Thursday, November 15, 2012

What Is This, Civil Disobedience?

I say in the assignment, "Observe a hamster for several days, then write a careful account of that hamster's behavior.  End your paper by analyzing how this behavior reflects or fails to reflect the theory of hamster behavior we just read about."  I also write, "Here is an outline you may use for your paper." And I also write, "Here is a procedure for how to write the paper, including a timeline that may work for you."  And I also write, "Here is a checklist of everything this paper must include."

And then I get the papers, and a third of them give me a vague account of their reaction to the reading, rather than what I asked for -- an empirical observation.  So I write, "This paper did not fulfill the assignment.  Redo it."  And they turn in the redone version, in which they have corrected a few spelling errors and changed the title, but otherwise it remains the same.  So I write "This paper did not fulfill the assignment.  Redo it."  And they turn in the SECOND redone version, and it is the same as the last.  

Meanwhile, in another place, students are revising their drafts for their term papers.  I have commented extensively on papers, especially those needing work.  I have written things like "This paper needs clearer topics for its paragraphs.  It's not always clear to the reader what you're talking about.  Consider adding explicit topic sentences to each paragraph, to guide the reader's understanding through the paper."  And I've written, "This paper has no argument.  That's a serious problem, and you'll need to rewrite it.  One possible thesis is the idea you have you in paragraph such and such, where you say this, and could develop like this."  And I get back -- the SAME TEAPARTYING PAPERS WITH A FEW TYPOS FIXED.

What the hell do I have to do to get the little snowflakes to follow instructions?  Seriously, what?  I will do it.  Whatever it takes, I will do it, because I seriously cannot continue like this any longer.  I'm so frustrated and pissed off that I'm trolling academic hamster weaving forums on the internet to pick fights, just so someone who is intelligent will make a goddamned argument and defend it with real goddamned evidence.  Seriously, that's how mentally ill this is making me.  

I've got ten more papers to grade, but I am going to order a pizza and get drunk instead.  I don't know if this qualifies as a thirsty, big or otherwise, but any suggestions other than alcoholism and comfort food would be welcome.  Should I yell at them?  Am I just a failure (even though these assignments have mostly worked every other year)?  Do I suck as a teacher?  Is this some kind of rebellion against my authority?  Are they stupid?  Am I?  

28 comments:

  1. Redo it apparently means fix minor errors. Maybe you should ask for them to specifically respond to each of your comments with where they addressed that issue in the new draft, which would be even more work for them, which would cause fewer of them to do the assignment, which would give you more time for pizza and beer!

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  2. You can't be nice or civil or reasonable when telling them to do a rewrite. You have to spell it out for them that this work, as it is presented right now, is an F. And then you have to put a big F on top of it and say "this is your grade." If they then want to rewrite it, you have to tell them that it needs to be rewritten entirely--even the 'and's and the 'the's.

    That's the only thing that lights a fire under their asses.

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    1. As the balance of power shifts, that may not be possible. If you don't cater in some way to allow their incompetence to achieve at least a majority percentage of passing grades, then you'll be removed, and someone else put in your job who's willing to overlook the incompetence.

      This is why "free inquiry" and "the academy" cannot survive without some manner of tenure, to say the least.

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    2. Gone Grad is right, though, that they only see grades. Giving them a big, fat, unambiguous F might (should!) get them into your office or inbox to ask how they can do better (at which point you could reiterate the exact. same. points. you have written on their paper), and if you are feeling especially magnanimous you can grant a rewrite on the condition that the new version must respond to your specific critiques. I've heard of people who require a cover page in addition to the rewrite itself, in which the student explains exactly what s/he has revised in the new version, but it's usually obvious enough if they've actually put in some work.

      My personal policy on rewrites is that I only grant them when a student has put in a good faith effort, but has fundamentally misunderstood what the assignment was supposed to be about. I chalk it up to their ESL and let them redo it, and 99% of the time the revised version passes muster. But the students who hand in something that's half-assed to begin with don't get that second chance.

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  3. This is not a reflection of you as a teacher, it's a reflection of the kids who have grown up in the everyone-gets-a-trophy generation. You can give them very explicit step-by-step by directions and tell them they must follow those directions to get a passing grade, and for some of them it won't make a bit of difference. They assume just doing it (regardless of whether it was done properly) is enough to receive an A or a B.

    I second Gone Grad's suggestion to just give them a big, fat F - but don't let them rewrite. Why should you have to do more work just because they couldn't follow directions?

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  4. It occurs to me that instead of writing centers, we need "following instruction centers".

    What to do? If you're tenured, give them Fs (they had three chances at this??). If you're not tenured, I then it depends on the environment you teach in, but I guess the harshest grade you can get away with is the only thing that would work.

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    1. It occurs to me that instead of writing centers, we need "following instruction centers".

      Yes. That.

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  5. "Whatever it takes, I will do it"

    That's your problem. I'm sure you don't literally mean that but students might get that basic impression. Maybe you should give off a vibe that says, "If you don't do this correctly, you fail." They will still turn in shit but at least you've prepared yourself for it.

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    1. Ben's right. This also goes back to something Stella posted a few days ago -- stop caring so much about their grades. Caring about students as people is one thing, and that's what's rewarding about the job, but it is not productive to wring your hands this much over their performance, or to freak out over giving amply deserved Fs. Your standards are certainly more than clear. You owe it to yourself and to your students to be strict about enforcing consequences for not following basic instructions.

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  6. What's with all the revision? That is obviously a lot of unnecessary extra work, not to mention stress, for you. If they don't get it right on the final draft, give the F it earns. They have all had the chance to read the materials you've provided, and have all chosen to ignore those. You provided the learning environment; they chose to walk away and not learn. They've earned the F.

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    1. FWIW, I think it's brilliant to just stop, eat pizza and get drunk. That's likely more rewarding than grading those last 10! More and more, I figure taking time to reward myself helps lower my blood pressure, which, overall, helps me not get sick (stress leads to sickness).

      In the past, when this has happened to me (students simply being lazy), I've made students grade their own papers by using the rubric that I use (and provide to them ahead of time so they have a checklist of items). I tell them that if they give themselves points for something that isn't there or isn't done well, I'll deduct double the points off for that when I grade it. This has helped me to help them to pay attention to detail and to think about how to do something well. I don't do this very often b/c it's so labor intensive to grade their work AND their grading attempts, but it has helped.

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  7. Well, in one of these classes, the stated objective is to teach revision, so it's got to be there. But I think part of the issue is the perceived lack of consequences for not doing the work. I don't mind reading actual revisions; in fact, I kind of like it. It's interesting to see how a student's thoughts develop. But when they downright refuse to think, you're right, I shouldn't have to take on extra work and stress because of their laziness. And they refuse to think because they think they can get away with it.

    I am, fortunately, tenured. I say fortunately, because of course most of the people doing this are on the Foozeball team, which is the big important sport on our campus. And if I've learned anything recently, it's that students on the Foozeball team can get away with murder.

    Gone Grad has a good point. It's possible that my "you may want to consider" is being read literally, rather than as a polite way of saying "sit your lazy ass down and do the goddamned work you muscle-bound twit." I'm going to try using the bare imperative from now on.

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    1. Doing revision is one thing while still writing, but having to revise after the final product is quite another because it sends the message that they can do a shitty job on their next assignments and just revise when they have more time later. If you want to continue doing that, they'll continue to turn in crap knowing you'll allow revision.

      I allow revision because I have to teach the 'process,' too: we do brainstorming, types of outlining, first and second and third drafts, during which points students are conferencing with me, conferencing with each other, presenting their writing in class, getting feedback on that, revising, and finally, submitting a final product. But once that final draft is turned in, that's it. I let them revise one of their essays at the end of the term (but I don't tell them I'll allow this until the second to last week of school), but they have to justify to me why they deserve a chance to revise if they didn't bother to go through the initial process of writing to begin with. There are so many checks and balances along the way in our process that I rarely get a draft that isn't what it's supposed to be anymore unless a student skips the 2-3 weeks we're working in class on the drafting process, at which point I just assign an F because it's never what it should be. I'm not saying you have to change your teaching to mirror this process, but if your goal is to teach the process, then spend time in class doing that instead of assigning a final draft and THEN attempting to teach the process.

      Good luck with this. I know you're trying to do the right thing by turning this into a learning experience, but they're not even reading the instructions here, so learning isn't taking place, and simply allowing revisions isn't getting the results you want. It may warrant going to class and making those who didn't do it right read word-for-word, out loud, while they tell you what the instructions mean to them with examples of how they could do that in their papers. Those who did the assignment correctly could be excused for the day or something.

      Perhaps it means spending more intentional time on the next assignment making them read and process the assignment's instructions more intentionally (i.e. quizzing them on what's expected). I've had success with that, too, but I teach developmental classes where we spend considerable time learning how to follow instructions. And students are penalized for not doing so. It takes 1-2 times of docking points, and voila (!) they suddenly develop an ability to follow basic instructions, or at least show some measure of interest in attempting to follow instructions. But as soon as I allow them to 'slide,' they take advantage of that. It's not fair, but we're not dealing with students from 5 years ago. These are some snowflake children we have here.

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  8. I was thinking along the same lines as Isis: make them write something about what they changed and why, either in the margins (but that can get tricky if they don't realize that they're supposed to fix *all* the topic sentence, etc., not just the first one you marked, with a note to look at the rest) or at the top. That sometimes helps a little (with an emphasis on "sometimes" and "a little").

    Otherwise, yes, pizza and drink sound like the right response. With all the talk of MOOCs and other approaches to efficiency through technology, I can't help thinking that we could increase the efficiency of composition instruction 1000% if we could just figure out which 4 or 5 students in each section were actually going to read and act on our comments. Then we could comment in detail on those papers, and just read and assign grades to the rest (which takes about 1/4 the time, at least for me). Unfortunately, I don't think even the students know for sure. They have good intentions, but time gets away from them (as it does from us all), and they panic, change the title, do a bit of editing, and hope we'll accept the result as a revision. It beats the ones who panic over having no draft at all and do some quick cut-and-paste plagiarism, but it's still annoying, especially in classes structured around the (true) idea that revision is an integral part of writing. Eventually, we probably need to teach them to revise on their own, so that we can do what Cynic describes: receive and grade final version that *have* been revised, just without our participation. It would be nice if they were already doing that by college, but that's probably too much to hope.

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    1. When I have made them write in the margins why they changed something, or showed me their attempts to revise, students couldn't follow instructions on that, either. So it just felt like an exercise in futility and frustration.

      We had to revise our whole curricula about 3 years ago to reflect the needs of this generation: a need to learn how to interpret instructions, how to then implement what they THINK is being asked, how to focus on a task, and all this before we even started drafting.

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    2. Mine are a little more advanced -- mostly juniors -- so more of them can already follow directions, even fairly complex ones for a fairly complex project (this is, of course, both because they've learned in their first two years, and because some of the most hapless students never make it to junior year, and my class). So they're benefiting from your instruction; thank you! But they still run into the problem we all do: too many things to do, too little time. And some are simply resistant to the idea of process, and revision (and some are going into fields where that may be okay, since most of their writing will be relatively quick and internal, and there will probably be someone on the team/staff to polish stuff that gets delivered externally. Of course they'd have even more options if they could write well as well as be engineers or whatever, but they may not realize that for a while).

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    3. Even for my advanced classes (juniors and seniors), I've just started including deadlines for things I wouldn't have before (i.e. topic due, some kind of outline due, annotated bib, etc.), even if it's only to get them thinking ahead of time rather than waiting until the last minute. It works for some. Not all, as you've pointed out.

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  9. This isn't civil disobedience. They don't have the brains for that.

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  10. ...and now that we scroll below and discover that he does have something called "tenure," let's go beyond saying "the least," and add that true tenure cannot survive in this racketeering nightmare. Honest and just professors, like honest and just physicians, will be sent off to prison and/or hungry cold alleyways, so if you're going to continue cranking out credits for pay, you might as well mold yourself into the incompetence-praiser you're meant to be.

    The real lesson to learn here? Years ago, when you decided you'd compromise with the system in order to become part of it and improve it, everyone else was doing the same thing, with the result that they ended up bolstering the downward trend. If all or a significant majority of the academics back then had refused to hand out passing grades, the system would've had to adjust. But that battle's been lost. If the general strike came now, techno-syllabi and industry reps would be on hand to adjunct-teach all available course offerings.

    The short-term benefits of compromise are deceptive; the results are, ultimately, mortal to the system. When you're reincarnated, don't compromise.

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    1. So, you are saying that anyone with tenure is part of the system and therefore guilty for creating the problem? Am I reading you incorrectly? Am I more drunk than I realized? I am not sure how that works. Honestly I am not. I know people guilty of grade inflation who both have tenure and do not. And the tenure process, as I witness it in the lives of my friends who struggle to get it at R1s and SLACs (I leave myself out because in my CC system, tenure is kind of a joke......everyone gets it and it does not even really protect you from anything, it just makes it a bit harder for them to do anything, and in the world of lazy admins, that is a kind of protection in itself), is so difficult and subjective and requires so much work and years of a person's life. Student success and approval are only a small part of it.

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    2. Not at all, dear Bella. And in another way, exactly. Participating in this business of generating revenue by selling evaluations and credits is only sustained by maintaining a facade of academic legitimacy while still giving approval to the lamentable output of people churned through American K-12. To demand quality is an affront to the whole system.

      Once, the mythos of "the academy" might have served as a protection to this. Stuffy old professors and aspiring young professors could have refused to adjust their standards at all, and as millions of college freshmen around the country flunked their every course, even the corporate media would've had to acknowledge it, and we might've seen some actual educational reform in order to maintain the rest of the system.

      This didn't happen, and we all, in some way, know it. And anyone continuing to teach has to deal with students growing less competent by the year, and administrators who need those students to keep coming back and funding the system. Ergo, anyone still in, even at the adjunct level, is as culpable as those near-retired tenured professors who helped make the original decision to drop standards.

      If enough people make the choice to participate in the system in order to maintain paychecks and tenure-tracking, then the system can keep growing worse, year by year, because the admins know that faculty doesn't have the organization or the character to, shall we say, "strike." So why NOT keep admitting more and dumber students, giving fewer benefits to faculty, and raising admin. salaries?

      Withdrawal is a viable way to eventually change it. Similar to, say, refusal to vote under a corrupt regime--stop compromising with terrible standards, suffer short-term (a generation? two?) consequences, and give your grandchildren the chance for academic freedom and economic stability.

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  11. Mild tangent: I remember having the opposite problem in grad school. One of my profs would look over a draft, point out a few typo's, mis-spellings etc, and hand it back. I'd be left with no idea whether my ideas had any merit until I went and talked to him.

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    1. One of my dissertation advisors focused his (very few) comments almost entirely on my overuse of semicolons (which was probably a way of saying my sentences in general were too long, which they probably were). I'm not sure I ever heard anything more substantive from him. Yes, this is one (but only one) of the reasons it took me a very long time to finish the diss.

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  12. Personally, after the student hand back the revised copy I would ask the student to get me some of the medical weed they've obviously been smoking. Then I'd buy a case of beer and sit down and relax, then later order that pizza for obvious reasons.

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  13. What the hell do I have to do to get the little snowflakes to follow instructions?

    Grade them. Low grades.

    If that's not possible, then quit and move to a school whose leaders tolerate you giving appropriate grades.

    And if that is not possible, then drink bourbon.

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  14. Where's Strelnikov when you need him?

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    1. What, you want me to stick them in Uncle Touchy's Puzzle Basement for a few days?

      The sane answer is above you: "Grade them. Low grades."

      The insane answer requires electrodes, rubber truncheons, and "sluggishly progressive schizophrenia."

      Take your pick.

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