Work-related vent

phira · October 2013

@bethsmiles and other teacher types: you might appreciate this (or maybe it'll cause you to tear out your hair)

I'm the teaching fellow for an honors level course at my university. Our class has almost 120 students, and a great deal of them are pre-med because of course. The normal professor for this course is wonderful, but we have a visiting scholar this semester who was required to teach, so she's teaching the course instead. Because of the language barrier (she's from Europe) and because she's basically a new professor here teaching someone else's course, the class has kind of devolved into a mediocre course at best.

That being said, I am getting very frustrated with the students. The entire point of discussion, which I teach, is that we are learning to read scientific papers. I'm leading the paper discussions, and I come in with questions I've written up to help them understand the paper. I've told them from the start, the goal is for them to start doing this kind of legwork on their own, and by the end of the semester, they should be able to lead the discussions almost entirely on their own.

We're halfway through the semester, and I am appalled by how badly everyone prepares for discussion. I ask the same damn questions about every figure (like, "What was the goal of this figure?"), and when I ask, five papers into the course, no one has bothered to try to answer the question on their own. There are terms that no one bothered to look up. After class, I get a ton of people saying, "Well, I wasn't sure what this meant, so I wanted to wait till after discussion to ask," as if I don't have an email address.

What's more, they all focus on completely pointless stuff and resist every attempt I make to get back on track. We end up not being able to finish the papers every week because no one is prepared and they're all asking legitimately pointless questions.

Tonight has been the last straw for me. There is a quiz next week. It'll be easy, and they already know what'll be on it. So naturally, no fewer than 10 students have asked to meet with me for an hour (separately from office hours) to "go over the papers." I've started telling them that no, I no longer have time for an appointment, so they can email me with questions or come to office hours. Here is a general exchange I had this evening:

Student: Can we meet next week on Monday or Tuesday to go over the papers before the quiz?

Me: I'm sorry, but I don't have time. If you can't make it to office hours on Tuesday, feel free to email me your questions.

Student: Oh, well, I can't come to office hours. Is it okay if I reread the papers and then send you concrete questions?

I replied politely, but I'm fuming right now. You should reread the papers BEFORE you would meet with me. You should have concrete questions BEFORE you would meet with me. Meeting with me should be reserved for when you actually can't make heads nor tails of a paper, not when you just want a refresher or a personal tutoring session from the TF.

Ladies, I've had enough and I'm joining the circus.

loves2shop4shoes · October 2013

Hugs. I'm sorry you're frustrated.

You could mess with those little bastards and tell them that XYZ COULD be included on the test...just to watch their heads explode and make them do some actual WORK.

KateJ16 · October 2013

Maybe you can assign people to come in with questions as part of their grade? Either they have to email them ahead of time, or they have to present them during class? Can you give a participation grade to the lil buggers?

CLoGreenEyes · October 2013

Ugh, that is frustrating. Sorry there is such a lack of effort on their part.

I am not a teacher by any means, but I once heard about a professor whose method to this kind of stuff intrigued me. She would email a couple of students per class and warn them that she would be calling on them to answer certain questions in class. She says it was a win-win because they'd actually do their work for her and they got to look really good in front of their peers. I don't know if a similar approach might push them to be more prepared?

phira · October 2013

It gets even worse!

Another student: I would really like to meet with you about the papers before the quiz!

Me: I'm sorry, but I have no time to meet with students outside of office hours next week. If you can't come to office hours, please email me with your specific questions.

Student: Oh, but it would be MUCH more helpful if you could meet with me in person. Here are the times I'm available. Thanks!

HEAD. EXPLODING.

They do have participation grades in class, so you'd think that would solve the problem, but clearly, it's not. I think that I'm going to email them this weekend (with the quiz reminder) and let them know that I expect them to come to class prepared, and not to show up expecting me to explain the whole paper from scratch. I think the reason why everyone's so desperate to meet with me outside of class is that they don't read the papers beforehand, so discussion is 100% new.

It SHOULD be: students read the paper and try to understand it well enough to present it themselves. In discussion, they try to present it themselves, and I'm there to help them understand the paper better. After class, they feel satisfied that they get the paper.

What is happening; students glance over the paper but the only prep work they do is to take notes on the text (not all that helpful with biology papers). In discussion, they have to have me explain the whole paper to them. After class, they then want to meet again because now they have more questions to clarify the papers. And then my head explodes.

AprilH81 · October 2013

Can you start rotating through the students and assign one of them to lead the discussion each class? That will almost guarantee that at least one person will have read it and tried to figure it out.

psychbabe314 · October 2013

That really sucks! Honestly, I understand not being prepared sometimes, but all of the time is just ridiculous and I am stating this as a college student.

You might want to try what one of my teachers did my Freshman year. She got so frustrated with the class that she came into the room and slammed her books down on the podium. She then proceeded to go down the row and ask each student a question from the reading. If you answered correctly (or at least demonstrated you had read), she moved on. If you did not, she took your name and had you leave the classroom. She then later sent a quick discussion guide to all of the students she had leave. It was over half the class...

But, it started the best discussions for that class ever! Never had a better class that had group discussions since then.

phira · October 2013

@aprilh81 This is actually how I used to do discussion--I'd assign students to present parts of the paper. What ended up happening was that people barely read the paper and then struggled to understand their single part of it. The end result was that no one understood anything.

@psychbabe314 I don't think I can do something that drastic, but it's tempting!

I think that based on your suggestions, what I might do is something like come up with a list of questions that they should have been able to answer if they had made an effort to understand the paper. Then I will go down through the students one by one to see if people can answer the questions; I'll ask the same question until someone answers it correctly. That will probably be very embarrassing for them ...

CLoGreenEyes · October 2013

I am not a huge advocate of resorting to calling students out, but it sounds like you have given them literally every chance to participate in discussion and gain something from it. Enough is enough!

phira · October 2013

The thing is, a lot of them participate. I typically count all participation to ensure that no one is afraid of giving the wrong answer. But no one, not even the "smart" students, are answering basic questions that they should have tried to answer on their own before coming to class.

bethsmiles · October 2013

That is so frustrating! I'm having a similar problem where due to stuff going on in my own life/grad classes I really can only meet with students during my office hours. They are in the morning so students always want me to adjust to their schedule.

Also, I told them a week beforehand that we would be signing up for the next speech and they needed to know their topic before they could sign up. In my last class only 4 people knew their topic. Also, we have them follow a very specific format for this speech and after explaining it some students were asking if they could do something different because they think they are a special snowflake - no you can't! It's on the fucking rubric you've had access to since day one!

I'm sorry you are having such a rough time with your students! Fingers crossed next semester will be better!

phira · October 2013

I wanted to update you all, since we had our first discussion (since this vent) yesterday.

Naturally, before the quiz was handed out, students were asking last minute questions. SO MANY of the questions were ones that were like ... BASIC questions. "I have a question! What was the point of this figure?" Oh, you mean the figure we discussed at length in class? The one that we opened with, "What was the goal of this figure?" The one I hinted quite heavily would be on the quiz? And you've had the paper for three weeks? And you're asking me now?

That was fun.

After the quiz, we started on this week's paper, which has some great figures that are mostly pretty easy. Once we got to the figures, I took a look at who had already participated, and then I started at the top of the list and called on the first person who hadn't participated. I asked them the question I *always* ask: What was the goal of this figure?

I did that for every figure. You could tell by the end of the class that the people I called on who couldn't even make a guess were embarrassed. They should be--I ask this question about every single figure in every single paper. I gave them enough warning this semester that by the end of the semester, they should be leading discussion themselves. If they don't know the goal of a figure by the time class starts, they didn't prepare enough.

I definitely appreciate the feedback you all gave me. I take teaching very seriously, since it's what I want to do professionally (I am currently a graduate student in the sciences, and I'm only teaching right now for funding--I'm supposed to be mainly doing research). I don't want to be the asshole teaching fellow, but it's gotten to the point where I'm very disappointed in this group of students.

@bethsmiles I think you need this T-shirt.

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