A number of readers sent this link, and it was referenced in the nearly 2 hour live chat earlier today!
[+]
Chronicle Vitae's “Dear Student” series, featuring snarky professor and TA retorts to common student requests for leniency, has garnered some push-back recently from professors and graduate instructors alike (folks like Jesse Stommel, Dexter Thomas, Dorothy Kim, and Kevin Gannon), who argue that public venting about miscreant students is unkind and inappropriate and discouraging to students, not to mention bad for morale. It's hard to argue with them on those points. Stommel’s post spurred indignation at the idea that students struggling with mental health concerns, financial pressures, and job anxieties (as well as actually dead or dying grandmothers) would find their requests for leniency subjected to ridicule. In short, as Kevin Gannon’s post urged, we should “punch up, not down.”
But before we double down on our indignation at this public grumbling, let’s take a moment to consider their source. As some of the replies to Stommel's post made clear, many of the complaining instructors saw their harsh critiques of student behaviors as punching up. In other words, they viewed their students as more privileged than themselves, and they saw these students’ requests for indulgence — an excusal, an extension, or some other bending of the rules—as unthinking expressions of that privilege.
That was a fun chat. Good idea to set that up today.
ReplyDeleteI saw that Stommel joined the chat, denied sock-puppeting, and claimed to have "done his time" in intro and cc teaching, but I had a student come in before I could see the whole transcript, and now it's gone. Did he acquit himself well, or was it "you didn't hear me so I'll say it again slower" rehashing? The little bit of the laptop discussion I saw suggested "deep thoughts" but not a lot of engagement with concrete experience.
ReplyDeleteIt was weirder than that. Whenever someone tried to pin him down or asked him a specific question, he would either go into rehash mode or disappear for a few minutes and then return later and say that the RGM was blocking him. I'll say that the never really answered a question in a substantive way. Or at least not while I was in there. He got there before I did, so I might have missed a moment in which there was some substantive engagement.
DeleteThere was a particularly hilarious but also painful exchange with Chiltepin over his assertion the "the students are the text" in which Chiltepin tried to get him to admit that there is a hierarchy of value in which Seneca should be held in higher regard than Dr Phil. He never even pretended to respond. It was awesome.
I keep reading this name, "Stommel". What makes him so special? Why do we have to worry and talk so much about what he thinks or says? If he is some kind of troll, can't we just ignore him completely?
DeleteDid he say that he taught intro classes? I didn't see that, but there was a lot of different conversations going on.
DeleteHe said he had taught other kinds of courses, but he didn't go into specifics really. Looking at his Vita, he did teach at a small catholic college in Oregon for a couple of years in between the PhD and Madison. It's a tiny school (only around 900 students), so even if he taught intro courses there they'd have been minuscule by most of our standards. I've taught gen ed courses with 350 students in them. That's not the same universe.
DeleteThanks, Archie.
DeleteI'm still blocked by him on twitter, by the way.
Requests for leniency in my classes are rare. If it's a reasonable request and it is made once, I have no problem granting it; but the same student had better not ask again. It never makes a difference in their final letter grade anyway.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of the "public venting" is a reaction against the fact that even the lackadaisical, absent students are allowed to evaluate us, and may do this at greater rates than the good ones. Adminiflakes ignore the evidence of what a joke student evaluations are, pretend to take them at face value and use them as a weapon against the faculty. The power to openly demand even a modicum of student responsibility in higher education has been taken from us, and without it we're reduced to awarding meaningless pieces of paper.
Preach.
DeleteBingo.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteCan't it be both? Making fun of a student who says or does something dumb not because they feel they are special but because they don;t know better, could be punching down. Complaining about a student who assumes that because Mummsy and Daddy have always given int o their every demand and you should too ("I pay your salary!) could be interpreted at punching "up" as defined here, complaining about someone who feel they have more privilege than you. The latter I have no problem with, but the former seems mean-spirited.
ReplyDeleteWHY does it not occur to these mofus that, 99 out of 100 times, the grandmother does not actually "DIE"? And cases in which three or more grandmothers die per semester are especially curious. One can only abuse my compassion SO MUCH before I get REALLY ANGRY!
ReplyDeleteArgh, I'm so bummed that I missed the chat! I had the time zone shift backwards and my Tardis is in the shop.
ReplyDeleteI dunno; as long as we anonymize the heck out of the student and details, what's really bad about the facepalm smackdowns ("punching down")? As someone elsewhere said, we're making fun of the behavior, not so much the individual. Although sometimes the Little Dears make it easy to mock them personally, my smackdowns (and I suspect those of fellow CMers) are about amalgams of different students.
ReplyDeleteRight. Exactly.
DeleteProfessors, and others who comment on education-related matters, should have the perspicacity to recognize that what people post on anonymous forums and what they do in the classroom are generally very different.
Many profs vent online precisely BECAUSE they exercise care and patience and empathy in their dealings with students. This article linked in this post slides effortlessly from a focus on "public grumbling" to a discussion of how professors actually act in the work environment, without ever really acknowledging that there might be very little connection between the two things. That's stupid.
I don't make assumptions about all of my students based on a few dumb comments I read on RateMyProfessors, and if students and other professors get their panties in a wad over some anonymous online grumbling by anonymous academics about anonymous students, the first thing they need to do is get a sense of perspective.
"One way to keep students from making unreasonable requests is to make this struggle transparent. You can put the question to them directly: 'How would you balance justice and mercy?'"
ReplyDeleteCome on. How naive can you get? My actual experience teaching 17 years' worth of intro-astronomy-for-general-ed students, 100 at a time, shows that invariably, the response to this question WILL be: "I'd balance justice and mercy by giving me what I want." Again, you CAN'T shame the TOTALLY SHAMELESS.
I therefore ask this question differently, and this is straight out of my syllabus (and derived largely from CM, thanks so much to everyone!):
"Concerning funerals or family emergencies: I am sorry, and I don't want to seem hard or mean, but I will need documentation of attendance at any funeral or family emergency, which includes the dates the student is gone. This is necessary because I am being asked to give a student an exception that could be seen as favoritism which affects her or his grade, and I need to be able to show why I allowed that. Other excuses that will be accepted for being marked "excused" for exams, labs, or assignments include paper copies of a physician's or counselor's note for the student or a legal dependent, the cover sheet from a hospital discharge, a police record in which the student is listed as the victim of a crime, a summons for jury duty, or official documentation for military service requirements.
"This is really the only possible solution, since it takes about eight hours of the instructor's time to prepare one of the instructor's special, mathematically formulated, cheat-proof exams, each of which must be different for every student who wants a make-up exam or an exam in advance. (In the past, students who were allowed to take make-up and advance exams abused the privilege by attempting use the situation to cheat.)..."
The good, old syllabus is now at 19 pages and counting, since so many of the little shits act like lawyers. Every last one of them I do approach initially with compassion. SO many of them abuse it, without even flinching. I still do nevertheless make provision for that 1 out of 100 who really do have a dead grandmother.
Jesse Stommel strikes me as a person with very limited experience with students. It matters not how much time he's spent in the classroom with them: even if he does have much of this, something in his mind isn't connecting.
Imagine how much easier this would all be if you didn't assign grades.
DeleteIn the chat he said "grades are not a good way to evaluate students." I've got to say, the more I think about it, he really brought the awesome.
DeleteWhich begs the question, since "evaluation" is only one interpretation of what we're trying to accomplish, and not a widely held majority position, at that.
DeleteTo recycle something I wrote a long time ago, trying to work out the Grading Knot in my own mind, grades are a form of communication that everyone admits is flawed but which the system requires as 'proof of purchase' (unless you're Jesse Stommel, apparently).
"Stommel strikes me as a person with very limited experience with students. "
DeleteHe strikes me as someone with a very limited experience with life in general...