An actual good student
It's easy to let one slip through the cracks here on this blog. It's like love poems. There aren't many because people in love are to busy being in love to write poetry. I don't write about the good students because I'm too busy concentrating on the Nimrods who get to be nimrods without any repercussions for numerous reasons all of which are pretty spurious.
In the last class of the worst class I had, four of my students stayed after. The subject that was brought up had to do with class presentations. You see, because my university has this really strange philosophy of making students responsible for their own grades (or rather they're against that), the standard last day is a collage of class presentations which are all kind of pitiful, some more than others, and which have no point to them whatsoever. Faculty are not required to make this the last day, but they are strongly encouraged to do so. I mean, what are you going to do instead? Give an actual final? People have test anxiety, you know!
So, instead, people get up and they read their final paper for the class and they answer the questions. This gives the teacher a chance to grade the final paper in class and to turn their grades in first thing so that the administrators can look them over and make sure you haven't given anybody an F (see previous post). Tuition is, by the way 25,000 a year.
Anyways, one of my students complained to me. Her reasoning was thus: given that each class was worth about $250 and that she felt it was ridiculous that she should fork out that kind of money so as to listen to her moronic peers jabber on about their uninformed and ridiculous opinions. I mean, none of the things that I'm complaining about were a mystery to her. She absolutely knew that half of the class were a bunch of jack offs and she didn't want to pay to hear them.
I told her I agreed wholeheartedly and even told her who to contact about the issue. During this time, three more of my students joined the conversation, all of whom were extraordinarilly intelligent. The two women getting As in my class were both single mothers (one a mother of a six year old, the other a mother of a 17 and 15 year old), one was dislexic. Of the two other women hanging back, one screwed up an essay to miss the A and another was too much of a writer (she could write a hell of a story but the essay part killed her). They were all of the opinion that things were bad.
One student asked me if I was required to dummy down the material so that the morons could pass. She really wanted to know as she felt it was ridiculous that there were people who could not do what she considered to be rather remedial work. She all but asked me what I was going to give some of the other students as I think it was abominable to her that they even pass. Two of the women listened in silently but nodding. They too had put in long hours and worked their asses off to please their teacher who is, by all accounts, kind of a hard grader, all while working jobs and keeping together families without a husband around to help out, and it kind of pissed them off that there were people who never turned in essays or turned them in late, who strolled in on the last day and just phoned in their presentations (some didn't actually present, they just stood up there with nothing to say). What was clear was that they felt cheated that the class had to slow down to accomodate people who shouldn't be in college.
Now, you don't hear about these people, but they're in the background whenever I write about my lousy students because half of what pisses me off is that these con artists, bullies, and morons think that they should get the same grade as the students who are putting in the work. It irks me that they expect even to pass. I have students who barely speak English who manage to get work done. How should I feel about people who don't work, don't have families, don't do squat and who give me a song and dance whenever I want them to turn something in?
I think this blog gives a rather one sided picture of what it's like to be a teacher or what the education system is like. It isn't that everyone is stupid, it's that you have to work your ass off as a teacher and take a crap load of flak in order to make it fair for the people who deserve to be recognized for their work.
In the last class of the worst class I had, four of my students stayed after. The subject that was brought up had to do with class presentations. You see, because my university has this really strange philosophy of making students responsible for their own grades (or rather they're against that), the standard last day is a collage of class presentations which are all kind of pitiful, some more than others, and which have no point to them whatsoever. Faculty are not required to make this the last day, but they are strongly encouraged to do so. I mean, what are you going to do instead? Give an actual final? People have test anxiety, you know!
So, instead, people get up and they read their final paper for the class and they answer the questions. This gives the teacher a chance to grade the final paper in class and to turn their grades in first thing so that the administrators can look them over and make sure you haven't given anybody an F (see previous post). Tuition is, by the way 25,000 a year.
Anyways, one of my students complained to me. Her reasoning was thus: given that each class was worth about $250 and that she felt it was ridiculous that she should fork out that kind of money so as to listen to her moronic peers jabber on about their uninformed and ridiculous opinions. I mean, none of the things that I'm complaining about were a mystery to her. She absolutely knew that half of the class were a bunch of jack offs and she didn't want to pay to hear them.
I told her I agreed wholeheartedly and even told her who to contact about the issue. During this time, three more of my students joined the conversation, all of whom were extraordinarilly intelligent. The two women getting As in my class were both single mothers (one a mother of a six year old, the other a mother of a 17 and 15 year old), one was dislexic. Of the two other women hanging back, one screwed up an essay to miss the A and another was too much of a writer (she could write a hell of a story but the essay part killed her). They were all of the opinion that things were bad.
One student asked me if I was required to dummy down the material so that the morons could pass. She really wanted to know as she felt it was ridiculous that there were people who could not do what she considered to be rather remedial work. She all but asked me what I was going to give some of the other students as I think it was abominable to her that they even pass. Two of the women listened in silently but nodding. They too had put in long hours and worked their asses off to please their teacher who is, by all accounts, kind of a hard grader, all while working jobs and keeping together families without a husband around to help out, and it kind of pissed them off that there were people who never turned in essays or turned them in late, who strolled in on the last day and just phoned in their presentations (some didn't actually present, they just stood up there with nothing to say). What was clear was that they felt cheated that the class had to slow down to accomodate people who shouldn't be in college.
Now, you don't hear about these people, but they're in the background whenever I write about my lousy students because half of what pisses me off is that these con artists, bullies, and morons think that they should get the same grade as the students who are putting in the work. It irks me that they expect even to pass. I have students who barely speak English who manage to get work done. How should I feel about people who don't work, don't have families, don't do squat and who give me a song and dance whenever I want them to turn something in?
I think this blog gives a rather one sided picture of what it's like to be a teacher or what the education system is like. It isn't that everyone is stupid, it's that you have to work your ass off as a teacher and take a crap load of flak in order to make it fair for the people who deserve to be recognized for their work.
posted by Monstro D. Whale | 3:57 PM
2 Comments:
I applaud these people. They deserve what they earn. And when they have their degrees, which they most certainly will, the people who hire them will know that these people earned the right to be where they are.
They won't be regarded as slackers that somehow made it through the system. They will, however, be regarded as people who should go into postbaccalaureate studies.
These are the kind of people who deserve a break, now and then, because they are working their behinds off the rest of the time.
And if they get that 'A' in the hard-grading teacher's class, that should be enough for them to know that they did better than anyone else. They don't actually need to know what grades everyone else got. They just need to know that those who didn't do their work are going to have to dig their way out of the bad grade that such slackers are assured of getting.
By the way, I really think we ought to bring back 'slacker' for common use in education and the workplace.
My blog is once again active, by the way. :)
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