Nacho4Sara, me too please!
But wait! This is the dream I still have and I finished college in 1973! However, I’ve never (in the dream) actually spoken to a professor, because I have no idea where the classroom is.
I’m not a teacher (Thank you Og!) I was a lab assistant in college for the biology labs, in general, and microbiology, specifically. I got to know all of the instructors as peers rather than serf/lord.
I was getting VA money so I had to take a full load. I started 2 semesters early so I wouldn’t be overwelmed with nursing and the required liberal arts classes. Consequently, I found myself gleaning electives from the bottom of the barrel. I couldn’t face another art class, and I almost failed PE in high school
**
(we’ll talk)
So, I had to resort to taking biology and ecology (last) I’d taken all the other science classes offered.
My ecology class was spring semester at 2:30 pm. There were 9 students, and 3 transfered out after a week. I swear, I was not asleep! I heard every word he said and my test scores proved it. 
We were assigned a paper on the first day of class, due on the last. We had to do 3 field surveys in teams (well, one team)
My professor would tell me and anyone else who’d listen, how embarrassing it was going to be for him to have to fail me. Well, I got A’s on all his tests.
Oh! The paper! At 10:15pm on the penultimate day of the semester, I dragged out my 75 lb Underwood.
Yes, I got it in on time. I had graphs, I had time lines. I used every color pencils came in. I had 32 pages! I still can’t type! I think I may have worn my 'jammies when I turned it in.:rolleyes:
Three days later, I got a call at home from said professor, asking me to come in to talk about my paper. I was sure I was busted.
The first words out of his mouth were. “Thank God I didn’t have to fail you!” Then he asked if he could keep my paper to use as an example to subsequent classes. I started to laugh, and asked if he’d like to know when I started it. He just covered his ears.
So, does this explain why the educational system if failing? :dubious:
Nacho4Sara: I’d appreciate it if you’d send the paper my way; it could be of use to me in my capacity as a writing tutor.
Thanks!
Hmm. Forgot to add my e-mail address, of course.
This thread has been raised from the dead, and Nacho4Sara doesn’t seem to be as active on the board as she once was. She may not see the latest requests for her writing guide.
A story from a high school teacher:
The student was supposed to do a research paper on El Nino; however, the end result was clear. He had not done enough research to be able to adequently define El Nino; he just pumped out a stream-of-consciousness flow of sentences that kept mentioning El Nino, which, he kindly informed the reader, is one of the greatest evils on this Earth and must be stopped. My favorite passage went something like this–
“The el nino causes tornados and fires. I hate the el nino because it killed my family. The el nino is found everywhere, but mostly in Texas.”
A story from a college professor:
The student chose to do her research paper on William Shakespeare, or, as she called him, “Will.” She wrote, “Will wrote the best comedies. They were so funny because of the many deaths and the many different ways to die in his plays.”
(Emphasis added)
To some extent, you answered your own question. As a non-traditional student, there is a LOT I have to remember about even the most basic stuff. I was utterly flabbergasted when I got a 96 on my first paper. I hadn’t written an academic paper in easily 10 years or so, so it was hard to get back into that pattern.
Business writing is a lot different from academic writing. I can sit down and write a coherent one-page memo in about ten minutes. The memo will say everything it needs to say. If I have a paper due for class, there is a lot more to remember in terms of form, language, organization, citations, and so forth. Missing any of these means lost points. To complicate things further, some teachers want MLA citations, others want APA citations, and one of my past teachers wanted citations in some goofy format that I never quite got down. So, it’s not always the student’s fault that papers are hard.
I think the emphasis on the formality of the writing process makes it seem a lot more intimidating than it is. I don’t use an outline and never have, mostly because I spend more time figuring the outline out than I do writing the paper. Basically, I start with an idea and run with it. It takes me two hours to produce one page, but that page is nearly perfect. Who cares if there is or is not an outline? Who cares if there are notecards? As long as the finished draft is acceptable, what does it matter if I follow the Approved Procedure ™?
Robin
I teach high school physics and I have this “toy” I use to demonstrate angular momentum when we are studying rotational mechanics. You may have seen one–it’s sold as an exercise device for your wrist and forearm. It’s basically a gyroscope mounted inside a plastic ball. Once you start it spinning, you can make it spin faster and faster by rotating your hand with a certain rhythm. It’s actually kind of difficult to get the hang of and usually none of my students can do it.
“Ashley,” however, quickly learned the proper technique and she would often grab the toy off my desk and play around with it during the last few minutes of class. This became almost routine for a couple of weeks.
Eventually, I cleaned off my desk and put the gyro-toy in a drawer.
In class a few days later, I finished the day’s lecture, assigned the evening’s homework, and took a seat at my desk. The students began putting their books and notes away in anticipation of the bell.
Ashley looked over at my desk and then at me and called loudly across the room, "Hey Mr. Tangent, can I play with your thingy?"
The room got dead quiet for about two seconds and then everyone burst out laughing (including myself, I confess). A horrified look broke onto Ashley’s face and then she started turning bright red!
She soon started to laugh, too, but I could tell she was still very embarrassed. I felt bad for her and I wanted to say something to let her know that I , too, often make a fool of myself by way of an unfortunate choice of words.
What I said was, "Don’t worry, Ashley. I do that all the time."
Ashley, in an exaggerated manner, replied, “Oh, you DO, huh?” Everyone was laughing again.
And it dawned on my that I had just done it again. In trying to confess that I often embarrass myself by choosing my words poorly, I had actually made it sound like I “play with my thingy” all the time!
And instead of letting it slide, Ashley had immediately called it to everyone’s attention with her “Oh, you DO, huh?” comment. There I was trying to express my empathy and she took to opportunity to deflect the laughter from herself to me. Where was the gratitude?
You can bet I gave her a hard time about that for a good while after, but she was one of my favorite kids that year and it was all in good fun.
This reminds me of a situation that occurred my first year of teaching. We teach in teams at my school, and 3 out of the 5 teachers were first year that year. There was a rumor flying that 2 of the first year teachers (he was Language Arts, she was Science) had the hots for each other.
About the middle of the year, we got this kid named (not joking) My Dang. He was a little bit of a troublemaker. My had LA 6th period and Science 7th (last). One day he had caused some problems in LA, and the teacher wanted to talk to him after school.
The result was the LA teacher calling the Science teacher’s room and stating, IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE CLASS “Hey, can you hold My Dang after school?” The entire room erupted in laughter. My wanted to be called Myke after that.
Oh, you DID, huh?
I’ve got two stupid teacher tricks.
I was in the 8th grade, and we were having our weekly vocabulary lesson, from published vocabulary lists. Each new word was defined, with a sentence demonstrating common usage. In turn, each student had to stand up, recite the word, and read the definition and sentence, and then make their own sentence using the new word. One Friday, my word was rendezvous. So I stood up, and read,
“‘RON-day-voo’”…
Sister Caroline interrupts,
"Tch! That’s ‘ren-DEZ-vuss’!"
I honestly thought she was kidding…
“Ha-ha. Uh, it’s pronounced ‘RON-day-voo’, Sister…”
"DON’T you contraDICT ME! It’s ‘ren-DEZ-vuss’! You have detention!"
At the language school where I work now, there is a university student who loves anything to do with England. He makes no secret of it, and tells everyone that he’s studying English conversation because he wants to move to London. I told him once that he could describe himself as an Anglophile. He repeated this in another (American) instructor’s lesson, and that instructor warned him not to say “Anglophile”, because it sounded like “pedophile”, and people would think he was some kind of pervert.
:smack:
We had a girl in 7th grade pre-Algebra who went by “Hickey” as the short for her last name.(you see where I’m going witht his already, huh?) Our teacher was preparing to ask for a volunteer to give an answer to a math problem, but realized he hadn’t called on anyone, so he changed in midsentence - and of course, it came out “Gimme a…hickey.”
Turning this thread back to the OP, dumb things students do, while IANAT I remember a day in college that I call “throwback day.” i was the bright kid who always knew the answer and would carry some classes when younger, but you’re supposed to have those problems weeded out by your 2nd, 3rd year of college. I mean, in high school Government class, a requirement, we might have had 15 kids out of 24 who weren’t exactly National Honor material, and 2-4 who were too busy to study. At times I would be the only one who knew things. But, at a liberal arts college known for its academics and not for being a party school?
Well, on this day in college, near the beginning of the year so it wasn’t exam time for anyone, I started raising my hand and answering question about our homework. I forget the class, but it was one that I know nobody was forced to take - we had electives within the required science/math, foreign language, etc.
/And yet, it was like everyone else was on strike or something. Several students flat out said they didn’t do the homework. The professor is starting to get flustered about 20 minutes into the 50 minute class, because I’ve been the only one all day who’s answered anything! Finally, one student just flat out says something to the effect of, “I had time, I just didn’t want to/didn’t feel like studying.”
Didn’t feel like it? Why was that student in our class? I don’t know. But the professor went on a mini-tirade about how I was the only one who seemed to care, and that since nobody else seemed to that day, and the only one who did understood everything, he was just cancelling class till the next time.
Everyone was fine after that, and we didn’t have any more problems with people wanting to do the work. But, any student who can so fluster a professor that they just cancel the class for the day, or group of students, have to be just about the dumbest.
Suppose he’s got a pointed stick?
Regards,
Shodan
SHUT UP ABOUT THE POINTED STICKS!
My former co-worker (aw, hell, he was a “cow-orker” to be sure) did something that left me dumbstruck. Now, it qualifies for this thread because he is a PhD student and he does this at school as as well.
He had to put together a presentation in French and a very, VERY detailed syllabus had to be prepared for publication. He can speak French, but his writing is less than stellar. No problem though. Typically, in our office, if the producer isn’t comfortable writing at a professional level in French the write-ups are done in English and our translator/proofreader converts it flawlessly.
Cow-orker however, decided to employ the method he uses at school. He swears by his system. Swears by it, I tell you!
He wrote the report in English and translated it (garbled it) through a software program. You know the kind that turns “the dog is sleeping” into “unconscious is Chewbacca”?.. One of those.
He handed that in… and deleted the original!
It was largely incomprehensible. We had to try to reconstuct it line by line.
How he has managed using this “system” in a PhD program, I 'll never know.
One day in 10th grade Chemistry lab, we had an experiment involving both a large, glass thermometer and a bunson burner. Within about 30 seconds of our arrival in the lab, the class goof had lit a fire directly under his thermometer, which promptly exploded. The sound of glass shards hitting the window was enough to get the teacher’s attention. . .
One semester I was TA for the lab section of an Intro to Earth Sciences class. All the students complained about having to do calculations for lab (“scientific notation on a calculator is just SO confusing”), but one particular student really took the cake.
For one exercise, the students had to calculate the gradient of a stream segment (so the sine of the gradient = elevation change between the starting and ending points of the segment / stream length). Said student was having great anxiety over this simple geometric exercise, so I told her I would walk her through the problem. First, I needed her to measure the stream length on the map and convert it to true distance in feet using the map scale. The department had only supplied us with standard 12-inch rulers, so I left her to make her measurement with this ruler.
Five minutes later, I came back to her and asked her for the stream length. “2.7 inches!” she exclaimed proudly. I was puzzled about her taking the initiative to convert her map measurement into decimal form, so I asked her to show me how she’d gotten the answer. Turned out that she had counted 7 hash marks beyond the 2-inch mark, but since this was a standard ruler the correct measurement was 2 and 7/16 inches… When I broke the news to her, and told her she would have to convert the 7/16 fraction to a decimal expression, she started to cry.
Did I mention this was at an Ivy League school? :smack:
As of today…
I’ve just finished teaching a drama survey class – the historical / literary overview kind that covers everybody from Aeschylus to Moises Kaufman. One of the choices I gave the students for the final paper was to script a creative (but textually supported) dialogue between two of the playwrights we’ve read, in which they discuss their philosophy of drama, what they hoped to do with their plays, how they felt about how their work was received, etc. Lots of clever, witty papers, including one with a hilarious takeoff on Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure as a setup. I mean, this kid can write. The introduction was a little over-long, but I was getting into it.
Then I hit a chunk of text discussing Othello that is obviously in a different, and much weaker, writing style. I Google a phrase or two and come up with an essay from an Internet term paper mill – about the usual quality for these sites, poorly written, poorly organized, poorly thought out. Almost its only virtue is that it introduces some historical background that the student was evidently too lazy to look up and paraphrase on his own.
Dammit. Why would anybody plagiarize a paper that is so much worse than what he is capable of writing for himself? What on God’s green earth is the point?
:: wanders off muttering bitterly ::
Student does not realize that as the TA, I am an authority figure, not their cool, in-the-know friend:
“Can you tell me if the final exam and the make-up final will be different and if so, which one is easier?”
Student got a 14 on the midterm exam and has been told by the extremely easy-grading, no-F’s-ever professor I’m TAing for that this is a C-.
“I did the 10 point extra credit assignment, so does that mean I now have a B-?”
I have one student this semester who routinely send me emails with no salutation, punctuation, capitalization or closing, which all look something like this: “i was not in class today” That’s the whole text of the email. Every time I’m tempted to email back just ‘yes.’ or ‘so?’
This was the same student in both examples.
Senior year in high school. The very attractive blonde in my Second-year AP Physics class asked me to help her understand the difference between Kinetic and Potential energy. We met in the library at lunch and I went over the situation with her… and she just could not wrap her mind around the situation… “But just how does Potential energy turn into Kinetic energy??” She was completely flustered… it turned out that she didn’t have any intuitive understanding of the material… she just regurgitated on exams, and aced everything… and that flustered me.
This girl turned out to be the class valedictorian.
Next year, during my first week or so at the University, I encounter her in the computer lab while working on a programming assignment. (This was back in the days when it was a rare individual who had their own PC… and personal computers did not come with hard drives… just floppies.) Since we were from the same high school, of course, she asks me for help.
I forget her problem… but it was something obvious. And all of her files were named “mommy” and “daddy” and “baby…” No extensions. Nothing to make sense of revision order or changes made or anything.
Thinking back on it, 20 years later, I’m nearly certain now that the first instance was probably her weird idea of flirting with me. She was smarter than she let on, and just wanted to check my reaction, and to test our compatibility Also, I had just won a National Merit Scholarship and had my picture on the cover of the school paper… so that must have got her attention.
The second instance, though… just sheer idiocy. If she was flirting, well, I’m sure she found her man… and I’m glad it wasn’t me. I can’t stand women who play dumb.