Okay, maybe not. Maybe I won't leave this gig after all. Maybe I just have to channel that part of me that is "quietly and politely evil sometimes" (as my friend Doug says about me).
Student comes by wanting to know "are we doing anything tomorrow?" (urge to kill, rising, rising...seriously, if they KNEW how many times I have heard that question and resent it).
But this time, I had a response prepared - this is the stats class, the one that is driving me batguano crazy because so many people have missed and then don't know how to do the tests and then earn 20%s on their homeworks and are all sad and angry over it.
I said: "In fact, we are. We are doing correlation coefficients. They will be on the final, you will need to know how to calculate one. And the way it's written up in the book is not at all clear; you need to see someone work an example to understand it. You will be sorry if you skip class."
And he kind of hemmed and hawed - it was a social thing he was going to that might lead to miss class - but then he assured me he'd be there. So I need to stop any desire I have to be liked or even respected, I just need to be the tough old witch who tells it like it is.
I'm putting an attendance policy in my classes - all of 'em - next semester. Now, I hate attendance policies, first, because this is NOT fifth grade, they are adults and should know that they need to be in class, and second, because all of the logistics and the dealing with doctor's notes and obituaries and sad faced people demanding excused absences drives me wild. But I am so tired of people skipping for two solid weeks and then coming back and being SURPRISED there are consequences to it.
4 comments:
That is an awesome response.
I think that telling it like it is can actually bring about respect, if not like; I know that a lot of my profs who were into telling it like it was were the most respected ones.
Huh, things have really changed since I was in school. I would NEVER have had the courage to skip class and then expect the prof to deal with it, instead of the other way around.
I am trying to just give up on the notion that "adults should know better". Instead I think there are two kinds of people: people who understand the necessity of meeting obligations and people who think "it's all about me". I've never known one of the latter to grow out of it.
I know that's probably not helpful.
Ditto what Lydia said. That was an absolutely awesome professional response to a dumbass question.
In some ways, I can see the whole in loco parentis thing with respect to universities. (My school was a bit out of the norm--our average student was 26, had been in the workforce for a while, and was paying on thier own dime.) You are the adult teaching/leading the class, not the drinking buddy or sob sister. You are not there to be their friend, you are there to teach them the skills they will need to go on to do what they do.
Keep on telling it like it is. Sometimes the telling won't be fun, and you have my sympathy there. Think of it as a teaching opportunity. The student has one last chance to discover that actions have consequences, and better to do it here where one fails a class instead of losing one's job/house/freedom.
Post a Comment