Maybe it is the third week of my only sleeping about 2 hours in a row before being wakened by a toddler with an ear infection or a baby who I now think might have a cold but I am already feeling a bit irritated by my college students. Because of last Spring’s problems I decided to go the tough love route with my classes in terms of tardiness. I told them the first day of class how rude it is to be consistently tardy, how it is disruptive to both the teacher and student (door opening, climbing over the rows of backpacks strewn out on the floor, ruffling through the bag) so if tardies became an issue then I would simply start locking the door at the start of class. Most students took it kind of well but this one woman started flipping out on me and saying how it would not right if she was a couple of minutes late to be locked out, etc., etc. I told her to talk to me after class at which she explained that she wasn’t the type of person that was consistently tardy and I reassured her that I would not start the door locking as long as tardy students did not become a disruption to learning. And of course she was tardy yesterday. I also gave them the lecture on the fact that there was no need to bring a bag of McDonald’s into class and enjoy lunch during lecture (yes this happens, more often than you could fathom). That the point is that it is fast food so they should be able to scarf it down before class begins. That believe it or not the constant tapping on cell phones and the opening up and rustling of multiple bags of snacks actually is a (gasp!) disruption. I explain that the first couple of weeks of lecture this semester are brutal because we are doing a review of all the different groups of living things so it is a lot of factoids and not much ‘process’ which I understand can be tiring. Plus the class is a T/R lecture which means an hour and twenty minutes straight which is a long time to listen to the natural history of plasmodial slime molds and the different ways zooflagellates move. But, there is just so much content that is covered in the second semester of biology that there simply is no way around it but to jump right in and get to it the first day. And I almost had to laugh at the 20 year old guy who wanted me to email my power point because ‘his hand cramped from writing’ (there are lots of breaks when we look at pretty pictures trust me) and the young woman who told me her biology teacher last semester provided them an ‘outline so we would not have to write as much” to which she added “I learn much better this way” which of course is implying that she isn’t learning from me. I actually used to do both of these things (email power points and provide outlines) but then realized that most students learn by writing stuff down so the outlines were scrapped and I was tired of doing all the work for my students as they would sleep or text in class knowing they could review my power point at their leisure. My reply to both of them was that they could shorthand the notes (i.e. create their own outline during class which could be filled in by actually (again gasp!) reading the text book. I also asked both of them if they had read the chapter as I suggested last Thursday before coming to class but this was met with as you imagine the typical response (uh, no). I was nice about all this but ultimately I am sorry that high school’s simply spoon feed students for 4 years so that when they are expected to actually take ownership of their learning it is much easier to blame the messenger (and that they all assume they should make an A with minimal effort). Okay, rant over. Happy Wednesday!
January 21, 2009...10:19 am
testy
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5 Comments
January 21, 2009 at 11:02 am
My dearest daddy-o was also a big fan of the Show No Mercy method of teaching. And while it won him no fans, I think people actually learned stuff in his classes. Go get ‘em!
January 21, 2009 at 7:10 pm
I feel for you here, I really do, but this post cracks me up!
January 22, 2009 at 5:15 am
I’m surprised you’re not more angry than you are! Testy wouldn’t cover it for me!!
My cousin is a tutor in political science at a British University and she tells the students at the start of term that if they don’t behave she’ll fail them. They dick around once, she reams them, they don’t do it again. Mind you, she’s really scary. And you can get away with that stuff over here!
I read an interesting article on the net recently called ‘Dude, Where’s My Job?’ which stated in essence that there is a generation of gilded, overprivileged kids coming into colleges now who have been told throughout their lives that college automatically equals a red-hot job and loads of cash when they graduate. They are finding, of course, that this is not so. I think this is an important and necessary adjustment in attitude in our young people (hark at me, I’m only 36!). Maybe, just maybe, it’s going to be useful and dare I say it, cool, to work hard and excel at College once more. It should be a mark of a superlative person, a good grade, not an inalienable right!
*Piereth coughs and climbs down off soap box*
January 23, 2009 at 9:42 am
It is better to be a hard-ass. Once I learned that, it all became much easier to cope with.
Hang in there.
January 23, 2009 at 10:52 am
I think it is being an adjunct is what makes it hard for me to be the complete hard ass I was when teaching high school. I worry about students going to the lead instructor or department head (which they love to do) and complaining about me. Even though both are awesome and completely back me up I still want to stay under the radar so that I make everyone happy so they keep giving me classes…