I pit my fucking fucktard "students."

The BBQ Pit
1

Attention to detail, fucktards!

When I put everything on-line, and I mean everything, be a non-fucktard (NFT), m’kay?

Don’t ask about dates that you can find on the page that has the dates on them.

Don’t ask about shit on class days that you missed, when all the original stuff is online, indexed by calendar date, with class discussions transcribed and linked. Especially when I spent a full fucking day about where everything was, you know, on the fucking web-page.

Just look the fucking stuff up, eh?

Don’t ask about test details when I’ve posted every fucking test that I’ve given, with keys, since circa fucking forever.

Don’t ask stupid fucking questions when the answers are on the fucking web-page.

Don’t ask me if I really want things written out the way that I have things written out on the material on the web-page, fucktards. Oh Noes, you fucktards have discovered my secret fucking plan to spring an entirely alien format on you! Damned nosy kids, I would have gotten away with it if not for your cunning fucktard detection methods.

Never mind that there are fucktards who persist well into fucking month two of a five month semester blissfully ignorant of the web-site.

And while I’m at it, fuck the fucking fucktards who obliviously ignore or do the exact opposite of the protocols in my carefully-fucking-planned case studies. The fact that fucking flatworms or the fucking Koi fish at my favourite fucking sushi place have more short-term memory than you fucktards just makes me all warm inside.

2

overheard in the quad: “Dude! We drove Mr. C around the bend already, and it’s still only September! Hey look, it’s 4:20!”

3

So fail the last group and repeat “It’s on the website” to the rest. Problem solved.

Now, how exactly *do *you want things written out?

4

All I recall from Mr C’s class is that he likes to say “fuck” a lot.
Shit–my shitty laptop doesn’t work/was stolen/don’t have one. And I’ve lost the shitty url/link/email addy.

Shit.

:smiley:

5

In my experience, there’s never an excuse to lose a url, link, or email address. You put them into a document and send the document to your own web-based email account (such as gmail, Yahoo!mail or hotmail). Accessible from any place you can get online.

6

You know, if all the info is online, and you spent a whole day explaining this, but you still get lots of your students asking for this information … maybe you ought to consider the possibility that your website is not very well done.

A recent study of the US Census Bureau website showed that 6 out of 7 people who went there for a specific fact (the current US population) were not able to find it. Even though the Census Bureau knew that people came to their website looking for that information, and so put it right on the front page. But they did such a poor design that people still didn’t find it. (Specifically, they made it big print, bright-colored, flashing fonts – all the hallmarks of an advertising banner, so people just ignored it.)

You might try a simple, cheap usability study on your website. Create a ‘quiz’ asking for a dozen specific facts that are on your website. Then recruit 3 or 4 people at the school (students in other classes, fellow teachers, the dept. secretary) and have them try to find the answers on your website. Record how many they get right, and how long it takes them. If they don’t all get 75% or better in a half-hour, then the problem is in your web design.

7

Well, fuck, you say.

8

Beautiful. Brightened up my morning :slight_smile: .

9

Okay. It’s calculated risk time.

What are the odds that you will kill me if I ask the question, “what website?” and by some cosmic coincidence, I’m in your class?

10

Teaching: a great way to muster up the motivation to pursue a career in insurance sales. :slight_smile:

11

It’s only a handful of students who do this - or there would be blood on the walls.

The page has a very simple design, all but the occasional professional grade fucktard gets it. Theres an index page, with a clearly labeled link to Fall 2007. Then, there’s a Fall 2007 page, with clearly labeled links to dates, policies, date-indexed content, sample test banks …

It’s a bit like limbo - the clearer one makes the process, the fewer miscreants one gets, but there are always miscreants about who specifically exist to calibrate the lower bounds of stupidity and carelessness.

As for the Census Page, it is indeed useless. They do have a nice query engine, the American Fact Finder, but if I want actual data, I go to the NCHS website - NCHS is the bastard child of the CDC and the Census Bureau.

12

I’m taking online classes and one of the early assignments was a scavenger hunt where we were givin a list of things to find on the resource web site. You might try something like that to get your students into it at least once early in the class.

13

Is it possible to link to your site so we can see for ourselves? Because I’m reminded of a webpage one of my current professors posted before this semester started with the following instructions:

And then a week before class started, the message was changed to this:

Those are very different directions and I imagine somewhere my professor was screaming into the wind about how stupid his latest crop of students were for asking about the open hours of the message board.

14

Wow, those fucking fucktards just fucking live to fucking fuck with you, don’t they? I mean, fuck, I am so fucking glad that I am not in your fucking class because you fucking seem to fucking have a real fucking short fuse. Fuck.

Fuck.

(Dammit…now that word looks strange. “Fuck” isn’t even an actual word is it?..I must be spelling it wrong…)

15

They are paying somewhere between $100 and a couple thousand bucks to take your class (depending on where you teach) and you are upset that some very small percentage of them are asking stupid questions? You may be reliable and consistient, but there are lot of proffs who aren’t, and when students follow directions they thought they understood and then get dinged, the response is always “you should have asked”.

Answering stupid questions is just part of teaching.

16

This is the pit, isn’t it? Better to blow it off here. I suppress plenty of ickiness induced by students, staff, administrators and department heads and direct it elsewhere, where no-one is harmed in the process. But vent I must.

As for the students “paying” for their classes, about 80% of it is paid for by tax-payers - both the real kind, and the stupid kind (lottery). A good portion of these people are on “HOPE Scholarships,” which are more like entitlements. Even so, the teaching/learning model is not a “services rendered arrangement,” it is more like a guided apprenticeship arrangement.

The sad thing is, my class is in real time, and I use hypermedia in lieu of hard copy. I use browsers and other applications to access the stuff in the actual classroom. I could see the problem if this were a DL course, where the web-page was the classroom, but we actually navigate the fucking web page in class.

It’s like having a person in your car as you drive around campus, with a map, pointing things out as you hit those places in real time. The only way to get lost in that situation is to be negligently stupid and careless.

This is like a student “losing page 40” after you’ve sat with them, with their book, and physically shown them page 40, and physically bookmarking it, with a physical book mark. See? This is page 40, right here. “Duhhhhhhhhhh, where is page 40?” Argghhh stupid.

When I use a dates page with all the dates on it, and when I hit that fucking page on a daily basis to confirm our class status, to have students then ask when something is, when they’ve seen the fucking dates page every single day, this is fucking stupid. Brain, brain, what is this brain you speak of?!.

When I show particular cases from sample tests in linking the test questions to the in-class work, by navigating to the sample test pages in class, and then have students ask what tests will be like? This is also fucking stupid. **You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid! **

And when I have every single day’s stuff linked by fucking calendar date, and you miss class and then wonder what we covered? Arrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh stupid!

A cardinal rule in the classroom is to not have a short fuse in the classroom - and in class, I do not. But Jebus Farking Christ with an Anally Occulted Hockey Stick, to have these students, who can navigate the inter-web tubules with ease when it comes to stealing copyrighted material, to bank, to hook up, to browse pornography, all these browsing skills disappear in some people when it comes to learning online.

And don’t even start with me on the Luddites who can’t be arsed to learn up on some twenty+ year old technology.

As for linking to my website in a thread where I’m ranting about fucking fucktard students? Not such a good idea.

17

Of course it’s not payment for services, but it’s still relevant–access to real proffs is a big part of what makes the college experience different from some entirely on-line process.

I teach high school. I get questions so stupid and irrelevant and self-evident that it boggles the mind, mostly because it’s slightly less work to ask me than it is to look down and read the paper in front of them, and from their point of view, where’s the incentive to do that extra work? But sometimes stupid questions are a way to see if more complex questions are welcome.

18

“Hope scholarships”? If you’re part of Georgia Tech, tell all your colleagues I hate them.

19

Hey cerberus, you should vent some spleen on Rate Your Students. It’s made for rants like this.

20

shit on a stick. Fuck.

More :smiley: