Hello and Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog-o-licious blog. Or Blog-a-delic blog, whichever makes me seem cooler.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that ProfessorDog is not really a professor. What I am is an adjunct instructor at BranchCampusOfAMajorUniversity and BranchCampusofaCommunityCollege. I don’t even have a doctorate! BCCC lets us teaching-monkeys style ourselves “Professor,” because that totally makes up for not giving us health care or a living wage. At real colleges, you don’t get to call yourself “Professor” until you have tenure.

As of this writing, BCCC just wrapped up summer semester, and fall semester will be starting in ten days. BCMU, where I haven’t been since spring semester ended, will start up again two weeks later. My schedule is as follows: On Mondays and Wednesdays, I teach Remedial English at 9:30, then Major British Authors at 10:45, and Regular English at 5:15, at BCCC. Split shifts rock. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have Remedial English at 12:15 and again at 1:45 at BCMU, which if fairly cool except it’s an hour drive each way. Fridays, I have off. If you envy me, see the part about pay and health benefits, above.

OK, on to the fun stuff. Most of my best stories start with “So I have this student….” Please note that throughout this blog, pseudonyms are used, and identifying details may be changed to protect the privacy of blah blah blah.

So, I have this student. During summer term, I have a tiny section of remedial English in the morning. It’s an awful section—half the class never comes, and the other half knows they can pass without putting forth much effort, so they don’t. But the worst of the lot is Guy Who Swears A Lot. He’s a single dad, and I will be astonished if his daughter’s first word isn’t “shit.” Besides my class, he also takes reading, which meets right before. Early in the semester, he decided that he didn’t like the reading teacher, so he stopped doing work in either of our classes. Because, you know, that’s the best way to get back at a teacher you don’t like, is to fail the class and waste your own money. He kept coming to class, however, because if he was dropped he’d have to start paying back his financial aid. Or something. I didn’t really follow, and I didn’t really care. Now, if he just sat there and didn’t do anything, that would be OK. But he insisted on reminding me that he wasn’t doing any work, to spite the other teacher. “Okay,” I tell him. Every once in a while, he’d get bored and do a little work, because he likes me better than the other teacher. I’m….uh, flattered, I guess. Then one day I had the nerve to tell him that I didn't really care to hear, in the middle of a lesson about pronoun agreement, all about his meeting with his parole officer. Now he doesn't like me, either. I'm so sad.

*****

I have this other student. After you teach for a few years, you start to notice a few recognizable types of students. One of them is The Student Who Puts in the Minimum Effort to Pass. Frustrating, but not quite as frustrating as The Student Who Puts in What He Thinks is the Minimum Effort To Pass, But is Horribly Wrong. Because this student always gets to the very end of the semester, then realizes his mistake and becomes desperately eager to somehow make up for it. Then he sends you an email sort of like this:

i work two jobs to pay for school and i am a very unorganized person. i remember the important things and not the other things. i believe that is why i did nopt hand in my journal writings... i really need this class and i cannot afford to fail. i am willing to make up my journals for partial credit if i can.

The “journal writings” are a weekly (bi-weekly in the long fall and spring semesters) assignment that, I tell them, doesn’t take more than a half an hour to do decently. I give them seven questions, and they’re supposed to write a page on one of the questions each week. The questions are things like, “Reflect on a time you had difficulty learning something (in or out of school), but eventually succeeded. What led to your eventual success? How can you apply those strategies to learning in college?” It’s not rocket science. They’re supposed to do 6 of the 7, and the whole thing is worth about the same as a paper or exam. You get full credit if I can tell you put in some thought. It’s not a terrible assignment. I regularly have students tell me that they learned a lot by doing them. And even if you don’t like it, I’ve told you that it only takes three hours, spread out over the semester, to do.

My question is, what kind of a person—when emailing his teacher to ask for mercy on his flunking ass—says that he didn’t do the assignment because it wasn’t important enough? And now that he's realized he's failing, he's "willing to make it up"? What am I supposed to say? "Oh my goodness! Well, I can see how you didn't realize that doing the assigned work would be important. I'm so glad and honored that now, two days from the end of the semester, you're willing to do it!"

Then, of course, this student attempted the refuge of the Student Who….is Horribly Wrong—cheating like Cheaty McCheatersons. My suspicions were aroused when this student handed me his research paper. It was nine pages long, with a works cited page AND a bibliography. I asked for six to eight pages, and a works cited page. The Student Who… (whether he’s Horribly Wrong or not) never turns in more than the required length; he generally turns in a page or two less, and hopes for a C).

Then I looked at his works cited page. You may not know this, but when you cite an article that you got out of a subscription database (like Proquest or Lexis-Nexis), you have to put the name of the library that subscribes to it, and the date that you looked at it. A glance at Cheaty McCheaterson’s WCP revealed that he had done his research in Local Area High School Library. In the year 2005.

Here’s a cheating tip for the kids out there: When your teacher asks you, “Is this your high school research paper?” and points to evidence that it is, that’s the time to say, “Oh my gob, I had no idea I wasn’t allowed to do that.” Your teacher will not believe you, but has been too worn-down by this point to give you the response you deserve, and will probably give you another chance to write an original paper. If you say, “No, I went back to my high school to write my college paper,” your teacher will still not believe you, and—if your teacher is ProfessorDog—will call Local Area High School to check if there’s any chance they let random alums come in and use their library—during the SUMMER. And ProfessorDog will have a nice chat with your high school librarian about how Kids These Days are Lying Liars. And you will get a zero. And be mocked on ProfessorDog’s Blog. Which is only what you have coming to you, Cheaty McCheaterson. On the other hand, ProfessorDog does like to make new friends, and the librarian and Local Area High School seems nice.