Saturday, January 18, 2014

Dr. Amelia thanks you for the tips.

Dear Stu,

Thank you for offering your heartfelt opinions on how to run my class.

I was not aware that most group in the hamster fur industry are groups in name only, as they do not actually consult with each other in the creation of their projects. I guess during my years of experience, every company I worked for was pathological in this expecation.

I was not aware that students work better when you just let them be. I guess the whole idea of hiring an experienced instructor to decide the actions of the course and what should covered is just old-fashioned and silly. Of course you will do a better job just making all the plans and decisions yourselves.

Although I wonder why you are in school at all, given that you already know everything. Perhaps you can enlighten me on this as well.

Dr. Amelia

12 comments:

  1. I had one of these last semester. Looked at my syllabus and reading list and told me what I should have done instead. Then proceeded to show up late to class and jump into discussions--completely pissing off his classmates in the process because he was almost always wrong. Tried to argue with me over some minor point until I just shut him down, cold. He skipped a lot of classes at the end, including the last day when I handed out the final exam essay prompts. My suspicion is that he has an undiagnosed disorder, because he's reasonably intelligent but totally socially inept. He was the nail in the coffin for my willingness to add students after the semester has started.

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    1. I've never made a systematic study, but it does seem that late additions to the course are, on average, more trouble than those who registered on time.

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  2. I've had a few of these, all of them men. I interpreted their behavior partially as discomfort at being in a role inferior to a woman. Have any of you encountered a woman student who did this? Have any of you male proffies had male students who behaved this way with you? (Burnt Chrome, are you an Inny or an Outie?)

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    1. Yes, in my experience most students who do this sort of thing are men. However, I did have one female student who did this. She was in her fifties and I had just turned thirty--I think she resented taking a class from someone so much younger. One day she went off on a big rant in class because I had decided to give everyone an extension on an assignment--the whole class was having a lot of difficulties with it, and I decided to save myself having to mark a pile of shitty assignments because they needed more time to understand the concepts.

      This student freaked out because she said "a deadline was a deadline" and it wasn't right to "coddle these kids"--I needed to "teach them a lesson about personal responsibility!" I was so taken aback I actually burst out laughing after she finished scolding me. She ended up leaving in a huff, which was probably for the best as I feared her classmates were very close to breaking out the pitchforks. God, she was annoying.

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    2. Mostly, I've had the same experience: males and non-traditional female students (but not non-traditional males). I'm not sure if they feel some obligation to "fix" things or if they really do feel that superior.

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    3. I've had one such student, a traditional-age female education major who informed me smugly that using a red pen to grade papers was Bad Practice. I followed her advice for one semester, and found that students pay no more attention to comments in green ink than they do to comments in red.

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    4. Proffie, don't you have a staple gun? I'd lend you mine, but since it's the beginning of the semester it's in constant use, since I need to make an example for each class to see.

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  3. Worse are the self-taught "experts" who think they know it all. I had one of those in a service course I once taught and he was a royal pain in the proverbial. Just about everything I did was wrong, according to him and he made that abundantly clear to me.

    As it turned out, he behaved that way with other instructors and we were glad to be rid of him. I suspect some of my colleagues passed him just to get him out of their hair.

    The reality was that he was a know-nothing who just wanted that magical piece of paper in order to give himself, or whatever firm he had, credibility. There wasn't a trick he didn't pull in order to get what he wanted and there were enough people at the institution who helped him with that.

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  4. It is times like these that I am glad that I teach mathematics. They know that they don't know as much as I do. :-)

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  5. I teach in the life sciences, so most of my students are women, which probably explains why most of the "I'm smarter than you" interactions I've had have been with women (and the actually smart students are nearly all women). I once taught an entire course with a 60-40 female-male split and I didn't hear ONE peep, not one word from any of the males all semester long...

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  6. Oh, but they get begged to be empowered, to believe they have agency! And then they do this. What's the dividing line which they should not jump?

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