Dana From Decatur Offers Tips for Dealing with PTSD (Post Traumatic Student Disorder.)

1. First, you need to re-establish your self worth. This can be difficult, since your school has probably made it abundantly clear that Snowflakes rank way above Adjuncts, TAs, and maybe even Proffies in some cases. Try to ignore the fact that they value the little brats' input before your own. No, really. I dare you. Just try.




2. Just don't take it personally. Easy as pie, right? You know, when the plagiarizer not only fails to feel guilt for wasting your time and assuming you far stupider than you actually are, but he actually blames YOU for his plagiarism? Just brush it off, man. It's not personal. Those students showing blatant disrespect in their evals and their classroom behavior? It's not personal. The student who showed up on eval day after missing 50% of the classes, only to write "She was horrible. She should be fired," the insults about personality and attire--they're not personal either. They just SEEM personal. Deeply, deeply personal.




3. Or try adopting Bitchy Bear's attitude: well, I don't care. Teaching means nothing to me anyway. Try to maintain this mantra while ignoring the fact that your livelihood depends on teaching since you are just a temporary worker. So, if you stop caring about teaching, you will probably have to stop caring about eating too. But who needs food, anyway?




4. Are we still recommending that we ignore the fact that with 85% (I'm being kind) of our students being lazy, ignorant, entitled, lying cheaters in some way, shape, or form, that we as teachers are confronted daily with a horrific vision of the future and humanity more generally? Yes? Okay, well, I guess you should ignore that too, then. Repression can be healing. Try reading some "uplifting" stories from the ridiculously blind--maybe Katie from Kalamazoo is a good start.If nothing else, it may temporarily re-direct your anger.




5. If all this fails? Drink.

Chronicle Multimedia: Journey to the Center of an Essay Mill.

We know most folks read the Chronicle, but a number of our readers have asked us to link to their recent slideshow about essay mills. So, we woke up, did it, and are now going to the Target to get some orange cups and saucers. That's how we roll.

Caroline from the Carolinas Works In An English Department. And She Tells Phillie from the Plains To Eat Shit.

A number of English proffies wrote to us about Phillie's recent skewering post. We weren't surprised by this. English proffies love to write. Hey, wait a minute, some of our best friends teach English. Wait, that reminds us. Do you know how to get an English Ph.D. out of your house? Pay him for the pizza. No, that's really bad. We apologize. Pretend Phillie told you that joke.

*()*

I am so tired of defending myself and my profession from the assumption, so thoroughly demonstrated by Phillie, that the majority of English Departments and professors are "literary wonks who occasionally do a bad amateur-night impression of teaching" or "soft-headed weirdos who'd rather 'commune' with their students than teach them anything." Sure, Phillie, lamely defends himself against generalizing (it's not "universal"), and then goes on to generalize and stereotype all the same: "at every school I've been to, this kind of activity appears to be as good a formula for advancing in the discipline as, you know, actual pedagogy." If "every school" you've been to uses this as criteria, Phillie, I shudder to think of the quality of the English departments or academic standards of the schools by which you've been trained.

As a graduate student and soon-to-be-professor of English literature, I have to defend myself constantly against the assumption that my field requires no knowledge base or pedagogical training. I constantly have to work against student beliefs that all "feelings" are valid as arguments and interpretations, that everything said is okay because the student feels strongly about it, that writing cannot be judged because it is "personal," and that there is no right answer because everything in English is "subjective." Students challenge the interpretation of texts, believing it to be an exercise in "like/don't like" (or the more reprehensible "this totally reminds me of the time I felt/experienced..." response), and I have to provide them with the necessary analytical tools required to participate in the processes of interpretation. Furthermore, I must use my pedagogical skills to reveal, in appropriate doses, the massive body of historical and critical information which undergirds our interpretations of texts. Thus, it is my job to literally teach students to read, to think, and to argue. This is not easy, and it requires a great amount of skill and patience. Studying English is not about finger-painting, singing songs, and sharing feelings (and a good hug/cry) over a cup of tea, though learning how to interpret and analyze can be an illuminating process that allows students to develop new insights into the self as a human being and a learner.

I strongly question Phillie's assertion about experiences with professors who "know less than nothing about philosophy [but] try to explain it to their students nonetheless, using - God help us - Derrida and Foucault." With the massive range of philosophers, theorists, and scholars who contribute (or have contributed) to the field of English today, it would indeed be a poor English professor who relied on only two theorists to explain a different field than that in which she/he teaches. However, the majority of the English professors I know and work with are widely read in critical theory of a variety of fields. Not only is critical theory a necessary part of English research, but professors often effectively bring it into the classroom as part of the method of teaching students how to interpret and analyze texts. You may not agree with every professor's choice nor every theorist, but exposure to theorists is important to every student's experience. Perhaps Phillie hasn't been in an English department since the 1980s?

Unfairly, as an English instructor I also have to work against the outside assumption that I want to be treated as a best friend, day counselor, psychologist, or substitute mother. My classes are strictly focused on the literature at hand, though we may discuss larger human issues that are addressed in the text. My class sizes may lend themselves to slightly more intimacy than a 500 person math lecture. And it is worth noting that the discussion of human issues makes my students think of themselves, each other, and even the professor as human! Thus, my office hours may occasionally be the scene of personal confidences or an attempt by the student to extend our professional student-teacher relationship into a more personal one. I care about my students (I really do!), and I enjoy getting to know them as people. But I, like the majority of my colleagues, maintain healthy sense of boundaries with them. I direct those who need counseling to Wellness Services, I do not invite students to socialize with me outside of appropriate boundaries, and I do not share private information about my own life. However, and this is an anecdotal rebuttal at best, I have yet to hear that any of my graduate student friends in math or science departments have to take such careful steps against student overtures, and none have ever received the confidences offered in office hours that my English colleagues have experienced.

Furthermore, I have encountered numerous non-humanities professors who are as equally ill-equipped in the classroom as any English professor who "communes" with students. Professors in many fields are hired purely because of their research skills. Many of them are never trained how to teach their subject effectively. Many of them, in fact, do not value teaching as part of their careers, and some openly avoid teaching or acknowledge it as a secondary aspect to their university positions. The personality type of the professor who bonds with students inappropriately may appear in any department anywhere, though anecdotal evidence might point disproportionately to humanities and English departments because it is the nature of humanities departments to discuss human issues. However, I'd suggest Phillie and others look at individuals rather than stereotyping and not confuse the subject with an inability to teach it or teach well.

Analytic Avery from Austin On Syllabus Worth.

The latest fake but fun reply to a student reminded me of an article by Jay Schalin I found linked from National Review Online's education blog, Phi Beta Cons.

In short, the article makes the case that providing at least some information (perhaps not at the level of a complete syllabus) would be beneficial to students at a relatively low cost to professors. As an instance of the benefit to students, he, "give[s] a more concrete example, at the University of Washington there is a course, English 242, called 'Reading Fiction.' The course catalogue description reads: 'Critical interpretation and meaning in fiction. Different examples of fiction representing a variety of types from the medieval to modern periods.' Two brief sentences. 27 vague words. Not much to go on. But the University of Washington has an online system with much more detailed descriptions, similar to syllabi. And three of these expanded descriptions for English 242 in the spring of 2008 reveal exactly why online syllabi should be commonplace. One teacher subtitled her course 'Sex, Freedom, and Constraint' and uses the gay leftist philosopher Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction as the primary text. Another professor based his course on detective stories, 'from Sherlock Holmes, to Batman, to Veronica Mars.' A third focused on 19th century British fiction: William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure."

[Full disclosure: I was a student at the University of Washington, and did get more information about classes using this system. However, said classes either had only one section in a given quarter or were math courses that were exceedingly similar across sections, so it did not benefit me as much as it would others.]

So let's run a cost-benefit analysis:

Professors would have to put up some information for the class when students can register for it. If the professor knows in advance that he or she has this course, the professor has taught this course in the past, and does not want to change the course materially from last time, then this cost is actually fairly low. (As a non-professor, I have no way to evaluate how likely it is that they would know enough in advance which course to teach.)

Students could use this information to register for a class that they are more interested in, think they would do better in, or both.

It would raise transparency levels as to what a class taught, and by extension what a degree is worth.

One limitation is that this seems to be more useful in humanities and social sciences rather than hard sciences. I would expect that it is difficult to personalize math, engineering, and physics courses.

I am sure that there are other costs and benefits that I am missing, and those would certainly be valid points. Mr. Schalin's full report deals with more than I've presented here.

So is this a good idea? I think so. I would love to have more detailed descriptions for the courses I am taking for my master's. And if I teach, as I hope to, I would provide that information for students who are interested in the classes I'd have if there is a place for it.

Map of Final Locations in Search for Georgia Killings Suspect George Zinkhan.

Georgia Murder Suspect Zinkhan's Body Found in Shallow Grave.

MyFoxAtlanta.Com Story
by Julia Harding

It will be a few more days before it is learned what exactly killed the University of Georgia professor accused of murdering three people. Hundreds of searchers spent two weeks looking for Georgia Zinkhan and Saturday, his body was found in the woods not far from the theatre where he opened fire.

Alpha Team Search and Rescue, a group of men and women with their K-9 crew searched a total of 10 hours and 10 minutes before finding Zinkhan buried in a shallow grave.

The two week international manhunt for the triple murder suspect ended in the woods of Clarke County.

Complete story and latest video.

**

RYS Note: While this story does not speculate on the circumstances surrounding the shallow grave, a posted online story from the Atlanta Journal Constitution includes this text: "The search ended Saturday morning in a rural part of western Clarke County, when cadaver dogs found Zinkhan in a shallow grave police believe he dug before firing a bullet into his head."
**
The CNN story.

Bradford from Bossier City Reaches His Breaking Point.

I reached my breaking point. Long story, short: my students in my survey course are convinced I am not here to help them succeed.

When one of their classmates submitted 10 questions, less than 48 hours before an exam, and I posted a six page response to the class web site, how is that not helping them to succeed?

When I post a two page comment about a topic they need for their project, how is that not helping them to succeed?

When I provide an outline with major and minor headings, a workbook, and a rubric for said project, how is that not helping them to succeed?

When I post an old case, question prompts from the case, and two exemplary responses to the questions, how is that not helping them to succeed?

When I post needed formulae and additional explanation for quantitative analysis ahead of an assignment, how is that not helping them to succeed?

When I meet with students outside of office hours, how is that not helping to succeed?

I stood there blankly, bile rising up listening to this snowflake make this statement.

Another snowflake followed with, "there is soooo muuuuuch information in the book. How are we to know what is important and what is not. A study guide would help."

OH, MY FUCKING GOD!

Where does it end?

How about I outline the chapter for you?

How about I give you a list of a hundred questions and tell you 50 of these hundred questions will be on the exam?

How about I give you 50 questions and tell you these questions will be on the exam?

How about I give you 50 questions, mark the correct answers, and tell you these questions will be on the exam?

How about I bubble in the answer sheet with the correct answers?

Do these dumb asses ever take responsibility for their learning and knowledge?

Oh, boo hoo. We have to spend 20 hours outside of class for every 4 hours we are in your class.

Grow up you whiny bastards. If you cannot or will not do the work, then suck it up, drop the class, and go waste someone else's time. Better yet. Drop out, try to get a job. Whine to your boss about how much work there is, how the work process does not fit your work style, and how you cannot figure out to prioritize your time. While you are dropping your snowflake rant on her, she is mentally reviewing the 10 candidates who are more qualified than you, have more experience than you, and have more education than you. Thanks to the last eight years of economic mismanagement, jobs are pretty fucking scarce and job seekers are pretty fucking plentiful. Why should anyone put up with your bullshit?

On the first day, I told them this class was a killer and how to prepare for class. Halfway through the class, these snowflakes seem genuinely surprised that I spoke the fucking truth on the first day of class.

I stood there, reminded them of how I suggested they prepare for class, and started my lecture for the day's chapter. If I hear one more whine, then I will walk out of class and wish them luck with the final.

Paradise Lost Continued. How Students Ruin a Perfectly Good Career. Carney from Conshohocken Cries Out.

Last month on your site, Professor Apocalypse asked, "Does anyone else feel my pain?"

I'm living it. Or, rather, lived it.

Just five years ago, I was a fairly successful grad student. I had won several departmental paper prizes. My peers and colleagues told me they envied my writing ability. Professors recommended me to help other grad students with editing their papers and generally adapting to grad school. I seemed primed to get a TT job somewhere, even if it were some po-dunk backwater where I'd be happy and productive contributing to the discipline.

Then my departmental funding ran out. Despite most of my peers taking 5-7 years to complete the PhD, my department decided to stop funding everyone at the end of year three. But, they'd be more than happy to hire the rest of us as adjuncts at a fraction of the pay of a teaching assistantship...and no benefits! Who could pass *THAT* up? Since I thought I'd only need another 2 years to finish, I decided to take them up on their very lucrative offer. (ha!) I had been told teaching assignments would keep me "fresh" on the job market, and it never occurred to me that might be a fib. So, after a year teaching Intro classes, the adjuncting well started drying up as more grad students began sipping from the font. This meant I had to start taking whatever job came my way, which is how I got roped into teaching a series of writing classes.

My profs thought I was perfectly qualified! I had taught a remedial writing class for the department twice before. And several of the courses I TA-ed for had major writing components. It would just take a big leap for me to teach the Writing for the Discipline course I got hired to teach. Heck, fool that I am, I actually took on a writing course for the English department that same semester; it looked like a dream class, with just 13 students signed up for this sophomore-level class devoted to learning how to write a research paper. These were not freshman comp classes, so all the deadwood should be floating away, right?

Wrong! Just like Prof. Apocalypse, I soon discovered that most of the class (in every single section of the 5 I taught over the next year) could not [would not?] follow instructions. Most of them refused to learn how to use the word processing programs on the computers they shackled themselves to; I got papers that were single-spaced, triple-spaced, in 10-point font and 14-point font, with 2 inch margins and 1/2 inch margins...you name it, I saw it at least once in EVERY section...often with several of these in one paper. And then there were the 3-page paragraphs, the newspaper articles masquerading as scholarly sources, the made-up citation methods (because I guess MLA and APA are just too arcane to grasp!), and the plethora of comma splices, sentence errors, and "typos" (which is what the students called them) that littered most of the assignments.

If I assigned a reading, almost no one read it. If I asked them to summarize the reading, almost no one could tell me what it was about. If we went over a rule or method or technique in class, most everyone neglected to use it in their papers (as if class time assignments weren't designed for them to use on the papers they wrote for me to ASSESS their mastery for a grade). The inability of most of the students to grasp how quotation marks work still haunts me. If you didn't invent the idea expressed in the words you are typing, put the exact words in quotation marks and tell me who said it and where you read it. Why is that soooooooooooooooooooooooo hard?

But here's why all of this still bugs me: These lovely, precious cherubs of light mobbed together and blamed me for their failure to learn the course material. I was just a bad teacher. It didn't matter if they didn't read the book. It didn't matter if they openly admitted on course evaluations that the majority of them spent 1-3 hours per week on homework instead of the recommended 6. No, no, it wasn't that they were chronically absent, or web-surfed when they were to be using the lab computer to complete an in-class assignment. Nope, it was my fault they failed because I am a "flamboyantly homosexual," "racist" who "talks funny," is "unclear with instructions," and am "mean," "smug," and belong teaching in a "third level community college." Nope, it was my fault because I was a big failure who was incompetent and set them up to fail.

We'll ignore that these classes ballooned in size to almost double the recommended size for a writing course (the largest had 31, the smallest 22). We'll ignore that my syllabus was 8 pages long, with details on all course policies. We'll ignore that instructions for EVERY assignment were at least 1 page long, often written as a series of steps for the students to follow so they wouldn't forget something, and fully explained during classtime. We'll ignore that every major assessment was preceded by a short lecture/practice session for them to see how to do things properly (and for me to shepherd the little lambs back into the fold when they went astray). We'll ignore that so many of them disappeared for 10-25% of the semester, some longer. We'll ignore the fact that the international students often had a better grasp of written English than the native English speakers...let's especially ignore that!

I got so disgusted by all this that I refused to teach writing classes the following year. And so the adjuncting well went dry. When forced to choose between tuition and rent, I opted to use my meager savings to pay my rent, thus ending my burgeoning career in the academy. After years of angry e-mails and being shouted at in the hallway by C students, being infantalized by incompetent office staff who ruled the office supply cabinet like a petty feifdom, and being lied to by my professors about non-existent summer employment opportunities, I have been exiled and branded for my failure with unemployment. If anyone has any recommendations on how to deal the post-tramatic stress disorder resulting from years of dealing with plagiarists, cheaters, and lairs, let me know. I'm still feeling the pain.

Boston's Bitchy Bear Passes Out a Final, And then Brings Us Various Heads to Enjoy.

I warned them the first day of class. I warned them at midterm. "The final requires some thinking, you'll want to take notes over my discussion," I said at various points in the semester, as I looked out at a sea of slack-jawed faces, eyes glazed as they gaze into their laptops, tapping away on FB / IM / WTFEver instead of paying attention. And before anybody gets all preachy-teachy student-centered yada-yada- yada on me, I usually lecture for 30 minutes out of a 3-hour class. The rest of the time is play-time, whee, where all their little creations are praised as the very products of genius. I know: thirty minutes of something being not about them is akin to waterboarding, but what can I say? I'm old school.

So there I am last night, handing out the final on the last day of class. I am shocked to see people in the room that I have not seen since about the second week of class. It is a take-home exam.

"Do you have any questions?" I ask.

Dead silence. They start talking to each other. "Can we go?" A guy in a baseball cap asks. I recognize baseball cap guy as the guy who has turned in the crappiest work I've ever seen. "Sure." I say, "You can go. But I'll stay and discuss the exam with anybody who has questions." Most start packing stuff. "Sure you don't have questions?" I say.

"Do you expect us to have read the books for these questions?"

Me: "Yes."

Another baseball cap guy: "Do you know if they still have the books in the bookstore?"

Sweet cracker sandwich, kid. I found a kitten on 9th Street I'm pretty sure is smarter than you. Why not just raise your little arm and say "Hey, proffie, flag my exam for extra scrutiny for plagiarism, 'mkay?" Do you attach a sticky on your 1040 EZ telling the IRS not to look too hard at your W-2 as your employer always prints them on Hello, Kitty paper like this?

Me, in response: "I have no idea. There may be some copies left."

A little more silence. They are glaring at me. Another kid says "Are you going to give us an outline?"

I'm dumbfounded. "An outline? What for?"

Ok, this is the kid who overparticipated and routinely talked with his mouth full of half-chewed food and who props his skateboard against the wall. He looks at me like I'm an idiot. "For the questions." He draws out the last word to help me understand how stupid I am being.

"No, I am not giving you an outline. I already know how to write essay." I say. "I encourage you to write your own outline, though. It might help you organize your essay."

The rest of them scatter. Whoopee. Class is over with an hour left to go watch TV or whatever it is they do when I am not ruining their lives with my irrelevancies. I take the bus home. By the time I get there, there are seven individual emails from the wee flakes. I'll only present the gems:

1. A pronouncement from one of the (seemingly 100) athletes in the room that she needs to reschedule the final because she has a photo shoot and her agent has told her to be available.




2. A long, detailed question from the kid who threw one of his homeworks on the floor in a snit because I wouldn't take it a week late. This email essentially asks me in email form to write an answer to questions #3 and #5.




3. Two as-yet-undisclosed and undocumented learning disabilities, with long-drawn explanations about how they can't be expected to answer essay questions under such time constraints (they have two weeks). One suggests that I just use his average grade so far for his final score; another proffie has done this little thing for him and he's sure this is the easiest for both of us.




4. A request that I allow students to decide how much the exam is worth, as that is what Proffie X does, and Proffie X is a real proffie while I am just an assistant proffie and so I should go with the policy that Proffie X uses since he is my manager, and she's good friends with Proffie X. (Proffie X is actually an adjunct, and a very nice man, but the department has no such policy; I guess he's a real proffie by virtue of his old-guy-ness.)
   

Now, since I don't actually care about teaching, I don't take any of this nonsense too terribly seriously. I'm in this gig because I want steady health insurance and to be able to practice my obsession into old age and not have to eat cat food. But honestly. For those of us who see teaching as a grand 'calling,' how do you stand it semester after semester? Do you keep flasks of Knob Creek in your backpack? Special brownies? Or have you just successfully shoved all the crappy first-year, required-class teaching onto your junior colleagues so that you can now sit back and lecture one and all about the joys of teaching (...honors and doctoral seminars)? Do you only care about the four or five students every semester who seem to have two brain cells to rub together? Or do you also possess a riding crop and ball gag?

Goodbye Haiku.

Summer closes in.
My cracked will to continue
has broken clean through.

Are there safe places
out there, places where I can
find myself again?

Desertscapes rush past.
An open gate my passage.
Stars, me, wolves, highway.