Meh, by now it’s a mute point.
Could we segway back to procrastinators?
My problem with papers (and to this day with lectures and such) is that I do much better work when I’m up against a deadline. If I’ve got two weeks to do a paper I can do an OK one in the first 13 days or a great one the night before.
It’s always been kind of annoying, because I really would try to get things done early in college, but I’d usually end up scrapping it when the last minute rush came on and better stuff started coming out. And there’s no psyching myself out of it–I can’t just set an arbitrary deadline for myself and pretend that it’s the real one. Doesn’t work.
The difference, of course, is that I never would have considered it my professor’s problem if I didn’t manage to get it done (though I don’t believe it ever happened).
Now I don’t know if you’re messing with us or not. 
All of you who work your asses off to meet ridiculous deadlines for procrastinators are just enabling them, you know? You pull their biscuits out of the fire, and that’s all they care about.
Yes, I realize that you do yourself more harm by refusing to play their games. And I have no idea what the answer should be - the “Lack of planning on your part…” mantra will pretty much get you fired, or in deep doo-doo at the least. So it becomes a no-win situation. And in the end, you do what you have to do for those who can’t be bothered.
Slackers will make life hell for the rest of us. That is truth. That is life.
Aww..yer, I am there, admittedly; that one sounds better read out loud (I get it in student presentations a lot, and the first time missed the next part of the student’s talk because I was trying to reconcile the image of the Beatles outting aside their time-traveling Segways to work on Sgt Pepper – because as you know, the songs on that album segue from one to the other…)
On topic with stories!: a huge cause of stress among my students are group projects, and they tend to fret mainly because there is always one or two people in each group who slag off and make life hell for the ones who want to do a good job. I know students hate group work, but again, in the real world, we can’t always work alone on a project – so I mark the individual’s work in each group as well as the group – and it’s usually pretty obvious after all these years who in the group didn’t actually do anything, but hopes by standing up next to the rest of the group he or she will get a good mark. That’s where questions from the Boods who’s been sat quietly at the back of the room separates the wheat from the chaff.
Other solutions we’ve had for group work – each member of the group is allowed to rate the contribute of their group’s other members. So, they get 10 points to distribute among their group-mates. For the first project, everyone tries to be generous and fair (whether the slackers deserve it or not) – by the end of the term and project three or four, all bets are off.
I also make it clear to groups that if you’re called on to present, and someone in your group isn’t there, YOU will get the mark, but HE/SHE will get zippity do dah.
Finally, if the class is small enough (I usually have 50-90 in a class, but sometimes it’s a small section of 15 or 20), I figure out who the slackers are, and I put them in their own exclusive group. So far when I’ve done that, none of them have ever shown up on presentation day, each one assuming the others will be there to cover his or her arse.
Sometimes I wonder if I teach history or drama, really…
I love this. I always hated group projects.
I’ve got to admit, the first time, it was hilarious (to me, anyway!) *All four *members of that group slagged off, assuming that he or she would be the only one, and that since it was a ‘group’ project, they’d all get the same mark whether they were there or not.
It’s happened at least twice since! Don’t the kids talk to one another, and warn each other? When I was a student, we did.
I do sympathise with FairyChatMom, too, because I know exactly what you mean – I don’t want to mess up just because the colleague with whom I’m working is a slacker; yet they know they can slag off because I’ll pick up the bits. It really is a damned-if-you-do situation.
Just last spring I had to eat a plane ticket and pay double for rooms at the last minute at a conference because the person organising one set of panels completely and utterly screwed up a lot of people. He’d shifted and changed meeting times – not just from morning to afternoon, but one day to another – and then waited until less than a week before the conference to tell any of the participants. I found out only by accident that I had been moved from Saturday afternoon to Thursday evening :eek:
He left a lot of people scrambling, cost a lot of money, booked people into conflicting panel times (ie had similarly themed panels meeting at the same time) – but it was a conference presentation I really needed to give. He blamed everyone else for the screw up except himself, really, as they do.
I am grinning and rubbing my hands together and cackling over here. I’ve been the teammate who was the only one to show up. And I’ve been the only teammate who actually put any work into a group/doubles project. I was usually assigned a partner or group, because the teacher wanted me to be an example to the others. Mostly this meant that I got to do most of the work AND the presentation. I wish that I’d had an option to do a smaller project by myself, rather than a group project. Yes, we have group projects IRL, but not everyone is capable of working in a group, and the slackers shouldn’t be allowed to coast on the workers’ efforts.
Oh, I remembered a relevant story - I was working at a temp job with another temp. Our supervisor was away for a while, but I did my job anyway, and the other temp spent 90% of the day on the phone with personal calls and making social plans. When the supervisor came back, she mentioned to me that she had gotten glowing reviews of our work while she was away. Before I even realized what I was saying, I said, “BOTH of us?” Of course, she wanted to know what THAT meant, and I told her that my co-worker was spending most of her days making personal calls. The other temp was fired by the end of the day. Sometimes things do work out.
We do this one event at an ungodly hour on one Friday morning. It’s an hour long event and we plan for it for a couple of weeks in advance - we have 150-200 people in attendance.
Anyway we hold it at a hotel, and we are allowed to bring stuff over the previous night and store it at the hotel. And I was surprised and pleased to have my new boss this year said we should go over at 2 pm and drop stuff off. Why?
In past years my boss and my coworker have always spent the whole day slacking off and chatting, even with my gentle hints. Then, at 4 pm they want to go over, and set up the laptop, and make sure it works, and they want me to stay late, etc.
I don’t mind staying late if there is a legitimate reason to do so. But I’ve been working all day, assholes. So you want me to stay late just because you were too damn lazy to work???
I always found the best solution was the one my advisor used. When you got into his 400-level classes, he knew every student in the major and their degree of slackitude.
So he’d assign groups, and he’d try to make a group with a known good leader, 1-2 known hard workers, and 1-2 known slackers–but he’d also let people know that the leader could boot someone from the group with minimal documented provocation (like not showing up at a group meeting), and the bootee would A) not be assigned to another group and B) have to do a solo version of the same project–said assignment still of a scope designed for a 4-5 person group.
Of course we know. But, as you’ve observed, we have zero choice in the matter most of the time.
This is so beautiful, I think I cried a little bit.
Normally I teach almost exclusively freshmen, but am taking over for a colleague who’s off on sabbatical next term…upper level class, majors…am frantically taking notes here, and softly laughing in a diabolical manner.
It is a thing of beauty.
Mwwuuaaahahahahahaha! This is a thing of beauty. I have struggled with the concept of group projects for this very reason (not wanting one student to end up being the sole worker). I am seriously considering how to adapt this idea to my classes this next semester.
Please note, I’m not sure how much of this Dr. V. got away with because he essentially built a good portion of the major I was in from scratch (to hear his stories, anyway). 
Why wasn’t said group practice leader right there beside you until midnight, helping fix the screwup that he caused?
He had a prior engagement, plus we basically kicked him out because trust me, he’s the one person you don’t want involved in anything that requires organization.