You don't give kids your real email, do you? That is, the email that makes your phone go "bing".
I would think that just refusing to answer emails outside of business hours would solve about 50% of the problem.
Who emails lecturers? I didn't even do that when they emailed me to ask if I'd dropped out or not.
Obviously you're supposed to just ghost instead of notifying anybody you dropped out. That's just good practice.
As an undergraduate, I never once emailed a professor.
3: I find it amazingly easy to forget altogether to check my work email, with no extra effort required.
My work email makes my phone go "bing", but that's a necessary trade-off for the flexibility I get plus the not moving to the same time zone as my boss plus the extra consulting work after hours.
As an undergraduate, I never once emailed a professor.
Since I wasn't working for DARPA at the time, neither did I.
Does anybody have an AWB whistle? This looks like her cup of tea.
Snark aside, if the only available way of asking your professor silly questions is to speak to them in person by phone or by knocking on their door, the incentives to be self sufficient are greatly increased.
My roommate was working as a TA and got called by somebody asking what "TBA" on the syllabus meant. I heard it go to voice mail.
In keeping with the spirit of the topic, I didn't read the article.
and got called by somebody asking what "TBA" on the syllabus meant.
Total Bullshit Actually.
Or "theatre", if you want it your way.
It kind of sounds like her students are treating email/emailing a prof as a casual interaction. I can see a student being stressed/sleep-deprived/goofy and asking their roommate who the author was (n.b. I am horrible with remembering names so I may be imagining myself). Email (on one's phone) makes it just as easy to be like 'oh hey prof...what's the author again?' and expect a message back in like 2 seconds. Kind of like when my husband texts me to ask where the iron is.
Anyway, that's a different kind of issue than entitled students. That's students no knowing or not remembering that email is not equivalent to texting. That emailing a prof is unlike emailing or texting their friends and family and more like a business situation.
Alternatively, sexism because women profs are just like friends!
You should email your professor with course questions. Text to ask her on a date.
10: She has almost identical complaints at the Other Place. They're so similar that I initially thought it was her.
I teach mostly graduate students in "professional" programs so don't deal with the kind of student who would have dropped out 20 years ago. So I've finally -- now that I've gotten the last promotion I will ever get, have stopped looking for other jobs, and am no longer very vulnerable to poor student evaluations -- gotten to the point of email answers that sometimes amount to no more than "It's in the syllabus" "It's posted on Blackboard" "I'm sorry but that's not possible" Some situations of course demand more responsive answers.
What drives me nuts are the "the assignments aren't clear enough" from graduate students. When the assignment is "Identify 8-10 significant points from the reading and write a couple of sentences on each." When I hear this in class I want to say "You know, this isn't high school" But I more likely fall back on something anodyne like "Well, you know this is graduate school and it's like at work where you sometimes have to figure out on your own what is important ..."
I don't get this much from liberal arts undergrads who presumably still have (please God, please that this is till true) some of the "read three books and write a paper on them" assignments. More from students with either business and/or the now blessed-sainted-holy STEM undergrad majors. The ones who work in IT are the worst.
I'd be inclined to write, "Do your best. If you get a low grade I'll include feedback to help you improve it for the next assignment."
3: I frequently offer this advice to the Opinionated Academic, who for some reason insists on answering them.
I've said this before but I kind of think universities should make it easier - as in, less consequential - to fail and go away and start again, rather than keeping students on the train through heroic intervention. Of course you don't get the money if they don't stay, so...
Also, surely 20 should include "No." among the list of stock answers.
22.2: At my large state school, it was actually pretty common to flunk, get put on "go away for two semesters" stats, come back, and eventually graduate. Tuition was cheap enough for this to be plausible.
It's probably not so cheap any more.
22: yes, and the same with getting Fs. Students should get Fs for not learning anything. But the financial repercussions and the job-hunting consequences are disproportionately severe to the crime.
I haven't regularly taught since about 2009, but I certainly had some similar experiences.
In the particularly egregious case, someone went to a senior academic crying/complaining about the amazing workload and how much stress I was putting on them. The tutor then cancelled their tutorial (without telling me) and did a load of coddling. So I rode 5 miles into college to do a tutorial for which they just didn't turn up, and for which I didn't get paid.
N.B. this absolutely wasn't the case. Completely standard tutorial workload and I was very easy going about late work, or work postponed, or rearranging classes.
I got an F in an employment-relevant class (compilers), and it wasn't that bad. I did learn something valuable from it: that I should not try to power through group project courses on my own--even if that's suggested by the professor--after my teammate drops the course on the second day and I already have a full workload.
Admittedly, I still haven't written a complete compiler from scratch. But I have a pretty good idea how they work.
Pretty much.
I probably should have asked for help more; I'm not sure if that was more stubbornness/social anxiety on my part or the university not being particularly coddling.
24 My alma mater still does this. It's a really good idea, and the employment stats back that up.
I haven't taught since 2009, either, but my two cents is that you can be nice enough while being appropriately evasive. The author complained that her university was initiating a policy that e-mails had to be answered within 24 hours and assignments graded within 7 days. Seems reasonable and similar to how I've handled it. That said, I would tend to check and reply to student e-mails once a day. If it was stupid and urgent, I'd wait until it was close to 24 hours and send something like, "See p. 3 of the syllabus" or "Here's a link that contains the info you are looking for" with an apology that I hadn't been at a computer all day. They'd figure out that last-minute questions were risky. I suppose maybe this would show up in student evaluations as being unresponsive? Is that the problem? It seems really nuts to think that she's having these extended interactions and tying herself in knots over them. It's pointless to try to preempt stupid questions with an ironclad, 50 page syllabus with "the rules" and a waste of time going back and forth and back and forth. I liked my students and did try to be helpful, but after two ask-reply cycles, I'd invite them to stop by my office, because it was clearly the sort of discussion that would work better in person.
I have a stated policy not to answer any emails about the course until they have posted the same question to the course message board. It doesn't stop them from emailing me anyway, but it makes me feel better about ignoring them.
The question in the email has never, not once, been urgent in any way.
Wow, things have surely changed.
32: her university was initiating a policy that e-mails had to be answered within 24 hours
You know who else has that policy? Amazon, for those who sell on its site.
They'd figure out that last-minute questions were risky. I suppose maybe this would show up in student evaluations as being unresponsive?
You know who else presses that concern? Amazon, for its sellers: your feedback might suffer! Buyers are invited to rate your responsiveness, and if they rate you badly, Amazon might throw you off the site for having 'bad metrics.'
I'm sure it hasn't escaped people that universities have become viewed as service providers. Even before I quit teaching sometime in the early 2000s, students demanded that their poor grades be reevaluated, parents insisted that a poor grade was not what they were paying for, etc.
There was room for push-back back then, but my understanding of matters today is that administrators have bought into the framework as well.
||
Lift me up by Five Finger Death Punch has successful Halford vocals.
|>
My daughter teaches at both [UC System] and [prison]. Guess which one causes her more grief with "helpless" students. Of course the inmates don't have email but shes says the attitude and self motivation are much different. Says the SQ guys are better students.
TM geographical I - if a front pager sees this could you change the locations to UC System and prison?
Thanks
35 is a good point - the university isn't requiring a response within eight working hours, as in a professional relationship. If normative, I do not really want these students as coworkers or at my cable company, either, even though someone has to sanitize my telephones.
No, wait, landlines gone, I sanitize my own cellphone. Satire just can't keep up.
The prison is still there acronymously in 38.
35 gets it right. This isn't about student "helplessness." It's about satisfying the demands of the student-as-consumer.
I have a student who asked at the beginning of the semester to take my class pass/fail instead of for a letter grade. I agreed. He asked what I expect of him. I told him I expect him to do all the assignments, because most of the course grade is based on exams and if he tries to aim for a minimally passing grade he is likely to fail.
Today, after explaining that he missed an exam yesterday due to an illness, he told me that he has previously taken a class pass/fail and that it involved "a negotiation" with the professor who agreed that as long as he turned in half the problem sets and "tried some of the exams, but not all of them," he would pass, and can we do that in this class too?
Kids these days: my MIL texted me and AJ, "What makes borax a good cleaning agent in laundry" (yes, no punctuation). I replied, "This article seems to cover it pretty well!" Helpless Baby Boomers can't even Google.
Call me prejudiced, but I don't see how mules ever make things cleaner.
Having a niece in Silicon Valley venture capital, this sounds like a job for bots, that is, dumb pattern matching programs that respond to free form text with vaguely apropos responses. This is the hot new technology originally developed in the late 1960s as a joke, but now being adopted by corporations and other overgrown entities as the solution for too many needy people. A teach-bot that can send links to web pages and the like could revolutionize teaching. It could even be an app, whatever that means nowadays. If nothing else, it would get you 3-5 years on the VC gravy train before anyone realized that even professors are broke these days.
How do you feel about not having read the syllabus?
This all said, I'm suspicious of all this "students are consumers now" stuff. I remember this being used as a smear against us when we protested tuition fees and top-up fees. Also, if you look at the boomerocracy's great founding myth, 1968, the stuff they were actually protesting about was absolutely a bunch of consumer whining - the halls of residence are terrible! our professor is a dick! I wanna bring my girlfriend in here! - before it mission-crept into the revolution.
Further to 49: So it turns out that if you make people pay thousands and thousands of pounds for something then, yes, they will tend to worry more about whether they are receiving value for money than if they are getting it for free. Tuition fees were justified at their introduction by arguing that a university education is not a public good like a sewer line or a streetlight - it is an asset that will primarily benefit its holder, like a car or a computer, so it is right and just that the holder should have to pay for it.
This was an argument supported by the universities themselves, which also
charged their students the maximum fees permitted by law,
and
supported the huge expansion of higher education that (while vastly improving the career prospects of individual academics) made the introduction of fees if not unavoidable then at least far more likely,
and
successfully lobbied for universities to be able to charge even higher fees than the original cap.
So, whiny UK academics: if you don't like your students acting like consumers, you shouldn't have made them into consumers in the first place. You turned yourselves from public servants into a concierge service for high-paying customers. You don't get to moan now when they complain that their croissants are cold.
Will there even be croissants in a post-Brexit UK?
Croissants will be allowed thanks to their bracingly anti-Muslim origin story.
How do you feel about being so... Helpless?
re: 50
TBF, I'm not sure that individual academics were largely in favour of all of those. There's a slightly dubious slide from 'universities' to 'academics' there, and while many of the staff within universities are academics, a lot of those measures were opposed by the (shitty and ineffectual) academic unions.
Or at least, there was an attempt to get some quid pro quo for the people doing the teaching out the massive expansion and introduction of fees. No such quid pro quo was forthcoming.
I'm not an academic anymore, so no longer have any skin in this particular game, but I think as a general rule, academics were not in favour of the move to 'student as consumer'.*
* none of which excuses providing shitty service to actual students.
TBF, I'm not sure that individual academics were largely in favour of all of those. There's a slightly dubious slide from 'universities' to 'academics' there, and while many of the staff within universities are academics, a lot of those measures were opposed by the (shitty and ineffectual) academic unions.
Not noticeably, to be honest. I was at university at the time (protesting) and I can't remember a single academic expressing any sort of opposition to the introduction of fees. Maybe they did and I didn't notice - that's quite possible.
Or at least, there was an attempt to get some quid pro quo for the people doing the teaching out the massive expansion and introduction of fees.
That is not the same thing. "Oh, yeah, we let the government screw the students over, but in our defence we at least tried to make some money for ourselves out of it."
I think as a general rule, academics were not in favour of the move to 'student as consumer'.*
This is definitely true. I think they just didn't see it coming - they thought that you could radically change the relationship between student and university without changing the way students acted at all.
...but in our defence we at least tried to make some money for ourselves out of it.
At least some part of Thatcher sank in.
re: 57
The UCU consistently opposed fees. Admittedly, in a pretty ineffective way. The UCU is a shitty union in general, and when I was still in it, the things I ended up on strike over were never the things I personally would have picked a battle over.
Will there even be croissants in a post-Brexit UK
There will, but Patisserie Valerie will be seized and handed to Gregg's to form a national champion.
re: 57.last
I never said it was. The core point is that: i) academics basically didn't support it, and ii) largely didn't benefit (as individuals) from it.
Universities, as institutions, on the other hand, quite different incentives.
So this is what it feels like to match wits with someone at your level.
They benefitted as individuals from the immense expansion of higher education that made tuition fees almost unavoidable, because it created a lot of new job opportunities for them.
And maybe deep in their hearts they didn't support it? But they did nothing effective to try to stop it or even protest against it, as far as I can tell - and they were in a position to do so. They didn't even do anything to support the protests against it. Even really tiny things like "I'm supposed to be giving a lecture that clashes with a massive protest march about tuition fees - I'll reschedule it so the students don't lose out". We didn't even hear the remotest public expression of sympathy for the anti-fees protests, which would have been literally the minimum possible gesture; and, remember, we weren't even protesting on our own behalf. Our tuition would have been paid by the state, whatever happened. The fees were only going to come in after we had all graduated.
So I reckon I owe the whiny academics of today exactly as much sympathy as they gave us back then.
This is pretty much an exact parallel to the process being used to destroy public sector unions in the U.S. today. I guess because it works.
I'm not trying to destroy the UCU, Moby, I'm just not inclined to be too sympathetic to its members' complaints that the students of today are too demanding.
I'm sure. I don't even know what a UCU is. But the people at the top trying to get the people at the bottom to blame the people in the middle for not stopping the people at the top seems to be a common thing.
Consumers need to understand that the product they buy from a university is the ability to use one's intellect alone and unaided in a howling wilderness devoid of human feeling. This sounds to me like an easy sell in the current environment.
The amino acid which promotes seriousness.
67: no one's actually trying to get me to do that, or if they are it's very subtle.
It's the amino acid that allows you to accept the things you can't change.
Its effects are countered by the disagreeable amino acid arginine, which is often found in complexes containing the scornful disparagine.
At least in my students, some of it is neither consumer mentality nor deliberate helplessness--- it's mistrust. This may be because I teach mostly interdisciplinary classes, but I get a lot of "is it ok if I use MLA citation format" which is really "I know you said we could use any citation format we wanted, but did you really mean it?" They don't trust that I won't come back with some unwritten rule that they were supposed to understand, so they check everything, sometimes even citing the syllabus. I'm not sure how to solve it though.
no one's actually trying to get me to do that, or if they are it's very subtle.
It's still a bad idea even if you're doing it spontaneously.
52: Yes, but they'll have to pronounce it American-style, rhyming with and stressed as "the gaunt".
74: "The Cossacks work for the Tsar but it's very rude to point that out because you might hurt their feelings."
No. I'm saying that the kulaks aren't class enemies even if they were a little better off under the Czars than the very poorest peasants. Blaming faculty for university fees is blaming the wrong people.
And now I'm banning myself for picking up on your analogy. Particularly given that it wasn't really an intentional analogy, more a thoughtless cliche.
Lately, U.S. politics seems to be billionaires pointing out middle class people who still have jobs with pensions and shouting "intolerable privilege" at them to the poors.
Which is why you'll not see things from me pointing out problems with teachers unions or something any more and you would have back in the day. In the current political environment, such criticism is just arming somebody with no interest in education but who wants to destroy the public sector.
I thought it was the other way around, billionaires pointing out poors who have refrigerators and cell phones to middle class people who just lost their pensions and shouting "You lost your pension because of the Obamaphones!"
I guess soon we won't have a middle class so it won't be an issue.
Everything will be as pointlessly divided as the Kansas City airport.
77: you're right, it is a bad analogy, because the Cossacks don't actually vote for the Tsar but the faculty vote for the university council.
82: This must be something peculiar to the UK. I've been on the faculty at both private and public universities in the US, and at no time were we consulted regarding the appointment of high level administrators.
Also, what powers does the university council have? Do they decide on fees? I would have thought that was more a government decision, but I'm not familiar with the system in the UK.
re: 83
I think it varies hugely from institution to institution, but I'm hardly an expert on academic governance.
Oxford is governed by Council (basically the executive of the university), and by Congegration (basically the legislature):
So, academics do indeed have a vote on major policy, and have some say, but not total say, about who is on the governing Council of the university.
So, in the case of Oxford, ajay's accusation holds some weight. In the sense that there is a venue for academics to express opposition to major policy changes, and where their vote can be heard, and so it's pretty hard to claim "it wasn't me, guv".*
I think with other universities, academics have significantly less power.
* ironically, I only became a member of Congregation once I stopped teaching. Because when I taught I was only ever a TA or part-time/fixed-term lecturer. But, as a senior manager in the library, I was a member.
Just out of curiosity, do any of the professors who teach undergrads ever intervene if it looks like a student is falling into a clinical depression?
Also, I had a classmate call a professor at home at 10pm and I was shocked. This was a very formal German Man with grown children. It was, however, well known that he sometimes pulled all-nighters.
Do none of you go out for lunch with students?
Just out of curiosity, do any of the professors who teach undergrads ever intervene if it looks like a student is falling into a clinical depression?
Also, I had a classmate call a professor at home at 10pm and I was shocked. This was a very formal German Man with grown children. It was, however, well known that he sometimes pulled all-nighters.
Do none of you go out for lunch with students?
Going back to themes earlier in the thread, Alex and ajay's points in 49/50 are well-taken.
50: it turns out that if you make people pay thousands and thousands of pounds for something then, yes, they will tend to worry more about whether they are receiving value for money than if they are getting it for free.
Given that at this point parents do pay for their childrens' college educations, I'd make a point of distinction over just what they take themselves to be purchasing.
One would have hoped that it was a good education (with the suitable grades and credential as by-product). That's not the same as purchasing the grades/credential itself regardless of whether receipt of a good education is evidenced by the student's performance.
The sort of behavior I ran into (15 years ago at this point) was in the latter category. But I acknowledge that maybe it was always so.
It's weird that the person who made his reputation with funny and absurd one-liners and all-caps opinionated grandma comments has now become the blog's most (one of the blog's most? truly, I don't care about the details) acute political observer. Or maybe it's not that weird. I have no idea, because nothing makes sense to me these days.
I don't think I ever knew who Opinionated Grandma was/is, or if I did, I've forgotten. But if astute political observation is the measure, that'd be Moby in 67 et seq.
I feel like -- and I don't intend this in any way as a joke -- that the fact that Moby went from posting only jokes to posting moslty substantive comments represents more clearly than anything else the peril our nation is in. It's like we're living Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of the Great Dictator every hour of every day.
Including the spelling of "mosltly".
91 is on the money.
90 Hasn't everyone been opinionated grandma at one time or another?
While Moby has been OPINIONATED an awful lot, he's not OPINIONATED GRANDMA.
Not that anyone says he was, I'd just hate for credit to be mistakenly misattributed.
It was ned, wasn't it? Whoever it was, they admitted it in comments years ago.
I thought OPINIONATED GRANDMA was a collective pseudonym, but i was late to that party. I may have thoughtlessly appropriated it a few times.
Oh, I wouldn't call it appropriation -- you make a joke like that, you're releasing it into the wild for anyone to play with.
MH posted about politics, I think, but the law of initials as pseuds means no one remembers that.
The law of LB cracking downs means I went my MH for about fifteen minutes.
I might be thinking of your comments at other blogs.
Moby comments at other blogs? (CT? but I don't recall).