Based on the one semester that I TA’d graduate thermodynamics, the absolute worst refusal to allow himself to be helped was from an international student (Japanese). I offered to meet with him separately to discuss the material and/or test-taking strategies, I probably wrote as much on his homework as he did (at least the ones he turned in), I asked the professor to speak to him (thinking perhaps he had an issue with me being a woman) - total disconnect. And you had to pass this class to stay in grad school in our department, too. I never did figure out what his problem was.
There’s also the phenomenon of some students who have learning disabilities which have not yet been diagnosed or which they’re trying to hide.
We sometimes ask students if this is a possibility and suggest that they get tested at our DSP&S Center. This has mixed results. One colleague suggested testing for a student, and the student responded in a tone of outrage: “ARE YOU CALLING ME A RETARD?”
At CSU, this applies to a lot of local students too. If they’re getting funding or loans, they often need to have a certain course load in order to keep the money coming.
Preach it. At seventeen I had absolutely no business being at college. I was certainly capable of the work, but with no perspective on anything that would have made the experience particularly useful. When I think back about what opportunities were available to me on that campus, and what courses I actually took… what a waste of time and money. I am actually fortunate to be using the degree I hold in a job I love, but I don’t feel like my university education has much to do with that. During those four years I was pretty much consumed with figuring out how I was going to pay the rent, and also being a idiot of a teenager. School was incidental. What a waste.
Nice.
Just to join in the “kids these days” party, the worst group-project experience I ever had was one time in a sociology course where we were required to write a group paper. This was a reasonably prestigious university and it was an upper-division course. We were in groups of eight. I volunteered to compile and edit everyone’s page-and-a-half contributions to our ten-page paper. How hard could that be?
More than one of them didn’t have a single coherent, grammatically-correct sentence anywhere on the page. Two didn’t know what paragraphs were.
I felt a whole lot better about my writing capabilities in relation to my peers after that project.
Maybe they didn’t realize they’d have to do some actual work–as in brainwork.
A fellow English prof told me she received a negative evaluation comment from a student along those lines. It went like this: “I didn’t like this professor because she made me think!”
(Apparently, making him write in a writing class was already too much to ask.)
Re feedback: when I was at Miami (a total of 16 terms), every term the “best TA” price went to the same TA. The one whose students’ minimum grade was a 90 every time and who would give a 10 out of 10 to someone who’d submitted only 1/5 of the homework because what had been submitted was right? That one!
Her minimum grade was a 90 because the professor had refused to accept all-100 grades.
I would have been pretty pissed if I’d been a good student and gotten the same grades as the classmates not handing anything in. But I know that many of our students just saw “A, great!” and didn’t realize that, since at some point they would all get evaluated against each other (most were premed and wanted to go to our med school), everybody-gets-As doesn’t really help anybody’s prospects, as well as not giving you feedback about where you need to improve.
I agree that’s pretty fucked up, Nava.
Still, having taught at a school where there were a lot of students who wanted to be doctors, i do feel a bit of sympathy for that TA. There is no creature in all of academia that whines and complains and cajoles and argues about their grades more than the pre-med student with a B+.