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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Since I Hear Crickets; or, Worst Office Hour Ever
I would have made this a contest, but that would seem uncouth since I would certainly win. Who wants to play a rigged game?
Since we have an abundance of good will brimming around here, I thought I would take advantage of it by suggesting we discuss matters we all must face regardless of theoretical orientation. I mean, who hasn’t walked in on undergraduates having se...I mean, I think we all have had issues with inappropriate undergraduate behavior. Why not vent a little, since 90% of the people who read this are marking papers as I type?
Also, since we’re all concerned about the impact of Google on our careers, I want to invite everyone to vent anonymously. Are you logged in? Log out! Cut loose! There is no lonelier time in the quarter/semester than that last week, so I invite you to join the community of the lonely and share your desperation.
I think this maybe should be a regular feature around this time of year. Posting slows down, blood pressure rises, and we’re only human after all, no? Why not vent in safety? Isn’t this The Valve?
Comments
I don’t know so much about the inappropriate student behaviour but I will provide this quote from a student’s paper I marked this afternoon. Hopefully, you will all feel my pain:
“Following is a mix of Machiavelli’s quotes from his works, some of which demonstrate his ability to justly justify a prince’s rule, and some which unjustly justify a prince’s rule, as well as some quotes in which, in retrospect, he may have been incorrect in justly justifying a prince’s methods to rule.”
Since I’m not an academic, I don’t have to bother with anonymity. Offhand, one memorable teaching experience was the time when, as a T.A., I had a special coaching session for Astronomy 100 students that any student who had questions could go to. I was trying to explain how to do scientific notation to someone who’d asked about it (something you’re supposed to learn in high school, but hey). “So you subtract negative one over here and get positive one...” I was saying when the student said that was the part he had trouble with. He didn’t know how to subtract negative numbers.
I froze. How do you teach someone how to subtract? I had long since forgotten. Finally, another bored student (who had ostentatiously raised his newspaper during the long scientific-notation bit) snapped from behind it, “Try the number line!” “Good idea!” I replied, happy to have something to move things along with. So I drew a number line on the chalkboard and dutifully showed how to subtract negative numbers. I’m really thankful that he didn’t suggest the Sesame Street subtraction song or something; I was just rattled enough so that I might have tried it.
After the session, I asked the original questioner what his major was. Fashion. Well, he was dressed better than I was.
My very first year of teaching, I had a student approach me after the first day of class, explain that he needed to take the class in order to graduate, but that he also needed to take another class being offered that semester only at a neighboring community college at the exact same time as my class, so he had decided to register for my class....and never attend. He swore he’d do the reading and show up for exams. Would that be okay?
(I tried to talk him out of it; I failed. He went forward with his plan; he failed the class.)
My favorite student malapropism: regarding the main character’s indiscretions in The Coquette, a student wrote that as a young woman Eliza could not be blamed for having merely “soiled her oats.”
Last semester, a student e-mailed me the night before a paper was due to confess that he had lost his laptop, which contained the paper, in a bar. I think you’d have to be having a pretty good time to forget about your laptop, and he admitted that he had been partying “with the hockey team.” After recovering the computer, he handed in the paper. Its topic? Joyce’s story “Counterparts” reveals the destructive effects of alcohol abuse in Ireland. No irony, nor even embarrassment.
Cannon, he was just following that old writing dictum “write what you know”.
Russell Arben Fox, I’ve passed (with B’s, I think, since I wasn’t interested in them) classes that I never attended except for test days—in some classes, lectures are just regurgitations of the textbook. The problem is that you have to have someone attending the class tell you when the test days are. And then you need to find the room.
My favourtite student malapropism: a whole essay on Old Curiosity Shop that discussed the character of ‘Little Neil’. A whole essay!
Once I had a Candaian student who returned to Canada to spend Christmas with her parents. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but on her return to London for the first day of Term 2 she did not have the essay she had been supposed to have written over the break. ‘Why haven’t you done the essay?’ I asked her, as we both sat in my office. ‘Well, we live out in the middle of nowhere in Canada,’ she said, ‘and I had some trouble at home with my computer. It froze.’ ‘That’s not much, of an excuse, is it now,’ I said, with a slight intimation of sternness. ‘It froze? All you do was turn it off and turn it on again ... that can hardly have taken you all Christmas to do.’ ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Not froze in that sense. It froze. There were icicles hanging off it. Things are like that in Canada in winter’ ‘Ah,’ I said.
I’m sure a lot of you have had this experience, but I’ll report it nonetheless. Comes from a philosopher friend of mine.
During reading period, two students walk in during office hours with their books and their notebooks. They sit down, put down their papers, and say “Professor X, we just don’t understand this.” Professor X, feeling equal to the task (this is what office hours are for, after all), asks “well, which parts don’t you understand.” They gesture broadly to the books and the notebooks in front of them and say “all of it.” [Professor X: “perhaps you should come see me next semester...."]
Rich, I have some experience teaching math to fashion majors. That’s not uncommon.
Rich, I actually did the same thing myself back when I was undergrad--it was some Physical Science 100-type required class, and I stopped attending around October. I should have mentioned in my comment above that this was an upper-level, lecture and reading intensive course. I explained this to the student, but he essentially said that he didn’t mind doing poorly, just so long as he scraped by.
As spectacularly bad has his tests were, I think he still might have gotten a “D” if his book report hadn’t consisted of random paragraphs from the book, transcribed verbatim.
Once, in graduate literature seminar, I asked my students to explain the difference between special and general relativity. Blank stares. Then, I asked for a brief synopsis of Wittgenstein’s private language argument. They couldn’t do that either. Nor explain the difference between analytic and synthetic cubism. I could go on and on. Those darn kids.
I’m a graduate TA at a major American computer science dept and I was one at a major Canadian one as well, and you know what? After several semesters of TAing, I have almost no funny stories about my students that really come to mind. Almost all the funny stuff, well, *I* was the butt of the joke. Even in discussion sections, it was either me who was inadvertently funny or the tech support.
I had a graduate professor who never got tired of telling the one about his undergraduate student who began her essay, “Jane Austen entertained her family by diddling with her pen.” My best one is the slightly more tame, “Sir Gawain was adept at marital arts.”
Adam: your student was having you on. Unless the computer was in the garage. Or the power went out. Not that I am Canadian, you understand.
Damn, Scott, I just read your post. I have nothing to beat that. (But, don’t you people have locks?)
And talk about gaps in their education: yesterday I had to explain who Vincent Price was.
Few minutes later: using a pseudonym isn’t easy; my fake email was unacceptable. And why am I using a pseudonym anyway? Just so people don’t know that I was chatting about Vincent Price in my 18thc lit class? Which isn’t in Canada?