Some work stuff

I am being aggressively advertised to by a "content provider/content management" company. This sort of thing annoys me greatly - they even sent me an e-mail stating:

"We have created an account for you to access your [redacted] instructor and student eResources from a single location. Almost everything you need to teach your courses can be found on a single website and accessed using one single sign-on.

To complete the account creation process, click the link below and follow the instructions: (also redacted)

Please note: the link is only active for 14 days from the receipt of this email. Should the link expire, please contact your Sales Representative."

This bothers me because I tend to be honest and earnest about things, and if I get an e-mail like that my first reaction is, "I missed some meeting somewhere and I'm now expected to use this." But apparently no: apparently it's a marketing tactic. And that makes me all kinds of angry. (There was also a phone message from one of their reps, wanting me to "talk" about my spring 2015 classes with him. NO.)


I don't know. The way I teach now works for me and seems to work for the students, incorporating more online stuff is not something I want to do. I don't WANT something that enables the people who want justification to skip class to skip. I don't want to create more work for myself just to have fewer people show up for my classes, and then have them wonder why their grades are tanking.

 ***

EVERYBODY is sick. I think I had six people (about 10% of the two classes combined) out yesterday, and there may be one or two more I've not heard from. It's kind of exhausting to keep up with. (Yes, I know: six people. But still, that's six different times for them to come in and make up the exam, and six different reasons to remember, and all that. I also have one person in another class who has not taken the second exam yet (they have been out sick for a good half of the class and still persist, despite being counseled to drop). I wrote a make-up for them so I'm going to be unhappy if they never take it. (This is why I generally do not do make ups more than a day after the fact. I got burned too many times after writing essay exams for people and then having them never show. People are too darned irresponsible.)

This is one of my dissatisfactions with how the Financial Aid system works: it's actually in your best interest to accept an F in a class rather than drop and try again next semester. So this has repercussions: for one thing, if you're a faculty member who gives even half a fig, it is distressing to see no-shows and Fs on exams. And it leads to your "DFW" (D, F, Withdraw) percentage being higher: and that's something they're looking at now. Fail "too many" students, and some places, you're "relieved" of teaching that class again. So far, that's not really happened here (though a Temporary person's contract was not-renewed partly based on the fact of their DFW being MUCH higher than that of the other faculty teaching the class. Well, there were other issues as well, but the high DFW provided a good justification).

And yeah, yeah, I know: the standard commentary going these days is college is too expensive and it's not worth it, bla bla bla. I always respond to that with "And if we shut down the colleges and universities, 20 years hence, where will we get the doctors? The engineers?" I mean, yeah, with the economic downturn it's no longer possible to earn Gentleperson's C's in whatever major you consider to be following your bliss, and then you still can get a job in a cubicle, but there's still value in a college degree, ESPECIALLY for kids coming from a lower-income, rural background. Like some of our students.

But Financial Aid is kind of a mess, and I don't know how you'd reform it. (And I don't know that we can cut any further....as I've said before, salaries here are in the 10th percentile or less of comparable institutions, so faculty are not being overpaid, and support staff salaries are a joke....part of it is just how higher education is supported is changing from how it was 20 years ago, and part of it is unfunded mandates, and part of it is that students and parents demand stuff like brand-spanking-new computer centers, and you can't always find an "angel" willing to pay for those....)

But anyway. I do the best job I can, I try to prepare the students the best I can, I try to be flexible in the cases of emergencies (I have a student who had a major life-upheaval; they referenced "having to find a new place to live" and I don't even want to ask as I think they were having some marital issues, so I told them to come in tomorrow on my office hours to make up the exam).

And yeah, it's possible a certain percentage of the people are playing me. Though most of the students who were sick, like seriously sick, bring in a doctor's note. (Hand, foot, and mouth disease is apparently making the rounds). And I tend to feel like it's on THEM if they are playing me - as I once told a colleague about cheating, "I do what I can to look out for it but I figure if they do it so stealthily I can't detect it, I'm just gonna throw up my hands and go "It's THEIR souls," and yes, if a person doesn't believe in the soul or if they don't believe there's some underlying moral code beyond "I wanna get mine using whatever means possible," that doesn't have much impact on a person, but I do like to think that if someone is playing me for a fool, they will either feel guilty about it later on, or they will pay for it somehow later on (Pulling a move like that on the job and getting fired. And yeah, I may be wrong about that ever happening, too).


But I don't know. Kind of like the old saying, "Better a guilty person go free than an innocent one be wrongly imprisoned," I tend to feel like, "better that one student manages to "play" me than I come down really harshly on someone genuinely having problems, but problems not easily documented, and I wind up discouraging them." The reaction of the student who had to find a new place to live, when I told them they could have a day's grace on the exam, told me I made the right choice in that case - the look of genuine relief in their face.