Oh, I'm so bloated. But enough about Thanksgiving with my husband's large and loving family (and their tables full of pie!)What really brought me the discomfort yesterday was the stack of email awaiting me. Students whose names I hardly know had filled my mailbox with all sorts of messages: "Ms. Keef I really need to see you." "Dr. Darla, I was hopng I could write an extra credit report. Can u approve?"
Loads more. And most of them came from students who have been lazy and uninterested in my help all semester. One wrote: "I am really ready to focus my attention on class now!" Like it was a little gift the student had to give me.
Honey, we're 13 weeks in. We have a few class periods left where I'm going to prep you for next semester - at least the ones of you who will make it. But as far as showing me that you're ready now, well that's a lovely sentiment. But you should have engaged long before this.
And now I'm up early and grading the last couple of essays that I took in just before Thanksgiving, and I suspect that I'll have a group of energized and desperate students awaiting me at school, people who have snoozed through the fall term, but who now have come alive at its closing.
Will it be enough to help them pass? Or is it too late? Do you ever have students who come alive in the waning days who do enough to convince you they're ready to move on?
This is what happens, Darla...
ReplyDeleteWhat I HATE at this time of the year is the stream of students who come to me to tell me HOW MUCH my class has meant to them. This sort of bullshit makes me crazy. Does anyone get taken in by this brazen ass-kissing?
The only thing that convinces me is a doctor's note. Other than that, they get a life lesson.
ReplyDeleteI swear that you can smell the fear in the library....
ReplyDeleteNo, I won't "help" them pass in the last few weeks of class. If they don't "help" themselves I let them sink. Now if I have a student who has been asking for help all sememster and has been doing their best and applying what I have taught but still needs help, then I throw them a lifeline.
ReplyDeleteWhy on earth would I help a student who's been slacking all semester? Are you nuts?
ReplyDeleteThe attention they get from me is directly proportional to the seriousness with which they approach their education. If they suddenly "realize" how much they fucked up...well, that's 100% THEIR PROBLEM, and yes, it's a life lesson.
As for "help," well that has a negative connotation if you think about it. They have to do things by themselves, and they can be TAUGHT to do that, but not "helped," which implies doing the work FOR them.
As a teacher friend told me years ago, "Students don't have to do well in class to learn something. Sometimes they fail and learn a lot."
The lesson often comes from their failure, not in spite of it.
Here's what I hate, which is only marginally related to the rest of your complaints. After my lab partner and I faithfully showed up for my professor's office hours every week for the entire semester (because we were supposed to so he could review our code, not because we are annoying super-keeners, although we are that, too), the very last day of office hours, the day before our giant 300-page project was due, we show up at the proffie's office and there's a huge long line of our slacker classmates. But whatever, they were there first, so we take our place and resign ourselves to a long wait as poor prof attempted to review hundreds of lines of code, over and over again, for each pair of slackers. The clock is a-ticking and office hours - the last office hours of the semester - are almost over. It's clear we won't all get to see the prof. But we're okay with that because there's a line, and we happen to be near the end, and so we accept that we might not get to see him. Then, the jerky slacker behind us, the one who kept announcing what an utter waste of time the class was, decides to cut. Not in a sneaky way, but a totally blatant I'm-cutting-you way. Naturally there was some disputation, but his excuse for this rude behaviour? "You two have seen proffie every week all semester, and I've never been to see him, therefore, you've had more than your fair share of his time and now it's my turn."
ReplyDeleteThis happened some time ago, but I'm still appalled by his rudeness. But my lab partner was livid and there was very nearly a fistfight. I had to step in and appease them, and we ended up letting jerky guy go in front, not because it was the right thing to do, but because I didn't want to listen to him bitch about it over and over again until I graduated (since we're a small program and I was sure to encounter him in another class.) As much as I wanted to stop him from cutting, I also didn't want him telling me for the rest of my natural days that he failed the class because of me, because I wouldn't let him go ahead of me, and I knew that's exactly what he would do.
Rude people have this huge advantage in that polite people will bend over backwards just to make them go away and never come back. They get away with all kinds of crap simply because yielding to their insane demands puts an end to their whiny, annoying presence.
(Of course, proffie generously extended his office hours and didn't even reprimand the class for being such johnny-come-latelys, but he's an old guy and probably too worn down by that sort of thing to even notice anymore)
I've never seen anyone "come alive" at the end of the semester who wasn't "alive" at least shortly after midterms.
Rude people pay for it in other ways though. As you said, it's a small program. When you get out there in the real world, your entire program knows all about this cretin, and not one of you are going to hire him.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's some consolation but I can't help wanting the comeuppance to happen even sooner. But that student dug his own grave because he didn't get a very good grade, despite his frequent announcements (right in front of the prof) that the class was a waste of time and he already knew everything that was being taught. Fortunately prof was so ancient, I don't think he even noticed and certainly didn't care about this student's insulting behaviour.
ReplyDeleteThis problem Darla described has got to drive you all crazy, no? You sit there week after week in your empty office, no students in sight, and then all the sudden at the end there's a mad rush of students desperate for help. Do they even apologize for waiting so long, or do they just pretend it's perfectly acceptable behaviour?
I once waited an hour for a professor while he explained binary arithmetic to a johnny-come-lately. There is no excuse for a graduate computer science major not to know binary arithmetic when he's more than halfway through an advanced cryptography seminar. I don't understand how he could even ask the prof to explain it to him without being utterly embarrassed or at least acknowledging that he was at fault.
Another prof had a strict policy that students who showed up regularly for office hours would be bumped to the front of the line, anytime there was a line. Typically, there was only a line at the very end of the semester, and I did get to experience this VIP service when she ushered me into her office and told all the other johnny-come-latelys that they would have to wait. She actually put this policy on her syllabus - a tough English bird who didn't take any guff.
"Does anyone get taken in by this brazen ass-kissing?"
ReplyDeleteYou'd be surprised...