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| The never ending quest for a decent Amelia-avatar continues. |
My students have, well, a healthy fear of me. I think I've gotten to the point where I have the reputation as the professor who doesn't take a lot of crap from students. Mostly, that works for me.
But this year in particular, I'm seeing healthy fear looking a lot like unhealthy anxiety. So while I am getting a few tugs at the boundaries, I'm getting more need for re-assurance. More having to re-state things so they can be sure they don't screw it up. And surprise and disbelief when there are things I'm not so uptight about.
So I am wondering, has it gone too far? It's too late for this semester, I think (first 15 minutes and all), but do I need to tone it down a bit?
Let yourself be guided by the immortal words of the emperor Tiberius: "Let them hate me, so long as they fear me."
ReplyDelete*cough* Caligula. *cough*
DeleteI'm going to go let my dogs lick the abundant egg off my face!
DeleteTheir fear and need for reassurance isn't really about you -- it's about your students' inability and/or unwillingness to think critically, at all, about anything. They want you to repeat things endlessly because they don't (can't?) read/listen closely or critically enough to trust their own understanding, but they don't want to have to face any negative consequences for refusing to just fucking read/listen. This is just another way of getting you to spoonfeed them. Don't fall for it!
ReplyDeleteIf you have tenure, no. If you don't and it's affecting your evaluations, yes. Then, after you're tenured, you can be a royal bitch again.
ReplyDeleteNo one messes with me because they know they can't, and I don't take on any fight I can't win. Therefore, I don't have to eat shit sandwiches all the time like many of my colleagues. No talking no texting no sleeping no eye-rolling no passing notes no leaving the class no coming in late no late papers no extra credit to make up for missed work no no no.
This also means my class size usually halves by midterm in my core classes. And that approximately a third of the students on my roll on the first day get through with a "C". Every lazy ass I chase off is a personal victory.
Now it's hard for me to answer you exactly because you're not specific about what students are anxious about, or how you have to reassure them. I tell all my students that they can succeed in my class and I am there to help them every step of the way, but that succeeding may require a lot of time and work.
The "succeeding" part they like. The "time and work," not so much.
When life hands you a shit sandwich, sometimes you just gotta flush the toilet and walk away.
ReplyDeleteI teach large, general-ed, astronomy-for-non-majors classes, so I have always gotten this all the time. It is good for you to be concerned that healthy fear does not turn into unhealthy anxiety. Recent trends in childrearing, such as helicopter parenting and the learned helplessness it cultivates, have indeed made this problem worse.
ReplyDeleteSo, I do my best to be reassuring and never gratuitously nasty. I still am fairly strict: I never allow late work, and about 10-20% of the class is math (at what used to be 8th-grade level), because the Universe follows orderly mathematical laws.
I go to great lengths in stating things so they can be sure they don't screw it up. A problem with this is that nothing is idiot-proof, because idiots can be very clever. If your explanation of anything is more than two sentences long, which may appear necessary to preclude common errors, your students won’t read it. I never have to deal with surprise and disbelief when there are things I'm not so uptight about, because I’m very uptight about everything, like a boss in the real world is. It’s not easy, but it works for me.
P.S. I have tenure, and what I do would be quite impossible without it.
DeleteP.P.S. You haven't gone too far. You have gone too far if you do this:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Lft6EQh-Y
You've already got the rep, don't ruin it! They knew what they were getting into when they signed up for your class.
ReplyDeleteThey're going to be anxious even if you're super nice. That's just how they are now. Maintain your credibility and reputation and they'll be less anxious when they get used to you.
ReplyDeleteAt least that's what I would do...
DeleteThe considerations about tenure (and/or how much student evals count for things such as raises) definitely apply, but, laying those aside, I'd say that it's probably not you, it's them. My experience matches Cynic's (and others'): anxiety does seem to be on the rise, probably with good reason: the economy is a mess; they all know by the time they've gone through the college admissions process that they're part of an extra-large population cohort, and are beginning to suspect that that may not serve them as well as adults as it did when they were children; the failures of our educational system (K-12, plus college) are very much in the news. At least at my school, there are also a good number of community college transfers concerned about how much harder "real college" will be (most of them, in fact, strike me as reasonably well prepared, though impressions vary; some of my colleagues feel they really stand out as less prepared).
ReplyDeleteI've been sending out what I call welcome/warning letters for classes with an online component for 4 or 5 years now; it's only in the last 6 months that I've gotten feedback (in informal conversations in office hours, in emails, in formal introductory online posts) that say, in some form or another, "that letter really scared me." I've had scattered reactions to the letter (which has stayed essentially the same) before, but they were less anxious.
I *have* been trying to make it clearer in first-day discussions of the syllabus, welcome/warning letters, etc. how the upper-level writing-in-the-disciplines course I teach differs from freshman comp (since "why should I have to take another English class?" is a common question/complaint); that, apparently, makes the class "intimidating." Like you, Amelia, I'm torn between worrying that I've pushed it too far, and thinking I've got it about right.