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Chuckling Charly started teaching this past quarter (to cover for someone on extended maternity leave), and she comes equipped with what seems to be endless entertainment potential: the "it" factor that clicks with students. They heart her, they luuuurve her, they really dig this chick. <3 <3 <3 (barf).They love that she Facebooks the minutiae of her life. They love that she makes fun of them and praises them on Facebook. They love that she cracks jokes and talks about getting drunk and being stoned in college. They love that she texts in class, cracks Kardashian jokes, knows Soulja Boy dance moves, spouts lines from "Glee," dresses like they do, shows youtube clips of random daredevil stunts, lets them leave class early every day (!), and sometimes cancels class for 'football days' or 'rain attacks' (yes, she wrote this on the board: "Due to Prof Charly being attacked by rain, class is cancelled today"), and mostly: they love her for not assigning homework because she knows "they won't do it anyway."
They love that she gives them an A for doing things that amuse her in class (the harder they can keep her laughing, the higher their grade for a particular assignment; the students compete for this "honor"). She is pretty much what they would be if they were the professor.
How do I know these things that they love about her? Because they come to her office to 'oooh' and 'aaah' and vie for her attention and laugh about something that happened in class (never anything related to coursework) and she comes to tell me about how much she loves teaching here and how the students are A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. And this makes me angry.
There is nothing inherently dislikable about her (except that she isn't really doing her job and thinks she's doing well because she equates popularity with being successful), so I feel somewhat petty for disliking her, but I'm really annoyed that despite the fact that she is teaching next to nothing, the students love her. They love her so much that several of them have already praised her to the chair by saying she should be a permanent addition to our department. Students have done fuck-all in class, and the chair wants to talk with me further about hiring her permanently because they have raved about her.
Well, fuck a duck! OF COURSE they love her if she's giving A's for jokes (literally). When I pointed this out today, the chair hinted that I am probably just jealous of Chuckling Charly. Never mind the implied insult that I want my students to like me (my position on this is that if students seem to like me too much, I must be doing something wrong. I don't trust their judgment to think critically enough to know who they should like; after all they love Chuckling Charly?) So now Chuckling Charly has gotten the chair to drink her bubbly Kool-Aid, too.
I don't want Chuckling Charly as a permanent addition to our department. I know we wouldn't be able to just hire her on the chair's recommendation or whim, but I also know that we have hired others in-house although we went through the motions of a search, so it's a possibility. And that possibility makes me angry enough to shun the alcohol I need to go back to grading final exams.
This is where student evals *should* work in your favor for once. Because students confuse what Charly does with teaching, their written narratives should be littered with evidence of how great she is (student reality) which should actually be evidence if how crap she is (reality reality). And what about peer observations?
ReplyDeleteWhat you have to do is ask yourself how this is your problem. It's not your problem if she's popular or students enjoy themselves. It IS your problem if her standards are low and you get stuck with students that expect you to be the "popular" teacher that facebooks and never fails anyone, or, oh, teaches.
ReplyDeleteYou might want to frame your criticisms in concrete terms. There's no law against being popular or chatty or watching Glee. But if she is not properly preparing the students, or conducting her classes, that is a problem. So, you ask questions like: "Do her grade distributions follow the standard bell curve, or at least match the general grade distribution or grade given out by our department?" "What will happen when her former students, who are used to getting the higher grades she gives out, show up in our classes expecting the same from the rest of us?" "How often in the past semester has she cancelled class, and for what reasons?"
I am not a "cult of personality" in my department, and I've nothing against those who are. However I do have something against colleagues that significantly lower their standards in order to be popular with students.
I also find it very pathetic when people significantly older than student age try to present themselves as cultural peers. Kind of like the professorial version of the bleached-blond, botoxed, tanned 60-year-old in the tube top and short shorts.
I'd bet my univ. has checks in place to make sure prof's don't give all A's or all F's. It's rumor that one professor who taught the same freshman physics class as another professor...but without the curve...ended up getting bounced because pretty much everyone failed. So maybe the same thing would apply to bubbly barbara here if she gives everyone A's.
ReplyDeleteI have two words for you: common final. See how well her students do with that.
ReplyDeleteSeems like the department chair and/or dean aren't doing their jobs, either. But Chuckling Charly's behavior has nothing to do with the original post about using "sense of humor"--and CC's seems literally sophomoric--as a factor in faculty evaluations.
ReplyDeleteI'd document, document, document. Such as writing an email to the Chair stating something to the effect of "As per our conversation of XX March 2012, when I indicated to you that I had serious reservations to hiring Dr Charly, I wish to reiterate that I have not seen Dr Charly spend any substantive time instructing the students on material appropriate for the course, or evaluating them in a manner reaching a level of rigour suitable for a university course." So, when the shit finally hits the fan, and the Chair goes deflecting blame on others, you can whip that email out at the appropriate moment for some AdminFlakeSmackDown.
ReplyDeleteI'd be interested in what course she's teaching, just to know in what area she's shunting the students along. If it's something not likely to endanger someone's life, like Eastern European Hamster Literature I'd be less concerned than if it were a prerequisite course for a med tech, such as Hamster Chemistry/Biology.
ReplyDeleteI agree that she's making hard on the rest of the proffies, who actually expect the students to pay attention, take notes, do homework, and show a mastery of the subject on exams.
Comp, comp, comp, all the way... so at best, students won't be able to write a research paper. At worst, they won't be able to write a research paper.
DeleteI once had a prof like this, in a course on nuclear physics. I was furious, since I wanted to know nuclear physics, because I was an astronomy major and wanted to know how stars generate energy. Most of the class were also furious. They also wanted to know nuclear physics for use in their jobs: they were nuclear engineering majors.
ReplyDeleteGee, nuclear engineers with a lazily-taught, intellectually brain-dead background in nuclear physics. What could possibly go wrong there?
Your department Chair is a jagoff, who should not be allowing this. OK, so this isn't a nuclear physics course, it's comp. The results could still be deadly: imagine one of these students writing documentation for a nuclear reactor.