It’s the day before the final in the class I TA for, and I am about to snap. This entire semester has been a disaster. At this point I am about ready to slaughter anyone who has anything to do with this class except the other TA, who feels exactly the same way I do.
The problem starts with the class in general. Is taught by a professor who is a relic from the 60s. It is supposed to be a classical myth course, but it ends up getting entangled with his own private fixation on hallucinogenic mushrooms as the root of all human religions. So the class is a confusing mass of lectures and dense readings from his secondary publications on topics such as 3rd century AD Greek shamanism, etc. But in previous years this hasn’t mattered, because the professor is also the king of grade inflation, and everyone got good grades even if they learnt nothing in the class, and it worked. Not in a teaching-learning sense, of course, but in a he was happy-they were happy sense. The TAs? As long as the test format was easy to grade, we didn’t care.
But this year he got a bit of a smackdown from the administration, and has formulated a more rigid grading policy, wherein still no one fails the class but very, very few people get As and Bs. The students, of course, were not privy to this information, and signed up for the class to fulfill their humanities distribution requirement in the usual droves, expecting an easy class with a guaranteed high grade.
The average on the midterm (graded by yours truly and the one other TA) was a 68. Ouch. They got their grades the day of the deadline to drop a class without penalty. So not everyone who might have wanted to drop when they saw their grade had the time.
This means that after the midterm, we had approximately 200 angry and bewildered students who, as far as they were concerned, weren’t getting what they had signed up for. But they mostly didn’t take it out on us TAs, for whatever reasons. In fact they were actually easier for us to deal with than in previous years. For the most part they did so badly that they didn’t even bother with the usual post-midterm ritual of coming in and telling me how I had graded their test wrong and demanding the extra 7 points they had found because of my mistakes. No point. The C range stretched from 27 all the way to 79- what does 7 points matter?
Meanwhile, just to give you an idea of the circumstances we were working under, the professor had conveniently scheduled his class so that on Wednesdays it fell smack dab in the middle of one of the graduate seminars that both the other TA and I had to take. So we’d been missing 1/3 of the class from the beginning, without any more updates from him than “Oh, you know, you’ve both TA’d for me before.” So neither of us has any idea what happens in class on Wednesdays. He seems to like making important announcements on Wednesdays. Such as when our office hours are, before we’ve decided on them and told him when they actually are. Or that all 200 students should feel free to email us early for their midterm grades so they can be sure and make the drop deadline. (He didn’t give them our email addresses, though. Just told them to call the department and ask. Boy, were the secretaries pissed.)
Now, starting after the midterm, the professor decides he’s so ahead in his material that he will be cancelling all Friday classes from now on. So now the other TA and I are attending only 1 meeting a week (Monday), and are feeling completely out of touch with the class, a feeling that is well-founded, since, on another Wednesday, he announces the dates for the final and make-up final. But doesn’t actually tell us what they are. We’re forced to puzzle them out from student emails to us asking about the exams.
That pretty much brings us to last Friday, when I came in to proctor the early final for all those who had a conflict with the scheduled final time. The professor tells me that he won’t be in to administer the actual final, either, because it’s at 9 AM and he “has trouble finding parking that early.” That’s right, the actual reason he gave me, to my face, about why we will be getting no fucking help from him in dealing with his own class, which he hasn’t conducted a meeting of in almost three weeks due to various cancellations on his part (and the last week being review sessions taught by me and the other TA), is that it’s too hard to park his car. At the same time, he informed me that since he’s leaving for Italy soon, the other TA and I will just have to grade all 200 finals in 2 days so he can get the grades turned in. We, of course, have papers and finals of our own, and he could at least grade a few of his own damn finals to ease the load since time is so limited, but oh no. We’ll just have to get it done, somehow. Without him.
Things have gone downhill from there, hardly anyone showed up to the scheduled early final, which had been announced multiple times in class, but starting immediately afterwards I was deluged with email from student who had suddenly discovered, 3 days before the final, that they had a conflict and couldn’t take it, when was the make-up final? So now I have to schedule individual appointment make-ups for more students than attended the scheduled session. I have additionally received dozens of other stupid emails, asking me what’s on the test (outright), what the format is (something covered in 3 classes and all the review sessions), and just now, finally, the last straw.
A student just emailed me to ask if we could meet tomorrow and go over her midterm, because she’s “found a few points taken off that probably shouldn’t have been.” That’s right. She wants me to change her midterm grade AFTER THE FUCKING FINAL, which is tomorrow at 9 AM. “Can we just meet afterwards?”
My instinct is to tell her politely to forget it, that I’m not changing a midterm grade after the final has been administered, but then I think of the professor and exactly how much support I’m likely to get from him, and I’m just tearing my hair out. This class is a disaster, thank og it will be over soon.
Wow. This is really long. Sorry, but it’s a whole semester’s worth of rants escaping at once.
