School should be difficult. Teachers should do better

I'll try and describe through example why having hard courses as part of a Computer Science curriculm is not the reason students suffer. In my opinion the best run course in the Computer Science program at UTSC is MATA37 with Kathleen Smith. MATA37 is a hard course; the year I took it our midterm average was barely over 50%. MATA37 is a stressful course; it is included in first-year POST requirements, where a student hopeful to be admitted into the program would like to achieve a final grade of 70% or higher. Yet if you were to ask the students (even those who didn't perform as well as they'd liked), it would be hard to find someone that would speak ill of Kathleen or the course itself. From the outside, A37 is the same as any other first year course and without looking deeper you could imagine the stress caused by such low marks contributes equally to the "mental health crisis" of CS students at UTSC. 

After midterm marks were released, Kathleen made the class a proposition that I haven't seen made anywhere else. She stood in front of 500 students packed into IC130 and said "If you would like to schedule an appointment with me, you can bring your midterm and we'll sit down and talk about it to figure out where you went wrong". I scheduled a meeting. What I thought would only be a 15 minute conversation, turned into a 45 minute in-depth review of what I could do next time and how I could perform my best for the rest of the course. I know other people had a similar experience. This level of compassion for the students makes it enjoyable to go to class and makes it worthwhile to struggle through the challenges of first-year CS. As a student, you can trust Kathleen has your best interest at heart.

Kathleen's lectures aren't dry or uninteresting. She presents with a sense of enthusiasm, and isn't afraid to crack a joke. She is relatable. She provides a large amount of (challenging) practice material to students, meaning that you're almost guaranteed to receive what you put into the course. During the final exam, she made visits to each writing room and gave everyone a chocolate. If every course was conducted in such a way that it felt our successes and failures were taken seriously, I would find it hard to feel hopeless despite the difficulty of the program. So I'm left wondering if Kathleen Smith taught every course at UTSC would we still have a "mental health crisis"?

That being said, I can in no way expect professors to work 24/7 supporting their students. Maybe we need to hire more qualified people, capable of giving 1-on-1 support where it's needed. Maybe we can do a better job at connecting students to their upper-year peers so people can build their own support networks. Maybe we need to be more open in the way we communicate with each other. Talk amicably about test results, let us know what we can do better. Don't just show up to lecture to present a slideshow. Find a way to make class enjoyable enough that I want to be there. Gain the student's trust that their interests are in mind while decisions are being made.