Seventh Grade Schoolteacher Sarah Shares.

As a public school teacher, I started reading RYS about a year ago because you do something that I love to do as well: complain about and rip into incompetent students. I’ve sniggered at your lovely snowflakes who can’t form complete sentences and who blatantly and shamelessly lie to you. While my problem students are a bit different (seeing as they are 12-14), I feel your pain. However, my blood boils when your site or others blame public school teachers for all of your woes. Now, I can’t speak for all of us, but I can honestly say that I do the absolute best that I can with what I’m given.

Don’t blame the public schools for society’s problems. Society at large is so obsessed with the preservation of self esteem that schools aren’t able to do what they need to do. I am not allowed to give a kid below a 50 on a report card, no matter how abysmal the grade actually is. Who do you think wanted this policy? Parents of stupid kids and superintendents who are afraid of parents. God forbid their babies feel inferior to kids who can do well. I have to attend endless “special education” meetings to try to help kids with special needs succeed. For some of these kids, there is actually something abnormal going on and these meetings are a good thing. Other kids are just so lazy or stupid that it’s not worth the time. Parents just can’t come to grips with the burger flipper they have produced because then THEIR self esteem would be damaged, so we label their kid as “learning disabled” and then I’m not allowed to fail them, period. They’ll pass through the system because “it’s not their fault” that they suck at life and will end up with a high school diploma.

What it all comes down to is that public school policy is made by parents: parents on the school board, parents who complain to the superintendent, etc. Parents have their baby’s emotional well-being in mind more than their academic prowess. Do you think teachers like giving out 10th place ribbons? Hell no! But if only the top two students in the class get a reward, the other students will feel bad. This is forbidden. So we roll our eyes, make the damn 10th place ribbon, and grab a margarita after school ... But in a neighboring town, not our town, because it would be shameful for our students should stumble upon us acting like real people!

Two sayings come to mind: “you can’t polish a turd” and “you can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit.” The same kids who drool on your desks once drooled on mine. I was obligated to give modifications and attend meetings to help them succeed. I emailed with their parents and held lots of tutoring sessions before, during, and after school. Their parents didn’t give a rat’s ass. There is only so much a public school teacher can do. Bad students are a result of their family and community more than the school system they went through.

So back the fuck off, academia. We deal with many of the same problems as you do.

Motor City Mitch Wonders Why Students Can't Just Hand Him a Freaking Paper in Person. (He Likes to Keep the Email Inbox Clear For Chain Letters.)

Receiving student papers in my email inbox, without warning, is my teaching pet peeve. The attachments don't open, I have to truck up to my networked printer three floors above my office, students skip class because they've turned their papers in electronically. The list of grievances goes on.

My syllabus very clearly says, "DO NOT EMAIL ME YOUR ASSIGNMENTS." In fact, I think I'm pretty nice about it. The actual policy is, "I will not accept any e-mailed assignments unless you have made prior arrangements with me. Repeat: I will not give you credit for e-mailed assignments unless I've given you explicit permission to send the assignment." In addition, at the start of each semester (and periodically throughout), I say in class, "DO NOT EMAIL ME YOUR ASSIGNMENTS." And yet rarely a day goes by when I don't receive some sort of homework in my inbox.

Don't get me wrong -- if a true emergency crops up, I will accept your emailed paper. I had a student whose mother died this week. I did not bitch when she sent me her paper without making advanced arrangements. But the kid who has emailed every assignment for the past two weeks, despite my reminders not to (and my not turning his work back when I hand back papers), is not so lucky. "The computer lab doesn't recognize my flash drive" is not an excuse. E-mail it to yourself, son! If my college email account can open your attachment on a college computer, I bet your college email account can open the attachment on a college computer too. Let's call this what it is: Lazy. I'm sorry you don't have a printer, and I'm sorry that you have to skip my class to leave campus early so you can spend the weekend at home with your girlfriend who is still in high school, and I'm sorry it's inconvenient for you that our class meets in the basement and the computer lab is on the third floor. But guess what: None of these things are my problem!

I think my students are under the mistaken impression that the college is made of money and all the professors have printers in their offices. They stare incredulously when they come in for conferences empty-handed and can't print drafts they've emailed themselves, or saved on their little allotment of the campus drive, or transported on their flash drives. (Well, they CAN print, but then they have to walk up three floors to retrieve their document from the networked printer my computer is hooked up to -- which is just as much work as if they'd printed the damn thing in the lab in the first place.) "Wow," they say. "You got it rough. You gotta go way up there every time you print? That suuuuuuucks!"

But do they remember this conversation a few days later? No. No, they do not. Their revised papers (a term I use lightly) still show up in my inbox because they were too lazy to walk up three floors to the computer lab to print before class. Funny how three floors is such a burden to them, but somehow it's not to me...

I have a colleague who only grades the first page of any assignments that aren't stapled. I need to think of an equivalent policy for the emailed assignments, because giving 0s obviously isn't having an impact -- probably because they forget they ever turned anything in, so they don't notice when they don't get anything back.

Abe From Ass Licker College - POW! (Pinata of the Week.)

A number of folks wanted a crack at Abe, but there's only so much time and so many sticks for the pinata, folks. So, let us enjoy the flava below:

Here's what's wrong with your college:

Your professors are weak-balled, weak-willed, and idiotic. At my own school we had to do away with the A+ grade because too many students were, uh, earning it (read: too many profs had their scared heads up their asses and adoringly plopped down A+ grades on the shit our students regularly turn in).

The point of college is not to have all the profs and students in silent, sycophantic, pathetic collusion with each other, but all too often, that's what happens. Profs and students agree to a sort of ridiculous detente: we will grade like you're in pre-school ('Look, he made a doody in the big kid toilet!!! Let's have a party!!!') if you agree to 'grade' us like we're your pre-school aides ('She made class so fun and easy, it was like I didn't even have to attend and could still manage to have fun doing the two book reports she required!!! She even let me use Wikipedia as my one outside source!!!').

Some profs are tired - teach 7, 8, 9, 10 (lower level) classes a year every year and get totally burnt out - and have a modicum of an excuse for poor conduct in the classroom. Some profs are frightened of you. They have PhDs or the equivalent but that doesn't mean they have a clue about how to teach, how to be a presence in the classroom, or how to deal with the realities of a bunch of 18-22-year-olds, many of whom should never have gone to Sleep Away School Year Camp (aka, your college and many others).

Two ideas for you, my friend.

One: the best way to get over on your professors is to fuck up their inane plans by actually learning something, particularly if you learn something beyond the boring, narrow, safe, pathetic confines of their intended curriculum. Don't get over on your profs by doing as little as possible and then bragging about how little you did for your A or B+. Fuck them up by doing ALL the reading and then reading more - from the footnotes, citations, or bibliography. Bring them totally proofread, spellchecked papers that you actually wrote and edited several days before their due dates (and for fuck's sake, turn them in on time). Spend time thinking about how ideas meet, synthesize, go together, and diverge...think about how big ideas apply to your own circumstances, to people unlike you, to other times and places.

Two: seek any and all classes where A grades are not guaranteed. Going for the A grades is weak-balled. Maybe the 'A' translates into 'student already knows everything.' What a dumb waste of your money and time then. Take the classes where you can't predict the grade, where you know you will have to think, learn, create ideas, write and reason well, etc.

[*]

Okay, first off Abe, I count no fewer than eleven spelling errors in your little rant. This is not to mention the number of times you use a lower case "i" when you need a capital one. There are also some usage errors; for example, you write "ban together" but the correct expression is "band together."

Do you realize how your readers will be disinclined to take you seriously when your writing is so full of careless mistakes? It also seems that you have not really applied yourself as a student very effectively if you can't even be bothered to learn basic spelling and grammar. This makes me think the problem is not with your instructors, but with you.

Here is what you need to do: Grow up, stop your whining and finger-pointing, do your work and make a goddamned effort; maybe this will address your boredom. You feel like you have time on your hands and aren't "challenged" precisely because you're not putting the requisite time into your studies, and by your own admission are doing the bare minimum to get by; this is all too evident from your sloppy, poorly-written rant. How dare you blame this on your school or your teachers! In reality, your teachers are probably just fine. But you: you're an underachieving slacker. Grow a damn pair of balls. It's not too late. You can change; but it will take some effort.

[*]

Number 1: By the time you're in college, the quality of your education is dependent entirely on yourself. You're not limited to reading what's on the syllabus. A lot of professors include optional readings - go ahead and read them. Or go ask for more to read on a topic you're interested in. Go to office hours and talk about them. Try to get other students to talk about them. Hell, talk to other students about education, in general. Try to change the way they approach school. If you want to learn how to write better, get together with a buddy and critique each others' papers. (A surprising number of students think doing this is cheating, unless they have been told explicitly to write this way. These same students don't cite their sources. Go figure.)

Number 2: Personally, I don't think my students are idiots. However, there is a huge gap between what they learned in high school, and what they are expected to know in college. Most profs/TAs have a full course worth of material to get through, which doesn't leave us time for grammar, writing mechanics, and library skills. We think you should already know this - but let's be honest, most of you have never been taught, which makes the whole thing slightly unfair. So let's take the easy road and blame the system.

Number 3: Most of the folks I know would rather die than look at RMP. A lot of us get frustrated with our campus evaluations, because even though we genuinely care about our students and our teaching, the poor evaluations never include any constructive criticism.

The Bitchy Bear of Boston on Bowls, Owls, And The Need to Protect Those Precious Snowflakes Through The Kind of Coddling Any Real Mommy Would Expect.

As is entirely too frequent in all of our lives, I had to confront and sanction a plagiarizing student this week. Keep in mind that this was a lame-ass assignment for a lame-ass class, the sort of class that most donkeys could pass if their parents were capable of writing checks for tuition. This particular assignment required a student to take five--count 'em--five whole digital pictures and required at a maximum--a maximum--of 300 words. Rather than take the digital photos himself, Snowy decided to take images off of Google. And of course, he used the first few images that show up on Google images, as he didn't have enough gumption to scroll. Then, he ripped off text from the web pages to describe the photos. He couldn't manage a whole five sentences for his own captions.

I confronted dear Snowy and his response was: "You didn't say we couldn't take text from websites." He says this, and I start to feel one of the veins in my temple give way. This is a 20 year-old person. Help me, God, please God help not to dope slap him because I am pretty sure that would tip off my colleagues to how I really feel rather than all the student-centered bullcrap I wrote in my teaching statement. This problem here, I guess, is entirely my fault. Instead of feeling...oh, I don't know....something even remotely socially appropriate like shame, Snowy is angry with me.

Suddenly, the weight of the world began to bear down on me much more as I thought of all the many things I have neglected to tell my students not to do. I have never told them not to come to class with a salad bowl on their heads. I have never told them not to spend their entire allowance on cookie sprinkles and pinking shears. I have never, not once, not ever told them not to stand in traffic and not to put out their cigarettes on another human being's head. I've never told them not to use bourbon in a martini. I've never warned them not to write their problem sets in blue eyeshadow. I never told them not to shove their keys in a light socket. Do you see the problem here? Because of me, and my failures as an instructor and, let's face it, as a human being, one of my students, right now, could be posing as a naked taxi driver in Tijuana all because I never told him not to! AIGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGH. There could be another student using nailclippers to trim hedges because I didn't tell her not to. The inefficiency! One of mine could be out there, right now, poking at owls with an umbrella because of my inability to make my expectations clear. Was I raised by wolves? It's like I have no social conscience whatsoever! Here I was, thinking about my own stupid little problems like paying rent and getting tenure, instead of thinking about what they shouldn't do.

So if you ever encounter a naked taxi driver or particularly confused-looking owl, you'll know who to blame.

Prof. Pedro Shares Another Email We'd All Love to Send.

Hello Prof. Pedro,

I have some questions I would like to go over with you before the midterm. Given that the lineup for your office hours will most likely be long, I was wondering if you could set aside, at most, an hour to go over my questions. Wednesday between 11:30am - 4pm works, and anytime on Thursday or Friday. This would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks,
Snowy Snowflake.

**

Hi Snowy.

What do I look like? Fuckin' Phantom of the Opera? Bring your American Express Platinum Card to skip to the Front of the Line? How are you more special, more deserving of my precious time than the huddled masses, your poor peers, camped outside my office?

Speaking of time, it's kind of you to limit your questions to "at most, an hour." Let's see. I've got 360 students this term. There are 168 hours in a week. Do the fuckin' math! How come you didn't show up to the office hours I had over the past 6 weeks? Oh right. Its midterm time. No one shows up for 6 weeks, then everyone shows up, then no one shows up again until final exam time. You guys call it "Just In Time" learning.

What about the hours I already put into digesting the textbook and writing up notes, and screen capturing my lectures so you could watch them anytime day or night? What about the hours proofing and posting the publisher's end-of-chapter question solutions, pulling together the bank of old midterm exams (with solutions!), and the 10,000 questions I've already answered on the Goddamn course discussion board?! Those are hours out of my precious life I'm not getting back anytime soon. One hour spent writing up a "homework helper" document kills more birds than one hour spent with you. "Wednesday between 11:30am - 4pm works." No, it sure as shit doesn't.

I have office hours from 11:00 'til 2:00 (or didn't you read that broadcast message to the class) followed by 1/2 an hour of "prep" (read: go pee, wash hands, and have a quick bite to eat - in that order) before I start teaching at 2:30 and go until 7:00. Take your American Express Plutonium Card and see if you've got enough points to buy yourself a clue. This would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks,
Prof. Pedro.

On the Sundress.

• I've been a rabid critic of this site from the beginning, but I can't argue with how great Doug from Daytona's post was over the weekend. That was really touching and something any "proffie" can appreciate. Well done to him for writing it, and to you for publishing it.


• The piece on the sundress was brilliant. Bravo.


• I loved Daytona Doug's post on the yellow sundress. It highlights so much about the dynamic of professors and students. We forget that these are young people, unschooled in so many ways. It takes wisdom and real caring to help them instead of abusing them. I think Doug is to be commended.


• I want to thank Doug for telling that story. I am a female graduate student in the Midwest and that story resonated with me in a very personal way. I won't go into details, but that story showed real humanity, something which I've seen too little of in my time as a student.

Doug From Daytona And the Shame of a Sundress.

Your recent discussions about classroom / student nudity generated a real uneasy memory for me, and I thought I'd share it with your readers.

I had been teaching for 2 years when I got my first real-live look at a student's bosom. It was a singular moment in my life, but not in the way you'd probably imagine.

I was 28, single, and the idea of scooping up some of the sorority candy for myself was always a temptation. I'd never had the courage or the bad sense to do it, thank goodness, but it was a titillating notion nonetheless.

On final exam day, in what remains a confusing slice of time, the most gorgeous student in my current class came to my office nearly in tears. She'd finished the final earlier, and had realized that she had likely failed. She had struggled all semester, but had sought help from the tutoring center to stay right on the pass/fail line. But the final had convinced her she was overmatched, and her story tumbled out of her: abusive father, disapproving mother, siblings who thought she was a stuck up bitch because she was going to college, dope-smoking friends, and a boyfriend who liked to fuck her sister as much as possible.

It was all delivered through sobs, and it was extremely uncomfortable. I said the normal platitudes about "let's see how the grade comes out," and "I'm not a counselor, but I can call someone at the college," etc.

And then it happened.

She was stunning, and dressed in a flowered sundress that showed off her figure, her tan, and her youth. She reached to one strap of the dress and lowered it, showing me her breasts. All the while she continued to sob. I felt a sickness in the pit of my stomach about the inhuman people who surrounded this young girl who'd somehow created an environment where this sort of behavior was an option. I felt such shame for many earlier thoughts I'd had about this student, other students, really mere girls who were not yet women, not yet real adults. The scene felt perverted, ugly, sick, and I hated myself for having been attracted to her and any other young girls in my classes in my short career.

I stood up quickly, told her to cover herself, dragged a female colleague from down the hallway to join us, and we finished a very brief and awkward conversation about waiting to see the final grades before anything else.

The young girl sat in front of the two of us, sheepish, still crying, and then left. She failed the final and the class. I saw her name on my class roster for the next semester but she never showed.

I never saw her again on campus, and never found out what happened to her.

I've never forgotten her, though, and am grateful to her for the lesson she taught me. A semester doesn't go by that a double of hers - always 18, always in a yellow sundress - doesn't stroll through my field of vision in a classroom or on campus. And I think of her, and hope that she is well.

Edna With Some Last Thoughts on Ophelia From Oxnard. "We Have Sold Part Of Our Soul."

The kind of burnout you are talking about has nothing to do with teaching online. Anyone who has had to work on no matter what, as in continuing to attend to the job during a family crisis, know how this feels. So in some respects it is likely the combination of grief and the general lack of ability of students to look at an instructor and cut them some slack.

That said- here’s some harsh words from a woman who has been working forever: personal problems are personal problems whether you are teaching or working in a bank or welcoming people to Wal-mart. These days, I teach. I have a great gig. I’m full time. However, I have personal leave that I’m encouraged not to take. I have sick days that no one wants me to use. I have official office hours, but I’m supposed to hang around all day. I have only one class on Friday, but I’m supposed to be there all day and if I leave early on a Friday afternoon, everyone acts like I’m taking a holiday. So it’s not the stingy online college – it’s the reality that when we sign on the bottom line, we have sold part of our soul.

Students, snowflakes or otherwise, don’t understand this yet. Life is still up for grabs. Nothing really comes to an end for most of them if, for instance, they don’t finish an assignment. They may, or may not, flunk a class. While it will catch up with them, it is more like a pin prick as compared to having a vein opened when you lose a teaching gig or really get in trouble with a boss. Additionally, the efforts of others is nothing to them. I suspect this has a lot to do with the new idea that students are customers. Considering most of us are trying to keep our institutions afloat during an economic downturn, their rising customer status may be true. It still, in my not so humble opinion, comes back to the harsh reality that most of us are teaching various levels of the Entitlement Generation. Whether they are older EGs or younger EGs doesn’t matter. It’s all about them, everybody owes them, and nothing is important unless they are going to benefit from them immediately. They don’t know what it means to be disappointed, turned down or denied. They don’t value learning or understand why it is necessary.

I really think we ought to be able to hit them.

Support for Ophelia.

We've received a number of supportive notes for Ophelia from Oxnard. We've chosen to feature this longer post:

I am sorry to hear about the loss of your mom. My sincere condolences. I'm so sorry to hear that you couldn't take the briefest leave of absence from your online teaching to attend to your mom's hospitalization, hospice stay, death and then funeral. It must have been agonizing to continue online teaching under such stressful circumstances. And I'm so sorry that while you did your best to fulfill your half of the bargain, you students did not fulfill their half of the bargain. I have also taught online and can relate. Your story reminds me that an online professor's unspoken social contract with one's students is tenuous at best.

Those of us who teach online teach naked. The online professor is stripped of the support system that comes with a normal teaching job - namely an office, a computer, internet access, telephone, office supplies, admin support and, last but not least, a community of colleagues. All of that, the support provided as a matter of course to the normal professor, the online professor must somehow provide for him or herself. You have no one to turn to for anything, except yourself. You even have to find a way to pay your own health insurance and fund your 401K. You are teaching without a net, and no-one is there to catch you if you should need some help, as you needed when your mom suddenly got sick. But you tell yourself that teaching this way is going to be OK. An unspoken bargain is thus struck. You will do your job and the students will do the work. When you fulfill your end of the bargain, and they fulfill theirs, things feel alright. You are clothed in the knowledge that, at the least, your efforts are valued by your students, whose questions you thoughtfully answer, and whose papers and tests you carefully grade.

By not doing their work when you -- against all odds! -- did yours, your students exposed the shallow social contract that binds together online professors and students. As you write, "Why should I want to help students -- why did I go out of my way to help them -- if they in turn treat the class like this?" You had already suffered enough indignity in the form of low pay, no benefits, and no support system. The institution who hired you offered you NOTHING when you needed to do something that normal human beings occasionally need to do -- attend to the ill, bury the dead, grieve. The students were all you had left to keep you motivated, and they failed to live up to their part of the bargain. Your grief is entirely understandable.

Ophelia, I am so, so sorry. I wish that we were colleagues who taught under normal circumstances. I would have filled in for you, and you probably would have done the same for me.

I can't offer much by way of comforting words. All I know if that this is not the way its supposed to be.

Kennewick Kennedy Gets a Little Old School Punishment.

Are you not keen enough to realize "super keener" is a derogatory term meaning "grade grubbing snowflaky pain in the ass, distinguished from the others by test scores and little else"?

We already know what you're talking about. That's what makes you a super-keener. You think you have super-keen insight on something that didn't occur to us. Yeah, yeah, the mind is the sexiest organ - we know. We had crushes too you know. You acknowledge that you yourself knew not to send e-mail requests for dates - that's what this issue was about. The direct solicitation - not the thoughts in the young lad's head.

Do you really think a super-keener with a crush would send an e-mail request for a date? No, they wouldn't. Super-keeners are annoying, not stupid. It's apples and oranges, sweetie. Someone keen enough to be turned on by their professor's intellectual achievements won't be confused by "the adult-student/professor relationship." Only a horny moron who thinks his teacher is hot and/or needs to get laid is that dumb. In which case, they don't deserve your apologetic super-keener-food-for-thought consideration. They hate you for ruining the curve, don't waste your time making excuses for them.

Now go back to writing something that will make the professor who wrote you one of those recommendations for grad-school put the letter opener down and live to get hit on one more time.