Chart-Making Charles from Chestertown Challenges Us.

Each semester I teach a large section of BIOL 1101, our college's intro course. I separate the class into 3-5 sections, based on the number of TAs I have. We do a standard placement test (designed by me and my colleagues) and distribute students evenly through the lab and discussion sections.

This past semester I had 4 TAs, all good kids who I've had in class before: Ann, Bob, Carl, and Dee. I meet with them extensively before the semester, but they have "lord's rule" over the grading and progress of their sections during the semester.

After a mandatory seminar we took on grade inflation last year, I got it in my head to plot the students' grades along with the standard TA evaluations we do each semester. Both are (happily) on a 4 point scale.

I've just now finished this chart in Excel, but couldn't figure out the export program. So I've displayed the data as near as I can in MS Paint. It looks awful, but the trend is clear.

Those TAs who had the highest student evaluations also gave the highest grades. It is definitely not statistically significant - my brethern would string me up - but I think it reveals a real truth about something.

The blue line shows the average grade earned, the red line shows the evaluation average for the TA, and the black line is the average final exam score for students in that section...the black line is a number I give. That it's so straight across suggests to me that our placement test did a good job sorting students fairly evenly, and that my TAs rise and fall in their evaluations based on the grades they give.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Wherein Someone's Lost.

It's a beautiful September day, sunny and low 70s. A woman shows up at my office door, clad head to foot in fleece, beads of sweat on her forehead and, of course, with a question. As if my own students are not odd enough.

Her question is buried under tons of ramble (which is like rubble, but made of useless words). It goes something like this: "I'm supposed to be in Real Estate Law with Mr. Instructor's Fullname but they changed the room they say it's 110 but I just went there and the janitor told me there was no one there I've been just about everywhere and I can't find it I'm supposed to be in that class and to top it off I got in a car accident yesterday guy hit me it's not too bad I pissed up the seat pretty good but that's going to be okay the car's at the dealer being fixed so I've got to find this room I'm supposed to be in class with Mr. Instructor's Fullname and I can't find the room I've been to 110."

I say, "Let me check." And I call the switchboard for room information. I find out that it's in room 110, but not for another hour. So I tell her she’s got the right room, but she’s nearly an hour early.

“Oh,” she says. “Is there a place I could sit down then?”

Seems a logical request to me. “Sure,” I say. I direct her to the cafeteria down the hall and suggest she relax before class. I wisely say nothing about her perhaps slipping out of her personal sauna.

“Now tell me,” she says, “why am I sitting there relaxing while I’m supposed to be in class in room 110 with Mr. Instructor’s Fullname?”

“It doesn’t start for another hour,” I remind her, wondering, of course, how on Earth she will navigate through real estate law when the concept of time eludes her.

“Oh,” she says, with some lack of conviction, thanks me, and toddles off.

I close and lock my office door.

Nobody Can Suffer Poor Charlie.

• In response to Chicago Charlie: good God, grow a pair. You've got 40 years till you retire? So you're, what, 25, and you've already consigned yourself to forty years of hating yourself, your job, your students, and your life? Gee, THAT'll show those slacker students, won't it! Do yourself and everyone you know a favour, and quit now. Get a job in construction; if you start now as a day labourer, you'll be a general contractor by the time you're 35 with a little application. You'll make more money, work in the great outdoors, be in better shape, enjoy life more, and you won't put your family and friends through hell with your constant whining.Leave academe for those of us, poor benighted souls all I grant you, who actually like it. I bet you my students are as dead-eyed as yours. I teach to the two or three that can actually stay awake. It makes my life a lot more fun to concentrate on the ones that respond. But if you can't do that, stop now. You've already put in too much time to get any other job? Honey, you haven't STARTED to waste your life yet. Get out before you do.
  


• Resign. Quit. Find something else to do with your life. With 40 years to go until retirement, you're still young enough. Seriously: you are a danger to those rare bright-eyed students who every now and then do find themselves in your class. You've become so dead, you're no longer capable of recognizing them. I know: I had professors like this, and they did me great harm. I might not have seemed promising when I was an undergraduate, particularly not since I was entering a field that still is among the most competitive in academia (astrophysics), but I prevailed. It sure wasn't easy. I can't help but wonder how much further I might have gotten if I'd had someone other than that old deadwood who clearly didn't give a fig about me, our field, or anything else, even themselves.
  


• Charlie's a baby. I see it often in my colleagues, this all or nothing bullshit. Charlie's had a bad class is all. His romantic notion about being a proffie has blown up in his face because it's not as easy and wonderful as he imagined. Classic response of a snowflake who finds out he has to teach comp. Comp is not easy. Comp is the anti-fun class in many ways. I taught it as a younger man, and students have hated comp forever. Welcome to the NFL, Charlie. I'd like to work up some sorrow on his behalf, but his posing is annoying. All his hard work was for naught? Cracks me up. It is awfully dramatic, however, especially that killing line, "Nothing. Numbness." Couldn't you guys have just turned that into a haiku? Charlie, have a Tums, honey, and take a nap.

Tara Thinks a Little Compassion Is a Reasonable Response.

I am an occasional RYS reader who has never held a college-level teaching position. However, the recent string of posts about funerals and missing exams struck a nerve for me and I felt compelled to write.

I can't tell you how grateful I am, in light of these posts, that my grandparents held on until after I graduated from college! I was partly raised by one set of grandparents, in addition to my parents. One of these grandparents died after a very prolonged period of illness and disability while I was in my first post-college job, and the other died suddenly and unexpectedly a month before my final exams of my first year in professional school.

Both experiences were marked by my dissolving into undignified tears in the relevant administrative office while asking for time off, and then going home for several days of culturally-prescribed rituals and trying to help my parents and siblings hold themselves together. I believe neither funeral had a printed program (our religion forbids taking items associated with a funeral back to one's home, so I don't see why we would have had them) and byzantine family politics precluded naming the grandchildren in the obituaries.

The most recent death, the one while I was in professional school, hit me particularly hard and I returned to school strongly resembling one of the Sophies (albeit excluded from a diagnosis of depression by having actually experienced a recent loss) for the remainder of the academic year.

Fortunately, my current program is small, centralized, and compassionate enough that, rather than going 10 rounds with each professor, one meeting and a couple of e-mails with one dean were enough to arrange both my absences from class and rescheduling exams so that my intense but temporary distraction wouldn't force me to repeat the entire year at great financial and career-path costs. No documentation required. (Although perhaps my bursting into tears and psychomotor retardation were convincing enough in themselves.)

I realize that college instructors have to contend with plenty of fishy excuses, especially at the undergraduate level where there are some particularly young and immature students in the mix, and I don't envy you the task. But if I had gone through my grandparents' deaths in college and had to deal with intense suspicion and no slack from my professors on top of everything else, I probably would have said, "Screw it all," stayed in bed until the year ended and someone kicked me out of the dorms, and had a much bumpier road to "resolving my grief," as the bereavement literature puts it.

No, it's not up to you as professors to be the guardians of your students' mental health or to care about their lives to any great level of detail, but I hope that you as human beings don't find it completely impossible to show a little compassion toward those students who are genuinely suffering.

Tara from Tampa

A Recover(ing/ed) Mourner