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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/fionafied on 2023-10-07 14:08:21.

I teach an introductory stem class that is required for the major and I have a student who took it and failed last semester with a D. Students who want to major in this discipline need at least a C-

This semester they’re retaking it and just failed their first exam with the lowest grade in class.

I spoke to this student and they seem pretty confident they’ll be able to bring it back up. I explained to them that even acing the rest of the class (which is incredibly unlikely) they’d end up with maybe a C or C+. It’s a passing grade but the courses only become more challenging.

For additional context, this student is a junior and if they don’t pass the class they’re now left with the option of switching majors only next spring with 3 semesters to complete a new major. I think it’s best to encourage this student to explore options while there’s still more time but I’m not sure how to bring this up tactfully.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/BridgeIntrepid6285 on 2023-10-07 06:00:05.

Greetings, everyone! I am hoping to get some insight from others on how best to handle situations like this in the future.

Some background: I am a young (mid 20s) female physics professor at a community college, and this is my first year teaching.

I recently had a student (about 10 years older than me) get very aggressive with me over her exam grade. She failed the exam, and upon receiving her exam score began to raise her voice and blame me for her score. She had missed two weeks of class prior to the exam, was performing poorly on the homework, and did not bother to ever schedule office hours with me. The first thing she told me after she got her score was that she was having a crisis that day and it was unfair that she had to take the exam that day. She had sent me a vague email the day of the exam saying that she “was not feeling well… likely too much stress,” to which I told her if she had a doctor’s note, she could take the exam later that week but no later because it wouldn’t be fair to the other students who had less time to prepare. I recommended that she come in and take the exam with everyone else, even if she didn’t feel as prepared as she’d like because I was allowing students to do test corrections. This was only my suggestion. She then blamed me for making her feel like she “had to come in” because apparently my email made it sound like the test corrections were going to be done the same day in class after the exam, and that’s the only reason she took it that day. It is CLEARLY stated in the syllabus that exam corrections are to be completed within one week of the exam, not the day of the exam…

She also had exam accommodations, and the exam needed to be scheduled through the disabilities services center one week prior to the exam (school policy). I even reminded her when we were one week out from the exam so that she could schedule her exam, but she told me she decided she didn’t need the accommodations. Then the day of the exam she emailed me and said she needed the accommodations so I came to class an hour early to give her an extra hour, which is not required by school policy. The official policy is that any accommodations must be made through the disabilities services center, but at this point it was too late for that since she missed the deadline. I made this clear, but I wanted to be lenient. She ended up turning the exam in after an hour, so she did not even make use of the extended time. Then after receiving her score she had the audacity to tell me me “I know you’re new to teaching so there’s a lot for you to learn and you don’t know how accommodations work.” She then proceeded to tell me how the exam was not appropriately written because sometimes I used words and sometimes I used numbers (welcome to physics!) and it confused her and “it wasn’t appropriate to do that.” There was a lot more back and forth and she grew increasingly agitated and kept raising her voice until I just told her I appreciated the feedback and would take it into consideration for next time. No other students had issues with the exam. I talked to other professors and they said the exam difficulty and results were quite normal.

I consider myself to be extremely lenient and kind, and I would do a lot to support my students and help them succeed. Maybe that was my mistake. It just sucks to see someone take advantage of that and use it against me. Most of my students have expressed a lot of appreciation for how much I go out of my way to support them (I work a full-time job that is not teaching but still make myself available for office hours pretty much every single day of the week including weekends and even did extra exam review the night before the exam, which this student didn’t bother showing up to). This experience kind of ruined things for me and makes me want to be “strict” moving forward, in a sense, to protect myself from this sort of harassment.

how would you have handled a situation like this, and is there anything I can do to avoid this from happening in the future?

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/1hyacinthe on 2023-10-07 07:42:35.

So this actually happened.

We all know faculty meetings are a little foretaste of hell. At our recent department meeting, we were discussing student behavior and how to file conduct reports.

Colleague: I had a student come up to my desk and chat with me. He was kind of boxing in the air, you know, as a joke. But it made me think. If a student punched me in the face, what can I do? Could I sit on him to protect the other students and myself?

Department head: struggles to answer for several minutes, without A. Telling the dude his safety didn't matter or B. giving permission to sit on kids

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Outrageous-Ad-9703 on 2023-10-07 01:07:35.

My Screen Studies 101 (equivalent) unit gets heaps of students taking it as an elective. The unit covers narratology, the formal aspects of film and how they can be used to create meaning/feeling, and theories of film authorship, art, and genre. Probably too much for a single first year unit, but that’s the reality of an arts unit these days.

Genuine introduction from a student in our first tutorial: “I hate watching movies. I think they’re too long and boring. But this will be easy because I’m studying psychology, which is more advanced than studying movies.”

This is not the first time someone has said this in my unit. The idea psychology is more ‘advanced’ than my media and screen theory units is a common, and personally quite offensive, statement.

Needless to say, these students often perform the worst because they don’t do the work.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/hornybutired on 2023-10-06 20:15:14.

Hey, all. I've been teaching at the collegiate level for well over a decade. I have a great full time position that I love. I have tenure. I am presenting at a conference next week.

But holy hell I am struggling.

I have had bad periods, times when I only kept my damn job by luck and black magic, but this past spring I was diagnosed bipolar and a LOT of stuff clicked into place. "Oh... THAT'S WHY..." Yeah. Like that.

Knowing why I went through long patches where doing even the basics of my job seemed difficult has not helped as much as I would like. I've been struggling to find a medication regimen that really works for me and I've been fighting through a bad spell that has me walking on eggshells around my dean for all the classes I've had to cancel lately. He's aware of my diagnosis, but there's only so much that'll help me if I can't get in front of a class and deliver the material the students need. I hate myself when I'm like this and I feel like I'm not only screwing up a job I love and worked hard to get, I feel like I'm failing my students.

Are there any other profs here dealing with bipolar or another serious diagnosis that really makes doing the job a challenge? How do you deal? Any solidarity or advice would be helpful.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Nervous_Lobster4542 on 2023-10-06 21:04:54.

....and the grade grubbing, incredulousness, and black cloud negativity come out. My least favorite time of the year. You didn't really have to study that hard to do well on exams in your other classes? We didn't go over an application question word for word in class? You misunderstood a question and as a result your answer was wrong, but your reasoning for your wrong answer was sound? Gaaahhhhh I don't care!

I had a student with a B on the exam in my office looking like their world was over. Maybe you should study differently? "Nah". Maybe you should take the next exam in a different space? "Wouldn't work". Don't worry, there are still plenty of points left in the semester! "Won't accept it". A B is also a solid exam score, by the way. "Not for me". Fine, stay salty then.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/forestfire2 on 2023-10-06 20:18:29.

I’m a newer professor, without any experience teaching anyone other than adults, so please excuse what may be a simple question:

I teach in a large, urban setting that has recently enabled high school students to take as many general education college courses as they want. The public high schools here are overcrowded, understaffed, and they push students through. The schools are known for bad behavior of students. I feel for the kids who want an education but can’t get one because of how disruptive public high school is, but now it is bleeding into the college classroom.

I teach in the evening, so I always have about 6 high school students in a class of 20. I expect I will always have this amount because evening classes are good for a high school students schedule. Most students are respectful of their peers, but I have noticed last semester, and this semester in particular, that there is some high school-antics, general disregard of others: rude to peers, rude to me, shirking rules, talking in back of class over others.

Basically, how do I firmly tell these students that while I cannot make them care about the course, they are disrupting the experience for the students who do care and who paid to be there?

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/rattus_illegitimus on 2023-10-06 19:41:48.

It was a nursing student in an anatomy and physiology class. God help us.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/SocOfRel on 2023-10-06 17:03:44.

I made a dumb mistake today. I'm the problem, it's me.

I'm curious what you would do in this situation.

On Wednesday, our faculty support person made copies of a test that I gave this morning. When I handed out the tests, a student asked "Is it supposed to start with question 7?" I said no, then discovered that only every other page had been copied. This is on me as I should have checked the tests before handing them out. Mistakes happen.

So, now a 40 question midterm exam is 20 questions. I do scatter material around on the test, so the majority of topics ended up with at least 1 question, though one section of material definitely ended up overrepresented. This midterm was to be worth 1/5 of the final grade. In the moment, I said take the exam you have in front of you and I'll figure out how to handle it later. Another section of the same class came in immediately after and they took the same half-exam.

What would you do for grading?

p.s. One student ended up with the original that I had provided to make the copies, and took the whole thing even though I'd made it clear half the test was missing. Honestly that's got me more confused!

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Doctor_Schmeevil on 2023-10-06 16:39:39.

I empathize with wanting students to be able to dig themselves out of holes, but this seems to be structuring the incentives entirely wrong. You would think people would *want* to know if they are getting it or not. Gift link is free to read.

Edited to remove ugly link.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Iron_Rod_Stewart on 2023-10-06 16:28:48.

American profs, what costume will you wear to work on Halloween?

Yes, it's undignified. But I do it anyway.

The last few years I've worn a star trek top.

I think this year I'm going to be a candy corn. Orange pants, yellow shirt, white cap

Other ideas?

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/liquidInkRocks on 2023-10-06 13:33:10.

This week I attended my first meeting driven by AI. Without being too specific, it's a monthly meeting of specific faculty from each department in the college. The only item on the agenda was to define a pedagogical concept that administration wants us to use to sell our programs to prospective students. In the agenda were several paragraphs, attributed to ChatGPT, describing the concept. I get that AI is kinda cool and new and interesting but it feels academically lazy to let a robot lead our discussion.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Mishmz on 2023-10-06 12:58:14.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Too-Old-For-This-57 on 2023-10-06 00:44:22.

Students were asked to record a question about the project status presentation made by each team (19) in the class during a week. Three to four students ask their questions during the 2 minute Q&A at the end of each presentation. Online students and campus students who missed a lecture can do this from the lecture recordings. The goal is to learn to listen to presentations and ask questions about the material presented as practice for meetings in academia and industry.

Two students didn't get the message. Ninety-five other students did.

Campus Undergrad Student:

A student copied and pasted the same generic question for each team, unrelated to the course topic or the specific presentation. We didn't give credit for duplicate questions on the assignment. Some students had 1 or 2. He did it for all of them.

Complained that the assignment didn't say the questions had to be unique and said he reported me to the university for unfair practices in the email he sent to me. Turns out the assignment was still open and I allowed multiple submissions so he completed the assignment as intended while still complaining that it was unfair.

Online Undergrad Student:

"Hey XXXX, for my I5 I wrote no questions for all the teams that presented, it was genuinely because I had no questions. However because of that, I got 0 on that part and my grades dropped to 60%, will you please consider giving me another chance so I can come up with more questions for it?"

Me:

"It’s easy to have no questions when you did not watch the recorded presentations in the first place. So no, you don’t get a second chance.

Remember that attendance is required and it appears you haven't watched any of the recorded lectures this semester."

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/nerdyjorj on 2023-10-05 16:44:22.

I'm curious as to how many of us were actually taught how to deliver effectively in some formal manner.

View Poll

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Uninfluenced123 on 2023-10-06 03:32:20.

I am an adjunct but I am also a therapist. I specialize in trauma treatment. The vast majority of clients are happy to have someone to talk to and to receive support. A few won’t like our style so they will go somewhere else but generally there is a mutual positive regard in my experience.

Teaching feels very different. I get the sense the majority of my students meet me with distain. I am a woman who looks young. I sense that in general students resent my power and there is a lot of projection of blame and responsibility when things don’t work the way they want. For example, I actively try to greet my students but am frequently met with apathy and even contempt.

Many students are great one on one but I have experienced a great deal of passive and direct aggression.

I have a friend who is also an adjunct and a health professional who commented on the difference between their teaching experiences and private practice outside of academia.

Anyone else feel like we are hated? Are we the enemy?

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Imjastv on 2023-10-06 01:49:21.

Well, I guess I knew this was coming. I was hired for a non-permanent contract, but the chair of the department was trying to move budgets around to keep me longer because they liked me and my work. Today they got an official answer from above saying that there is not enough budget for my contract to be renewed. Looks like even with the best people on your side, the system will still be there to crush your spirit.

I'm a bit bummed, this contract runs until after the start of our winter semester in early 2024, so finding a new contract is going to be a pain. I can't even start looking for jobs now apart from starting to contact my network of former colleagues/employers and see if they need a desperate TA to run whichever first year class everyone is running away from.

I got used to being treated well - I was paid for full time work, had amazing advantages and good work conditions with good students and enough time for research on the side. I got used to the luxury of having enough money to pay my rent, save money, have expensive hobbies and buy whatever I wanted (while being reasonable) while still having money in the bank at the end of the month. Now, it's back to silly TA contracts with crappy hours and barely enough in my account to pay my rent and maybe some cheap hobbies. I'm even considering taking a second job if it comes to that because there is no way I am giving up on everything after so many years of sacrificing my comfort during the PhD.

I probably have something lined up for next September (I was hoping they'd find budget to keep me on until that potentially started), and if that fails I'll fall back on my feet in any case so I'm not too worried about my future long-term, and I am lucky to be in a situation where my partner and family can give a hand if (when) I can't afford my rent, so it could definitely be worse, but I am still very bummed out by this.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/amprok on 2023-10-05 20:15:00.

I almost never have rants because I love my job with my whole heart. Honestly, if i didn't have a family, I would simply never leave my building. My students are the amazing and kind and talented, and I have 50 faculty members, of whom i'd take a bullet for 48 of them... I have two amazing office professionals who i always introduce as 'the women who keep me from getting fired'. My job is amazing.

But this semester is a bummer. Years ago, there used to be serious theft issues in my building. Presumably from students. Lots of little shit. Some medium shit (stealing art supplies from each other or whatever) some big shit, stealing computers, some huge shit, stealing all the furniture from the student lounge (!?)

To combat this, I loosened all restrictions. Made the building open 24/7, refused any cameras, gave students access to everything. All theft stopped immediately. This was like, 2016 ish.

This semester, the thefts have started again. I keep getting report after report of dumb shit getting stollen. Art supplies, which are expensive (art/design being the second most expensive major a student can pick, yikes) personal items, etc.

I started a thing in our bathrooms a few years ago where students/staff/faculty/alumni donate nice toiletries, so students can freshen up between class. Things like, disposable razors and shaving cream, spray deodorant, perfumes, lotion, facial wash, mouth wash with little dixie cups, name brand menstruation products, shit like that. Again, this is all out of pocket for who ever donates, and it's A NICE THING TO HAVE. now that shit's getting stolen.

It's all such a bummer. Im just ranting here. Thanks for being my twitter i guess?

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/jt_keis on 2023-10-05 21:05:55.

To be fair, a small portion of that number are students writing accommodated exams.

So far, I've had numerous accounts of concussions and dead relatives...

The ones that are really annoying me are those who outright say they simply forgot there was a midterm today.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/kingofthepotatoes8 on 2023-10-05 17:00:28.

I got an email yesterday from a student at 3:30PM about an assignment. The student forwarded her original email to me at 6:30PM when I did not respond. I logged in this morning and saw her messages.

I want to tell the student that it is rude to do this and that she should wait at least a business day or two before following up. How do I get my point across without sounding cranky?

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/DrSpacecasePhD on 2023-10-05 18:31:02.

Hi everyone! I do my teaching in the natural sciences, but also follow some goings on in the literary world and thought you all would empathize with this. Mods, let me know if this is inappropriate and I'll take it down. If you want to skip to the 'drama,' it's after the line break down below.

Anyway, as you all likely know, publishing in literary magazines is difficult to say the least, and the publishing world at large has been struggling. Unlike publications in many of our fields which have a very niche audience, the goal in literature is to get exposure from broad audiences. As a result, submitting (and being published in) older, well-known lit magazines is 'prestigious' and good for careers in a similar fashion to getting a manuscript in Nature, Science, or Cell.

If you search for prestigious literary reviews, you'll see a list including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and yes - The Gettysburg Review. It's one of those journals that creative writing faculty would love to have listed in their publication lists. As wikipedia explains, it is a frequent source of material for anthologies like The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, and The Best American Short Stories series and has included writing from the likes of E. L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Enter yesterday's drama. Gettysburg Review was informed by the college's administration that they're shutting down the publication, essentially without having consulted the editors at all. The administration cited budgetary concerns and declining college enrollments, and that they have to focus "on the programs and activities that directly and significantly enhance student demand and the overall student experience.” English and literature is relatively one of their bigger departments (4% of students) along with history for obvious reasons (8%), and they'd even recently gotten a donation from a former English major to the tune of $10 million.

As you can imagine, this stirred up quite a bit of drama in the literary world, along with emails to the university president and provost. It has come out that apparently neither of them had heard of the journal, and neither had the admissions department. An email soon went out from the admin to students and faculty declaring that yes, the cut was official, and leadership have been citing budgetary concerns and potential layoffs to turn it into a sort of Hunger Games competitive scenario. To no one's surprise, they also began blocking emails.

In some ways, I'm not shocked. Perhaps the magazine was a victim of its own success, being too high tier for student writers to publish in. Puzzlingly, no efforts were made to reach out to the editors, strategize on grant funding, seek a buyer for the publication, or find a donor to keep it going. Admin also seemed unaware of the journal's student internship program, and did not seek to bargain over who gets published e.g. to create opportunities for outstanding student authors from GC to get exposure in the journal.

The university student newspaper has a great overview of the story that's worth a read. We all deal with admin headaches sometimes, but this one seems to be next level.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/psychprof1812 on 2023-10-05 15:25:05.

Have anyone else noticed a growing trend of students saying this? I see it all over the college and college rant subs, but it’s also pretty pervasive at my own university.

Is it just a way for students to try to justify their own poor performance by placing the blame on the professor?

Is it because they have professors who teach in a different way than they’re accustomed?

Is it because they don’t know what teaching means?

Is there actually merit to the claim? Are some professors just not teaching?

I’m sure it’s a combination of all the above and more, but I’m curious if others have noticed this as well.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/Applied_Mathematics on 2023-10-05 00:01:33.

In short I'm starting year 2 as an assistant professor and very happy, but as I start to serve on committees and build working relationships with students, the power aspect is a little daunting because I'm not used to it.

I grew up in an abusive household and I've worked out related issues through lots of therapy, but the anxiety remains that I might be too harsh in this way or that. That I might push too hard or not listen carefully enough.

My intuition for what NOT to do is consistent with the various HR-style meetings/seminars about sexual harassment and such put on by departments or schools I've worked at.

However, these focus on how to avoid making students uncomfortable and avoiding legal issues, as opposed to helping foster a positive environment beyond that.

Would anyone happen to know of any useful resources to this end?

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/muaddib8619 on 2023-10-05 04:33:42.

Like the title says. I teach at a big R-1 in a STEM school. Up until quite recently, in fact up until last year, I really loved teaching and looked forward to every semester. Yes, there were issues post-pandemic, but I didn't feel those first few semesters like the grad students I usually teach were still trying and pushing themselves; the quality of their projects may not have been as good as pre-pandemic but it wasn't far.

This year has just been a nightmare. The quality of work has taken a complete nosedive this year, and the principal reason I can figure is that students have stopped giving a damn. Like, completely. I had the same cohort last semester, and it was the same problem. Set a deadline for students to show up with work in class, and most of them show up with 20-30% of it done. Their final presentations were atrocious.

It's only been 3 weeks so far but their first assignment clearly shows they don't want to work this fall either. Some students clearly didn't give even as much time doing them as I spent giving them written feedback: 80% of them clearly didn't even give more than 30m to homework this week. Work ethic seems to have gone down the drain - I spent the last two weeks spending half of class time to exercises designed to prep them to deliver on this assignment and some of the work handed in read like the students were treating the whole thing as a joke.

Not to mention when I gave some not-very-harsh critique to one assignment that read like it had been cobbled together by ChatGPt (some of the sentences literally did not go together - these are masters students in their second year and some of them have the English skills of an 8th grader), the student went and complained to my program chair. The chair took it all well - he knows what the deal is - but honestly, higher education is in the gutter if this is the sense of entitlement at play: they expect As while not even attempting to put in the work for a C.

Anyway, rant over, but seriously considering quitting academia. I was never in it much for research, the service they force me to do is overwhelming, teaching was the only thing keeping me going.

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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/qpzl8654 on 2023-10-05 05:14:26.

First Example: A colleague told me that instead of papers (since students were turning in crap and APA citations were too hard) that I should allow students to turn in a paper with pictures.

A paper, but instead of words, pictures.

In college.

!!

Second best: Leadership suggested that my class should follow a PE style format and have a sign-in sheet. Like, nothing else to the class, students come, sign in, get an A, and leave.

I kid you not.