At my current job (the one that ends in about a week) there's not a whole lot of student suckage or snowflakery. Say what you will about private business colleges, because we are accredited (unlike similar schools in our region) and our credits transfer, we get a lot of students that want to learn whatever we have to teach them so that they can excel at their eventual jobs. Compare this to "want a degree to get a job" without learning anything, and you can understand my current silence on student issues. I don't think our school would be creatable in a larger instance, nor do I think this is the right kind of school for everybody, but... well....
Being the director of a tutoring center leaves me at a distinct position to witness the douchiness and slackery of the staff. And here, for the first and last time, is that snowflakery:
1. Dear Douchette: When I asked you if you were reading your students' final essays, don't give me some sort of lame ass excuse about having had pneumonia several weeks earlier in the term. I get it--you got behind. When I asked you this question I had the flu. I felt like death. I was running a 101 degree fever. And you know what? I read my students' essays anyway. How did I know you didn't do your job? Because you gave the draft grades as the final grades, and several of your students had spent hours with me and other tutors working on those drafts.
In short: if you students do their job, which is making corrections and working on developing their drafts, it is absolutely not acceptable for you to just not take that into account at all, especially when you are the one to decide to require drafts in the first place.
2. Dear racist asshole: It is not acceptable to tell your ELL students that in order to pass your class they have to listen to more "White American students." Furthermore, when said ELL student actually follows what you say and then starts writing like the students around her it is not fair to fail her more. I realize that you cannot grade her any differently than your other students, but that also means that you should not treat her differently as well.
3. You are a composition teacher. You have to teach them some form of research and documentation. I don't care if it "cramps their souls." Wait, what? You don't know it yourself? Big surprise. That's why we have professional development. What? You weren't interested in the one that you don't know anything about? Tough. Just tough.
4. If you ask for "the latest edition of APA" in your assignment sheet, and we help the student do that, and then it turns out that you want APA that is two editions old, just screw you. When you refuse to change the student grade, when you tell me that no, you didn't tell them to do the old one in class, and you refuse to change your assignment sheet, that makes you the douche, not the student. If you tell me you might or might not remember to tell your students next term which one you really want that makes you an even lazier douche. You cannot expect anybody to read your mind, and taking off tons of points for this is just not fair.
5. If you bring me into your class to run a two hour APA workshop, don't pay me, and then require your students to do MLA anyway, I just flat out don't understand you. When your students show up asking me how to do MLA, filling my schedule and keeping many of my tutors here late two nights because you made this change two days before the assignment was due and they are far too compassionate for their own good--screw you.
6. If you tell me your students can't write, and I find out the reason that you think so is because they didn't have a proper running head, did not press enter six times before starting to type their title, or because their margins were 0.9 inches instead of 1 (one of our printers does this, it needs to be fixed), I would like you to read their work before pronouncing "they can't write." At the very least, change this to "they can't follow directions," "they don't care about style sheets," or "they don't know how to use Word well." Those things may all well be true. But their bloody running head has NOTHING to do with their writing ability, and is only a fraction of their grade in their composition classes. The paper you refused to read because the running head wasn't quite right was actually pretty good. It's your right to refuse to read based on this, but at least complain about the right thing. :/
7. If you fail students or accuse them of plagiarism because of a small error in documentation (not a huge one, just a small one) consider this:
I moonlight as an editor at an academic journal. We have never published a piece without first fixing something in documentation. Sometimes there are HUGE MAJOR PROBLEMS and these things get fixed after the paper has gone through peer review. Professors make mistakes in this shit all the time. They mention a movie and forget that, duh, it should have a citation according to our style guide (and most, for that matter). In other cases, not a single citation is done properly and nobody is failing them--no, instead editors are being told to fix their stuff. Do we occasionally snark said people? Well, sure. But it's not "OMG CITATION ERROR FAIL."
I realize that these people have been vetted by our system. They are graduate students and faculty members and therefore carry a level of respect that our students don't. But our students are still learning, and if we don't hold ourselves to the level that we hold them there is a problem. In that regard, I would much rather we hold students to the level we hold ourselves. If you want to make students try harder, please do try harder yourself.
What? It's too hard to "keep up with all those style changes?" Yeah, actually, I agree that many of the changes in style that APA, MLA, et al are always making are completely arbitrary. That's why (prior to standardizing, a move I realize a few of you hate and that I know creates problems of its own) whenever there was a change in a standard system we distributed a cheat sheet that told you what the important changes were. I'm sure as hell not reading a whole manual if I don't have to, and I don't expect you to either.
But if you literally tell me you're too lazy to look at that sheet in the same breath you are complaining about how lazy your students are--yo, something doesn't compute. HOW and WHY is their laziness worse? They're paying to be here, you're being paid to be here. You're a professor... so you magically never have to learn anything again? That sure as hell wasn't built into my shiny new tenure contract--should I have asked for it specifically?
Wow. This is really...something.
ReplyDeleteSince all the relevant research shows that traditional liberal arts and social science degree recipients are far more employable and make more moolah over the long term than the recipients of undergraduate business degrees, I'm not quite sure what you imagine you are preparing them "to excel" at. I know that Wendy's still needs night managers in higher crime areas, but beyond that, I'm not seeing it.
ReplyDeleteMy other impression would be that since private business colleges are pretty much the rock bottom of the academic world, you may not be able to expect that much from the faculty. Not because a shitty job justifies shitty performance, mind you. I simply imagine it is probably tough to attract competent faculty, when at that point teaching high school is more remunerative and probably no more frustrating than working at such a place.
Dear Archie,
ReplyDeleteI'm escaping, let me vent. I'm escaping to a pristine SLAC.
Now. Unlike a lot of business orientated places, all of our majors are required to take a full course of gen ed, including writing, the humanities, social science, and the like. And you know what? They *do* do better than people at other equivalent institutions. They also go on to higher level degrees. I get it. You hate this kind of school. That's fine.
We are in a very low income area, and the students that get degrees here go on to work in nursing, management in local industry, and human services (there's a lot of it around here). We are adjacent to one of the poorest cities in the country with quite literally what has been described as the worst public school system.
Despite the downsides to that, teaching people how to write (what I do) in such circumstances is pretty freaking awesome, especially since they are motivated and it does an awful lot of good for their lives.
So am I frustrated as all HELL at the crazy I've been handed? Well, sure. On the other hand, I'M OUT.
However, two of the instances above happened at an R1 where I held a very similar position before coming here. Can you guess which?
MLP, I heartily enjoyed your faculty smackdown. I've noticed that some of my colleagues who are among the most strict and authoritarian with their students, especially about deadlines, are also the most slovenly and irresponsible among us when it comes to meeting their own professional deadlines.
ReplyDeleteI find the portrayal of students in your post a bit rosy, though. Only motivated students seek out writing tutors. Maybe your sampling of students is self-selected against flakery? If not, what exactly is it about your school that produces or attracts such diligent behavior? I'm genuinely curious, not attacking or anything. Many of my students are low-income, poorly prepared in secondary school, and career-oriented as well, but I see flakery galore, especially in the form of a militant reluctance to admit that they may need remediation and hard work to succeed in their classes. What's your school's secret?
I suspect Surly has a point. I also suspect that at least some of this faculty behavior is a response to trying to teach too many reluctant (or downright terrified) students something that can be hard to measure or describe, and thus hard to justify, especially come grading time: how to write well ("I know it when I see it" works better for the Supreme Court than for beleaguered comp teachers -- and not so well for them, either). It's tempting to fall back on either overgrading the quantifiable ("he/she didn't follow directions on the handout, in the manual, etc., x points off for each error!") or go too far in the direction of cultivating their souls, or similar expressivist bullshit (I won't attempt to defend or explain someone who doesn't grade revised drafts -- one can tell an awful lot in a 2-5-minute skim, and anyone should have/make time for that on a major project, no matter how crushing their load -- or racism; some things are just plain unacceptable). I also know that our own undergraduate business school (a subdivision of the university) has some of the most draconian rules on campus about the consequences of technical errors, apparently on the theory that first/surface impressions really do matter (and that readers tend to assume that surface correctness and quality of thought have a deeper connection than they do -- a bit of human behavior which studies have, I believe, illuminated).
ReplyDeleteStill, there's no excuse for bad teaching, and all the examples above are bad teaching. Although it requires a certain amount of compartmentalization, it really isn't that hard to decide that technical citation matters, and mechanical matters in general, will count for x% of the grade, design a rubric that embodies that decision, and also grade a paper for argument, evidence, organization, etc., ignoring for that part of the grading the surface errors (of course, if they're so bad that you can't tell what the student is saying, then the other parts of the grade will be affected, too). The good students who are lazy about mechanical matters will get the message that they need to start proofreading it they want the A that their quality of thought deserves, students who're still struggling with mechanics for whatever reason (ESL, Standard English as an almost-second language, etc.) will get the message that the quality of their thought is actually pretty good (or getting there, or whatever), but that mechanics are holding them back, and students who can't think independently, but are great at slavishly following directions, won't be getting the As they don't deserve.
It sounds like you've fought the good fight in difficult conditions, Little Proffie. Congratulations on the new job. I'd guess that you'll soon have more complaints about students and fewer about faculty (unless it's faculty who over-indulge snowflakes). However the transition turns out, I hope you'll keep us posted; I suspect we'll all learn from the journey.
P.S. I'm guessing that #1 came from the R1, because it's the most obvious example of refusing to take teaching seriously (an institutional hallmark, sadly, of R1s, and schools trying to become R1s, though not, of course, of every faculty member at such institutions; there just aren't many consequences for such behavior, at least for TT faculty).
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, I can't guess what the other one is, since all are examples of laziness of some kind (either plain old laziness, or laziness disguised as rigor by dint of over-focusing on a few easy-to-check, unambiguous, but ultimately not all that important things).
#1 sadly was not at the R1. #1 has been the bane of my existence for two years. *sigh*
ReplyDeleteMy experience is less mitigated by lack of flakes (there have been a few) and more by the fact that my immediate admin, the Dean, backs me up on student issues. Unfortunately said Dean also backs up the people above on student issues. In theory that's wonderful, we all need an admin on our side. In practice, the students then turn to me when their lazy instructors do horrible things, and we both go back to the Dean. Usually this ends in me getting to read all their essays and deciding what grade they really earned. I can't really call that a student suck though--anybody whose work is flat out not read deserves it to be read by somebody. I do wish that somebody weren't me! (Oh hey lookie there, NOW IT'S NOT.)
Furthermore, the dean then does NOT back me up when it comes to disciplining faculty. Hence my spleen. Here is my spleen. Watch me vent it.
On an only sort of related note, for whatever reason we are blessed with some far older students who aren't afraid to tell the younger ones off when they are being rude and texting in class, talking, or not turning stuff in. I've seen several non-traditional student to wibby snowflake smackdowns that are all but the stuff of legends. I *suspect* this is the other part of my lack of snowflakery--those ladies are way scarier than any of us.
"Here is my spleen. Watch me vent it."
ReplyDeleteWith pleasure, My Little Proffie.
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us. To see oursels as others see us.