Saturday, December 22, 2012

What's New? A Weekend Thirsty From the Wayworn Wanderer

The university requires us to take roll as a matter of policy. Furthermore, the university enforces that policy. Last fall I took roll each class, and, since attendance was no part of the grade, I watched as student after student just skipped class, unexcused, with impunity.

This semester I plan to count off for unexcused absences and lates. Some of my colleagues do; others do not. I'm just pissed, and I want it to cost them more than occasional missed daily grades and test questions.

Q: What will you do in the spring that you didn't do this fall? And I mean, for real, not just in your wildest dreams.


38 comments:

  1. I'm going to protect my time and my sanity. No more endless comment on papers that students will just ignore, and no more accepting late papers without penalty. I'm going to make sure I put my focus and energy on things that will actually help students learn if they want to. I also won't let snark, rudeness, and entitled bullshit stand. I still feel like shit for letting that students insult me in email and not responding. Finally, I'm going to contribute and serve in areas that are worthwhile and that I regard as valuable to the university and the students.

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  2. This year, in my online course, I had several students try to game the system by not completing the homework and only taking the online quizzes. They figured they could afford to lose the points and still pass the class. However, I have explicit instructions that if a student does not complete 50% of the homework, they can not take the final exam, meaning they can't pass the class. Even though I have this posted, they ignored it and only completed the quizzes. Next year, I am password protecting the quizzes and will not reveal the password until the homework is completed. It is a shame I have to do this, but my students always try to avoid completing their assignments.

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    1. Won't the lazy students respond by simply doing their homework very badly?

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    2. Making things overly complicated for your students really just results in them being unhappy and things getting more complicated for you when you deal with the complaints. That's my experience, at least. I try to remember a modification of a common dictum: Keep it simple (because they are) stupid.

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    3. I often couldn't figure out whether my students were stupid or simply lazy. I'm sure they would have been pleased if my exams had all the solutions on them and all they had to do was put their names on the papers. On the other hand, they probably would have complained that even that was excessively demanding.

      I often had to ask myself while I was teaching: "Just how dumb does one have to be to flunk?"

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  3. I would check with admin first before grading on attendance. So far, at every place I've worked at, admin believes that having attendance count as part of grade is illegal (although they are completely full of it).

    On the other hand, you can steer around this by simply issuing a "participation" grade.

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    1. EMH,

      My Dean is AOK with it, but, in practice, it will show as part of the overall participation grade.

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  4. I am going to insist that my gradflake write his own goddamn thesis, even though he shows symptoms of having been helicopter-parented since he expects me to micro-manage him. This is going to be painful.

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    1. Maybe he's simply lacking in self-confidence. When I started working with a brand-new engineering degree, I asked my bosses a lot of seemingly dumb questions, often to the point of irritating them. It wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing but I understood what the consequences of a mistake could be. If I was the one who was going to make the necessary decisions, I wanted to be sure that they were correct and wanted the advice from someone who might know.


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    2. Then he can learn to look things up himself, in the manner of what used to be called a graduate research student, something I did as a lower-division undergraduate.

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    3. That may well be the case, but I remember when I started grad studies in the late 1970s. My thesis supervisor did next to nothing. I guess he figured that the ideas and insights would come to me spontaneously or by some form of diffusion.

      I had little idea of what I should be doing and when I asked for guidance, he kept referring me to his senior grad student. I learned more about what to do from him than our supervisor, so what did I really need him for?

      The only reason that supervisor ever showed any concern about my progress was because I wasn't producing any data that he could steal and publish under his own name. He also had the habit of hanging on to his grad students for years and, if any of them ever finished their degree, it was either by accident or because the university ordered him to do something because the required time limit for completion.

      I eventually dropped out, scrapped my thesis project, and transferred back to the place where I earned my B. Sc.

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    4. My Ph. D. supervisor wasn't much better. Most of the time, his guidance and advice was rather wishy-washy. I had 2 years left to finish my degree when I started my residency. It was then that he justified his lukewarm supervision by telling me he really wasn't interested in my project.

      Soon afterwards, I effectively kicked him out of the way, took control of my thesis, and finished it with next to no help from him. He was so lazy, I had to set up my defence all by myself. (His excuse was that it took several months to arrange something like that. It took me about half a week. after which I had a day and time that everyone agreed to.)

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    5. I, too, had less-than-helpful graduate advisors (when I had grad advisors at all; there was a considerable period when I didn't, and no one seemed to think that was a problem). But there's quite a distance between providing appropriate guidance about what should go into the proposal, and the thesis itself, and appropriate feedback on parts of proposal/thesis in progress, and actually doing the work for the students. From all that Frod has written on this page, and from his general enthusiasm for his subject (and his regular mentions of guiding his grad students to books and other professional resources that will help them), I'm pretty confident that he's providing his gradflake with appropriate guidance. From other descriptions of the gradflake's antics (this is the guy who left the observatory roof open, if I'm remembering correctly), I'm quite willing to believe the gradflake isn't responding appropriately. And I'd be all the more inclined to grab said gradflake by the shoulders and shake him should I encounter him because I received so little guidance myself.

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    6. Oh for God's sake! Just how much hand-holding do I have to do, particularly since no amount of it has any discernible effect?

      This is the same gradflake who gave me no warning he was about to take five weeks vacation when our black hole was at outburst maximum, dumping all the observing on me of course. He refused to take my course on astrophysics even though he doesn't know doodley-squat about the subject even though it might perhaps be useful for a thesis about a black hole, a real peach of dataset I am giving him outright. He also twice left the observatory roof open at the end of the night! And I should have known: twice and it's shame on me.

      I also had a thesis advisor who mentored by "benign neglect." The approach can indeed be abused and is a lot of work for the student. Nevertheless, I pressed on, caught on to things myself, and managed to get through anyway. Notice something, too: I'm now still an academic.

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  5. I am going to stop giving practice tests. They only study the questions on them, despite me telling them over and over again that it's not enough. The snowflakes have no clue how to study, and they need to learn.

    I'm open to what to do the day before a test, which ws previously used to go over the practice test. Maybe I'll have them bring in questions (if only they would).

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    1. After several years of teaching, in some of my courses, I stopped giving assignments. I knew that too many students copied from someone else and those assignments were a significant portion of their grades. It wouldn't have been so bad if, though that copying, those who did it actually learned something from it.

      Instead, I gave quizzes. I figured it not only showed them that they had to keep up with the course material, but they had an idea of what sort of questions I might ask on my exams as, often, I used old exams as a source. I even put some of those same old exams on reserve and suggested they photocopy them, though many weren't happy that I didn't include the solutions. (As if I was going to do that, eh?)

      Did that help them when my finals were made from questions from old exams? Not a chance. There was always somebody who, after the exam was over, would come whining to me that it was "too hard", even though it was open book, open notes, anything short of me actually writing the silly thing for them.

      It was such situations that made me feel sorry for Sisyphus as all my efforts were about as pointless as what he had to go through.

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    2. What if you still gave them a practice test, but simply handed out solutions in class, and spent class time working through just a few problems that were similar, but not identical, to the ones on the practice test, discussing in the process how studying is about learning strategies and procedures for solving problems, not just answers to particular problems?

      Caveat: I'm an English proffie who last took math freshman year in college (and have the C- in calculus at the top of my transcript to prove it. I'm still determined to figure out calculus one of these days; maybe that will be my brain-preserving retirement activity, should I ever be able to retire, which is looking highly unlikely).

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    3. Cassandra:

      My exams were close in complexity to the examples I worked out on the board and the practice exercises I assigned out of the text. Even that didn't help.

      Most of my students simply didn't have the ability to logically navigate their way through problems, something which would be critical once they got into industry. Many of them were fresh out of high school where, I suspect, something like that wasn't expected of them because the solutions were of a "cookbook" variety with little, if any, thinking required.

      I also suspected that many of them had poor reading skills as part of solving questions on my exams was first understanding what was required and what information was on hand.

      As for calculus, I relied on the Schaum's Outline "Advanced Calculus" by Murray R. Spiegel to get me through some of the courses I took as an undergrad. Everything I know about partial differentiation I got out of that book because it nicely supplemented the material in my course texts.

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  6. I am going to stop giving practice tests. They only study the questions on them, despite me telling them over and over again that it's not enough. The snowflakes have no clue how to study, and they need to learn.

    I'm open to what to do the day before a test, which ws previously used to go over the practice test. Maybe I'll have them bring in questions (if only they would).

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  7. I am going to explain what plagiarism is, even though they learn this in their English classes. Assuming that they understand that plagiarism is plagiarism, regardless of the discipline, is asking too much. They will not read the instructions for the lab reports because they don't.

    Any ideas on getting students to understand that [CTRL-C] + {CTRL-V] = F would be appreciated. I am preparing a script for a puppet show to be presented to the entire freshman class.

    Enforcing plagiarism this semester took up too much of my time and tainted my view of all students, which made the rest of my job less enjoyable.

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    1. Once semester, I had students write an extra credit paper on how to avoid plagiarism. Ah, the papers were beautiful, just beautiful... paraphrase, cite your sources, etc., etc.... But,wouldn't you know every damn student PLAGIARIZED their plagiarism papers. It is fucking hopeless.

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    2. Puppet show? It wouldn't work, Ben. It would have to be something like a music video or what they might see on Youtube in order for it to be "relevant" to them.

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    3. Several proffies in my subdivision of Academic Acres have declared Holy War on Plagiarism in the past year. We also aim to educate; unfortunately, it's remedial education. We aim to wound 'em, not kill - the wounded ones tell terrifying stories to their so-far-unwounded colleagues.

      We see evidence of story-telling already ("Please, oh PLEEEEEZE don't fail me like I heard you did to so-and-so").

      With luck, students will come to see that academic honesty is demanded by the program, noit just by a few 'hard' proffies.

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    4. I tell them that CTRL-C + CTRL-V must always be followed, immediately, by SHIFT-", mouse back, click, SHIFT-", and some sort of rough parenthetical citation. They can always go back and fill in the niceties -- e.g. what Diana Hacker calls "signal phrases" -- later, but this is the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM (yes, this is a subject about which I have been known to be emphatic).

      Plagiarism checkers also work, mostly for scaring students into being careful. Even after I explain in great detail just how primitive such tools are, and that their results must always be checked by a human being with an actual brain (not just an algorithm), students still think the tools are magic, and, sort of like Santa Claus, will know immediately if they're naughty. The downside: some of your more conscientious/anxiety-prone students will turn into quivering bundles of nerves, and you'll have to talk them down.

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    5. Horrible Meanie Prof:

      Part of the problem I found when it came to dealing with cheating was the attitude many of the students had, namely succeed at any cost. I actually had some tell me, after the course was done, that if they hadn't cheated, they wouldn't have passed.

      Something like that was difficult to fight and it got worse for me, particularly during my last year of teaching. I've had administrators all but approve of students cheating because I made unreasonable demands of them. So much for academic integrity.

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  8. I only recently found out that my uni allows for course instructors to NOT provide a make-up for missed midterm exams. Instead, given that the student who missed has a valid doctor's note cleared by the department, the final exam will instead be weighted to reflect both the midterm and the final! Why the hell did I not know this previously? After last semester's shenanigans wherein I had to coordinate, organize and preside over THREE separate make-ups, knowing full well that NOT all students who missed were sick and simply chose to write when it was convenient for THEM, I sure as hell included that proviso for this term's syllabi tout de suite. And it will definitely be included in any future syllabi that I write from here on in. Although I do have empathy for those who are truly ill, I am also quite aware that certain doctors hand out notes for the lowly fee of $15 with no questions asked.

    Live and learn! :)

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    1. A former colleague senior to me advised something similar. If someone squawked about doing poorly on the midterm, I wrote a short document stating that the mark they got would be cancelled, but the weight of that exam would be added to the final.

      I made a copy and both of us signed it and the original. I kept one, the student got the other. By signing it, the student agreed to those conditions. If he or she protested, all I had to to was produce my copy to show that it was legitimate.

      I used that 2 or 3 times and nobody gave me any trouble about it.

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  9. Research! I am on sabbatical. :-)

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  10. I'm still somewhat in beating-myself-up-for-getting-behind-this-semester mode, so my first impulse is to say "have more materials ready before the semester starts! [even though I really, really, need a break, and will also be taking an MLA/research trip]," and "not let the grading pile up," and stuff like that. But, even though I will try to do at least some of the above, and doing so will help, I think I need to follow Prof Chiltepen's example, and try to be protective of my time, and wise about how I spend it.

    At this point, I'm beginning to feel that I spend so much time breaking everything up into little steps, and explaining each of the steps to students in great detail, and providing feedback on each of the steps (and fielding arguments/excuses about grades on each of the steps), that I no longer have much energy to respond to the bigger things they do (e.g. the drafts to which all those steps eventually lead). Addressing the problem is complicated by the fact that I'll be teaching half my load online in the spring, and we're under pressure to provide even more explanation of what we're doing, and why (at least partly for assessor's benefit, as well as, at least theoretically, students').

    One clear result is that my students in the other two, traditionally-taught sections are simply going to have to come to class regularly and respond to oral directions and feedback provided there. I can't explain everything to them face to face, and then explain it again, online/in writing, to those who were absent and/or distracted. Mind you, I've already got plenty of detailed handouts, prompts, etc., for the activities of the course, and they'll get those, but I'm going to try to minimize the amount of online feedback.

    And, for all that we're being encouraged to communicate with our online students in multiple modes (video/audio as well as writing), my online students are going to have to be prepared to receive instructions and feedback from me primarily in writing, with a bit of audio/video supplementation (and the option of voice, or even, should they wish it, face to face contact during office hours and scheduled conferences).

    In short, each section will have a dominant mode of communication for explanations/feedback, and, while I'll supplement a bit with the other mode in each, for the most part, the students are simply going to have to adapt to the dominant mode.

    Of course, if we have a week of snow days, all this will go out the window, and I'll be teaching all four sections online, and/or busily trying to rework schedules because people lost power/internet access as well.

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    1. Contingent Cassandra, may I suggest a free program called "Jing" from TechSmith? It allows you to record brief (5 minute maximum) videos that capture exactly what you see on your screen. I haven't played around with it too much, but I think there is also a way to have it record you via webcam. This allows for more asynchronicity with communication.

      The major issue I have with it is that you cannot edit the video using the free software. You'll need Camtasia for that, and your institution might have a copy of it. You can do just fine with the free software, but be aware that it might take a few "takes" to get it right.

      When you finish the video, you can "publish" it to their website, but it takes the exact URL to find it. It's a gray area of student confidentiality, but for something like, "Here is where you click/go to for X in the LMS," it's a wonderful resource that can be used multiple times.

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    2. You can also use Adobe Captivate if your institution has access to it. It allows you to add animations (mouse clicking, etc.) to static screenshots, and then produce a video of it. I used it at my second job with my uni's library to explain the catalog to the freshmeat

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    3. Oh, I know how to do screen-capture videos (with the various free services; I haven't done camtasia, though I know what it is). I'm just resisting the idea that content in online courses *must* be delivered in part by video/audio. I'll do a bit, but producing the tea-partying things is time-consuming, and doesn't allow me to cut down on written instructions (which various assessors still rely on, and which also works much better for students with slower connections. I don't generally watch videos online because download times on a pretty good DSL connection are frustrating; I don't think my students are more patient than I about such things). It's a course in writing and reading, and they're going to end up doing a lot of reading as well as writing (and I'll warn them of that in a welcome letter). If they want to be taught via voice and gesture, they can sign up for a face to face class.

      Yes, I'm feeling a bit grumpy. Sorry. I already spend more time responding to online students one by one in writing than I do in class with face to face students. And written directions, believe it or not, actually work fairly well for most students (and I'm not at all convinced that video -- or at least video for everything; I do use videos where it strikes me as appropriate, usually when I'd put something up on screen and point to individual parts when I'm in a face to face classroom -- will help them).

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  11. Take better control of my class and not be steamrolled by stronger personalities.

    Make all my course homework assignments automatically graded by the LMS, or easily graded by me via the LMS. I'm done going over homework in class when the students obviously don't care/study/learn.

    Improve my pedagogy for my subject. Read up on innovative ways to teach my subject. Figure out how to do a "flipped classroom" with my introductory, general education course, or at least fake it so I look like I am professional and innovative and not using stodgy or stale pedagogy.

    Also, this is a pipe dream since I'm unemployed. I am bitter, yes.

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  12. I am going to act like I know more than my students, colleagues, and administrators. Because I do.

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  13. Stop sleeping with my students. Except the hot ones.

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  14. Ha. I am actually done with attendance next semester. Fuck 'em. I will give quizzes with no make up, and count class exercises, and that's it.

    They fail when they skip class. Many of them actually do. So just fuck 'em.

    I just got tired of it. I had an elaborate attendance policy, and it really did nothing anyway. So I'm done with that next semester.

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