Professor, would you want to be a student in your own class?

The BBQ Pit
1

[Disclaimer: this is not organized. I don’t much care. I’m too pissed-off right now to do a proper job of it. Enjoy.]

Dear Professor:

In the two weeks since I, along with the entire class, handed in my paper (5-7 pages long), I have not gotten it back. This is the only writing assignment we have had.

That paper, further, is the only written mark I have of how well I have understood the material, since there hasn’t been any other graded assignment and you bullshit about things better than a professional toilet-cleaner.

The mid-term for our class is next Monday. You, Professor, have failed to A) get the fucking paper back to me so I have some semblance of if I’ve learned anything from your bullshit classes with their pointed questions which I could actually answer without having read the material. B), you’ve failed to actually write the mid-term yet, so if I wanted to, say, get a feel for what it’s going to be like, all you can do is offer some hypothetical conjecture because you don’t know yet.

Today was our last class before the mid-term. I went to class today for the SOLE purposes of 1) getting my paper back and 2) getting some idea of the structure and suchlike of the mid-term.

You tell us that we know what it is we’re responsible for. My response to that, dear professor with the planning ability of a diseased yak, is such:

  1. YOU DON’T KNOW, BECAUSE YOU HAVEN’T WRITTEN THE MID-TERM!!!

  2. Unlike you, I have done my work for this class, which consists mainly of writing a paper and coming to class ready to discuss. Maybe I should count my lucky stars you can at least remember and differentiate between the various works you picked for class.

Oh, wait, you can’t. You were making a “wonderful” point about the ending of one poem, and then you realized (as the entire class sat there dumbfounded) that you were relating the beginning of one poem to the end of another WITHOUT REALIZING THEY WERE NOT THE SAME POEM! And you had them BOTH IN FRONT OF YOU!!! GAAAAAAAH!

You drive me so insane I can’t even properly rant. I don’t know what I’m going to do about the mid-term because every time I think about you I just want to launch myself into satiric verse about what a pathetic excuse for a “teacher” you are.

You have offered absolutely no excuse/reason/bullshit “I just can’t get to it” answer for this. You have yet to provide proof that you weren’t off sniffing glue during the two weeks you’ve had to correct our papers.

Oh, and when it comes time for teacher evaluations, whoever reads yours is going to get a well-reasoned, organized and otherwise cogent rant about why you should never be allowed within book-throwing distance of a classroom. Whoever the fuck allowed you to teach should be sacked.

::collapses::

2

Is this an older, tenured prof?

3

“Those responsible for the sacking have been sacked.”

  • M. Python

Dude, I hear ya - been through some of those classes myself. The only thing that made it worth it was knowing that I had better teachers in other classes.

Esprix

4

Here is my little method of getting through college classes:
Consider the profs evil until proven otherwise. Then the only suprises you will get are happy ones. :slight_smile:

5

Yeah, that sucks. I had some professors like that. In those classes, I really had no idea how I was doing until mid-term grades came out. In fact, I had a professor give me a mid-term “F” because he had lost my exam and never told me until I waltzed into his office all pissed off after having to explain that to the parental units.

One comment on the thread title - I’ve also had professors who have said to me on Day One “I wouldn’t want to be a student in this class.” Some of my fellow students have taken classes like this, too. In one class that a friend of mine took (“Money and Banking” at Washington & Lee University - a required class for junior and senior econ majors), the prof was fond of writing the following on the board on the first day of class:

God - A
Me - B
Everyone else - C, D, F

And followed it up with a little speech…

(IIRC)“God gets an A. Me? I would get a B. I can’t recall the last time a student got a C in this class. Most of you will get Ds, if you’re lucky.”

6

If he’s older he ages like Dick Clark. I have to think nobody would tenure this guy unless this is (I hope) atypical behavior.

And it would so follow if he lost our papers. Sigh.

7

{I used to be a college prof and evaluated part time instructors}

You’re right THespos. I would tell the part timers that they could use whatever grading scheme they wished (their right) but that every student must know or be told with certainty what there grade is at any given moment in time. The one that rebelled at this (out of many) wasn’t teaching the next semester.

As far as prof’s grading low (in THespos’s post) I find this despicable and unprofessional. I think it is more of an ego boast to a shallow prof than anything. My experience though, is the opposite – the part timers grading way to easy. Of course, so did I but I think I vented about that in a previous post…

8

Dude! We go to the same school! :smiley:

9

Dude, I totally feel your pain.

One of my classes last semester was Legal Research and Writing II. (I’m in law school.) The purpose of the class is, not surprisingly, to teach us how to write appellate briefs, trial memoranda, etc. The work for the class consisted of three writing assignments, spaced out over the course of a semester.

The class ended in May. Five months ago. And nobody in our class has gotten anything back. No marked-up papers, no criticism, no grades, nothing. We got grades at the end of the semester, but for all I know the “Professor” assigned them based on how frequently we picked our noses in class. It makes me absolutely insane.

10

Argh! I completely know what you mean! I’ve been waiting to get a paper back for a month in one of my classes. The prof’s excuse: “Well, I’ve been really busy with my other classes and things.” Gee, bitch, me too! This is a class full of graduate students, most of us have at least one job outside of school and we all somehow manage to turn in our papers on time. What the hell is her problem?

11

I understand you. Not this semester(this semester I only have bad teachers, not lazy ones) but a year before, I took my Calc 1. I realize that the teacher had a family, and gave other lectures, and that the tests where to be graded one by one, for the system is to give partial points for procedure and such. But…other teachers giving that course had their exams corrected earlier!!! My class had to wait 2 months to get their grade of the second exam…exactly the day they had their third exam. He was not a bad teacher, just lazy.

Another thing I really don’t like in some professors is that they don’t explain exactly what the paper is about. Currently I am taking a composition class with one of those, and I just hope that I got what he asked for in the paper.

Now, this semester, the only reasons I go to lecture are:

  1. To talk with friends(no, really)
  2. I don’t go, I go to the discussion groups(given by the TA’s(teacher assistants), who are the ones that basically teach you the course and grade you).
  3. Just in case they give information about quizzes, tests, room assignments, homework, etc.

Really, the way I see it at least at my university, the teachers that give lecture are not the ones that will help you pass the class(or will care about you, or grade you, even). So, instead of going to them, I go to the TA’s and ask them for help.

12

How well I remember a professor who told us the midterm test questions would be on material A, B, and C.

Imagine our surprise when we sat down for the midterm and got questions about D, E, and F, with nary a single reference to A, B, or C.

When the chorus of complaints arose, he merely looked at the class and said, “Well, I guess I lied.”

Grrr.

Now, in fairness, he did say at the beginning of the year that we would be responsible for all material covered… and D, E, and F was covered. But to deliberately or negligently mislead us days before the exam… blech.

  • Rick
13

…I’d say, first of all, Karl, that a Calc I prof who took a month to grade and return a test was way out of bounds. (I’ve taught Calc I more times than I can quickly recall, so I speak from experience.) It’s not that hard for the prof to grade the tests (and at Enormous State U., the prof probably has TAs to do that anyway), and the course builds on itself. If you aren’t clear on whether you know how to differentiate, then doing related-rates or max-min problems is gonna be a real pain in the patoot. If you’re the student, you need the feedback, so you know what it is that you don’t know. Waiting a month, while lots more new material flies by, is completely unreasonable.

And it’s fine to say ‘anything I’ve covered is fair game’, but not to actively mislead. Once the prof says, ‘the midterm will emphasize A, B, and C’, it really has to be there. In other fields, you can get sued for breaking a verbal agreement like that, as Kim Basinger once found out. In academia, suing is probably out, but I’d say, Bricker, that you and your classmates had a pretty serious complaint to bring to the academic dean. I guess you didn’t, which is too bad.

Now, law school (and law school profs) are a whole 'nother ballgame. Five months? A triviality. Yes, it’s totally unreasonable, but they get to be your gods for three years, and there’s no way around it. I’ve heard those horror stories for years from friends who’ve been in law school at various times. It seems to be the same everywhere.

iampunha, not writing the midterm in advance is not a big deal. Really. The professor is under no moral obligation to write the test ahead of time. He should, however, be able to give you some clue as to what’s important. If that hasn’t come through in his lectures, he’s doing a lousy job of teaching. I wasn’t the world’s greatest teacher, but I prepared, and conveyed a clear sense of what the class was about - what ideas were crucial, and what ideas were peripheral.

And if he’s teaching poetry, he should damned well know his stuff well enough not to conflate two different poems. Sheesh.

Might want to look at the departmental website, or in the catalog, to see his faculty rank, which will pretty much tell you if he’s tenured. The ranks, from top to bottom, are Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, and then a bunch of clutter like Instructor, Lecturer, etc. The tenure line runs roughly between Associate and Assistant Professors; at most places, few if any Associate Profs don’t have tenure, and few if any Assistant Profs do.

14

I had a few classes as described in the OP. They were a blast. The Prof lost papers, forgot about midterms and canceled the final. We pretty much hung out and watched movies and talked about the esoterics of filmmaking.

(The classes were Masterpieces of Japanese Cinema and Avant Garde Cinema)

BURN IN HELL OZU! NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO MAKE A 15 MIN SCENE BEING FILMED IN AN ADJACENT ROOM!

(Actors were in living room doing what ever, camera was 20 feet down the hall that opened up on the living room.)

15

He couldn’t, though. He outright didn’t know what would be on it. It’s one thing to have a good idea of what’s going to be on it, but he couldn’t outright say “there will be X essays where you’ll be asked to do P, Q and R.” He didn’t say “And since we didn’t cover Z, F and J, don’t bother with those.”

He didn’t give much of an indication of how many sections there would be; as far as I was able to glean there might be ten IDs and four essays where I’ll pick two. But maybe there will be three sections of two each, where you pick two out of three or . . . see, this is the problem. One student asked if he’d give us the footnotes in the book (and a key thing about the book, with him, is the annotations/footnotes) and he said yes first, then no, and then sort of.

The annotations are the biggest reason he had us buy the book. The other main reason he gave us was that it roughly followed the time period we’re looking at.

“[Professor] works on Eighteenth-Century British Literature and on South Asian Postcolonial Literature, and has also taught courses on Literary and Cultural Theory and Criticism. He received his PhD in 1993 from [decently prestigious university], and taught at the [less prestigious university] and the [prestige university] before joining the English Department at George Mason in 1999.”

He also appears to be teaching four classes. My class is not listed on his webpage, which I find amusing and slightly annoying.

Sheesh. All I want is a reason. I’d accept “I have a buttload of papers to grade”. I’d accept “I grade them individually” because at least with that we’d be able to make groups in my English class and see how different people did.

16

Before you complain too much about a professors grading time, check on his or hers workload. In my case, I’ve got roughly 400 students that I have to grade papers for. Even at five minutes a paper, I’m looking at over 30 hours of time spent on grading them. Hell, it takes me almost two hours to just write the grades in my gradebook. With three papers a semester, it is a miracle that any of them get turned back to the students. On top of that, I’m expected to spend many hours during the month dealing with performances, rehearsals, etc. (I teach theatre.) Last year I had an eight day period in which I spent 105 hours on university related business and classes. (Do the math, only 192 hours total in eight days.) Did my students suffer? Yes. Was it my fault? Hell no, I didn’t have a choice. I recommended to my students that they should complain to the administration about overworking their professors. Did any of them do that? No.

I also do not make my tests until two days before I give them. This is mostly because I do not want to have anything on the test that I have not covered in lecture or assigned readings. I do review what I expect them to know for the test.

Check before you complain. If your prof teaches four classes of 30 students each and no outside commitments, then complain about him. But if he is teaching four classes of a hundred each, with no grad assitants, and has other commitments, complain about the shortage of professors. If you go in informed, it makes your complaints have more weight.

17

This particular prof has four classes:

  1. 400-level class with maybe 20 students.

  2. 200-level class with maybe 30 students.

  3. 100-level honors class with maybe 30 students (IIRC).

  4. See above.

I would not be surprised if he is busy doing more research or whatnot to try and get tenure or something. I know he is being paid to teach. I do not know right now that he is not also being paid to do research on the side, but I would think he could put aside that research for two weeks to grade papers.

I completely understand the reluctance to write portions of an exam dealing with later material not yet covered, but I cannot imagine where he didn’t have a spare five minutes or whatever to write a damned ID question or some outline for an essay question. And he said he had not written the midterm yet. He did not know what would be on it. He could not give us much of anything more than a spontaneous ID question, and though that’s helpful the vast majority of the exam is essay, which he could not have given us much less advice on. He basically said “study the material”, which is about as useful in my mind as a film instructor, for example, saying “watch the movies again”. It’s going to take fucking HOURS of time, and most of it will probably be wasted because I won’t know what specifically he’s going to ask, or even what vaguely he’s going to ask. Hell, I can’t write a fucking sample essay to prep myself for the damned thing.

18

iampunha, do you know any Tekes at George Mason? I know some guys there. Their chapter advisor, Eric Larson, is an alumnus of UT-Chattanooga and my chapter here. Of course, there ARE 20,000+ people at your school…

19

Tekes? Those would be Tau Kappa Epsilon? Sorry, I’m not terribly familiar with fraternities here, but if you can give me the name of the Frat I can ask some of the brothers (in a different frat whose letters I have forgotten) if they know the man.

There are 24K people total. Some of them go to other campuses:)

20

Ah yes, the tenured. Truly the Teamsters of the white-collar world.