Well, you certainly illustrated the diversity of the word [/boondock saints]
Uh, Mr. C? Sorry to tell you, man. The dog ate my laptop.
Sincerely,
Your fucktard student
cerberus, type up a jillion little slips of paper that read:
“The information that you want has been provided in the materials already supplied to you. You are required to discern the answers from that material. If you are unable to do so, you have failed the first requirement for credit in this course.”
Keep these slips of paper in your pocket or in a handy desk drawer for appropriate occasions.
Of course, if a student asks a question which has not already been answered in other material, explain carefully and clearly until the student understands.
I understand the frustration. The following is a question that I answered with patience and a well-bitten lip:
“If I sign up for swimming class, will I have to get in the water?”
I truly had not covered this question in anything I had previously said.
High school freshmen English. First day of class, I have the kids get out their textbooks and have them open up to the single most important part of the textbook. The table of contents.
Why is this the most important part of the textbook?
Because if one of you little monsters asks me what page something is on I will fucking end you.
Oh, and you - you over there - the dumbass in the corner who hasn’t even gotten his textbok (Even though it says on the board, GET YOUR TEXTBOOK OUT) and is staring in a way that would make a paralytic deer say, “Dude, you OK?” If you ask me again “What did we do yesterday” instead of looking at the entire eastern wall of the classroom, whereon I have posted every day’s assignments along with any worksheets and notes (not to mention the class website), not only will no court convict me, but your parents will tearfully shake my hand for putting you out of their misery.
Ooh! Navy Seals…
Clueless teacher! He’s hitting on you, babe!
The whole email thing has, i think, led to a rather different relationship between teachers and students in colleges and universities. Many students seem to think the teacher should be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that every email should be answered immediately.
There’s nothing that annoys me more than a student email—often dealing with something they should already know, or should already have taken care of, or that is not even my responsibility—that ends “Please get back to me as soon as possible.” It’s all i can do to restrain myself from sending such emails straight to the trash.
And, of course, the students who send such emails rarely bother sending another email thanking you for assisting them with their problem.
Oh, yes.
I’m in a bit different position in that I provide technical support to distance students, all of whom already have degrees, many of them professional degrees. There are a certain segment of them that are too lazy to read the fuckin’ manuals (which are both under 30 pages, provide step-by-step instructions for everything they need to know about our software systems, and include nice clear pictures), or who think that because they are in Positions of Importance out in the ‘real world’ that I should not only be at their beck and call, I should do things for them (up to and including submitting their homework). Um, no. It doesn’t matter if you are the director of a multi-million-dollar organization - you’re a student again, and students are not only responsible for doing their own work, they are responsible for learning what they need to know to submit that work in a timely manner theirowndamnselves.
My mother teaches Graduate level students at Hamline University and she gets the exact same crap. Some of her choice quotes from supposed intelligent professional adults will make you want to go to her class room and strangle them.
Oooh, another one to point out - If I hear another fucking baby complain about the fact that they actually have to RESEARCH an article for class (prof gives the name/publication, we find it and get it to discuss in class) I think I’m going to lose my years of built up cool and creat a new method for puppetry as I jam my foot so far up their ass, Red Foreman will come by and tell me it was, “nic work for a rookie.”
IT’S A RESEARCH PAPER WRITING CLASS! HELLO?! Sometimes, people don’t just do all the “boring work” for you. And that’s why I got to work alone instead of the group of 3.
This is just the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard of.
A teacher finally gets everything s/he has to say, or apparently ever will have to say, typed onto a website. His entire contribution to mankind’s body of knowledge, painstakingly collected from his/her professors over the years, as well as her/his personal preferences with respect to how s/he should be treated (the other half of his/her contribution, apparently), has been collected and regurgitated online. This person’s life’s work has therefore been done, and done well: anything required of her/him between now and retirement is an unjust imposition upon a well-earned coma.
But these fucking students have the audacity to demand the professor’s personal attention, even after it’s been made clear that attention to a website to which they might have access has already been paid. Shocking.
Long before any “professional” develops the degree of contempt cerberus has for his/her clients (whether teachers for students, doctors for patients, mechanics for car owners, or whatever), they should get into another line of work.
As a current university student, I’d like to contribute that there are a large number of students that honestly believe that if the prof knows their name or are even vaguely aware of their existance, they will not be failed.
You’d think their thought-processes might at least involve the idea of “Hey, if the prof DOESN’t like me, maybe he’ll be LESS leniant”, but no. To some students, like attention-whores, there’s no such thing as negative attention.
By no means a justification of the fucktards actions, but maybe a clarification of their drug-addled state.
King;
I think you’re missing the point. We, the faculty, have basically been forced to do the website thing. Do you think it’s easier for us to just print off a copy of the the syllabus and other related course material and give it the secretary to copy to hand out to the students or go thru the hassle of putting it on line. We have to do the online thing because of the constant whining of the students that they didn’t get the syllabus, or they lost it or the dog ate it, and can you remind us every damn day what we’re supposed to know today. So we put it on line and we still get “we can’t get the syllabus, the dog ate it, can you remind us every damn day what we’re supposed to know.”
And the answer is grow the fuck up. You can find anything online faster than any adult human. Why can you not download the syllabus that 99% of your buds have. And if you can’t why can’t you borrow it and copy it from a bud or have one of said buds e-mail it to you. For jesus crying christ what do we have to do to make you happy?
For the record: I give out copies of the syllabus on day one. I go over the syllabus word for word on day one. I put the syllabus online. I tell the students the syllabus is on line. I give them verbal weekly updates in class of what is due and when it is due. And I still get the, “but I didn’t know it was due today” crapola.
And while you’re reminding them constantly of things they should already be aware of and should have picked up on weeks earlier, you might try wiping their noses and tushies too, because evidently we’re supposed to be doing that as well.
Have they learned your name yet? One of mine turned a paper in halfway through a 16-week semester with the words PROFESSOR UNKNOWN at the top.
cerberus, you said “HOPE” scholarship, which makes me think you teach in Georgia. So, just going out on a limb here, but if you’re [name removed --Giraffe], your website really does suck ass.
If the website is anything like the “Blackboard” system that the two universities I’ve attended use, there is really no excuse for these guys being unaware of how things work or where things are. (I do remember being a dumbass one semester and not discovering Blackboard’s url until four weeks in, but I did not need it to keep track of my progress in that particular class, as the professor handed back graded assignments. I was still a dumbass for not discovering it in the syllabus until then.) Once you log in, the site shows all the classes you’re registered in that are using Blackboard (most of them were), and most professors not only posted the syllabus, readings, and resources, but most of them posted grades there as well. It’s linked to the library system, so if you have problems retrieving a reading that’s not directly hyperlinked in the syllabus, you can look it up through course reserves or the catalog. If you’re still lost, there are discussion boards and a direct email link to the instructor(s) for the course; most TAs are linked, and will be more likely to answer the technical questions. It’s really simple to use, especially when a lot of professors use it in class. You’d have to be asleep during class to not understand how it works… and there were still people who didn’t get it.
I’m in an almost completely online program now, and, despite the fact that I’m dealing with a different format for the library system, I’ve still managed to find everything I need on my own. Yes, I’m a bit more technically proficient than some of the middle-aged folks in my classes, but I’m more than happy to help those who need help if I know how to do it because I would want my fellow students to help me if I had a question about something.
Oh, and there’s no excuse for not knowing what your professor’s name is at the end of a 16-week course. If you don’t know what it is off of the top of your head, you can still look it up on their syllabus, as it’s common for professors to put it on the front page near the top.
Soup: Fuck you, your strawman, and the horse you both rode in on, motherfucker.
For the record, I wasn’t forced into a web-page - I was likely the first person in my department to support a course web-page, and definitely the first to support an essentially complete course web-page model.
The web-page supports my classes. It isn’t my magnum opus. As for contempt for my students, no, not unless they earn it. Maybe one student in 300 truly earns my contempt. The vast majority are slugging through the best they can. There is an annoying slice of lazy, lackadaisical, careless, volitionally-stupid students that do provoke my ire. I shall not cheerfully enable them.
But it isn’t too much to expect the student to use the resources provided to them: read your books, learn your applications, study the sample tests, get the information from the course web-pages. It isn’t exactly difficult, given the current web-savviness of the current crop of students. It’s due diligence, and if you can’t be bothered, then you’re showing contempt for yourself, for the people paying for your classes, and the people teaching your classes.
There is a trend to force faculty into web-pages, and the reason that many of these forced pages suck is that they are poorly designed, boiler-plate pages provided by a clueless administration. Add in the fact that the university IT are already over-burdened, and the fact that good web designers can make way more than university IT weenies, and the fact that many faculty forced into web-pages then begrudgingly add the absolute minimum required content, one expects many of these pages to suck. I write my own web-pages, and host them on a non-university ISP.
Sorry, that’s me.
So, can i have ur notes?
Well, that website does suck.
But “going out on a limb”? That’s a mild understatement.
What did you do? Take a map of Georgia, throw a dart into it, and look up a random faculty homepage from the website of the closest college
[name removed --Giraffe] is a woman, and teaches sociology. As far as i know, both of those things would disqualify cerberus.
The King of Soup, i think you’re being unfair.
A website is not a mechanism for relieving faculty members of their responsibility to help students, and asking students to pay attention to what’s on the website is not an indicator that the faculty member has contempt for his or her students.
A website is a tool that allows the professor to place information like the syllabus, assignment requirements, due dates, useful links, and other important stuff at the students’ disposal. This means that the students can get this information whenever they want, simply by looking at the website. Not only is this more convenient for the students (assuming they make the effort to use the website), it also leaves the faculty member more time to do what he or she is actually there for—teach the students.
Every minute of class time that you don’t spend going over some basic requirement that you’ve already explained five times is another minute you can spend on the meat of the course, the actual intellectual content.
Ah, but you’ve forgotten the e-mail to the professor saying that Blackboard was down, as if the professor had anything to do with that. Usually it’s a student who waited until 7:20 AM to take a quiz that’s available for a week, until 7:45 AM that morning. The e-mail to the professor is full of statements such as “I have to take my kid to school at 7:30 so when can I take the quiz?” Answer: The entire previous week.
The reason why people hand out syllabi and post websites is so that you don’t have to spend twenty minutes out of every hour long class answering the same five questions from the same ten people who aren’t going to pass the class anyway. That’s why most professors spend the entirety of the first class going over the syllabus and sometimes go over it during the second class, thereby having to sacrifice time that could be spent actually teaching the material that the students are going to be tested on. Even if you miss class for a few days because you were sick/hungover/slacking, you can keep up with what’s going on in class with the syllabus and/or website so you don’t have to waste time asking the professor/your classmates/the TA/your pet hamster what happened while you were gone.
Og forbid that a teacher actually wants to teach the students who are paying attention without having to handhold the lazy/slow students. :rolleyes: Og forbid that anyone actually wants to learn something while getting their degree.