Favorite student emails

[the_geneticist]

They want to know if the summer 2 week version is less work than the regular version.

Yep!  We offer a full YEAR of organic chemistry + labs over the summer. 
Students are constantly thinking that 1 year in 10 weeks = less work/easy class
Like surely we can't be teaching them all of the content.  Right?
Wrong!
It's WAY, WAY more work.  They don't cut any content.  The class is 6 hours a day, 5 days a week.  Welcome to class! Your first exam is Thursday.
Unless you love chemistry, have no other obligations (no job, no kids, no long commute), and don't need extra time to process or practice this class will ruin you and your GPA.

[dr_evil]

They want to know if the summer 2 week version is less work than the regular version.

Yep!  We offer a full YEAR of organic chemistry + labs over the summer. 
Students are constantly thinking that 1 year in 10 weeks = less work/easy class
Like surely we can't be teaching them all of the content.  Right?
Wrong!
It's WAY, WAY more work.  They don't cut any content.  The class is 6 hours a day, 5 days a week.  Welcome to class! Your first exam is Thursday.
Unless you love chemistry, have no other obligations (no job, no kids, no long commute), and don't need extra time to process or practice this class will ruin you and your GPA.

Because "easy" and "organic chemistry" always go together, don't they?  I tell students that plan to take any chem class in the summer to not take anything else that term.  I should begin my summer classes with this clip from "Jurassic Park".

[Puget]

They want to know if the summer 2 week version is less work than the regular version.

Yep!  We offer a full YEAR of organic chemistry + labs over the summer. 
Students are constantly thinking that 1 year in 10 weeks = less work/easy class
Like surely we can't be teaching them all of the content.  Right?
Wrong!
It's WAY, WAY more work.  They don't cut any content.  The class is 6 hours a day, 5 days a week.  Welcome to class! Your first exam is Thursday.
Unless you love chemistry, have no other obligations (no job, no kids, no long commute), and don't need extra time to process or practice this class will ruin you and your GPA.

Because "easy" and "organic chemistry" always go together, don't they?  I tell students that plan to take any chem class in the summer to not take anything else that term.  I should begin my summer classes with this clip from "Jurassic Park".

I have advisees ask the same thing about taking stats over the summer. No honey, taking stats in 5 weeks will not make it easier. Honestly, we probably shouldn't even offer it in that format.

[Anon1787]

Received a message from Stu, who claims to have arrived to campus 20 minutes late and assumed that I would deny Stu entrance to the classroom to take an exam for being so late and decided not to show up until after the exam ended. I'm skeptical that this is common practice, but maybe I'm wrong. 

Q: Do any of you bar students from taking an exam if they show up more than a few minutes late?

[kiana]

Q: Do any of you bar students from taking an exam if they show up more than a few minutes late?

Nope.

I have colleagues who do if someone has already left, but frankly I think that if they did get info passed to them from someone who left the exam it wouldn't be enough to make up for the time they lost, so I don't.

[marshwiggle]

Q: Do any of you bar students from taking an exam if they show up more than a few minutes late?

Nope.

I have colleagues who do if someone has already left, but frankly I think that if they did get info passed to them from someone who left the exam it wouldn't be enough to make up for the time they lost, so I don't.

For our final exams, the rules are that:

• Students writing an exam can't leave until at least an hour has passed.
• Students arriving up to 1/2 hour late will be admitted.

Those two rules mean that there's in principle no way anyone leaving would be able to pass information on to anyone still eligible to enter.

[mamselle]

They want to know if the summer 2 week version is less work than the regular version.

Yep!  We offer a full YEAR of organic chemistry + labs over the summer. 
Students are constantly thinking that 1 year in 10 weeks = less work/easy class
Like surely we can't be teaching them all of the content.  Right?
Wrong!
It's WAY, WAY more work.  They don't cut any content.  The class is 6 hours a day, 5 days a week.  Welcome to class! Your first exam is Thursday.
Unless you love chemistry, have no other obligations (no job, no kids, no long commute), and don't need extra time to process or practice this class will ruin you and your GPA.

Because "easy" and "organic chemistry" always go together, don't they?  I tell students that plan to take any chem class in the summer to not take anything else that term.  I should begin my summer classes with this clip from "Jurassic Park".

I have advisees ask the same thing about taking stats over the summer. No honey, taking stats in 5 weeks will not make it easier. Honestly, we probably shouldn't even offer it in that format.

The arts have a consistent problem of new students thinking they'll be light, easy courses at any time, but the two years I taught liturgical arts courses in a two-week summer session at a local seminary, i got complaints like that as well.

I'd planned for the amount of work one does in a 13-week course, including the usual expectation of c. 80-100 slides, 5 dance videos, and 10 musical examples, as well as three theatrical scenes to be viewed in the library and read in class. There was also a final project.

Classes were 3 hours per day, and I went straight from class to the office to set up the slide trays and notes and prep for the next day, and told them I imagined they needed to do the same thing in terms of studying, and that I'd look forward to seeing them in the library after lunch, when I went in to set up the reserves for the day after that...

It was odd. For people who said they'd always been interested in the arts, no-one knew (either year) what the Iconoclastic Controversy was about or when it happened. They seemed to think it was fine to learn to appreciate the arts, but that critical analysis was beyond the pale, or that Scriptural and theological writings could be anything more than mildly supportive; no-one had read the second commandment, apparently, or paid attention to the level of detail in the construction notes for the Tabernacle and the First and Second Temples as examples of the significance of aesthetics in the life of faith.

They also couldn't believe I'd require something like Neibuhr's "Christ and Culture," supplemented with several other readings for each day, for theological reflection, or that I expected short written pieces on the odd days, with a mid-term quiz at the end of each week. They couldn't seem to understand how I thought theological texts had anything to do with the use of the arts in worship and the life of faith....(??), or expected them to ponder the same.

One person kept bringing printed-out coloring pages and crosswords from the Sunday School bulletins she used, and asking if we shouldn't be learning to do more of those instead...we did touch on them one day in discussion of how we would use what we had learned, but the course (which the dean's office had approved, so I wasn't off-base) really was supposed to be an exigent systematics offering, that was how it was being listed and credits assigned.

I allowed the final project to be written or a creative work, but the creative works had to be decently done, and I graded those as I would for a full course as well (and told them so at the outset). Some did some excellent work, so it wasn't an unrealistic expectation, a few were a bit underdone, and I graded those accordingly.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued; it didn't help that the pastoral counseling instructor across the hall had them all bringing fruit to share daily, just had a couple of well-known articles for class readings, and had them sitting out on the side of the hill for discussions of a very general sort (for all I could tell, passing by).

That school doesn't exist anymore, sadly; I enjoyed my work with the 2-3 students in each class offering who did their assignments and didn't whine, but overall it was disappointing, and I didn't propose the course after that.

M. 

[ciao_yall]

When I used to teach marketing I got the same complaints.

• Advertising - we'll just sit around and share our favorite ads on YouTube!
• Professional selling - just give them a discount!

[apl68]

The arts have a consistent problem of new students thinking they'll be light, easy courses at any time, but the two years I taught liturgical arts courses in a two-week summer session at a local seminary, i got complaints like that as well.

I'd planned for the amount of work one does in a 13-week course, including the usual expectation of c. 80-100 slides, 5 dance videos, and 10 musical examples, as well as three theatrical scenes to be viewed in the library and read in class. There was also a final project.

Requirements for things like this that have to be viewed or listened to at the library (back when that was a thing) make an awkward fit with the widespread student tendency to try to cram everything at the last minute.  At my old job I was in charge of the Media Center portion of the library where AV reserves were kept for viewing and listening.  It was a nightmare when art students were trying to cram their trays of slides, all on the same half-dozen projectors in the viewing room.  All day long you'd have to deal with jams, misplaced slides, bulbs blowing, and projectors sometimes just packing up and having to be swapped out for spares.  The room would get so hot you could feel the heat in the hall outside!

Meanwhile, Shakespeare class students were busily trying to cram their viewings of multiple productions of multiple plays on VHS tape.  When not dealing with glitches in the slide viewing room, the AV staffer on duty would be constantly swapping out and rewinding tapes, trying not to get them mixed up and hoping that none of the VCRs ate one.

My favorite, though, is the prof who tried putting seven copies of a set of audio listenings on reserve, without checking to see whether we actually had that many players.  We actually had three.

[Parasaurolophus]

Received a message from Stu, who claims to have arrived to campus 20 minutes late and assumed that I would deny Stu entrance to the classroom to take an exam for being so late and decided not to show up until after the exam ended. I'm skeptical that this is common practice, but maybe I'm wrong. 

Q: Do any of you bar students from taking an exam if they show up more than a few minutes late?

Nope. But all it takes is one prof who does.

[aside]

Received a message from Stu, who claims to have arrived to campus 20 minutes late and assumed that I would deny Stu entrance to the classroom to take an exam for being so late and decided not to show up until after the exam ended. I'm skeptical that this is common practice, but maybe I'm wrong. 

Q: Do any of you bar students from taking an exam if they show up more than a few minutes late?

Nope. But all it takes is one prof who does.

I've never done this, either. 

[mamselle]

The arts have a consistent problem of new students thinking they'll be light, easy courses at any time, but the two years I taught liturgical arts courses in a two-week summer session at a local seminary, i got complaints like that as well.

I'd planned for the amount of work one does in a 13-week course, including the usual expectation of c. 80-100 slides, 5 dance videos, and 10 musical examples, as well as three theatrical scenes to be viewed in the library and read in class. There was also a final project.

Requirements for things like this that have to be viewed or listened to at the library (back when that was a thing) make an awkward fit with the widespread student tendency to try to cram everything at the last minute.  At my old job I was in charge of the Media Center portion of the library where AV reserves were kept for viewing and listening.  It was a nightmare when art students were trying to cram their trays of slides, all on the same half-dozen projectors in the viewing room.  All day long you'd have to deal with jams, misplaced slides, bulbs blowing, and projectors sometimes just packing up and having to be swapped out for spares.  The room would get so hot you could feel the heat in the hall outside!

Meanwhile, Shakespeare class students were busily trying to cram their viewings of multiple productions of multiple plays on VHS tape.  When not dealing with glitches in the slide viewing room, the AV staffer on duty would be constantly swapping out and rewinding tapes, trying not to get them mixed up and hoping that none of the VCRs ate one.

My favorite, though, is the prof who tried putting seven copies of a set of audio listenings on reserve, without checking to see whether we actually had that many players.  We actually had three.

Yes. I have always been very careful to make good contact with AV, microfilm, and front-desk/reserve librarians, and encouraged them to contact me with any problems ASAP.

I did loose-leaf resource notebooks set up so they could go to the copier, run a quick set of pages, and sit down to work on them, and made sure they copied them daily so the logjam a5 the end didn't happen, by having open-note quizzes every other day.

I also showed clips of videos in-class first, and included those in the quizzes, so they would know what they were to look for and less likely to put it off as unfamiliar.

Some still did, anyway, I'm sure, but I went to the library after lunch each day to make the rounds and find out what was going on behind the scenes...some of my own books were on closed reserve, and I liked to be sure they were still there...

M.

[Istiblennius]

I used to supervise a lab instructor who would lock the door so students could not arrive even five minutes late. Infantilizing, not to mention unsafe practice. Sometimes a student would leave to use the restroom and then couldn't get back in. Which is how I found out about it when they knocked on my door to ask for help getting back into the room.

[apl68]

The arts have a consistent problem of new students thinking they'll be light, easy courses at any time, but the two years I taught liturgical arts courses in a two-week summer session at a local seminary, i got complaints like that as well.

I'd planned for the amount of work one does in a 13-week course, including the usual expectation of c. 80-100 slides, 5 dance videos, and 10 musical examples, as well as three theatrical scenes to be viewed in the library and read in class. There was also a final project.

Requirements for things like this that have to be viewed or listened to at the library (back when that was a thing) make an awkward fit with the widespread student tendency to try to cram everything at the last minute.  At my old job I was in charge of the Media Center portion of the library where AV reserves were kept for viewing and listening.  It was a nightmare when art students were trying to cram their trays of slides, all on the same half-dozen projectors in the viewing room.  All day long you'd have to deal with jams, misplaced slides, bulbs blowing, and projectors sometimes just packing up and having to be swapped out for spares.  The room would get so hot you could feel the heat in the hall outside!

Meanwhile, Shakespeare class students were busily trying to cram their viewings of multiple productions of multiple plays on VHS tape.  When not dealing with glitches in the slide viewing room, the AV staffer on duty would be constantly swapping out and rewinding tapes, trying not to get them mixed up and hoping that none of the VCRs ate one.

My favorite, though, is the prof who tried putting seven copies of a set of audio listenings on reserve, without checking to see whether we actually had that many players.  We actually had three.

Yes. I have always been very careful to make good contact with AV, microfilm, and front-desk/reserve librarians, and encouraged them to contact me with any problems ASAP.

I did loose-leaf resource notebooks set up so they could go to the copier, run a quick set of pages, and sit down to work on them, and made sure they copied them daily so the logjam a5 the end didn't happen, by having open-note quizzes every other day.

I also showed clips of videos in-class first, and included those in the quizzes, so they would know what they were to look for and less likely to put it off as unfamiliar.

Some still did, anyway, I'm sure, but I went to the library after lunch each day to make the rounds and find out what was going on behind the scenes...some of my own books were on closed reserve, and I liked to be sure they were still there...

M.

Some profs were certainly more helpful than others in trying to help library staff make the AV element of their classes go as smoothly as possible.  I used to think that some of those AV assignments looked pretty neat, especially the one prof's emphasis on viewing, instead of merely reading, the Bard's plays.  But procrastinators will be procrastinators, and when they're all trying to use the same limited resources at once....

[Anon1787]

I used to supervise a lab instructor who would lock the door so students could not arrive even five minutes late. Infantilizing, not to mention unsafe practice. Sometimes a student would leave to use the restroom and then couldn't get back in. Which is how I found out about it when they knocked on my door to ask for help getting back into the room.

I definitely understand the urge since it is disruptive when students routinely arrive late, but I have never heard of anyone actually doing it.

I am aware of instructors barring students from starting an exam after the first student has finished it and left the classroom, but no student has ever finished one of my exams in this course in 20 minutes (this was not the first exam, so students knew that my exams take longer than that).