picture of Rural South Dakota At Sunset
A majority of my students grew up working on family farms. They relied on their parents and their families for structure in every aspect of their life. They woke up in the morning and worked alongside their families throughout the day to help earn a living. While in elementary through high school many students had small class sizes and went to school with the same small group of kids their entire lives. Because class sizes were small, students got more interaction and attention from teachers...a very different environment compared to my 100 student auditorium class where it was impossible to give all students individual attention.
Rural South Dakota isn't a place that attracts a lot of outsiders. The winters can be harsh and in rural areas you live an isolated life. Because of this young people grow up only interacting with limited people.
College Culture Shock
I understood fully why my student needed to go home for that week. It was because college was a culture shock. It was full of so many new faces and a culture that she wasn't use to. She wasn't working with her family anymore on the farm but working by herself to survive. Those first few weeks of college she probably got overwhelmed by the huge change in culture she went through.
Compassion and Tough Love As a Teacher
I quickly learned I needed to teach to a unique audience after moving to South Dakota from a big city. At the beginning of a new semester I let my students know that they were adults and that they needed to be responsible because I wasn't going to coddle them. I also let them know I wasn't a hard-ass and if they needed help to ask me.
Over my time there that one girl wasn't the only student I saw struggling to cope with that first semester. I would encounter students who didn't know how to study, had extreme test anxiety, had never encountered racial or cultural diversity, and more. It was a unique teaching experience for me and I constantly had to shift my teaching methods to fit the culture surrounding me. I had to stop thinking like a city person and think like the locals. I had to adapt my my teaching methods constantly to fit the rural culture surrounding me and in doing so I became a better teacher who was more conscientious of cultural diversity and how that impacted learning and teaching.