Adventures in Teaching

Student Evaluations

2007-01-16T21:30:00.000-05:00

So today I got called in to Random Head Honcho's office at BCMU to discuss my student evaluation scores. Turns out I am supposed to engage in self-reflection about my teaching practices, taking the students' input into account.

SO. Maybe all y'all can help me with that.

On the written comment form, one question is "If you were asked how the instructor could help you learn more successfully in this course, what would you recommend?"

My hand to God, I am not cherry-picking these answers. This is all of 'em.

"Classes be more entertaining." (I have no words.)
"She should want the student to succeed." (This is pretty damning, if true, but what leads the student to think I don't want him/her to succeed?)
"Be more helpful when students come ask for help." (None did. I had exactly zero visitors to my office hours.)
"Stop saying Fab to everything." (I do say that a lot, and I remember from my own undergrad days that instructor's particular verbal tics can really get on your nerves after a semester, but....honestly.)
"A new teacher."
"Go to their office hours and hope to get a spot." (This person, I guess, misunderstood the question and thought she was supposed to give advice to a future student. I guess. Again, not so hard to get a spot at my office hours.)
"Get students more motivated." (This is one of the more helpful comments in the batch.)
"Make the class harder. Everything was stuff we already know." (This student brought this problem to my attention during the semester. She probably should have gone straight to 015. Since it's an outlier, I can probably safely disregard this one.)
"Don't be so mean."
"Nothing, she did what she could." (The only positive comment in the bunch. I think I know which student this was, too--she wrote in her journals a lot about what a pain it was that no one in the class did any work.)
"Didn't answer the question." (My best guess is that this student meant that he/she didn't want to answer the question, but it may mean that I didn't answer students' questions, or that I shouldn't have. I'm a little mystified)
"More positive toward the class."
"She just talk like we already know the information which is not the case." (If this was more detailed, it could be useful feedback...on the other hand, I probably say, "Does anyone have any questions?" almost as often as I say "Fab," so it's not like this person didn't have a chance to ask for more detail on whatever information she felt I was glossing over too quickly.)
"Learn more material to do with English 15." (Again, this might be useful if I knew what it meant. On the other hand, who knows what the student thinks English 015 is like, and if his/her perception is at all accurate?)
"Learn how to teach and grade."
"Quit."
"Quit." (These two were probably sitting next to each other.)
"Lower your standards." (Second time for this idea. I'm going to be humming the Carlos Mencia parody "Lower the standards" for the rest of the day, at least.)
"She was a horrible teacher and person." (I can't begin to imagine how many meetings I'd have to go to if I wrote on a student's paper that he/she was a horrible writer and person, or even just a horrible writer.)
"You should lower your standards when it comes to the papers."
"Lower standards for this class!" (Hat trick!)
"Make it more interesting Also to change grading (very strict and not lean)" (Last word doesn't make sense, but that's what it says.)
"Don't be so demanding. Don't grade us like Wall Stret Journal Writers. Your expectations were very high." (I'm going to count this as "lower the standards" #5. I'm amused and a little mystified by the WSJ reference.)
"Nothing really." (I guess that counts as positive too.)
" " (Left blank)
"Don't even try. This is an English 4 class it was supposed to prepare us for higher writing and it didn't. The grading is too harsh for the level we were at." (This student says elsewhere on the form that "the majority of the class got D's," which is not the case. I explained to the class--several times--that the grading on essays would be strict, but in-class assignments and homework would be leniently graded, and on journals they'd get full credit as long as they did it, so it all balances out. The only people who got D's or F's were those who screwed up very, very badly.)
"To actually tell us what she wants instead of assuming we already know." (Like the similar comment about ten lines up, this one gets at something important--but again, there's no shortage whatsoever of opportunities to ask question if I'm not being clear enough about what they're supposed to do.)

So, you can see, the majority of these comments are childish, mean-spirited, and/or stupid. What am I supposed to take away from this? I'm inclined to engage in serious self-reflection about getting a different job. I mean honestly. I probably am a little crankier than would be ideal, but look what kind of spoiled brats I have to deal with.

Still Alive

2006-11-30T01:33:00.000-05:00

ProfessorDog is still among the living. Nothing interesting has happened in the last month. As soon as something happens, I'll blog about it, promise!

Unacceptable

2006-11-02T21:57:00.000-05:00

So I have this student. Apparently, she has always considered herself very good at writing essays. Being placed into remedial writing at BCMU did not lead her to re-evaluate this particular aspect of her self-concept. Nor did her grade on the first paper that we wrote in class. Or the second. However, when the secoond paper came back, and the grade failed to reflect her unusual skill in the area of essay writing, she did realize that there was a problem. So, after the next class, she came up to the front of the room and said, "Um, I got my paper back, and I saw my grade." Since i had given the papers back, and I knew she was not blind, none of this was new information. "I got ____ out of ___. [Exact numbers withheld] That's like an F. I don't think I can accept this grade."

I've had plenty of grade complaints in my life, but this was the first time one had been stated so baldly. I never know how to handle these things. Finally, I picked my jaw up off the floor and told her that it was not appropriate to inform a teacher that her grade was unacceptable, and advised her not to do it again.

This is where the story gets really funny. She looked at me with complete bafflement and said, "Why?"

I proceeded to explain that it's the teacher's job to decide what is acceptable performance and what isn't. Students do not have veto power over their grades. She looked extremely skeptical about this information, so I added that the immediate consequence of such an ultimatum would be that her teacher would think she was a spoiled brat. Then I asked, "What do you think is the alternative to accepting the grade?" She explained, as if I were a five year old, that the alternative was to go to the head of the English department and tell them that she had recieved an unacceptable grade. I explained that, if she did so, the Head of the English Department would not pat her on the head and give her a cookie and a higher grade. (Fortunately, at my insitution, this is the case. ProfessorDog's Inappropriate Soul Sister TeacherLady is not so lucky.)

I further advised This Student that if she wished to do better on the next paper, taking a draft to the school's Writing Center would be a very good idea, then began industriously erasing the board.

My Favorite Spelling Errors

2006-10-25T23:23:00.000-04:00

Of course, I see a lot of spelling errors in my job. Most of them do not involve what any reasonable person would consider hard words. Things like using the wrong "there" or putting "quiet" for "quite," make up something like ninety percent of spelling errors at both of my institutions.

Still, I have two favorites:

1. "Defiantly" for "Definitely": This one is an artifact of spell-check. I do find "definitely" sort of hard to spell, so I have some sympathy for getting the red wavy line on it. BUt if your best guess has the letter A in it, then the computer's first suggestion is going to be "defiantly." If you remember your hooked on phonics and sound it out, you'll realize you want choice two--but most people don't bother, which leads to sentences like, "I defiantly recommend this book/movie/thingy to anyone," or "I defiantly didn't want to be working for minumum wage the rest of my life." It amuses me to imagine someone defiantly making these declarations.

2. "Pregnate" for "pregnant." I admit, I see this one on my rodent lists a lot more often than in class-- things like, "I brought her home from the pet store, and a week later I found out she was pregnate," or "Litter available--my mouse is pregnate!"

Anyone else have faves typos or spelling errors?

Bad ProfessorDog!

2006-10-20T21:28:00.000-04:00

First off, let me say that I know it is wrong to cuss out a student in front of the class. Or in any other setting, really, but in front of the class is especially bad because it gives you 20 people who can potentially complain to the Dean and get you fired, rather than just one.

But here's what happened. We were doing a grammar lesson on subject-verb agreement (this is the remedial class at BCCC). My stnadard grammar lesson plan involves me going over a rule or trouble spot, with a few examples, then doing a few questions out of the book out loud (which means I read the question and wait for someone to whisper the answer in the tiniest of tiny voices. Only when I say, "You were right, can you just repeat that so everyone can hear?" will anyone give an answer in an audible voice), then the students do a couple more questions in writing (because it's always the same two or three people who whisper the answers, and I need to know if everyone else knows), and then they write an original sentence or two that demonstrates what we just learned. It's not the most exciting thing in the world, but it's also not listening to me drone on and on for hours on end--it's five minutes of lecture, five minutes of participation, five minutes of individual work, lather, rinse, repeat.

Anyway, on this particular occasion there were two young women in the back row who were having a private conversation so interesting that it was not possible for them to stop talking. Besides being rude, this prevents me from hearing the whispered answers during the participation portion of the program. Also, I have a number of students with disability letters saying they should have a distraction-free enviornment during testing, and I figure have people talking during individual work qualifies as a distraction (although not as testing).

My first step in dealing with these matters is glaring. That usually doesn't work, and didn't this time. Next, I say very sweetly, "Do you have a question back there?" Both young ladies gave me dirty looks, and one managed to say, "No," (in a very snotty tone, of course) before turning back to her friend and resuming their chat. Next, I said, "If you'd rather talk than be in class, go outside." Another dirty look; conversation resumes. Then I said, "I'm serious, shut the fuck up or get out."

They did shut up, for about ten minutes.

On Edit: I teach at a community college in Amish country. Our students are not used to hearing the F-word from teachers.

Excuses, Excuses

2006-10-17T21:14:00.000-04:00

I've finally succeeded in getting through to my students the message that if they wish for an absence to be excused, they must have had an emergency. Great, huh? Only now they simply describe every reason for which they intend to be absent as an emergency. I'm going to Puerto Rico to see my family for two weeks. It's an emergency. My mom had to borrow my car, because of an emergency. I have a court date, because I ran a stop sign on my way to an emergency. I don't have my paper done, and I can't bring it to the next class because I have to go home for a family meeting. Anemergency family meeting.

I'm especially annoyed with two-weeks-in-Puerto-Rico guy. I understand wanting to see your family, really I do. When I was in Illinois, which might as well have been a foreign territory, I came back home every chance I got. But, you know, I scheduled my visits for school breaks. I know, he says there's a family emergency--but what kind of family emergency do you know about two weeks in advance (when he first informed me of his intended absence)? And you know in advance it's going to take exactly two weeks? I'm thinking "emergency airfare special." Plus, he gave me this note saying that he was "willing to sign an agreement" that he intended to make up the work. WTF? If you want to pass a class, you have to do the work. It's not something extra that you do to placate the teacher. Even if you had a genuine emergency, doing the work is not optional. Fortunately, I have two weeks to decide what I want to do about this situation.

BCMU Students Surprise Me

2006-10-05T22:02:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, one of my remedial writing classes at BCMU classes sucked. They universally failed to do the 27 pages of reading that they'd had a week to do (one of our classes last week was cancelled, so they had two whole classes worth of reading to do, poor lambs). When I asked them questions about what they were supposed to have read, they sat there and stared at me. When I put them in small groups to discuss another part of what they were supposed to have read, they sat there and stared at their textbooks for thirty minutes. It was one of the worst classes I've ever suffered through.

Today, I opened my class with a little sermon about how they won't learn anything in this class if they sit there like lumps on a log, how I get paid the same either way, so it's no skin off my butt if they don't learn anything, but they should think hard about if they want to waste their time and money taking a class and not getting anything from it because they were too lazy to do their part.

And with one or two exceptions, they responded well to it. Participation was the best its been all semester. They worked during the group work--and stayed on-task, except for a little bit at the end when all of the groups except one were done--and I checked the groups that said they were done, and they actually had done a reasonably thorough job of what I asked them to do.

So now I know, next time they stop working, they respond well to ranting.

In Defense of Unicorn Girl

2006-09-21T01:01:00.000-04:00

After reading some of the responses to my original post on Unicorn Girl, I did a wee bit of undergrad-style research (that is, I typed my topic into google). I found that there is, in reality, a cave painting that is referred to as a unicorn--even though in the photo that I saw of it, it clearly has two horns. There is also an extinct species of rhinoceros that has "Unicorn" in its Latin name; it apparently had a single horn (although the horn is not preserved in the fossil record), and it's believed that myths about unicorns may be based on this animal. Finally, there was a scientist in the 1700's who believed that he had found physical evidence of extinct unicorns. So the student in question is still seriously confused, but not quite as badly as I thought she was. I can see how she found much-diluted and corrupted accounts of these facts, perhaps on some sort of message board for people who believe that unicorns are real, and conflated them into recent scientific evidence of real unicorns. It's possible she is not crazy, just not very good at telling reliable sources from unreliable ones.

On the other hand, apparently the draft she brought to peer review was about different kinds of magic and how dragons only speak mind-to-mind with people who are pure of heart. Her classmates apparently convinced her to dial down the crazy a bit. I remain slightly boggled by the idea of a college student who things unicorns and telepathic dragons are an appropriate paper topic, but I'm guardedly optimistic that she's not completely off her rocker.

In other news, I have a student in the Lit. class who, upon having her single response paper (she should have written two by now) returned with a low grade for being late, and a comment that she was one response paper behind, told me that she had, in fact, done the first one. You see, she left it on her desk in the classroom when the class ended. She assumed I had it, even though when I returned her classmates' work, she didn't get it back. Is there anyone in the world who thinks that leaving work on a student desk in the classroom constitutes "turning in" said work? Is she really that dumb, or does she just think I am? She produced a "second copy" of the paper, which I didn't accept because my firm policy is that response papers have to be turned in on the day we discuss the text that it's responding to--the whole point of them is to ensure that students show up to class with things to say about the reading assignment, so if students go home and write them after the discussion, their purpose isn't being served. The student just said, "Oh, okay," and left, but I forsee further difficulties once she's had a chance to come up with what she thinks is a compelling counterargument. I mean, she did have it on the day! It's not her fault I didn't inspect every random piece of paper left in my classroom, on the off chance that it might be somebody's homework!

I plan to stand firm--they're supposed to do seven response papers; missing one is not going to torpedo her grade, as long as she writes the rest of them on time.

So I have this student...

2006-09-17T20:56:00.000-04:00

in remedial writing at BCCC. And she's apparently a total whackaloon. One of the (textbook) prompts for the first assignment is "Something that really interests me."

Her paragraph is about whether fairy-tale dragons exist in the real world. She believes that they might, because in an art class she heard that unicorns were real at one time, before humans or climate change killed them. In conclusion, she continues to hope that fairy-tale dragons exist in the real world.

The paragraph is structured fairly well, with a topic sentence and everything, although riddled with grammatical and syntactical errors. But don't be distracted by that. The crucial issue is that here is a grown-ass woman, a high school graduate, who thinks that it's appropriate to write a college paper about how dragons might be real. And her evidence for thinking this is that unicorns are real.

This person can vote. I'm frightened.

PS: And her course evaluation at the end of term will count the same as that of a sane person.

PPS: This post originally contained the full text of the student's paragraph, but I removed it when I started to worry about the student someday finding this blog and knowing I was making fun of her. This way, even if she does see it, she can't be totally sure that it's not about someone else with the same weird interest.

Grade Complaints Ahoy

2006-09-07T22:47:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted anything new here all week, but I do have a thing up on RateYourStudents--if you're not familliar, click the link on the right side of your screen. September 5. It's my third RYS item.

I've gotten a grade complaint from one of my summer classes. The student hasn't actually spoken to me about it: she wrote to me asking how she "could do better" in the next class. I told her, and pointed out that since she hadn't passed mine, she wouldn't be taking the next class in the sequence until she took the other class again. She replied by asking to come in and meet with me on a day that the campus wasn't even open, and for copies of her final exam and final assignment. I left the work with the secretary for her to pick up; a week later, the secretary decided she probably wasn't coming in for it, and gave it back to me. Naturally, the next day, Student came in for the stuff. Secretary (a wonderful person, BTW, without whom the college would not function) told me; I left the work with her again. When the student finally came in for it she met with Dean of Students and claimed I had made a mistake in her grade (not true) and then said she would bring in a doctor's note to prove that her two-weeks-late paper should have been excused.

And that's where it stands now. I informed Dean of Students that I would change Student's grade if she (DoS) told me to, as it was not a hill I was willing to die on. This is actually a good strategy (I think) with DoS, because, while I could tell she wanted me to change it, she knows better than to try to make a teacher change a grade--if the other faculty found out about it, she'd have a serious staff-relations problem on her hands. So now we're waiting to find out if Student ever actually brings in the Doctor's note.

My argument against changing the grade is, A, the student is not ready for the next class anyway. Sometimes students can squeak a pass even though they aren't actually prepared, and if she had passed, she'd have been one of those. In this case the numbers, as they often do, jibe with my holistic evaluation of her performance. If she did seem prepared for the next class, I'd be more willing to hear about juggling the numbers. And B, introducing new evidence to change grades at this late a date--almost a month after the end of the semester in question--is not a precedent I want to set. What do others think about this second point? Does anyone accept excuse notes after final grades are in?

Happy for me, Sad for you

2006-08-31T01:24:00.000-04:00

The Girl God Sent to my class has dropped. I guess God decided He didn't want her to take my class after all. The only down side of this turn of events is that I won't have any amusing stories about her to share. The girl in Remedial writing who wears Very Christian Attire and stares at me in a disturbing way has knocked off the staring, and her attire has grown a little less Christian (Today she had on a tank top with a chain belt, over her floor-length skirt).

I haven't posted all week, because nothing noteworthy has happened on the teaching front. I got response papers from half of my Lit class, and they were Not Terrible. We might be going on a field trip later in the semester. Remedial writing is working on a paragraph about Personal Goals and on identifying subjects and verbs. So far, no one has claimed not to be able to grasp that "is" is a verb (A few semesters ago I had this student who, every time this fact was pointed out, would put on a Confused Face and say, "I don't get it." I'm not really sure what there is to get or not get, exactly). Freshman Writing is working on a description of a person. BCMU starts next week.

A Colleague...

2006-08-24T23:34:00.000-04:00

...at BCCC called me "kiddo" the other day. I'm still not sure how I feel about this.

First Day Back

2006-08-21T21:47:00.000-04:00

The first day back at BCCC went reasonably well. I used my new diagnostic assignment in both writing classes (remedial and regular freshman comp). I copied three letters written to advice columns, and had the students respond to the one of their choice. In the remedial class, the only really unexpected thing I encountered was some truly horrible spelling--did you know that the plural form of "you" is "use"? People pronounce the plural "you" that way in this area, but I'd never seen it spelled that way before.

A few students displayed moderate misunderstanding of the letters that they were responding to, or gave answers that didn't make much sense. One of the letters was from a woman who was going back to school full-time, and had quit her job. Since she left work, she's been doing all of the housework, and is feeling like the maid. (It's unclear from the letter if she and her husband discussed the housework arrangements before she made the decision to stop work.) Several students answered that she should get a part time job to help with the bills, since it's not fair for her husband to support both of them.

This answer reveals a lot about the students' backgrounds--apparently, not working, even in order to go back to school, is a totally foreign concept--I guess they just didn't grok that the woman was saying she didn't have enough time to go to classes and do all of the housework. Which totally makes sense, given that most of the students at BCCC are working, going to school, and running their own households (often with children). I suspect a combination of unfamilliar cultural context and low-ish reading comprehension led to some students not quite grasping the letter-writer's complaint.

Another of the letters was from a mother whose 12 y-o daughter had been invited to a sleep-over--at a boy's house. The students were almost universally in favor of allowing the girl to attend the co-ed sleepover, but offered good suggestions as to how the mother could be more comforatable with it: questioning the lad's parents about the sleeping arrangements, supervision, and refreshment plans; requesting that the boys and girls sleep in separate rooms; or, if she just couldn't handle the sleep-over aspect, letting the daughter attend the party for a while but come home at a reasonable hour. However, one (male) student wrote, (in his persona as Dear Abby), "Don't worry your little pretty heart about your daughter at the co-ed sleepover....I know you want to protect her, but you can't always be there." I'm glad I decided not to comment on individual papers for this exercise, because I wouldn't know where to begin.

All in all, I think the advice letters made a good diagnostic assignment--unlike the "introduce yourself" paragraph that I've used in previous years, this exercise gives me a chance to assess reading as well as writing skills, and also lets me see how much (or little) the students already know about considering an audience when writing. In the "introduce yourself" paragraph, "considering audience" comes across a lot like "sucking up," which many are much better at than they are at other kinds of considering audience--and other students know how, but are unwilling, to do. This new exercise also requires stating and defending a position, so it's more similar to academic writing than the "introduce yourself" paragraph. I recommend it!

When I was looking for letters to use, I strove to find at least one letter from a male, since I figured some of the men students would be uncomfortable or awkward giving advice on a woman's problem. Some of the men--including the one quoted above--had no problem with answering women's letters; however, about half of of the men students did choose the man's letter to answer, (and nearly all of the women chose one of the other two) so I'd recommend that anyone using this exercise include letters from both genders. Unfortuantely, most advice columns geared specifically to men either require specialized knowledge (about sports or men's health, for instance) or are not appropriate for the classroom (such as sex and dating columns), so wound up trawling through Dear Abby, where I had to look at something like a dozen columns before I found one with a male letter-writer, and I wasn't very happy with it. (It was from a man who likes to go hunting and fishing, and his wife gets upset when he's away overnight. The students' advice: a) take the wife and kids along on some of the hunting and fishing trips, or b) make sure she gets to go away to do her own hobbies an equal number of times. The answers were all so samey that I think it must have been obvious what the "right" answer was.)

In the British Lit. class, I did use the "write a paragaph introducing yourself to me," exercise, because I've never taught it before and I did want to know what expectations, preparation, attitudes, etc. the students are coming in with. I found that most of them are majoring in other subjects (I have one English major--she must be transferring to another school, since we don't actually have an English major, just a generic "liberal arts" major), most have not taken a literature class since high school, and a surprising number profess to be excited about reading Chaucer. (One of the things I suggested they write about was "which of the authors or works on the syllabus are you most excited about reading?" I was aware that most of them probably wouldn't have a favorite, but wondered what they would put.) Now I'm left wondering why Chaucer? A fair few reported having read Beowulf, some Chaucer, some Shakespeare, and "A Modest Proposal." I doubt that many have read the specific Chaucer and Shakespeare that we're doing, so I'm not too worried about recycled-term-paper-land.

Now, I'm sure you have been wondering, "Who is this reasonable person talking in a sensible manner about legitimate pedagogical concerns? I want to hear ProfessorDog complain about idiotic students."

Well, okay, since you asked so nicely. So I have this student. Her "introduce yourself" paragraph begins, "I have but only one goal in life, and this is to fulfill my purpose as God's creation according to His guidance and will. Which is why I sit in this very class right now." Then she goes into why God thought it best that she leave her previous (religious) college last year (I'm not going to say, because, privacy. But it's a hair-raising story). It's not clear exactly how God brought it to her attention that he wanted her to take British Literature I.

Scary in a different way, I have this other student whose paragraph says, (among other things), "I am not a big reader...the biggest thing that I am hoping to get out of this class is a good grade." I'm a bit relieved that I only had one person come out and say that in the paragraph, actually, although I have a few others who gently talk around the idea that they are, as they say, reluctant readers. I'm debating whether to make an announcement from the pulpit that those who don't like to read might want to meet with their advisors while the add/drop period is still open--I probably won't, because that's the kind of thing that can look bad if a student goes and tells someone in the administration about it. And heck, it's possible that my reluctant readers will be swept up in the gestalt of the class and become just as excited about Chaucer as the others are.

So--Mood, still cautiously optimistic, although a bit worried about the Girl God Sent To My Class.

In-service

2006-08-20T23:08:00.000-04:00

I promised in my last post to post a bit about my in-service session at BCCC. First off, I'd like to say that I have few complaints about the way BCCC handles in-service. They hold in on an evening during the week between summer session and the fall semester, which allows most, though not all, to attend, even if they have another job. (BCMU holds theirs during the day, the week before *their* fall term starts. And since their fall term always starts the week before BCCC's, I have a choice of missing in-service or missing the first or second day of my own classes at BCCC. I've never been to a BCMU in-service). Second, recognizing that some people will still not be able to make it (people who teach summer session often like to schedule a short vacation during the week off, and of course some people's other jobs are in the evening), so attendance is encouraged but not mandatory. I generally RSVP, "I don't know, I'd like to get out of town if I can afford it, but I don't know...." and then end up showing up anyway. No one has ever given me grief about this). Thirdly, recognizing that many people will come to in-service straight from work at another job, and also that others may benefit from some light encouragement to attend, they give us dinner. The dinner is always a fairly good catered buffet, with salad, bread, soft drinks, dessert, and a couple of main-dish options. This time they had pasta with beef tips in a red sauce, baked fish of some kind, and chicken cooked with almonds and grapes, along with potatoes and two vegetables. It's free, perfectly edible, and all-you-can-eat.

The first part of the event is the worst, a half hour of speechifying from main campus administrators. I managed to miss it this time, owing to genuine confusion over when the thing actually started. (The schedule of events includes a half-hour window for "check in," (in other words, picking up your name tag), a half hour for speeches, and then the dinner.) I wanted to get there at the end of the check-in period, but instead got there at the end of the speeches. Sad for me. Had I heard the speeches, I probably would have something to complain about--I remember at the last one, the college president said something about "thanking you for helping us teach our students"--where "you" is the faculty, and "us" is the administration. Somehow, no one else at my table caught what a ridiculous an offensive statement this was, until I pointed it out to them. The same president also pointed out how we are the only college in the immediate area without a union, and that contributes to the sense of "collegiality." Uh, yeah. Okay.

So anyway, I missed the speeches, and we had the dinner. The theme for the table decorations was golf, which, given how much (read: little) we are paid struck a false note as far as I was concerned, but I'm not going to quibble about it. I met two new English teachers--one, an older man, had taught at other regional colleges before, and the other teaches at the local high school. Both seem nice, and I was able to catch them up on things like how to get their class roster off the web.

Then we went to breakout sessions by department/division. (English is actually the only department that gets its own, because we're always the biggest group once you fold in ESL and Reading). The session was mostly about what to put on your syllabus, which was useful for the two new people, although not for the rest of us. One weirdness happened when the department chair alerted us that there was new boilerpate we were supposed to put on the Freshman Writing syllabus--the college had changed the old "Course Objectives" to a new set of "Learning outcomes." Mild flurry of distress from everyone who had already made and copied their syllabi. I muddied the waters by asking if there was any difference between a "course objective" and a "learning outcome." (The short answer is, no.)

Last event of the day was the breakout sessions. They give us three or four sessions to pick from--the only catch is that you have to pick, ahead of time, by session title, and it's hard to tell from the titles whether a given session is going to be worthwhile. I've been to several that were complete wastes of time. This time I went to "Keeping students on course with feedback." In that session, I learned that in Rocket Science, feedback is communication between a space vehicle and ground control, and it's very helpful because out there in space, the people in the rocket can't tell if they're heading where they want to go or not. Interesting metaphor, but I'm not sure I learned much about giving students feedback on work. We talked about how feedback should be frequent, timely, and specific--was there anyone there who didn't already know those things? I kinda doubt it.

So, in summation, BCCC inservice is relatively painless, and there is free food.

Value of Blogging

2006-08-15T23:49:00.000-04:00

I've spent most of the last five or six days either sleeping or reading education blogs (with a brief time-out to go to Inservice at BCCC--more on that later). I started wondering, is this a worthwhile activity? Especially since I seem to be using my own blog mainly to bitch?

I've decided that the answer is a cautious "yes". I'm not getting many specific ideas or strategies from my extnesive reading, since most of the blogs I've been reading are by teachers in radically different settings and subject areas-- Sex Ed in Higher Ed is a college prof who teaches Human Sexuality, for instance, and the one I'm in the middle of right now, MsFrizzle, teaches middle-school science in the Bronx. However, I've definitely spent more time thinking about teaching practices in the last few days than in any other comparable period of time, except maybe my grad school teaching orientation. And I've come up with a few neat ideas--a new first-day diagnostic to use in my writing classes, is one, and I'm also toying with the idea of replacing my journaling assignment in Freshman English with a class blog. There are a lot of logistics to work out with that idea, and I definitely won't be starting it this semester, but it's something to think about for Spring.

Besides, if I wasn't doing this, I'd probably be either trying to catch up with all the programs I've got saved on my Tivo or else reading fanfic--it's not like I'd be whipping up the cure for cancer, or even finishing my Canterbury Tales lesson plan.

(Note: I'm bloggng from my front porch/stoop right now. It's about midnight, and I live in the city, in kind of a dicey neighborhood. Two guys just walked by, and I wondered if this choice of activity/location may lead to a sudden change in ownership of my laptop. Now I'm mind-f*cking whether that worry is reasonable or a sign of unconscious racism. Sigh.)

British Literature

2006-08-15T02:52:00.000-04:00

So I'm teaching this literature class in the fall. (Meaning, the week after next. Eek!) It's the first half of the British Literature survey--the course that, when I took it as an English major, made me decide to go to graduate school and focus on the Early Modern period. (Note: "Early Modern" is what the cool kids are calling the Elizabethan/Jacobian period these days. Shakespeare 'n stuff. In my undergrad days, every now and then students would show up on the first day of an upper-division Early Modern class expecting, like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.)

So, there's no pressure or anything.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the class. I haven't met any of the students yet, so I don't have the foggiest idea what to expect. Unlike everything else I teach, it's not a required-for-everyone class. It's not exactly a free elective, either--most students completing an Associates degree have to take at least one course from what they call the Humanities Core. If they're able to drive to the main campus for a class, they have lots of choices. If they want to (or have to) take all of their courses at our branch campus, they have a much more limited range of options--we do one literature class a semester, usually one or two music classes, something called Humanities, which is basically art history but with some extra stuff thrown in, maybe a couple of other things that I haven't heard about. And then there's the internet/video courses, which most students prefer not to take for a variety of mostly-good reasons. So there isn't a lot of choice, but there's some, and my class is what they've chosen. So far I have 16, which is well under the cap, but is a good size for something like this--enough to get a discussion going. I could get more--they can register up until the second weke of classes--but it'll probably stay about that size.

We're working out of the Norton anthology--the school picked that book for me, but it's probably what I'd have chosen anyway, so that's fine. My undergrad survey used the Norton--the edition where the Shakespeare play was one of the Henry's. I want to say Henry IV part I, but I can't swear to it. I'm glad Steven Greenblatt changed that--I like the history plays, I do, but I don't think they'd be a good choice for community-college non-English majors. The new Norton has King Lear and 12th Night. I picked 12th Night. It's a little bit less complex, and I bet many of the students haven't read a Shakespearean comedy. I think the schools around here still do Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and then one of the big-name tragedies--Hamlet or Othello. The classes that do Shakespeare at all. (Julius Casear has to be the worst possible choice for 9th grade--how did that tradition ever get established? I honestly can't think of a single Shakespearean play that would be a worse choice for teenagers.) It'll be interesting to show them how the romantic-comedy form has lasted. Lear is good too, but it is a lot harder, and is also kind of samey-same with what they've probably already been exposed to. 12th Night is a bit of a screwball comedy, plus it'll give us an opportunity to talk about gender and sexuality.

But before we get to Shakespeare, we have the Anglo-Saxon and Medival stuff. Probably my weakest area in the period! We're doing Dream of the Rood on the first day, then jumping into Beowulf. Norton has the Seamus Heany translation, which I think is really good. And I just checked tonight--I'm in a wired classroom, so I can play sound clips and show slides easilly. If you're an English teacher, check out Norton's web page--they have quite a bit of material to easilly turn your crap lesson into a multimedia extravaganza. For Beowulf alone, I've snagged some sound clips of Heaney reading passages from his translation, a map showing where the Danes and the Geats actually lived, and some pics of Anglo-saxon bling. I also have an audio clip of a passage being read in Old English--that's not from Norton, but it's pretty cool too. I got a video from the media center, too, but I don't know yet if I'll use it. For some reason they can't send it to the branch campus for me to look at until this coming week. If it's not total crap, I have that, too.

But I don't know how much of the class we're going to have to spend just on understanding what's happening in the story, as opposed to talking about the larger themes. I've prepped based on spending half the time on comprehension, half on analysis. If they're swifter than I'm expecting with regards to comprehension, I might find myself underprepared. On the other hand, if the comprehension is really bad, I don't have a clear idea of how to scaffold them up to understanding it on their own, as opposed to just telling them what happens.

Then comes Canterbury Tales. Norton has it in Middle English, which I'm a little dubious about. I've bookmarked a couple of web sites that have side-by-side translations of the parts we're reading, so if it ends up being just impossible, I can make copies of that. I hope they can manage reading it in the original--for one thing, if they can do that, I shouldn't have much bitching to deal with when we get to the Early Moderns. One thing I'm not doing, however, is oral reading. We definitely don't have time to both learn to pronounce Middle English and to actually understand it. In fact, oral reading in a Middle English accent actually makes the language harder to understand than just reading it phonetically based on modern pronunciation. Plus, I never got the hang of reading the Middle English out loud. More Norton sound clips to the rescue! They'll get to hear a little bit of how it sounds, then we'll focus on what it means. We're doing the general prologue, Miller's tale, and Pardoner's tale. The Miller's Tale is a really filthy one--sort of the medieval version of American Pie--so I can be fairly confident that they haven't encountered it before. Again, I have the same worries about comprehension versus analysis--but by the time we get there, I should have a fair idea of what the class is capable of.

And that's as far as I've gotten in my prep. I know I'm doing miracle plays next, but I haven't even really looked at what Norton has, except to figure out what pages to put on the syllabus. I pity any student who signs up thinking, "Oh, we'll read some lovely literature from old-timey people who were so much more pious and just generally nicer than people today!" Violence, crude sexual humor, and viscious anti-semitism, that's the first five weeks of my class.

What makes for a bad class?

2006-08-14T17:52:00.000-04:00

Earlier, I said something about how my morning developmental writing class was my Worst Group Ever. I got to thinking about why that was--yes, I had two obnoxious students, but what was it about the others that made them so unsatisfying to teach? First off, it was a very small class--it's hard to sustain any kind of momentum with a very small group. (I started with six, ended with three.) I had the two obnoxious ones (Guy Who Swears A Lot and Man-Vagina), and two who had personal problems/crises that prevented them from attending consistently or putting in much effort. I'm pretty sympathetic to that--BCCC students generally have very chaotic lives, and sometimes school ends up last on a very long list of priorities. But being sympathetic doesn't mean that such students are a pleasure to teach. First of all, I can't teach them if they aren't there; secondly, even if they do try to keep up, often they don't make enough progress that I can honestly pass them on into regular freshman English. It's frustrating for me to have to fail students who are doing the best they can in a bad situation, and of course it's even more frustrating for them.

And the last two? They're the most difficult to evaluate. They were clearly just there to get a passing grade. Unlike Guy Who Put in What he Thought was the Minimum Effort to Pass, but was Horribly Wrong (who was in the evening class), these two had a realistic idea of what they had to do in order to get through the class with a satisfactory grade, and they did it without (much) fuss. I can't really complain about them; they didn't do anything in particular to wear on my nerves, and, unlike the students who had personal crises, I didn't have to spend any time or mental energy worrying about them. But I'm also pretty convinced that they got no lasting benefit from my class--they learned just enough to pass, but they probably could have passed the placement test and avoided my class entirely if they'd had a couple of tutoring sessions beforehand. Now, I do tell my students, and I really do believe, that even students who are on the upper end of the ability/preparedness spectrum for developmental English, can get a lot of benefit out of my class if they put in effort. No one, and especially no community college student, is such a terrific writer that they can't improve with a practice and (to a lesser extent) instruction. But a student who is on the upper end of ability, and is focused just on getting a passing grade? Is just wasting their time and money taking my class.

So, in short, I don't think anyone got much of anything out of my morning remedial English class, except me: I got paid, which is always nice. (I do like sleeping indoors.) But it's hard to maintain much enthusiasm for remedial English when I'm the only one in the room who's making any kind of effort, or who cares if anybody learns anything or not.

PS: I did think of something that one student, maybe, got out of it. When we read a piece by Dave Barry (it's in the textbook), Guy Who Swears A Lot really liked it and asked where he could read more by the same author. Since he self-identifies as a person who doesn't read unless he has to, I suppose putting something in front of him that made him at least imagine that he might want to do more reading for pleasure is an accomplishment. But a very small one.

A Poll

2006-08-14T00:38:00.000-04:00

Not a real poll, because I don't know if blogger has a poll feature, or how to use it if we do. But, gentle reader, you can answer in the comments. Do you ever read (or watch, I guess) Harry Potter and wish you were Professor Snape?

I mean honestly. How does he get away with it all? Not the Death Eater stuff, the way he carries on in class. Why doesn't Dumbledore ever make schoolwide policies in order to curb his specific antisocial behaviors? And why don't the students bust out laughing when he makes his infamous "dunderheads" speech on the first day?

JK Rowling often gets asked in interviews what magical power out of her books she would like to have (she always says flying). I want some of whatever Snape's on.

First comments! Woo-hoo!

2006-08-13T16:42:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Teacher Lady and Graycie for stopping by! TL: I'm a real chickenshit about kicking people out. Or imposing discipline of any kind. What I do is shrug off all kinds of inappropriate behavior until I Just. Can't. Stand. One. More. Thing. and then explode with rage. I need to come up with a better strategy than that.

Graycie: Major props to you for teaching high school. I've thought about doing that--the pay is actually better than what I'm doing now, and at least there's benefits--but I don't think I could handle it. I hate, hate, hate dealing with discipline and attitude problems, and in high school that kind of thing goes with the territory. The good thing about so many of my students being first-generation college students, they usually don't attend straight out of high school, and wait until they're a little bit older and ready to settle down and take their education seriously. They may not have internalized much about appropriate classroom behavior, but generally they aren't going out of their way to make trouble.

All of my stories so far on this blog have had to do with BCCC students, but I really have a lot fewer attitude problems there than at BCMU. The BCMU students are at the branch campus because their high school record isn't that good--but they still see college as an entitlement, just what you do between high school and real life, so they don't see any reason to work any harder than they did in high school. The BCCC students, on the other hand, know that they're going to have to somehow develop better work habits if they want to improve their situation in life.

Answer to a Question Posed on Ratemyprofessor.com

2006-08-13T02:29:00.000-04:00

One time when I was checking my ratings on Ratemyprofessor.com (hush, you know we all do it), I discovered that a student had asked me a question: "Why are you teacher if you hate students?" (sic).

"Well, bugger," I thought to myself. "I thought I was doing such a swell job of hiding it."

Unfortunately, the little prick never came back to class after that. (Of course I know which one it was), or I'd have told him. I was raised to believe that you work because you like living indoors and eating food that you didn't scrounge out of a dumpster. If you get any measure of satisfaction out of what you do, that's an un-looked-for bonus.

Seriously, though: why is it that the moment a teacher expresses any dissatisfaction with his or her job, someone chimes in to say, "If you don't like it, do something else!" (Edited to add: I didn't say in class that I hated students. I said that I hated being asked "Why did you take off this point?" fifty bazillion times a day, and that I was likely to throttle the next person who asked.) Are teachers the only people in the world who sometimes find one aspect or another of their jobs to be, shall we say, less than thrilling? Of course not. Every job requires you to sometimes do things you don't want to do, and interact with people you'd cross the street to avoid if you had the choice. But teachers, apparently, are expected to enjoy every second of their jobs.

Well, except marking papers. In recent years, it's become acceptable for teachers to gripe about marking papers, especially since most lay-people think (when they think about it at all) that computers will soon be doing all of our marking for us. And I guess we can dislike prep, too, since most people have no idea we actually plan out ahead of time what we're going to do during the class day. (Our Dean of Students, for example, when she sees me working at an unusual hour will ask, "Staying late to grade papers?" I usually just say, "Yeah," because if I say, "No, I'm doing some prep," I'll have to spend thirty or forty-five valuable seconds explaining what that is.)

But anything that involves actually being in the same room with the students? If you don't love every second of that, you should quit! If you don't love having students wander in late with their cell phones going off, cheating blatantly on exams, lying about their dead grandmothers, ignoring your instructions and then asking about something you just said--if any of those things bother you, then quit! Just do something else! If having students do the minimum possible amount of work all semester, then ask for extra credit the day of the final, or having them interrogate you--in the middle of a lesson-about every point you took off of their paper, or tell you that they didn't do the assignment because they 'only do the important things'--if any of that frustrates you, rather than filling you with a passion to bring englightenment to the little dears' minds--then you should quit!

The same goes for structural inequalities and injustices. If you don't like having no health insurance, making less money than a manager at Burger King, and reporting to a Dean who knows less about teaching than the average factory worker, well, nobody put a gun to your head and made you go to graduate school, did they?

Do people think through the ramifications of what they're saying? Do they realize that if every teacher who ever experiences job dissatisfaction just quit, no one would last more than week in the profession? Or does "Just quit" really mean "Just shut up"?

"Is That Okay?"

2006-08-13T00:23:00.000-04:00

Students often come up to me and explain how they have to miss class, or leave early, in order to do such-and-such. It might be to pick up a child or elderly person, to get a car fixed, to do something for work, to hang out at the mall, whatever. But regardless of the excuse or reason, the explanation always ends with, "So is that okay?"

Now, my absence policy is fairly clear. I don't assess an automatic absence penalty (BCCC recommends against them), but, I tell them, you miss what you miss. You're still expected to learn it, and it's up to you to do so. If you miss something graded, you can only make it up if you were absent due to an emergency.

I used to answer this question, "Yeah, okay." To me, that meant, "Of course you should be in class, but I won't think you're a horrible person if you go do this other thing that you have presented as though you don't really have a choice anyway."

That approach led to a lot of absences, and a perhaps-understandable confusion from the students about why they weren't allowed to make up the quiz, and why they were still expected to know what I had taught, when I had, after all, said it was "okay" for them not to come to class.

I experimented for a while with saying, "Well, no, not really." The experiment didn't last long. The student I tried it on went to his parents and told them I had forbidden him to go on his family vacation. They called the Dean of Students. I'm not sure exactly what they said, but the sticking point was that I had taken a sick day that semester, announcing it the day before, in order to do some charity work that I had committed to before I knew my schedule. (We get one paid sick day a semester, and using it only for actual sickness was not rigorously enforced.) The parents thought it was a 'double standard' that I was allowed to miss a day, but their pwecious boy couldn't go on vacation.

Lost in the wind was my explanation that it was, of course, up to him to decide whether he was going to miss an entire week of an 8-week course to go on vacation; I was just telling him I didn't think it was a good idea, and that if we had a quiz, he wasn't going to be able to make it up. For some reason, the end result of this affair was that teachers at BCCC are no longer allowed to announce in advance that they plan to use a sick day, since this student (and, more importantly, his mother) thought it was unfair that he couldn't announce in advance that he'd be absent and have that be "okay". And the Dean of Students agreed with him. Yes, ProfessorDog ruined it for everyone. That's one reason why this blog is anonymous; my colleagues will lynch me if they find out that was my fault.

Since both "yes" and "no" have proven to be unacceptable answers to the "is that okay?" question, I'm seeking a new one. Sighing heavilly before saying, "Yeah, I guess," and adding, "but be sure you do the reading," seems to work a little better than a straight "yes." If the proposed absence is long, or will entail missing something graded or unusually crucial, I say, "Well, if you're sure it's a good idea to miss (whatever they'll miss), it's your decision," is better, but requires me to actually check what they're going to miss, and students still seem to get the impression that their absence will be completely without consequences.

Last week I had a student come to the last class and tell me that he had to pick up his nephew, so "was it okay" if he left early? I gave the new answer: "We're going to be reviewing for the final exam. If you think it's a good idea to miss that, it's up to you." Now, I admit, I didn't remind him that giving out the essay question was part of reviewing for the final exam. He stuck around for about ten minutes, then left. That evening? Email in my mailbox, asking for the question. My answer? "Well, no. You chose to leave before I gave it out." Who knows what will happen when this one's mother complains.

How do other people answer "Is that okay?"

More About Guy Who Swears A Lot

2006-08-11T02:58:00.000-04:00

I hesitated on posting this, because it could be identifying information--I hope there aren't two people this dumb in the world. But there probably are, so here goes. I told you, oh Blog-o-delic-blog, about Guy Who Swears A Lot. He doesn't just waste his tuition money to spite his teachers, he does the same with actual physical purchases. He told a story in class one day (also interrupting a perfectly good lesson) about how the car dealership wouldn't sell him the car he wanted--his credit wasn't good enough to finance it, so he had to get something slightly cheaper than what he had in mind. In order to get back at the car dealership, he went out and wrecked the car after he'd had it two weeks.

That'll show 'em. His insurance went up, plus he has no car (which means he can't make it to my class as often, which is a tragedy for the rest of us). I'm sure the dealership is very sorry they wouldn't sell him what he wanted.

Oh, and here's one more. I had this student, who came to class on the first day with no textbook. He told a fairly standard tale of woe about how his financial aid was messed up, so he was unable to buy his textbook. (A student in the next row pointed out that she had had a similar problem, but the school gave her a voucher to get her books and have the cost deducted when her aid finally did some in. I should have listened to that.) Since it was the first day, I was not yet quite as pissed off as I usually am, so I decided to let him use one of my spare copies for a day or two. (We get new desk copies every semester, usually both a teacher's edition and a student edition, unless we specify that we don't need'em. I usually forget, so I have a lot of textbooks sitting around. But not enough to give one to every student who would prefer not to buy one.) Most of the people who attend BCCC are poor, and textbooks are expensive.

Well, weeks went by, and I pondered whether to embarass the student by asking when he was going to buy his own damn book. Finally I nerved up and asked, and of course he was not embarassed. He claimed his aid had still not come in, but he'd get his own book next week. Okey-dokey, I responded. The next week, I asked again. Still no aid, no book. "You need to buy a book," I said firmly. He began explaining why that was impossible. "I don't care what the reasons are," I answered. "Everyone else managed to buy a book. I want mine back next class." Next class, he gave me my book back, and sat there with no book, looking pitiful. He did manage to participate fairly well, even when we were doing exercises out of the book--probably run-on sentences or something like that, I forget. (I have to admit I found that fairly impressive. Most of my students can barely follow along if they do have the book in front of them.) When I asked about his book, he claimed to have his own at home. "Bring it next time," I said. Next time? He was back to his no aid/no book story. I remained firm, telling him that since the semester was now 2/3 of the way over, he'd had more than enough time to find some way to get a book, and I expected him to do so.

Later, I consulted some other teachers about this problem, and was reminded that if he really hadn't gotten his aid, he would have been dropped from my class for nonpayment. However, if I was still worried about this poor young man not being able to do his homework if I didn't provide a book, I should inform him that he can use a book at the tutoring center or the library. Okay, I thought. If he does that, I'll let him use one of my books during class time, but not take it home. A wise, Solomon-like decision, that balances my buddha-like compassion with my drive not to be taken for a schmuck.

Student? Never came to class again.

ProfessorDog? Schmuck. The whole time this student was in the class, he seemed to expect special treatment--to be allowed to interrupt the lesson with things that weren't relevant (such as telling me he had to leave the room because his "man-vagina" was itchy. I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm reasonably sure it's a part of his body I don't want to know anything about), to talk to himself during quizzes, and to call out the first answer to every question, even though he wasn't the only one in the room. Maybe he'd have done it anyway, but I wonder if I aggravated his natural sense of entitlement by lending him the book that everyone else had to buy.

Pets Galore

2006-08-10T23:16:00.000-04:00

One of the neat things about my job at BCCC is that I got two of my pets there. Now, I worked in an animal shelter for a few months, and managed not to get any pets out of that experience. But the community college? Pets everywhere. In addition to the two I actually took, I also had an option on rescuing a pit bull from an abusive marriage.

First BCCC pet was Fred. I used to have two cats. Then one got hit by a car and died. (Yes, I know I'm a bad pet owner and a terrible human being for letting my cat go outside. He kept running out the door, and eventually I got tired of running through the dog-poo-covered yard and vaulting over the neighbor's fence--in my pyjamas--to bring his ungrateful furry ass home.) Around the same time, one of the secretaries had a kitten show up at her house. I resisted for a while, then decided that the remaining cat was depressed, and a kitten would be just the thing to lift their spirits. Not a very interesting story.

More interesting is the story of the Stray Mouse. I hang out with one of the librarians sometimes, so she knows I'm an animal person. Last week she came in to work with a story about how when her father was working in the yard, an albino mouse suddenly ran up to him. They and the neighbors started feeding it sunflower seeds and almonds, and it hung out there for a few days. However, my friend's mother is afraid of mice. While, as she said many times when I was over there collecting the mouse, she knows this is a ridiculous fear, she was convinced that if she got too close to the mouse it would run up her legs. And then do what, I don't know. So the mouse had to go. When my friend first told me about the mouse, she--cleverly--said that they hadn't seen it lately, so it might be gone. I said (naturally), "Well, if it comes back, let me know and I'll come get it. I have a cage already." (Someone was throwing it out. I have a hard time resisiting potentially useful objects that are being thrown out. In May, I forgot to check the dumpters in the dorm area of BCMU for things the leaving students were throwing out, and I still regret it.) Of course, the mouse came back. I was over there collecting it that afternoon. Now it's installed in a the cage on my desk, and making sure that none of the other pets eat it has become one of my major preoccupations. On the other hand, I'm probably one of the few people in the world to have taken in a Stray Mouse. (And yes, I'm sure it's not a wild mouse--first of all, it's white with pink eyes. Second, he already knew how to operate the exercise wheel. Third, wild mice do not typically run up to strange people, and then hop into the first available cage with tiny little sighs of relief.)

Hello and Welcome

2006-08-10T20:35:00.000-04:00

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.