Because the longer the 'Q roasts over the coals, the tastier it is…
Dammit…most of you little “snowflakes” live in-state…do not even try to tell me about “your travel plans” and why you can’t turn in your work on the due date this week. We have a full seven days until Thanksgiving, children.
I will take great pleasure in marking your papers off for being late.
I’ll also note that many of you are the same dumbasses who cannot spell my name correctly and constantly ask me about my office hours and location. All these things are on the first page of my syllabus. You are a disgrace to your species and the parents that raised you, but the fact that your smarter colleagues clearly despise you gives me hope for the future.
Furthermore, rocket scientists, it is not possible to inform me that you need things or have questions if you do not employ words. People, I don’t have fucking ESP. You cannot notify me of things using your mind alone. I know we tell you the mind is a powerful thing, but Jesus fuck kids, use some common sense.
One of my friends served as a (qualified and prepared) guest lecturer and she told me that three students walked out when they saw that the regular teacher wasn’t there (her apperance, of course, was clearly specified in the fucking syllabus, imbeciles!). If this had happened to me, I would have taken names, but I am a vengeful harpy and most of my other colleagues are nice people. In fact, thinking about the hurt on my friend’s face when she relayed the tale makes me so angry that I can barely see straight. You little wastes of space are so lucky that you are not mine because I would END you. Fortunately, my friend is going to be allowed to draft some questions for the final in this class.
I am in such a bad mood and I have never been so anxious for Thanksgiving Break in my life. I hope I make it to break without doing/saying anything that drives one of the brats to bitch to a Dean.
I hate Fall semester. Spring term is so much better.
As a student, I want to say that you deserve a hug. I work damn hard to meet deadlines, and it’s a lousy feeling to watch as little slackers beg an extension to gain one more night of drunken debauchery before they have to settle down and work.
– If you do not attend class on the day the paper is due, it will not cause the paper to go away. No, really, it won’t.
– If you do not attend class at ALL for six weeks, it certainly will not cause the entire class to go away.
– I’m not here to entertain you. I try to make the class reasonably interesting, but hey – it’s freshman comp. That means we talk about grammar, sentence structure, and paragraph development, and yes, I’m aware that most students think this stuff is boring. That doesn’t give you carte blanche to leave in the middle of class, text message, or sleep when we’re covering this material. (Why yes, I DO notice when you do these things. Believe it or not, I am neither senile nor blind.) Oh, and if you don’t like my jokes, it is very rude to do the fake-laugh “hur hur hur” thing. Show a modicum of respect, please.
– If you plagiarize, you will get caught – especially if you plagiarize from the introduction to an assigned text for the course. Who would have thought the professor would have read the introduction? :rolleyes: Anyway, nobody who has read your in-class response papers would believe for a minute that you know the word “bibulous.” Next time, try plagiarizing from MySpace or something.
– I don’t have to allow you to bump your grade up from a B- to a B by revising sentences. I’m being generous. If you whine about your grades, but you do not make any attempt to complete the revisions because Bs are not good enough for you, I reserve the right to ignore you.
Let me just say as a recent university grad…extensions in university are a load of crap. At this stage of your education, you should have passable time management. Not great, just passable…that’s all I had and I made it through. And this is coming from someone who had awful time management in high school and manged to scrape it together when it came to university.
I got my act together because I realized how important it was. I have no sympathy for someone who can’t.
To my seniors, the slacker class to end all slacker classes: No, I don’t know your grade. Everything I’ve graded --90% of what’s been turned in–is over there in the returned papers basket. You know as much about your grade as I do. Asking me every single day is not going to get that information to you. Nor am I capable on the fly of determining if you will pass providing you do X, Y, and Z. I know you’d hate to accidently earn a 75 or something and so want to make sure you do the least possible, but it’s not my job to determine that for you.
To my juniors, the over-achieving perfectionist crowd: It’s ok if you get a 97. Don’t text me at 10:30 to see if when I say “no cover sheet” on the rubric for your research paper, that that actually means there shouldn’t be a cover sheet. Don’t always show up for tutoring thirty seconds after I get in the building, two and a half hours before school actually starts. Don’t get mad at me when I have a meeting and so am not on call every single moment before and after school. I do love you all’s enthusiasm and I don’t want to discourage it, but you are all wearing my ass out.
To my decathletes: I know this needs to be fun. I try to make it fun. But you are all competitive kids who like to win and I wish you could see that you need to put effort in now if you don’t want to be humiliated in January. “Teeheehee I didn’t study” or “that’s a great score for straight guessing, I’m proud of myself” really don’t amuse me much. Not saying we can’t have fun, but getting our asses handed to us won’t be fun. Winning will be. So get serious, at least a little.
No. No. Nonononono. Don’t tell them to do that. They will do that. I assigned a paper last year where my students had to do a “site study” (basically why do people do what they do where they do it kind of thing–a peoplewatching paper). One guy printed out Tom’s MySpace page and turned it in as his site study.
There is no smiley to express the range of emotions.
I agree wholeheartedly, but sometimes an extension is necessary. For example: in the professional world, if I have two deadlines on the same Friday, and someone schedules a three-hour meeting Thursday afternoon, I can e-mail them and say “hey, the XYZ study is due Friday so I can’t make it. Can we re-schedule for next Tuesday or should I send someone in my place?” I have one – or maybe two – supervisors demanding that I attend every obligation they place on me, and each understands that the other sometimes makes inflexible demands on my time.
In college, each professor seemed to labor under the assumption that their class was the only one I was really bothering to spend any time on, so if the final report happened to be due on the same day as the final report for two other classes, well, I’d plan ahead. Never mind that each class had a increasingly grueling homework schedule leading up to that final assignment as each professor struggled to catch up with his optimistic syllabus. Never mind that the final requires us to master concepts which are still being explained in class during the last week of the semester, such that “working ahead” was impractical at best. Never mind that the professors would issue “minor corrections” to their expectations in the two classes before the due date.*
In the corporate world, we have contracts and statements of work and requirements documents which we can brandish eagerly and say “You asked for six pages in twelve-point font not twelve pages in six-point font.” In college, all we can do is turn in substandard work… or beg for an extension**.
Yes, this is because two classes before it was due, the most forward-thinking student decided to read the assignment in full.
** - or forgo sleep for the last two weeks of each semester.
One more bitter aside: when I say something must be within a 5-7 page range, that does not mean ten pages is OK. Do not toss a temper tantrum in front of your classmates and really don’t be surprised when your classmates do not support you. Most of them are not idiots and thus they can read my instructions, most of them struggled to fit their own papers within that page range (because part of the assignment was to demonstrate that you could organize and edit your thoughts), and I will not ignore the fact that they respected my instructions in order to satisfy your whims.
On the other side of the coin. When a professor lays down the expectations for an assignment and I hand in a completed assignment on time that meets these expectations to the letter, do not mark me off and comment “This meets my expectations but you should have done more.”
vivalostwages, I’ve been published at RYS once, but…I was praising my little buggers! :eek:
I like RYS when it’s all about roasting the wee ones; the blather about the profession is not as entertaining (I hate the Thursday Question :mad: ) and I was really put off by the recent junior/senior faculty exchanges on moving around. My thoughts on that question are suitable for the Pit, really.
I can understand your frustration and I think it stems from something that a lot of professors don’t necessarily make clear (I know I didn’t when I first started teaching). Most of the professors that I have known (so this is not a large-N sample) create those guidelines in order to drag students kicking and screaming to what the professor believes is the minimum acceptable standard (which corresponds to a minimum acceptable grade) and do not do a good job of indicating that higher grades require going beyond the minimum standard in terms of analysis, depth and type of sources, etc.
Now it is clearly stated in my guidelines that having the required number of pages, minimum required sources, etc. is only part of the grade and that A/B work will go beyond my minimum requirements in the guidelines–and it is clearly stated in the guidelines that the minimum source requirements are enough for a C+/B- paper in most circumstances. I clearly state the types of ‘above and beyond’ analysis that will move a paper into the B-A range now.
I make it very clear, both in writing and in speaking with students, that if they do the minimum amount of work deemed “acceptable” in my guidelines, they will receive the minimum grade I deem “acceptable,” which is something around a C-/B+. Doing this has cut down on grade complaints/frustration.
We had a snow day the day a paper was due. The next day, one kid didn’t hand it in because he “didn’t realize it was due” since we didn’t have school on the actual due date. When I took points off for a late paper, his mother called to argue with me that it was ME who was unclear with my expectations for when it was due. :smack:
