This is my second semester teaching at the university level. I'm teaching at my Alma Mater. This is a video production class with a focus on motion graphics. My first semester, the students were all great. Everyone in the class earned an A or a B, they were attentive, no attendance issues, etc.
This semester it's such a struggle.
1/3 of the class got a D on the first project because they blatantly ignored the instructions. (the project was to hand in 3 compositions, at least 1 needed to be made in photoshop, 1 needed to be made in illustrator, and the last could be either. 1/3 of the class handed in 3 photoshop files) When I told one of my students (who interns with FI) that 1/3 of the class did the project wrong, his response was "Really? But you made the requirements so blatantly obvious... multiple times"
They took a quiz last week that was OPEN BOOK and it took them 2.5 hours. Last semester the same quiz took the class an hour, and almost every person got 100%. No one in this class got 100% (again, it was OPEN BOOK!) The thing that boggles my mind is that there was no exercise that was blatantly more difficult than any other. In other words, there was no exercise on the quiz that had a bunch of people get it wrong. No one got 100% but they got tripped up on different questions. At least 1 person missed each question.
I emailed the director of the department and he is confident that it's not me and he says that sometimes you just get a "bad" class. It's just hard to get motivated to go and teach a bunch of kids that are either morons or slackers (or both). And so I sit in Panera, sucking up their free WiFi, waiting until the last possible minute to go down the street and get the classroom ready