* Another long day of meetings, a number of them about online teaching (that I don't do) and about AI (which I wish had never been invented; I have fundamentally a "write your own darn paper yourself" clause in all my syllabi but I know people are gonna complain "but some of my other professors" and I'm going to have to push back and it's just very tiresome)
And it moves so fast in what it can do. Some of the questions I had on assignments a year ago would not have been solvable using it; now they are, and I feel like I have to monitor yet another thing and it's like, when do I get time for things that are NOT tiresome to me?
* And the silly season continues. We previously saw the "childless cat ladies" crack; now there's the implication that the "purpose" of postmenopausal women is to watch others' children (presumably for free). I don't like others presuming my "purpose" and requiring someone to have a purpose that involves serving others comes perilously close, in my mind, to "you must earn your right to exist on this Earth" and is aligned with an alleged comment from another politician about it maybe being better if disabled people died - which I said on Bluesky, and I stand by, is literally demonic thinking. And the last thing is the "professors are our enemy" and while I KNOW I should not give those people's opinions credence, I was taught to at least LISTEN to other's opinions - so these past few days I admit my sense of self and who I am has taken a few hard hits and I'm somewhat cranky as a result.
And I realize too, now that I've commented on Roger's blog for today - the reason it irks me in part is that I have a hard enough time right now defining who I am and why I am here, and I don't need input from a heckler's gallery whose role seems to be to "neg" other people who are trying to make their way in the world
* But finally, yesterday there was a reference to some article on accommodations that led to some unpleasant comments on the part of people who either have never taught classes, or, likely, had bad experiences in college
One person commented along the lines of "tenured professors are [jerks]" (euphemizing) and there were a couple other comments about how teaching now is glorified babysitting and while I realize disability concerns raise strong feelings the broad-brush treatment makes me sad and tired.
My own experiences with it: Nearly every semester I get accommodations letters. The vast majority are absolutely frictionless for me to accommodate - if someone needs more time on exams, I give them a choice: I can send them over to Student Support and they can take them over there (I give them a week window in which to take them, Student Support can be hard to schedule). They get proctored over there and an employee hand-carries them to me when the student has completed. Or, if the student prefers, I have a quiet room (an unused research lab) a couple doors down from me, and they can arrange on my office hours to come in and take it. Same situation for someone who requires quiet conditions to take an exam.
I've never had someone who required an oral exam, but I could make that work, too.
Note takers are a little trickier; it can be hard to find someone reliable. In a lot of cases the student asks if they can audio record and I am fine with that provided they are the only ones using the recordings and do not publish parts of them (consent issues, especially with other students in the class speaking). I've never had anyone abuse this.
One semester I had a Blind student; he had a special laptop with an earbud - he would type his notes and it read them back to him. And for handouts and exams, I sent them to Student Support; they had a Braille printer and he read Braille, so he would read the exam questions and then dictate his answers to someone who wrote them down. Most of that was facilitated by Student Support so it was no extra effort on me.
(The point here is apparently the original article had some complaints about the effort involved in accommodation. And perhaps on some campuses it's not as good as on mine; I will say for a smaller school we have excellent disability support and it generally works well).
There are a few cases where it doesn't. I had one actual case and one "warned" case (where the student dropped my class before classes started, but the list of accommodations were daunting and I was warned about their attitude)
In the actual case, it was someone who started to demand extra accommodations- the person had a note taker but didn't trust them, so they wanted to photograph everything I wrote on the board. I do NOT like being photographed and found it unsettling; I got good at jumping back out of frame before they could catch me in it. (I later found out a faculty member in another department complained and the student was told to knock it off). Then they said I needed to call them before labs and exams because they "had no sense of time." That wasn't my job and it felt frankly intrusive, and I did refuse to do that (no push-back, so I guess they knew). And they took the "extra time" on exams to mean "not only do you get 2 hours to complete a 1 hour exam, you get twice as long to complete assignments" and that became a nightmare, and they ALMOST didn't get a final paper in to me in time for me to grade it and complete my grades on time - which would have brought problems down on my head*
(* a lot of people talk about how we shouldn't have deadlines for students but I don't know how you make it work getting grades in when you must get grades in if you don't, and most people don't get work to you until the very last day. It also defeats the "continuous feedback" part of teaching, where you hand back papers with comments so students can work to improve)
The situation that never happened was someone who demanded all kinds of wild things ("I have to sit by a window" which isn't possible in a couple of our classrooms - only one window high up and not near any seats) and it was reported they claimed at being asked to do anything that involved walking (this being a class with a field component) and that if they were displeased, they would threaten to sue. And I was told not to respond or react when they did that, and if they did sue me, the university would "probably" back me up. (One of our good admins - we didn't have a lot of 'em back then - told me in confidence: "I would like them to just do, just go ahead and sue us, so we can buckle down and fight it instead of having to constantly walk on eggshells")
But yeah. Some accommodations are easy, others are harder. I've never had a wheelchair user in my classes with a high field component. I have a vague idea of how I'd make it work but I'd also have to sit down with them and the head of the support services to make sure (a) what I was going to do was acceptable and (b) it didn't "defeat" the learning goals too much (we were told we can negotiate to not honor some requests - like a request of "no research papers" wouldn't fly)
But all of it is a compromise and a dance, a lot of it is done on the fly, and it seems to me a lot of the people who don't regularly work in a classroom that the wear and tear on the one teaching doesn't matter - and that one student I had who constantly demanded things, was intrusive in class, and handed everything in late and said that I had to grade it whenever they got it in, that person put a LOT of stress on me and I don't think it's coincidental I got the diagnosis of hypertension a few weeks after I had had them in class.
But yes, it feels right now like our culture (our species?) is showing a shocking lack of compassion for others, and it's exhausting and also upsetting if you're someone who tries to be compassionate: it feels very one-sided, like you're the only one making an effort, and you also suspect that those things you do will not be done for you when you need them, and that you're really out here on your own.
The heat doesn't help, it's supposed to be a heat index of like 106 F tomorrow....
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