“I also think it’s OK to give teachers a gentle way to dissuade students who ask them for a recommendation.”
My advice to all students, at all levels:
YOU WANT TO KNOW if the teacher/professor/boss is less than enthusiastic about you. The way you ask can invite candor, or deter it.
Don’t start by asking for a recommendation. If you ask, “Will you write for me?” the only options open to the teacher are (1) writing the letter and (2) refusing to write the letter, which is awkward and difficult. A lot of people will say “yes” for letters they don’t really want to write. You don’t want that lukewarm letter.
Instead, start by talking to the teacher/professor/boss about your plans. See what they have to say. Nine times out of ten, if you’ve picked the right recommender, they will say, “Do you need a recommendation?” But if they act like they don’t want to be there, or they try to change the subject, or they seem like they’re in a big hurry to get the conversation over with…well, that’s valuable information for you, and you can walk away without getting stuck with a mediocre letter.
As @toowonderful mentioned, I think it is very important to write thank you’s for teachers that take the time to write the recommendations. It is one of many extras they do for the students. We did the same for the GC - we were fortunate to be at a school where a close relationship for student and parent was easy to be had with the GC.
We bundled the thank you card with a gift and gave it just before winter break - basically serving as a cross between a thank you/Christmas present, and kids wrote something along the lines of, “regardless of how my college decisions turn out, I want to thank you for writing my recommendation…” etc. When doing it at this time, the thank you is made independent of the results.
I would be disappointed it the favorite for a recommendation couldn’t do it like OP faces, but sometimes the best recommendations come from someone that sees your students beyond their grades, and really likes them as a person. Maybe they didn’t get the top grade but they can write about the student being the most inquisitive, broad thinking or they participated a lot - things like that. I think it can be good to consider teachers outside of a student’s best grade.
On the other hand, perhaps your student could tell his current math teacher that he understands she is super busy and can’t write the rec, but perhaps she could mention to the Pre-calc teacher how well he is doing now or give some kind of feedback to them to include. That way the pre-calc teacher would have something to add like his growth or upward trajectory in his math studies. Just a thought.
My younger son’s APUSH teacher had a pretty good system to keep things under control. He had a long list of things for the students to fill out before he’d write a letter. I don’t remember all of it, but one was to give him a copy of one of the papers you wrote, another was to write a short essay about which text you’d liked the most and why, and another was about what you were thinking about majoring in and why. I’m guessing by the time you’d given him all that info, the recommendations were not boilerplate, and you had to be willing to go to the trouble to be thoughtful in your responses.
The ONE time in my career that I couldn’t write a sterling letter for a kid, of course I let her know! I told her that, if I were to write her letter the one really good thing I could say was that she did well on my final. But that I couldn’t talk about her test grades, her homework, her work ethic, or any of the things I would normally highlight, because she frequently slept in my class and her grades reflected that. And that if I were the best she could do, I would be happy to write as positive a letter as I could truthfully write, but I wasn’t going to sacrifice my professional reputation by lying. I told her to think about it, and to get back to me if she still wanted me to write the letter.
She respectfully declined.
We’re not out to sabatage any kid; that’s not why we became teachers. But that doesn’t mean we’ll sacrifice that professional reputation… next year’s kids and the ones that follow are going to depend on schools taking my letters seriously. They can’t do that if I lie and pretend that poor students are anything beyond what they are. I’ll absolutely search to find the good in any kid. Whether what you’ve shown me is more than you’ve shown another teacher is up to you as the student.
My son asked his pre calc teacher today after class. She said she’d be happy to write one for him and she thanked him for asking in advance.
He needs to ask another teacher but he’s having a hard time picking one. He’s a good kid with good grades, but hasn’t really made any connections with his teachers. He goes to a huge public high school in PA (3000 kids or so). He wants to ask his English teacher who’s pretty cool with him, but he’s afraid he’s unreliable and will either forget or wait till the last minute. His history teacher barely knows him (even though he’s gotten straight A’s in his class). We’re a bit stuck about where to go from here.
“the GPA should reflect how well the students did in class.”
Highly selective colleges do not use the recommendation letters to find out how the students did in class. They use the letters to look for signs of curiosity, resiliency, integrity, and other personal qualities. This is why, if you have the choice, it makes sense to ask a teacher who had you in class AND knows you outside of class through coaching, advising, etc.
Even without delving into how there’s no consensus on what integrity means, teachers, even coaches and advisers, rarely know enough about their students personal lives to be able to judge a student’s integrity.
While this is true, I recommend that my students share a resume with their recommender in order to give the writer a fuller picture of who the student his and how she/he spends time outside the teacher’s classroom since it’s not always possible for a teacher to know a student outside of class. Now whether or not the recommender has time to peruse through the resume is another story, but I know for my own children who used community college professors for some recommendations, the resume was really helpful.
You all stun me with the spring suggested deadlines to ask for LoRs. My kids’ school set a target of Oct 15 for RD. Granted, your schools must have a much larger senior class. And kids wre warned that that popular english teacher would be overloaded.
On the other thread, I said, “January of junior year is terribly early to be asking for an LoR. I’d think a school administration would set some guidelines, to avoid this very problem.” This shouldn’t be a rush to fill a teacher’s dance card, precluding other solid kids from getting the right recs. The administration allowing a first come/first served approach is not doing the kids justice.
It can matter, for most-competitive colleges. (Sorry.) You’re reviewed as an individual, but the context is still the pool. And that means all those other kids who did get that nice letter from a relevnt teacher.
If there is a large senior class, kids could request early, then the teachers could select those they felt they can write the best LoRs for.
One issue with boilerplate is they forget to change the name of the student. Johnny applies, that critical letter notes Susie. Or they added a little sweet aside about Mary’s deep interest in xxx and this letter is for Tom, who has no mention of that interest in his app. Sheesh.
A great letter reads customized. It doesn’t repeat basics or an inventory, it makes it seem the teacher really appreciates this student, for solid reasons. Can’t tell you how many letters emphassize the kid smiles, has homework ready, sems popular, then moves to a list of his/her clubs.
“I would say colleges should rely less on LORs.” Lol, when you start Roethlisburger U. :)>-
To be honest, if 30 or 40 kids asked for letters in the fall, there’s no way I would be able to do a quality job on them. I’ve learned that I can do a max of 2 at a sitting; otherwise they start to sound too similar.
Summer makes that do-able, I can get up in the morning, spend an hour or two on those two letters, and move on to whatever else is awaiting my attention. But during the school year? Simply not going to happen-- my classroom prep/ grading/ and all the rest take priority.
I don’t do boilerplate letters. At the most, I’ll copy the paragraph that describes the course and its expectations. But beyond that, I write a different letter from scratch for each kid.
It doesn’t just “read customized”-- it is.
I write the kind of letters I hope and pray some other teacher is writing for my own kids.
I’ve read enough of your posts that I can see your wisdom, your openness to new ideas, your generosity of spirit. I’ve seen you moderate threads-- eliminating those that cross the line into unkindness, balancing PC with giving people the chance to speak their minds. I can only guess at the number of hours you donate here, keeping CC the incredibly informative, inclusive place that it is.
Let me know to whom I can address the letter, lol.
“I write the kind of letters I hope and pray some other teacher is writing for my own kids.”
@bjkmom - in case your students and their parents haven’t said it enough… THANK YOU. Thank you for putting in so much work on the recommendation letters that are so critical to your students’ admission prospects. That is a true kindness.
Have you ever had a situation of having more students ask for recommendations than you could reasonably handle doing a good job on? If so, how did you decide whom to write recommendations for (or how would you if too many students ask next year)?
Our requests are due in by about March. A “typical” letter load is due in before the end of school in June. But those teachers who have a lot-- say 30+ – have the summer to get them done.
We have ballpark 600 kids in each graduating class. It simply stands to reason that some teachers are going to get hit hard. It’s part of the job.
Each of our kids requests 3 letters. Guidance splits them up, to try to avoid having one teacher completely overworked. If some sort of a crisis meant that I couldn’t do my letters, guidance would simply dole out mine to the 3rd teacher that each kid had requested. Not ideal, but it would still be handled.
