Professors, Teachers, TAs, how do you deal with an overzealous student?

In My Humble Opinion
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I’m TAing for my first time this semester (as an undergraduate no less), it’s pretty nice, especially since my professor is so busy I’ve gotten a lot of load off him. But I have a problem with one student. Don’t get me wrong, he’s nice, cordial, and he seems smart, but Christ, out of the 200 emails I got this week over 60 are from him. Most of them don’t take too long to answer, so it’s not that big of a deal, but it seems like every time he writes a new line of code he has to send an email asking a question.

I’ve been trying to help, this is an upper division course and we’re working in a language most of the school hasn’t worked in before, and on top of that the students have to work in a framework for each assignment that is admittedly a bit constraining at times. His questions haven’t been conceptual, which is why I’ve been helping him out, I understand that he’s having trouble adjusting to python AND adapting to a framework at the same time (this isn’t a programming in python class, so language idiosyncracies are only an unfortunate side effect of the homework assignment, thus we try to help with language problems so long as they don’t directly answer the conceptual underpinning of the problem).

As an example, I got ELEVEN emails while I was asleep last night, all with 2-3 questions in them (meaning I got over 25 questions in one night) and this morning he emailed me telling me to ignore all eleven emails, because he figured out the problem, and asked three questions alone in that email. He’s asked some strange questions and answered them in the same email, then didn’t realize he’d answered them. Then I’d answer his question – pointing out that he was correct in his reasoning, and he’d still not get that HE already knew what was right.

After he all but voided 11 emails, I’m tempted to just not answer his emails for most of tomorrow and wait to see if he gains some confidence in himself without the help. I think he’s rather bright, just unsure of himself. I don’t want to tell him to go away, because I want students to come to me if they have questions, it’s just that I don’t want to hold his hand.

The main problem seems to be that he doesn’t know how to debug without a debugger, I’ve been able to solve several of the problems by taking the radical steps of… reading the comments and implementations (none of which are more than 2-3 lines) of the classes and methods from the framework he’s using. And I’ve pointed out to him (not in an assholish way, just “I looked at the comments and they said[…]”) how I got the answer. For you non-programmers, that’s basically as obvious a step as “looking up the equation in the textbook.”

Again, he’s not asking questions about how to go about solving the problem, so I’m not just giving him answers, they’re very basic one-line questions that are closer to “how do I use a calculator?” than “which equation should I use?”

So what should I do, politely tell him to tone it down? Ignore him? Twiddle my thumbs and hope it gets better?

On the other hand, I get paid hourly, and that includes time spent answering emails so… :stuck_out_tongue:

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He seems to have a reading comprehension problem, so I think you should explain in person that

  1. he’s not to send you more than one (1) email/day, to a total of five (5) max per week. It would be a good idea for him to write down his doubts in a draft, but before sending them he must review them to ensure that he’s not sending the same doubt twice, nor sending one he’s already been able to solve himself,
  2. asking “is this the correct reasoning?” is not appropriate,
  3. and there is a series of steps he must follow (such as RTFnotes) before he even opens that draft to add a doubt to it.

I wouldn’t call him overeager, I’d call him overneedy. You’re neither his mother nor his babysitter.

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Is he a freshman?

This kid is clearly abusing his email privileges, so you really have to address it directly. Tell him he can come to your office hours for general questions, or send the occasional email if he can’t get to your office, but he doesn’t have a right to monopolize your time–you have your own studies and x number of other students who also need to be addressed. Emphasize that education at the college level is not about filling in the blanks with the right answers. It’s about learning how to learn, and learning how to teach yourself without having your hand held. By allowing him to depend on you, he’s not going to learn that. If he needs THAT MUCH direct help, he needs a tutor. Do you know any tutors? That’d be a great time to hand him a list. Or tell him to form a study group. This is the kind of shit that kids bounced off each other in my college programming classes. They wouldn’t dare bother a teacher or TA with such minutiae, unless they were totally clueless. You’re doing him a favor by letting him know what proper boundaries are. Because the next TA or prof he bugs might not be as nice about it as you.

It would also help to establish an email policy in your syllabus at the start of the semester. Several of my profs had a three-day turnaround policy. They didn’t answer email on weekends, or within two days of an assignment’s due date. You can bring this up in class now, too, without being directly confrontational (you don’t want to publicly single him out). Just say that “some students” have been abusing their email abilities, and you’re adding a new rule.

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He’s a sophomore, since he’s in a 400-level course and I know he’s had the prerequisites at this university (since we discussed the classes when he came to my office hours). I’m not sure how they handled it, he claims (unsolicited, he’s been apologizing for the deluge) that it’s just because he has to learn a new language on top of the homework – which I kind of get. Yet… at the same time I’m not a genius and when I was in his shoes when I took the course figuring out these problems was second nature to me – trivial, it’s just what you do as a programmer.

Oh, also, did I mention this is a group project? So yeah… now that I think about it, he has two perfectly serviceable other people to bounce this off of.

This just in (while writing this post): He’s been CCing my professor, an email my professor just sent me recommends just ignoring any trivial, non-urgent question and then getting back to him on Saturday or Sunday, figuring that after that “25 questions – oops, never mind I CAN think for myself after all” scenario he’ll gain confidence in himself, though he also gives me discretion to handle it however I want (also, several references to “though at least if we assume he’s an average student we know exactly where the rest of the class is on the project, down to the line of code” :p). I may just tell him to bang his head against the wall (metaphorically) for an hour or three whenever he encounters a problem before he emails me. I don’t want to be the TA responsible for coddling him, and then unleashing him upon the working world on some poor supervisor.

So far he’s brought up two REALLY bizarre bugs that were screwing him over that I don’t think were his fault*, so I don’t know if at this point I want to impose extreme limits on him.

  • Well, okay, to be fair, the bugs weren’t his fault (they were in the framework), but the workarounds were completely bleeding obvious if you can read. No, seriously, imagine you had a given utility function called DoSomething, and then for another near identical application you had a utility function called DoSomethingWithAddition. Then further, you had access to the source code so you could verify, with no effort, that DoSomethingWithAddition, did, indeed do exactly the obvious thing you thought it did (let’s say it did DoSomething, but added two numbers beforehand). Now imagine DoSomethingWithAddition was broken due to a strange bug. Would your thought to work around the problem be “use DoSomething, but do the addition yourself”? Congrats, you solved the problem! Of course, it was a BIT more sophisticated, it was some absolutely bizarre function composition error, but the workaround certainly isn’t something that should be foreign to a student taking upper division courses, familiar language or not.
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Next time a similarly weird bug comes up, remind him to read the source code. That’s it. Don’t give him answers or help him work through it. But anyway, this is all stuff that a tutor could help him with. Point-blank: you aren’t compensated well enough for the kind of individual attention he’s seeking. But given that it’s a group project, it’d be much more appropriate for him to bounce those questions off his teammates over IM. Debugging for every student is not your job, and he needs to know that.

A 400-level class is no joke. Suggest to him that as it’s a senior-level course and NOT an entry-level, doing individual research and debugging *without *TA intervention is a baseline expectation. It’s possible that he only got the pre-reqs done with a lot of outside help and truly isn’t capable of mastering the material on his own. If that’s the case, babying him will not help him do anything except pass this single class. If he can’t do this stuff on his own, he needs to get the F he’s earning and retake the class. A second time around, I am sure he’d do much better with the language.

If you’re feeling delightfully flippant, you could always respond that you usually charge $20 an hour for the volume and nature of questions he’s asking.

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**rachelellogram **really nails it, advice wise. The kid needs some boundaries, and some confidence in his own abilities.

Not to ride my hobby horse, but this is often the end result of Helicopter Parenting. This is a kid who was given so much feedback, constantly, by a hovering Parental Unit, that he has absolutely no idea how to think for himself or solve his own problems. Now he doesn’t have that, and he’s terrified. He’s terrified of making a mistake because he has very little experience fixing mistakes. His self-esteem is a fragile tower, built not on real talent or hard work, but a million “great jobs!” for wiping his nose correctly.

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I work with university students. Some of them believe e-mail is instant messaging & expect an immediate reply, multiple times per day!
I agree with setting an e-mail policy. I usually state that due to a high volume of e-mails, it may be up to 48 hours before I can reply. Which is also true. Delay your replies a little. He’ll eventually get the message you’re not available 24/7. Or, be honest & point out he sent you 200 emails last week - way too many - & needs to slow it down.

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I think this is the right approach, let him know that, while you’re there to help, you’re not going to sit next to him and walk him through every step. He needs to work through the problem, and only email a question if he is at an impasse. 10 emails a day suggests that he’s emailing at every bump in the road, every time he’s unsure.

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Him and everybody else! Hellooo, when we had to write programs in Fortran for Algebra II, we weren’t even taught the language beyond two, count them, two, hours of class, and we weren’t taught how to program either (I knew how to do it from an after-school activity I’d had) - it didn’t kill us.

ETA: and yes, the path was uphill both ways but since it was Barcelona, no snow. We got burning sand instead.

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Heh, reminds me of my Graphics class this semester, “you need to do your assignments with OpenGL.” We spend about 20 minutes total in the semester on OpenGL, the rest is theory and pure maths.

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I work in tech support and delaying answers by a few hours or a day is my favorite tactic with overly needy people. I’ve had some end users who regularly figured out more than half of their own problems (99% of which were user error) if given a little while to think about it. My bosses have always been in favor of this approach, as long as it’s used with some common sense.

As another random thought, I remember a college orientation where they told us freshmen that some of us had learning disabilities and would only be discovering them for the first time in college. I think they said it was usually one out of every two hundred kids or so. It’s certainly not your job to diagnose this kid or to push him into getting tested, but it might be worth keeping in the back of your mind if you find out that he struggles in other classes as well.

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I teach and wish my students cared enough to be overzealous! Most are slackers who do the bare minimum and try to get out of even doing that.

However, I have had a couple of students like you describe. I would open my email and see 10 or more messages. I would simply write back to meet me the next day and we will discuss all of this in person. When we met, they had figured out 90% of what they were asking and I suggested instead of sending an email every time they had a question, write them down and we should meet twice a week before the assignments were due.

This helped a lot. I was able to give them some real encouragement and compliments, and they felt more confident and wanted to figure stuff out on their own. Over the term, the meetings got fewer and so did the questions.

Some people simply want to make sure every step is perfect before they go on to the next step - they have a fear of taking a leap into the unknown. Once you get them to try the old “trial and error” approach, they are more comfortable with screwing up and going back a step or two. I know that sound obvious to most people, but perfectionists tend to move more slowly and get frustrated when everything doesn’t go perfectly on the first try.

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I’m a pretty big perfectionist, and I have done the crazy email chain before, though nowhere NEAR this degree (usually it’s more like, the day the assignment is due and I STILL can’t squash this damn bug I’ve had for three days and am freaking out). I’m seriously a perfectionist to a level where it can be legitimately crippling (like not getting personal projects done because I’m afraid of making a poor design choice). So I certainly understand his concern.

Anyway, ignoring him seemed to work, I still get more emails from him than other students (which is fine), but it’s gone down to one short exchange a day at most, and most of the questions are more conceptual in nature, which means that he’s at least comfortable with debugging for now, though it also means he gets less overall help because I can’t just flat out tell him what’s wrong anymore (which may or may not frustrate him, hard to tell).

Whenever he sends too many questions I just tell him that it’d be easier to discuss during office hours, because we can discuss his code in real time (and that’s the truth), so at least I can get company during OHs.

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Yep. Wait an hour, and they’ll figure out that the little plus sign before a folder means they can expand it. All by themselves! And when they do that, it sticks with them forever.

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Sounds like a great answer.

I teach third graders writing, and I have to explain at the beginning of the year that I won’t (or almost never will) tell them how to spell a word in the middle of our writing time. If I were willing to do that, then my room would be full of little hands raised in the air and pencils set on desks, and I’d spend all my time circulating telling students how to spell words rather than meeting with individuals for 10 minute at a time to confer on story structure, use of dialog, how to brainstorm story ideas, etc. It takes some training for some kids to get them out of the habit of relying on an adult for perfection, but I think encouraging their independence is really important. (And when I get a chance to meet with them, if spelling is their big issue, I’m all about helping them then.)