Commiserations cerberus, it was always a pain in the rear when lecturers didn’t make use of the ample online facilities to share hand outs and the like during my undergraduate degree. Having to ask people for handouts from a previous class they didn’t have with them and then asking the lecturer who only had a few precious handwritten notes he didn’t want to share was trying.
I didn’t know university students came with red shirts! Mine didn’t.
Well, this has certainly gotten nasty in a hurry! I’ll just stick with responding to the post that was addressed to me.
Likewise.
I think this is a valid concern, although more so at some campuses than others. All my TAing and teaching has been done at a couple of expensive private colleges here in Baltimore, places that charge about 30 grand a year for admission(Johns Hopkins University, and Maryland Institute College of Art). When students (or their parents, actually) are forking over that much for their education, it’s pretty unlikely that they would begrudge another $600 for a computer. If i were teaching at a local community college, or a very cheap state school, that wold be a greater concern.
Not only do my students all have their own computers, but there are rows and rows of computers on campus that they can use, and at Hopkins i’m pretty sure the computer lab is open 24 hours. There are actually times when i wish the students didn’t all have laptops, because with the advent of wi-fi campuses, some of them sit in class checking their email or surfing the web when they’re supposed to be learning.
Anyway, at the beginning of each semester, i make a point of asking my class if anyone has any trouble getting access to a computer, or to the internet. I tell them that i need to be able to contact them by email if necessary, that there is a course website which they will need to consult on occasion, and that if this is going to be a problem they need to let me know. In the last three years, no-one has come forward.
Well, i can’t speak for the OP, but i’m generally willing to talk about anything with the students in my office hours. If they want to talk politics or sports or banal procedural issues related to the course, that’s fine. I hold office hours for their benefit, not mine.
Now, right now i’m not a professor (i’m still doing my dissertation), and i’m only teaching one class a semester, so being deluged by students is not a problem for me. In fact, i actually have to remind my students that i hold office hours, because very few students take advantage of them. But if i were a professor with a bigger courseload, teaching big classes, my attitude to students coming to office hours with silly questions might change.
I have a friend who is a prof at the University of Texas at Austin, where she sometimes teaches large courses (300-500 in a lecture). She told me that at the beginning of the semester she will often get 40-50 emails a day from students, some of them asking questions that are answered right there in the syllabus she hands out in class, and some asking questions that aren’t even associated with my friend’s teaching responsibilities, things like questions about paying fees or completing registration. If you’re getting that many emails, even taking just 60 seconds on each one can quickly eat up almost an hour of your day. She says it drives her crazy.
I agree that a teacher has some responsibility to take matters in hand, especially in the classroom. If students are asking questions about things they should already know, and that aren’t related to the intellectual content of the course, i think it’s perfectly fine to say, “Well, you can find that on the website, and i’d also be happy to talk with you about it after class, but right now we need to move on with the lesson.”
A problem regarding “personal time” outside of class is that students often don’t have much idea of exactly what is required of professors apart from teaching. If a student knows that a professor is in his or her office, the student often feels (understandably) that the professor should be available for consultation, even if it’s not the official consultation hours posted on the professor’s door. But the professor might be in the middle of working on an important article or book, something that’s required in order to actually keep his or her teaching job, and might not want to be disturbed. This type of work is just as much a part of a professor’s job description as teaching—hell, most large colleges and universities pay far more attention to publications than to teaching when making tenure decisions—but the students still gets grumpy, and start grumbling about “paying for an education,” if they are asked to come back during office hours.
I actually do like college students. they’re generally fun and interesting to teach. It’s sort of like customer service, though—you tend to remember the assholes.
Your reliance on “fuckwit,” Miss Garbo, suggests that you’re a tad limited under stress. But never mind: I’m sure a wider vocabulary of invective is available on your website.
I’m glad your students love you, but be careful: they say that to a lot of teachers. There’s a subtle but important difference between applause and being given a dose of the clap.
It’s disheartening, though, to see a professor in possession of the kind of mind that seizes upon a point of view and distorts it just for the thrill of pronouncing it wrong. Sorry to disappoint you, but my thoughts about your future have nothing whatever to do with your twenty years in the biz, I said nothing remotely resembling a suggestion that most of your reviews were negative, and it was you who said you sourced your website in class every day, not I.
I did have an inference, though, you just lost it in your zeal to refute all the stuff I didn’t say. It’s based on these facts: (1) that as popular as you are with your students, the website is more so; (2) that you resent being asked questions the answers to which are available on the website; and (3) that everything they need is available on the website. This bespeaks an inclination to disassociate from your students (well, this along with the whole calling them fucktards thing), a tendency which is likely to increase as time goes by. That’s an inference, professor. It is true that by the force of your personality you are beginning to turn me around on my assumption that that’s a bad thing, but that’s another issue.
I’m glad that a “significant chunk” of your students own computers, but by my calculations (@ 2.5 significant chunks to the whole shebang) that means a lot don’t. Which means waiting in line to rent some computer time with scarce money, or waiting in a longer line for less time at the lab or library. So from time to time a student may work up the gall to outrage Heaven by asking the professor what the mid-term format will be.
It may be long exposure to life outside academia (maybe that’s what “reality-addled” means), but I’m floored by your apparent failure to realize the vast amounts of time spent by everybody on the planet doing things that, ideally, they shouldn’t have to do. Repeating statements that were clear the first time, answering questions the answers to which are available elsewhere, mopping floors muddied by people who should have wiped their feet, selling stamps over the counter when there’s a perfectly good machine in the corner – we all do these things, and require them of others, and while it may be exasperating most of recognize it as an essentially human problem and refrain from slinging abuse, even in the Pit. Your rant is not about wasting time, but about wasting your time, which means the real issue is self-importance. It’s an occupational hazard: you’re ceremonially certified as a master of some subset of knowledge and then surrounded for the next twenty years by kids who know little or nothing yet, who through training or calculation offer flattery and deference, and over whom you have authority. Not everyone succumbs to this; I doubt if mhendo will. But when you find yourself simultaneously denegrating your students’ intelligence and asserting that their queries are not worthy of you, some self-examination may be in order.
But this was priceless:
Absolutely beautiful and perfectly characteristic of you to try to impress us with the assertion that you have a 97% approval rating…among “fucktards”.
Good thing you don’t teach high school. I’ve always just assumed that answering questions was part of my job as a teacher…whether I thought the question (or the student) was stupid or not. Yet answering questions that you deem obvious seems to anger you. Maybe you are unsuited to teaching.
I had college and grad school professors who would get pissy when asked *any * questions. One, a chemistry professor, gave this reply to a young lady who asked him a question in class “It is not my responsibility to teach you these things. I am here to do research. You can learn it from your book, you can learn it from your classmates or from one of the grad assistants…I don’t care, but it isn’t my job to teach you.”
Now you aren’t an asshole like he was, but I hear echoes of him in you.
Bullshit. Every institution of higher learning has assloads of free Internet access. It’s in the dorm rooms, it’s in the libraries, it’s in computer labs, it’s in the student union, it’s in the frathouses, the dining halls, the classrooms, the mall, the coffee shops in a 5 mile radius of the campus, the friends’ houses, the parents’ houses, etc. Considering that every single student has to submit typed papers in almost every single class, I doubt there is one, single, solitary student of any institution of higher education in the United States that cannot get enough time on the Internet to read and print out the assignments page. Not one. I challenge anyone in this thread to prove that one college student in the U.S. is in that situation.
I’m sure they do, but there are tons of anonymous “Rate My Professors” type services online where students say what they really think about their teachers. Professors are as in tune to this as students are, and if they don’t check the websites themselves, I’m sure they at least get emails from fellow professors in the department like, “Look what this dumbass kid said about you! Isn’t that hilarious?”
At my school–a small community college in the chronically-poor Eastern suburbs of San Diego, which struggles for funding–I’m sitting in a computer lab that looks to be at 85% of capacity, at most. And this is a busy hour. Not to mention the directly adjacent library with 40 more computers, the free math and writing tutoring centers with 20 more computers each, the Chem tutoring lab with another 20 computers, and the science building’s computer lab with another 60+ computers. There’s an official 30 minute time limit when people are waiting, but it’s never actually had to be put into effect in all the time I’ve been here.
When I went to the University of Arizona in 2004, there was free Internet access in each dorm room, plus a dorm hall computer lab with a handful of computers, plus a computer lab right next to my dorm hall with its own ample supply of computers, the learning disability resource center with its own computers, the Science & Engineering library right next to my dorm hall with even more computers, the main library with hundreds of computers, and scores of other computers I wouldn’t have discovered if I went to school there for 10 years. Many of which were usually available until midnight, and I never saw anyone actually have to wait for one. All that at a state school, whose student body was mostly composed of local underachievers and Californians who couldn’t get into a UC school (like me).
fetus, I enjoy your posts, but come on, “I had/have something, so it’s ridiculous to consider that somewhere, some people may not,” while a sure-fire winner in the next slogan contest of the San Diego County Republican Party, falls some distance short of facthood. Sometimes more money may be spent on the facility, less on creating the opportunity to use it (tuition), and things like computers seem underutilized, and somehow people always interpret this as spending too much money on resources rather than too little on making those resources accessible to the public. But sometimes, and I suspect this is true of the OP’s institution, the reverse is true and you have more students scrambling after fewer resources. Anyway, all I said was “unequal access,” not “no access,” and you’re conflating internet access with ownership of a computer, and they’re not the same thing. So U of A had lots of computers free for use by anyone, anytime. It also had a great basketball team. Does everyone?
I checked: there are college students who do not own computers, and things that require internet use involve, for them, extra money and/or extra time. They don’t whine about it, and they do their best to arrange things so it isn’t a big deal, but I can say that and still sympathize with the occasional urge to just ask the guy who’s teaching the course, at least enough to keep from insulting them. The guy who’s teaching the course can’t, which is his privilege and his flaw, but I don’t see that either deserves great heaping mounds of respect.
Actually, soup, it’s something like 97% overall - fucktards and all. They don’t have a “check this box if you’re a fucktard” on the form. And again, soup, you show some sort of Swiss-cheese-like-process in parsing my text, inferring things that I did not say.
The fucktards are the ones who insist on asking me when the second test is when they can look that up themselves, and should have already done so, since part of their planning should involve laying out their tests and deadlines on a calendar. Or the ones who ask me about the grading policy, when it’s posted. Or the ones who ask me what a test will look like, when about ten years’ worth of old tests are posted. The supermajority of them are not fucktards.
I get high praise for my teaching approach, as well as the administrative flexibility of the course, as well as the support model employed in helping students prepare for the tests. People like my pedagogy, and they like my hyper-media. What you’re tripping on or over is that I said that even the few students who hate my guts still like the website. I didn’t say that that was the only thing that they liked.
As for your continued defense of the terminally-Ludditic masses, pointless in this discussion. In my neck of the woods, all the wee bastards have computer access.
And even if they only had paper syllabi, schedules and such, I’d still pit them if they are too lazy to look up the information. It’s a matter of attention to detail, of not wasting my time, of not wasting their time, and of developing some sense of professional self-reliance.
But feel free, soup, to bathe your hypothetical students in the warm, golden showers of enabling mediocrity, where all questions are equal, and the student is free to unleash whatever resides in its’ pointy little head, and by all means, use those clay tablets of yours - I think you might look into Cuneiform V.2. I have real students, and real pressures in terms of keeping a class running on schedule. And I won’t deny myself the use of technology that the University has mandated for use by students as part of their learning curve. Never mind that most of the wee monsters have already surpassed all but a few of their teachers in this regard.
It’s also part of my job to instill some sort of progressive learning process in them - to help them enhance their learning processes at the university level - and that includes managing the mundane details of a class by using the available information. It’s insisting on this that helps them realize that they need to manage the mundane stuff themselves - the Bursor, Registrar, Financial Aid Officers, Graduate School Admissions people, Corporate HR types will not coddle them. Am I helping them by coddling them? I think not.
I’m happy to entertain relevant questions of subject matter, or valid queries when information seems incorrect or ambiguous, but not questions born of self-entitled laziness. I’ve taught long enough to know the difference.
Damn you for making me smile during an argument. 
The difference is that the computers probably came from public funds, while the basketball team probably spends mostly rich alumni’s money. Where the U of A outpaces other state schools in technology was in places like the optics lab, and then only because NASA wanted a fancy one for their own research. I doubt that all colleges have a world-class optics lab, but my challenge stands for any Doper to show me that one college student in America does not have enough computer time to thoroughly read or at least print out the assignments page on a regular basis. “Equal access” may be an issue when it comes to getting enough computer time to, say, write an essay–which, BTW, college students are assumed to have access to for every class, without incident–but I really, honestly doubt that any college student in these United States has trouble getting onto the Internet for the amount of time it takes to print out a syllabus and an example test every once in a while. Though it’s outside the scope of my challenge, I would further assume that all students also get enough computer time to check their party invites on MySpace every day. I’ve described the free Internet resources at my school, a community college in a district where the money gets tight, to you. I seriously doubt any college is significantly less advantaged. And the U of A may not be the poorest state school, but I’m willing to bet it’s not one of the richer ones, in terms of the money available to give students free Internet access.
Extra money? I’ll just assume you didn’t say that, since, given the connectedness of college campuses today, I have yet to be convinced that a single student has had to spend money to get on the Internet while they’ve been enrolled in college.
Extra time? Sure. Book research requires extra time, too. That’s part of being a college student. I’ve been a broke student with a job before, too. It sucks, but you have to learn how to make time if you want a college degree.
I do, too. But to the teacher, who’s gone over it in class and given students a resource they have free and plentiful access to, it feels like he’s needlessly repeating himself. I can sympathize with his need to vent. Don’t you ever bitch about your job?
fetus, you know I’d always rather have the smile than the argument, and now that the OP is busy trying to define the word “fucktard” perhaps we can find some common ground.
I’ll admit that some colleges have an embarrassment of riches, insofar as computer resources are concerned. Does it really seem that improbable that some don’t? Remember what I said about some places spending money on resources and some on access: even equal spending doesn’t guarantee equal outcomes. Here’s a fun fact, free for nothing: I had to type all my college papers, and I didn’t own my own machine until my junior year, and even then it was a Bulgarian device that constantly jammed and had a couple of keys reversed. But that’s ink under the bridge. You’re absolutely right that owning a computer is no different, really, than having enough money to buy, rather than borrow, books, but I can’t see how that makes cerberus any less of a pompous jackass.
Frankly, the OP strikes me as the kind of academic whose sense of self-importance would cause problems anywhere s/he went, because they just don’t build hallways wide enough for her/his personality. But I agree that, ecologically speaking, the planet always seems to have room for one more.
Just sticking my head in here…
I would presume that someone teaching at a school low on internet resources would likely be aware of this critical lack and modify their material access accordingly. Likewise, an instructor at a modern, connected university is probably going to be aware of the resources available to their students. It’s not as if the instructor at Cutting Edge Uni has to account for the fact that Boonies College only has a tin can and string for their communications department.
In approximately what year did you graduate (feel free to shift it 5 years forward for effect)?
In the first weeks of class I ask my students approximately 30 times whether they have adequate access to a computer, and if not to tell me and we’ll work something out. If I were at Southeast Appalachian Pentecostal Women’s State Veterinary College and this were a widespread issue I’d have a clue about that, and I assume Cerberus would, too. My guess is that his students are being dumbasses.