In something of a defense of the exchange student, norms for holding classes do seem to vary by country. When I was an exchange student in Spain, we had classes cancelled frequently due to strikes by the teachers’ union, and the students’ union. From a US perspective, that was just bizarre. US teenagers just do not have the maturity and political identity to be going on strike. It is to laugh! But in Spain there really were students concerned about some issues like numbers of places open at the university and they called a legitimate strike.
Also, if US teachers were on strike, parental units would be all up in arms about how to keep students adequately supervised, how to make sure they all still got into college, and probably the sports schedules. In Spain, high school students were expected to fill their days largely without incident if school was cancelled.
Extended absences by individual teachers were not uncommon, and I don’t recall us ever having a substitute.
Also, as an exchange student, especially at the beginning, it is awfully hard just to keep up with what people are expecting you to do. It could easily have gone over my head if there were something I was supposed to be doing that people weren’t actually expecting me to do, like a missing philosophy class.
Harriet beat me to it. Going to university is pretty daunting by itself. Add going to a foreign country, and things get chaotic pretty fast. I only went as far as the next country to the left, spoke the language fluently beforehand, and was familiar with the city in question. I was still swamped, and I struggled badly for the first year. A class that suddenly got cancelled (unheard of, thank god). In fact, if it wasn’t for my parents going to the same university, and knowing how to get things to just make sense, I’d never have manager.
I completely understand why the children of academics are more likely to get an education, and it has nothing to do with intelligence.
Sure, she’d have drowned. Among goldfish, that’s pretty underachieving.
Back when I was a wee college lad, I had befriended a TA in the same department who once showed me a few papers he had to grade. The students were asked to read a book about television and write a couple pages on it. The only paper I remember after all these years was one where the student wrote a few sentences about different movies, then mentioned — at the end of the report — that the book he had read was Movies on TV.
My Freshman high school World Geography teacher acted like a complete ditz. People would have their test notes open under their desk and copy the answers right off of it. We had map quizzes, one of which he forgot to put the map up in the front of the classroom. The ENTIRE CLASS did a map quiz of South America with an actual 5 foot MAP sitting in plain view in the front of the room.
By the end of the semester AT LEAST 30% of the class was cheating every test because he never paid attention.
So the final test rolls around everyone busts out their preferred method of academic dishonesty…and after an entire semester, he walks around and busts EVERY SINGLE ONE of them. 1/3 of the class fails.
I think you should wait until he falls asleep and then kick his chair out from under him. Or maybe just smack his desk good and hard, right next to his head. That’s not rude, is it?
My Psych professor claimed that another professor told her how the students think the professors don’t see what they’re doing during class. She told me prof that she actually saw two students having sex in the back of the room once.
Dubious anecdote yes, but far more rude than sleeping, I say.
number one rule of plagarism is to rewrite whatever you plagarize in your own words. i’m not entirely proud of having done that but much less likely to be caught. if busted, maybe can weasel lack of adequate cites rather than outright plagarism.
Here’s one for you: I’m grading a cumulative exam at the moment. I alphabetize and find that a student simply appears not to have taken it. This makes the student’s highest possible grade in the class a 63 (which would require more stellar performance than s/he has shown thus far). It’s too late to drop or withdraw, and this is a required class in the student’s major. I’m just fascinated.
Way back when I was in college, a friend came back early one day and reported this:
A similar student had fallen asleep in class (again), and was actually snoring a bit. The professor stopped his lecture, looked at the sleeping student, looked out the window (late spring quarter, beautiful sunny day outside), turned to the class and said ‘you know, it’s far too nice a day to sit here inside a classroom, and this Chapter is an easy one, anyway. Let’s just end the class early today, and enjoy the nice weather. But we don’t want to disturb Mr. Smiths’ sleep – so everybody please leave very quietly. If he wakes up, class is back in session.’
Needless to say, the class packed up their books and left quite quietly. Then the professor left, shutting the door & turning out the lights as he did so. My friend says nobody ever found out just how long that student stayed asleep in that classroom.
I was upset because none of my professors ever thought of letting a class out early during nice weather!
I think you should get one of those annoying wind up alarm clocks - the really loud ones with two bells and a hammer between them. The next time he falls asleep, set it to go off in about 1 minute then put it as close to his head as you can. Continue class as normally as possible while the rest of the class tries to stifle their sniggers.
I’m a TA, so I spend more time than I would like grading lab reports and tests. Anyway, I just finished grading a stack of first-semester organic chemistry tests. The best score out of the batch I graded is a D-. Why are these people still in the class?
My question would be a little different–what are they doing while they’re in class if they’re doing this poorly at integrating the material? (Sometimes it’s because the instructor isn’t well-attuned to the kind of instruction the students need; sometimes it’s because the students are IMing each other rather than taking notes or participating.)
I’m an academic advisor. Some students just have no sense for when they should drop classes. Missing classes, F’s on tests, flat-out suggestions from profs that they should get out while they can-none of “You should drop this class like a flaming turd” messages sink in.
My question is “what in the hell are you doing wrong in teaching them that NONE of them managed better than a D-.”
My first algebra test was a horrible mess. The highest grade in the class was an 87. More than half the class failed and there was only one other B. The two people who got grades higher than Cs were one engineering major and one person who had a lot of exposure to math recently.
The instructor took a step back - what was he expecting on the test? Honestly, he was expecting a bunch of business and liberal arts majors to do “pre-calc for engineering” type problems because that was his own background. The next tests were far more successful.
There were still a few people in that class that didn’t give a damn - and didn’t do well in the end.
If a few of your students do well and the rest of the class doesn’t - maybe you have a class made up of mostly idiots. If the whole class fails - I find it hard to believe that there isn’t ONE kid in class who gave a damn.
I had a professor in university (in a fairly large class of about 120 students) who had the policy of photocopying about 20-25% of the tests after they were graded, but before they were given back to the students.
Thus, if you tried submitting your tests to be remarked and you were trying to cheat, you were taking a fairly high chance that you would be caught and completely fail the class (no exceptions).
I’m not the one doing the teaching, just some of the grading. That said, there have been two quizzes and now this exam given by that professor and all of the things I’ve graded so far have been just about uniformly this bad.
I remember my own first-semester organic classes. Yes, it was hard. Yes, now I look at the exam and could bust through it in 15 minutes. But I tend to believe it’s the students, and not the professor, based on my own experience with an organic class. Where I did my undergrad, the first year of chemistry was organic (not general like almost everywhere else.) We started out with something like 203 students (the biggest class at the time at that college.) Their reasoning was that since all the biologists, premeds, and the like all have to take at least one year of chemistry that organic would be more helpful in the long run than general. Anyway, that was one hell of a weedout class, as we dropped from 200+ to about 100 by the end of the first semester and starting the second.
But doesn’t that make it…not plagiarism? Isn’t that, in fact, what a research paper is: information from other sources, presented in your own words? Since that sounds like exactly what you were doing, why not just cite the source?
Because citing “Billy-Bobs paper from last year” looks pretty stupid. What you do is check the sources the person is using, then cite them directly. In fact, that way it’s not plagiarism at all, that I can tell. Assuming you use your own words, and actually make sure the sources say what you claim they do.
You don’t even have to do that. Just throw an eraser at him. He’ll wake up.
A couple days ago, a student came to the department office to find out if he could use the media lab to edit a project that was due in less than an hour. Apparently, he couldn’t be bothered to go to the lab during open lab hours, nor did he talk to his professor to see if arrangements could be made.
I have absolutely no sympathy for students like that.
