The Venting Thread

[mamselle]

Ugh, today my husband and I took my aunt-in-law out for lunch and she was terrible.  First, she was sick, and didn't stay home.  Second, she helped herself to the passenger seat and told my husband I had insisted (not true).  Then at lunch, she told me I was lucky because her friend's cancer was worse than mine.  And she said my hair was getting so dark (yeah, I'm not dying my hair because, chemicals & cancer) and then she said her hair was that dark but it was so unattractive, she always highlighted it. And she also commented on how thin my hair was. I think I showed remarkable control in not dumping the ice from my tea into her lap.  I have given my husband a cold shoulder he doesn't deserve - I feel sorry he's had to put up with such a mean, crappy bunch of family members.  But I am just so frickin' mad.

I am sorry you suffered from the "no good deed goes unpunished" bug that's going around.

Iced tea in the lap...hmmm....I can (sorry to say) understand it!

M.

[alto_stratus]

Thank you, Mamselle.  My steamy cloud of anger has settled, thanks to time, beer, and pizza.  Sadly, I don't think she can change being the bearer of inappropriate comments, but I can learn to care much less. 

[mamselle]

My turn for a steamy cloud of..frustration, maybe.

True torture is having to do a near-verbatim transcription of a meeting you could barely stand to sit through the first time...

M.

[FishProf]

I am doing a teaching evaluation and I am so furious with the students.  (The professor is no great shakes, but hardly the problem).

Students - did you read the book?  Have you EVER read a book.  You don't know the most basic of things, don't speak up, don't ask questions, and generally are grumpy lumps.  I'm here to observe because several of you complained.  I now think your complaint has no merit because YOU did't really even show up.  You were AWOL (Absent WithOut Leaving).

I don't have time to waste on this petty crap.

[AmLitHist]

Nothing like getting kicked when you're down, and when you've gone out of your way to do something nice to begin with.  Been there, done that, with various in-laws. Sending you BIG hugs, alto_stratus. 

ETA:

Fish Prof, my dean is coming in for my 3-year eval next week, and I already kind of presume that's how this group of students will act.  Nobody's gone yelling to her about me yet, but still, she needs to see for herself.

[FishProf]

Fish Prof, my dean is coming in for my 3-year eval next week, and I already kind of presume that's how this group of students will act.  Nobody's gone yelling to her about me yet, but still, she needs to see for herself.

These students have so undermined their case that I will be going to their department chair to discuss solutions.  They are in a pre-professional program and they do not belong there, based on my observation of the class.

[Aster]

I found another professor's midterm exam abandoned in a classroom. I looked it over and found that it was in my field. Looking more closely at it, I was horrified to notice that the overall exam was bad. Very, very bad.

- 25% of the exam was nothing but True/False questions.
- 5% of the exam was joke questions (where anything is correct)
- one question just said "free point Bonus!" on it... wtf...
- All of the questions lack proper grammar (no periods, no commas, everything is just sentence fragments
- diagrams were all badly pixelated. Sloppy.
- some of the academic content is not applicable to this course type and is not found in our textbook or our (college-standardized) lesson plans
- over half of the academic content that is *supposed* to be assessed on this particular exam was missing. That's appallingly lazy.

The abandoned exam didn't have any identifiers as to who it came from, but I can probably narrow down who it is to two or three people. Nobody in my department is supposed to be behaving this irresponsibly. We all use identical resources, have identical curriculum schedules for specific topics, and we're supposed to all have very similar assessments. Someone has been lying to me about his/her assessments. I chose not to rehire the last two professors who behaved this way.

I feel disgusted.

[hamburger]

Every class in my CC is like this. I repeatedly told them both verbally and in writing in the tests to put down their name and student ID on both the question sheet and answer booklet. 80% of the students did not listen. Every time a student did not do that, I talked loudly about it for everybody to listen. Yet, the remaining students repeated the same mistake. Last week, we had a test in the middle of the semester. Even I had my name written on the board in BIG letters, two students told me that they did not know my name! They don't know my name in the middle of the term?  Even I told them endless number of times to remember a special symbol and I made it clear that it would be asked on the test many many times, half of them made a mistake. Am I teaching pigs?

[Ruralguy]

They are young (mostly, I'm guessing for your CC--not always the case), not very highly skilled, distracted, and only care enough to kind of sort of show up sometimes. It happens at all levels of education, but can be worse at certain schools due to campus culture, professors "giving up", etc.

[smallcleanrat]

Airing out the cold pack seems to have gotten rid of the rancid ranch smell. Maybe I should pop a box of baking soda into the fridge to keep it from getting smelly again.

Ugh, today my husband and I took my aunt-in-law out for lunch and she was terrible.  First, she was sick, and didn't stay home.  Second, she helped herself to the passenger seat and told my husband I had insisted (not true).  Then at lunch, she told me I was lucky because her friend's cancer was worse than mine.  And she said my hair was getting so dark (yeah, I'm not dying my hair because, chemicals & cancer) and then she said her hair was that dark but it was so unattractive, she always highlighted it. And she also commented on how thin my hair was. I think I showed remarkable control in not dumping the ice from my tea into her lap.  I have given my husband a cold shoulder he doesn't deserve - I feel sorry he's had to put up with such a mean, crappy bunch of family members.  But I am just so frickin' mad.

Sheesh...I hope you don't have to see this person very often. Does she even realize how insulting and irritating she is being, or is she just that oblivious?

I have a few like her in my family. It may not be a kind thought, but sometimes I can't help but wonder "How is it that no one has bludgeoned this person to death yet?"

[Parasaurolophus]

Airing out the cold pack seems to have gotten rid of the rancid ranch smell. Maybe I should pop a box of baking soda into the fridge to keep it from getting smelly again.

Phew!

And: definitely!

[hamburger]

They are young (mostly, I'm guessing for your CC--not always the case), not very highly skilled, distracted, and only care enough to kind of sort of show up sometimes. It happens at all levels of education, but can be worse at certain schools due to campus culture, professors "giving up", etc.

Some students in this CC also like to ask me and my colleagues if they got the right answers before they handed in their test papers! I had two guys coming to the front and kept pressing me to answer them in front of other students during the test.

[Aster]

Every class in my CC is like this. I repeatedly told them both verbally and in writing in the tests to put down their name and student ID on both the question sheet and answer booklet. 80% of the students did not listen. Every time a student did not do that, I talked loudly about it for everybody to listen. Yet, the remaining students repeated the same mistake. Last week, we had a test in the middle of the semester. Even I had my name written on the board in BIG letters, two students told me that they did not know my name! They don't know my name in the middle of the term?  Even I told them endless number of times to remember a special symbol and I made it clear that it would be asked on the test many many times, half of them made a mistake. Am I teaching pigs?

Open enrollment institutions operate more as filters for the college-ready vs. not-ready than any other institutional type.

The "not-ready" are not ready for often many reasons. There is only so much you can do. If they can't perform adequately, they don't pass.

For people that don't write the proper ID's on their exams, I just leave their grade blank on the gradebook, and leave it up to them to come in during office hours and get it fixed. Oddly, lots of people never ask, never get it fixed, and seem perfectly content to keep those zeroes and flunk out. That's their choice.

[archaeo42]

I think I'm getting sick. I do not wish to be sick.

[hamburger]

Every class in my CC is like this. I repeatedly told them both verbally and in writing in the tests to put down their name and student ID on both the question sheet and answer booklet. 80% of the students did not listen. Every time a student did not do that, I talked loudly about it for everybody to listen. Yet, the remaining students repeated the same mistake. Last week, we had a test in the middle of the semester. Even I had my name written on the board in BIG letters, two students told me that they did not know my name! They don't know my name in the middle of the term?  Even I told them endless number of times to remember a special symbol and I made it clear that it would be asked on the test many many times, half of them made a mistake. Am I teaching pigs?

Open enrollment institutions operate more as filters for the college-ready vs. not-ready than any other institutional type.

The "not-ready" are not ready for often many reasons. There is only so much you can do. If they can't perform adequately, they don't pass.

For people that don't write the proper ID's on their exams, I just leave their grade blank on the gradebook, and leave it up to them to come in during office hours and get it fixed. Oddly, lots of people never ask, never get it fixed, and seem perfectly content to keep those zeroes and flunk out. That's their choice.

You are absolutely right. What I found out is that if I continue to care about my students, I am asking for unhappiness, have extreme mental distress and have my life shortened. Now I understand why some senior colleagues called them "rubbish".

We had a programming test. At first I planned to ask them to answer two questions each with 5 tasks. Knowing their level, I wasted my time to revise the paper. I asked them to choose only one question to answer and each had only four tasks. The tasks were as following:

a) Ask the user to input six numbers. Store those numbers in an array. (3 marks)
b) Print out the numbers stored in that array. (3 marks)
c) Calculate the average of the numbers. (2 marks)
d) Sort the numbers and print the sorted list (2 marks)

I believe that these are some of the simplest programming questions. Note that sorting is more difficult. It should have worth 3-5 marks but I made it 2 marks expecting that most of them could not answer. I also made b) to kind of give them 3 marks for free. It was a close book exam. I made it clear a few times both in writing and verbally. Within a few minutes of the test, the guy who said that he pays for my salary pulled out a pdf file and copied and pasted. I pointed out that it was unacceptable. He played dumb saying that he did not know. In other schools, I just asked IT to disable the internet connection. In this CC, it cannot be done as the students are not be able to use the compiler to compile their programs. It means that students could cheat easily as I could not watch their screens all at once.

In the middle of the test, a few students argued with me about why they had to do part b). They wanted to negotiate! A student said that he did not see the point of doing it and asked if he could get half the marks skipping it. At the end, a few of them did not submit part b. A few students also told me that they did not know how to calculate the average. They are 2nd year STEM students and they don't know how to calculate the average!!!!! They are worse than elementary school children. Interestingly, almost all of them got part d which was the most difficult part. Part d involved printing numbers in the sorted array. So they knew how to do that but they did not know how to do part b?! Few minutes before the end of the test, a girl started to cry saying that she did the work but suddenly her computer failed and she lost all the work. I asked her if she saved her work and she said no. I told her that it would be her problem as I reminded the class to save their programs regularly in case of computer failure. Interestingly, within a few minutes, she could start all over and got 10 out of 10! One student told me that she completed her work. When I asked her to show me Part a. She did not know how to input the numbers from the keyboard. I had to tell her what to press on the keyboard key by key. Yet, she got perfect score. How could this happen? In the first half of the test, most students were sitting there looking completely lost. Suddenly a lot of them were able to complete and got perfect or almost perfect scores. Some students were trying to distract me throughout the test. I also caught a student using cellphone which he was not supposed to. I believe that they coordinated with each other and wide spread cheating happened. I noticed that the student who finished first and got a perfect score was sitting outside the room for the remaining 1.5 hours.

If I talk about it, my students will team up against me. I will also lose my job if many students fail. So I just have to play dumb and make simple questions for them to pass.