A Newbie Proffie Is Already Wise Beyond Years Concerning Student Evals.

Congratulations.

You've written some mean things about me on the "Grade Your Professors" section of MySpace. I'm sure it was cathartic, soothing, fun, or whatever exactly you had hoped it would be. What's strange about this is that your peers seem to disagree with the things you said about me.

Many of my other online evaluations are beyond good -- they're actually quite stellar. What I find particularly interesting, however, is that the official written, signed evaluations collected by the university were overwhelmingly complimentary. Even the ones that expressed a desire for something to change did so in a generally positive, constructive manner.

In particular, in response to your "Lectures are SO boring" quip, I could present 5 signed student evaluations denoting that I, unlike many of my fellow math teachers, went out of my way to bleed my enthusiasm for my subject and to make my classes engaging.

Anyway, you can feel free to write whatever you like on your online forum. I realize that you begrudge me because you were forced by your degree requirements to take college algebra. I know that math isn't your favorite subject, and I'm truly sorry about that. I know that your view of college is akin to a vending machine; you insert your thousands of dollars, press "B9," and it spits out a degree. I understand that challenging you in any way offends you to your very core, and I'm willing to bet that I was guilty of this.

Actually, I'd like to thank you for teaching me a valuable lesson. Last year was my first year in graduate school, and I sincerely hope that it was the first in a long sequence of years of teaching. I would like nothing more than to make a career out of what I'm doing right now. If I'm going to survive these years that I hope are before me, I am going to have to grow a thicker skin. It's going to be important that I am able to ignore your cheap shot from behind your protective cover of MySpace anonymity.

That's why it's important that you understand the following: If you would like to make a comment about my teaching, yet you lack the chutzpah to sign your name to it, then you are a coward -- but more importantly, I am simply not willing to give a shit about you or about anything you say.

Wayne the Weatherman from Wicomico Walks In With a Big, Big Schtick!

Good morning, fellow RYS-ers. Professor Weatherman reporting from the balmy mid-Atlantic. Temperatures in this region have just dipped below freezing, and the change has had some startling effects on the local college students. No, the sudden drop in temperature has not caused them to run like mad to the library in hope of staying warm while they study for finals. No,the frigid climate has not caused these students to stay in class for the entire class time or, for that matter, to get to class promptly so as to maximize their time in a heated environment. And no, the insanely cold December air has not caused these young intellectuals to cozy up next to their professors in office hours, hoping for last minute clarifications on research paper requirements. No, my fellow teachers,this horrible, horrible change in climate conditions has made students concerned about a much more serious issue: tanning.

Yes, you read that right—tanning. Since we’ve crept under the 30-day mark to the Winter Solstice, more and more students have been seen strolling around campus with that weird orange glow shining outward from their bright, but strangely dyed, faces. There have also been reports of students going for the two-for-one deal on tanning and hair highlights. Some students have even gone past the highlighting stage and moved straight to full-on bleaching. Professors have been frightened by these students and the incomprehensible metamorphoses that they seemed to have undergone overnight. In fact, I’m just receiving word now that one professor in the history department just taught his class wearing sun glasses! “The glow was just too bright,” he writes. He continues: “The combination of the oppressive fluorescent lighting in the room and the grotesque gleam of artificial skin dye were just too much for my poor old eyes to bear.” When asked if any of his students brought their final papers to class, he morosely replied, “I didn’t see any.” Truly, truly frightening.

That’s all for now, folks. As always, stay classy.

One of Our Chief Correspondents Sets the Sarcasm on Stun.

Wait a minute, what’s that you said? You don’t think that you deserve a D on your paper? Oh my god. This sounds serious. In all my time teaching, I have never had a student complain about a low grade before. You’d better tell me exactly where I went wrong grading this, so I don’t make the same mistake again!

What? You put a lot of “time and effort” into this? I had no idea! That changes everything! I mean, I know you wouldn’t be lying to me just to get a better grade. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure that I wrote on the syllabus that I would be grading on effort, since grading on intangible ideals is always a good idea. No, it’s not on the syllabus? Looks like I screwed that thing up too! How stupid of me!

Oh, and you didn’t think the page length was “really strict or anything”? You “saw it more as a guideline” than a rule? I see!! I don’t know why I let the fact that half the paper is missing get in my way! I’m an idiot!

What’s that now? You thought that the fact that you told me that you had “relationship issues” over Thanksgiving break would make me “go a little easier” on your paper? OMG! I totally didn’t adjust your grade for your relationship issues! I just assumed that your personal business had no bearing on your work for this class. When will I learn!!

Man, the next thing you’re going to tell me is that you have some kind of scholarship riding on your grade in this class…WHAT? You DO??? Holy shit! I cannot believe I ignored this! To think, you almost had to drop out of school because of me.

Another Semester Teaches Us How to Further Idiot-Proof Our Syllabi.

Attention Snowflakes:

1. You are not as fascinating and intelligent as your mother tells you. Academic papers are not based on opinion. I don’t care what you think about behavioral analysis or psychological theories, what I care about are your ability to understand what those wiser and more experienced than yourself think. This is why I do not want to see the words “I think” or “I believe” leaving your keyboard. You can barely dress yourself and stay awake in class, much less have a coherent thought.


2. An online class is just that, a class that happens to be online. Tests are still tests. No you cannot discuss the questions in the forums; no you cannot email me and ask me if the answer you want to choose is right. It is to test your knowledge, not mine. I already know the answer; this is why I am teaching the class.


3. You cannot turn in assignments repeatedly after making revisions until you get the score you want. If I am feeling giving I will allow you to make some changes if I think you will learn something from this interaction. Otherwise you get the grade for the work you put in. This is why you don’t wait until 10 minutes before it is due to finish the assignment.


4. No late assignments means just that, NO LATE ASSIGNMENTS. I don’t care that your house flooded after the kitchen started on fire when you received a phone call that your second cousin removed was admitted to the hospital and you spent the whole week there, which is why you weren’t at home to put out the fire that killed your dog. Yes I know that you are SO concerned about your grade and that you have NEVER done this before and it will simply ruin your GPA. No I don’t believe you. As the syllabus says, no late assignments. Deal with it.


5. Plagiarism is plagiarism. Threatening to tell my boss doesn’t make you any less academically dishonest, it just makes you a blackmailing asshole. Do you think I am going to give a break to a blackmailing asshole? Why don’t you take the time you are putting into an attempt to bully me into not reporting you and actually research your paper and write it correctly. You will get a lot more out of the experience.

POW! Nothing Baffles The Student Mind Quite Like: "Everything's On the Final!" [Post of the Week.]

Dear students,

I guess I wasn't sufficiently clear in class when I told you, about ten times over three weeks, that EVERYTHING is on the final exam. Everything. All lectures and all assigned readings.

To be fair, I'm guessing that the dozens of you writing me emails to ask the same question had trouble dressing yourselves and heading out to find the classroom where I repeatedly let you know, in simple terms, that everything is on the final exam.

But what in the hell are you hoping to hear from me?! That those textbooks I had you buy and read aren't really important, so don't worry about being asked about them? That my lectures are really just an exercise in blowing smoke up your asses, so ignore everything I said? Or that you should dedicate 45% of your time to the readings, and the balance to the lectures (as though I do the math on this sort of thing, and as though you are sufficiently organized and intelligent to allocate your "copious" study time accordingly?!).

And where, out of curiosity, did you all suddenly obtain a vocabulary that includes words like "cumulative" and "comprehensive"? I read your essays. Half of you misspelled my name. Some of you misspelled your own. The concept of a paragraph seems to have escaped you. Many, many of you would be challenged by the prospect of writing a "Dick and Jane" book that wasn't in the form of a bastardized text message (C Dk run, C Jn ROFL...). I hope you appreciated the brevity of "F," BTW (LOL). Why is it that you only pay attention to complex ideas when it involves minimizing your work?

Here's the deal. Know the shit I taught you. Read the material. Stop trying to second guess what's on the fucking examination and apply your pea-sized brains to learning what you ignored all term. I swear I could give you all the questions in advance, and that a third of you would find a way to fail anyway.

Stop being so strategic about your "education" - those of you who do so excessively are among the stupidest of your cohort anyway. The good and intelligent students have been working hard all term to understand the ideas and content, and will work equally hard to walk into the final exam with a decent knowledge of the material. They don't care about "what's on the exam," because they are too busy making sure they understand everything we've read and discussed. And I don't actually need to ask questions from every section of the course to sort out the students who take this approach from those who do not. Deal with it.

I can't think of much worthwhile in life that comes from trying to find loopholes in the fine print or through focusing on ways to do the least amount of work possible. So, dear students, just study your texts and lecture notes (I understand this will be a problem if you have none, LMFAO...). Or don't. It doesn't much matter to me. And leave me the fuck alone if the only contact I'll have with you all term is to find out what is, or is not on the final exam. Everything is.

Sincerely,

Your professor.

P.S.: I guess I could tell you that the final in no way involves Chapter 22, or that funny anecdote I used to illustrate an idea in week 3. But honestly, I know it wouldn't help you one fucking bit.

My Shredder. My Friend.

We all receive excellent open-ended comments from students on evaluations that help us with our teaching. Here are a few of mine:

• “talks to only one side of the room”
• “penalized me for a late paper….such a bastard”
• “the book sucks, the teaqchehr sucks, such a waste of time”
• “the tests are to hard”
• “the classroom is too warm…not enough a/c”
• “the classroom is too cold…not enough heat”
• “will not discuss problems with us during the 10 minute class break”[professor comment here: during a 3 hr class, I do have to go to the bathroom sometime!!]
• “I already know this material but the university makes me take this course”
• “the prof missed one class this semester and I really needed a lecture that day”

Yes, folks, these are the kind of helpful comments from students to improve your teaching that do end up on the dean’s desk. I even had one dean state on my report that I should utilize some of my student’s comments. And this particular evaluation contained some of the silliest and asinine comments to date! Thank God, I do not work in that pitiful department anymore! But, the dean never hears those students who come up to me, face-to-face, to say:

• “thanks for your patience”
• “that was a tough test, but a fair test”
• “you are always so good to us”
• “ I have a friend who wants to take this course from you. What sections will you be teaching next semester?”

I always have the shredder plugged in upon receiving my evaluations. They make wonderful litter for pets.

Mary from Minneapolis Has Been Defeated. And She's Not Alone.

Where I go to graduate school, the senior faculty members have an abysmal publishing record, yet advise the graduate students to ‘publish or perish.’ They take a year’s worth of sabbaticals, while graduate students teach three first year composition classes and attempt to write a dissertation in their ‘spare time.’ My alcoholic dissertation advisor lives in another state, and I've been left without any sort of faculty mentorship.

The reality is this: perhaps at other Universities, graduate students are brought in to actually be trained as scholars. However, my people (the defeated, the disillusioned) know that we are cheap labor, period, doing the jobs no one else wants to do. I’d be far less defeated if I felt I received an actual education: just one-quarter of what I give to my students.

At my University, the course selection is narrow, the faculty is unavailable to confer and rarely leave comments on our exams and projects, and professional development is unheard of. This is because we’re not being trained as scholars, and we’re defeated because we know this. We signed on to receive an education, and instead we received 60 first year students. Without any training, we waltz into classrooms and attempt to teach these oftentimes difficult freshmen, for a pay rate of less than five dollars an hour (but you’ve heard this story before; I won’t go on).

In our free time, we field criticism from the faculty, such as ‘you’re teaching too much content’ and ‘you’re not getting through the program fast enough.’ Graduate school, at least in my experience, is not about the quality of one’s research: it’s about efficiency. I was even advised, in one of those rare moments in which I received something that vaguely approximated mentorship, that I should switch my dissertation to multicultural studies because it’s 'hot right now.'

We are defeated because we came in the door, with the love of our discipline fully intact. We are then told to ‘give up the individuality thing and package yourself, because it’s a corporate world, baby.’ It’s the corporate world and we graduate students are the bottom feeders. In my discipline, there are very few jobs available and in all likelihood, I will be working at Sears next year. I’m defeated, because I’m a devoted, good teacher. I’m defeated because I see faculty members with twenty-times my income spend a year on sabbatical, while I write countless letters of recommendation on behalf of my students. I ask one student, “why aren’t you asking an actual PhD for this recommendation to law school,” to which he responds: “I don’t know them, they don’t know my name, they’re never around.”

These same faculty members shoot off emails, telling the graduate students to ‘hurry up and get out,' because we’re an abstraction, and there’s a whole line of new students ready and eager to replace us.

We leave graduate school defeated because we’ve been force fed the corporate model of higher education. We leave graduate school defeated because we realize there’s no such thing as professional integrity. Our faculty members bicker and wage war on other faculty members, and in term, all the graduate students with Stockholm Syndrome start cutting each other’s throats to incur the favor of distant, unappreciative faculty members.

It's Only One Student Apology, But We're Grateful For It. We Will Alert You When We Get Another. For Now, We Will Bathe In This One.

Please know that there are students out here who agree with you, who hate the lazy, grade-grubbing, plagiarizing, Daddy-dialing little bastards who populate our classes.

We want to learn. We want to be good students. We want to be respected as intellectuals. Heck, we want to do good work and want you to like us. When all of those things happen your job is a little less hellish and our grade just might be shinier. And, in the process, we sometimes inadvertently get an education!

I apologize for the kids who plagiarize and then act like they don't know what that means. Isn't that an eight-grade vocabulary word? I apologize for the guy in the front row who asks pompous tangential questions in a painfully loud voice just to prove How Smart He Is to his peers. I apologize for the Little Grade Grubbers who ask why they got a 58 instead of a 90 on their exam, or the PreMed Grade Grubbers who gulp and sob over a 98. I especially apologize for the Beastly Grade Grubbers who call in Mommy, Daddy, the Dean, Daddy the Dean, or all of the above, in an attempt to prove to you, by a sheer display of Other Grown-Ups, that you're being So Unfair.

I can't really apologize for the kids who forget their pencils, their paper, or their pants, or who answer their cell phones during class, as this level of rudeness really is beyond my comprehension. I simply wish for your sakes that they disappear.

I apologize for department chairs who base your worth on the evaluations of bitter D students who just wish you'd inflate their grades a little more because "really, who does it hurt?" I apologize for the favoritism shown to professors who can't teach for crap but hand out A's (and evaluation-day candy) at the drop of a hat. I apologize for any persons in power who treat a university like a business and think that "the customer is always right" when in fact "the customer" is a spoiled dumbass who thinks that his tuition is seriously paying your salary.

But hey, all this apologizing isn't just because we, the ass-kissing students, want to empathize with you, our beloved professors. We're the self-centered know-it-all spawn of the baby boomers, after all - we apologize because the awful students are our problem too. When Johnny Moneybags the Third needs a two-week extension on his paper draft because his business-major self has had a stressful Greek Week at the frat, it hurts us all. Their 20-bullshit-excuses-per-week dilute the one situation per year that some of us really do need a break on. My idea throughout undergrad was to never EVER ask for an extension unless it was a ridiculous level of emergency, precisely because I figured that when I finally needed help, the professor would know it wasn't "just another excuse."

I eventually realized that most of my professors were not ogres with hearts of stone; they'd look at my past record and help me out if it seemed reasonable. And if they didn't, incredibly, the sun still managed to rise the next day.

Finally, I personally apologize for any time when I might have BEEN that student - emailing you about something I could have answered by looking at the syllabus, writing a grumpy evaluation because I wished I had done better in the class, or maybe asking an annoying question just because I wanted to prove to you that I was Listening, Attentive, and Smart. I hope you took off and bitched about me as you rightfully should have, and I hope that I have learned from my mistakes!

Some Last Day Suggestions From the Center For Touchy-Feelyness.

Like many campuses, ours has a Center whose purpose is to promote teaching and learning. I won't even get into the irony of a college that has to have a special center to promote *teaching and learning*!

But this center does have some events and resources that have been somewhat useful to me in the past. One of the services they provide is sending teaching suggestions periodically through a listserv. Very occasionally these have proved useful to me; most often I read them and delete, as the suggestions are things I already know, or that are not appropriate to my field or my classes. Most of the time, the submissions are not particularly memorable, for good or bad. The most recent one, though, stopped me in my tracks:

The last day of class can be hectic for students as well as instructors. This is a stressful time for all of us, and students may lose their focus just trying to make it to the end of the semester. Many instructors feel compelled to squeeze in those extra gems of knowledge on the last day. There are,however, more productive ways you can spend your time. One suggestion is a last day of class party. Have fun and plan some closing activities.

WTF? A "last day of class party" is a "more productive way you can spend your time"?!? A way to keep students from "los[ing] their focus"? The message goes on to list other variously educational and touchy-feely things we can do to wrap up the semester.

Maybe I'm hopelessly old-fashioned, naive, or pedantic (or maybe all three!) but I just can't believe that the last day of class--at least in a course with some actual content--isn't best spent maybe reviewing that content, or reinforcing concepts, or making connections with the earlier material, or, I don't know, helping students prepare for the final exam. Then again, it seems a lot of classes here (though not those in my department) don't bother to have final exams either.

A lot of my students seem to think that: (1) nothing really happens (should happen) during the first week of classes, (2) nothing really happens (should happen) during the last week of classes, (3) they shouldn't have required assignments or exams during the week before or the week after a holiday or break, (4) final exams are optional, and (5) they shouldn't be tested on anything that wasn't said out loud in class.

In short, a lot of them appear to think themselves entitled to at least a B for showing up in class at least half the time and breathing in and out. They take it as an affront when we actually start presenting material on the first day of classes ("What? You're not going to just pass out the syllabus and let us go?") and meet on the last day ("None of my other classes are meeting that Monday.") I can only assume their other profs are the ones saving the last day for cupcakes, letters to next semester's students, and a big group hug.

Oh, We Get Lots of Lists.

We get a lot of lists sent to us, funny final exam stories, 10 outrageous lies students tell, you probably know the drill. But the one we get all the time is this one, a list of between 10-50 funny things for professors to do on the first day of class. (Our favorite entry is this one: After turning on the overhead projector, clutch your chest and scream "My pacemaker!")

We get that list from someone at least a couple of times a week. We love it, but have read it so often now that it's not nearly as funny as it was the first time.

But last night someone sent us a new version of the list that we've never seen, and while it didn't make us pee our pants, or anything, we were glad to see some new material. Here are the ones that tickled us most. Enjoy the flava.

----

Ten Things to Do In Class.

1. Bring a trombone to class and hand it to the student closest to your desk. Say, "You take care of Mr. T-Bone, and I'll take care of you."
   


2. Whenever anyone asks a question, just reply: "I don't know. What does your monkey think?"
   


3. Announce the start of the exam, but don't pass anything out. Put your head down on your desk and say, "You're all on your own. I'm turning on the radio in my head."
   


4. In the middle of lecturing, stop, look around and say, "My mama. Did you hear my mama? You, there, can you see her? Let me know if my mama is behind me!"
   


5. Tell the class that if anyone says the words "bacon," "dishwasher," or "panorama," that you've got a sock full of nickels in your briefcase that you'll smack them with. Hold the briefcase up and say, "If it's a trip to nickel city you're looking for, then I'm the man to send you there!"
   


6. If any sound comes from outside the classroom, check your watch and say, "My wife will be here any minute. And then we're all in trouble."
   


7. Pull aside a student and whisper, "That guy behind you? Man, he looks crazy!"
   


8. All semester long, whenever any student comes in late, say loudly, "And so that's where we buried the gold." Then laugh a little too loud and a little too long.
   
   
9. When anyone else is speaking, tap the top of your head with your palm. Stop when they stop, and then smell your hand.
   


10. Bring a big tray of food for yourself. Start eating from it, and occasionally point to various students and say, "These are my beans, baby. You may want some beans. But you'll have to get your own."