Topic: Bang Your Head on Your Desk - the thread of teaching despair!

[onthefringe]

We are talking about Prof X having a list of all his students, and their advisors/ advisor email addies.   Is this info not regularly provided to all faculty?  If it is, it would be very easy to spend those five seconds a kid, lets say maybe ten seconds a kid, to fire off those form emails to all the advisors of all one's own students who would be in such a situation...

No.  At my school, I'd have to look up each student individually in our clunky database.  It would tell me the name of their advisor.  Then I'd have to look up the advisor's email in the directory.  It would be super annoying.  And it's not like the advisor would have any special insight into the student's issues or be able to make the student attend class.

And in most cases they have gotten this information in the syllabus, in in class announcements, as announcements on the LMS (that are sent to their email) and frequently as direct emails from the instructor. I'm unclear why you think one more email (albeit from a different person) is going to make the difference.

[FishProf]

I can raise a flag in Starfish (which I did) but that only notifies their advisor IF they actually check on Starfish.

A form letter isn't exactly the kind of personal outreach that will move the needle if they don't care about their grades enough to read the professor's email.

[marshwiggle]

I can raise a flag in Starfish (which I did) but that only notifies their advisor IF they actually check on Starfish.

A form letter isn't exactly the kind of personal outreach that will move the needle if they don't care about their grades enough to read the professor's email.

This is like the futility of trying to make lectures more engaging for the students who never come to lecture. No change matters because, by definition, they won't ever see it.

[mythbuster]

We have an "early alert system" for these type of issues. It doesn't work. The first time they rolled it out and I flagged students -- I got emails from the advisors wondering what it was about. Then they take their sweet time even emailing the students once they are flagged. One, it took a month to track the student down! At that point they had failed and we were past the drop deadline etc.

These type of systems are great in theory, but once you are dealing with larger numbers it all falls apart.

Oh and the average advisor load at our Uni is 300 students per advisor. Of course that assumes that we have a fully staffed office. All of our STEM advisors quit this summer/Fall, so the load is much higher and the advising is bad for students in those (more complicated ) majors.

[poiuy]

One, it took a month to track the student down! At that point they had failed and we were past the drop deadline etc.

This is why I include "if you miss XX number of assignments I will drop you from the class" language in my Syllabus.  I do a lot of due diligence to chase down non-performing students (emails to them; to the advisor; Starfish flags, etc.) but even though we have fairly responsive advisors and student support services, there is only so much they can do. 
In the student's own best interest, to preserve their GPA, I have dropped them - around 1-2 per semester (out of a classes of 80-130).

[the_geneticist]

We are talking about Prof X having a list of all his students, and their advisors/ advisor email addies.   Is this info not regularly provided to all faculty?  If it is, it would be very easy to spend those five seconds a kid, lets say maybe ten seconds a kid, to fire off those form emails to all the advisors of all one's own students who would be in such a situation...

No.  At my school, I'd have to look up each student individually in our clunky database.  It would tell me the name of their advisor.  Then I'd have to look up the advisor's email in the directory.  It would be super annoying.  And it's not like the advisor would have any special insight into the student's issues or be able to make the student attend class.

And in most cases they have gotten this information in the syllabus, in in class announcements, as announcements on the LMS (that are sent to their email) and frequently as direct emails from the instructor. I'm unclear why you think one more email (albeit from a different person) is going to make the difference.

Same here.  It's not easy to track down information about students.  I'll contact advisors if a student tells me about a BIG event (e.g. needing to miss >1 week due to surgery/car crash/family issues) or when the student is needing help I can't provide (homeless, suicidal, grieving death of a loved one, etc.).
I have limited time and I'm not going to bother the advisors for each student who doesn't do the syllabus quiz. 

[apl68]

Oh and the average advisor load at our Uni is 300 students per advisor. Of course that assumes that we have a fully staffed office. All of our STEM advisors quit this summer/Fall, so the load is much higher and the advising is bad for students in those (more complicated ) majors.

Are these faculty advisors, or is this a university with a central advising office full of professional advising specialists? 

I've seen complaints before on The Fora that the latter sort of advisors don't always know enough about a given student's field to be able to give the best possible advice.  A faculty advisor is supposed to have this knowledge...but if the faculty are stretched thin, then they don't have the time to provide good advising either.

[fosca]

I am requested (read: required) to put students who miss assignments or aren't doing well into the student engagement portal, whereupon someone else calls them and if they don't reach the student (which is what normally happens) then they email them.  I am also to email/text them myself before I report them (I refuse to call them, as I draw the line at that). 

If I don't do this and students fail the class, I get in trouble.  If I do so and students fail the class, I have covered my ass and get in less trouble (basically if a student fails the class for any reason or too many students withdraw, it's a black mark against me even when it has nothing to do with me--students in the second 8-week minimester each semester always drop like flies no matter what, but it still counts against the professor). 

Since I teach four classes of freshmen core courses this takes a couple of hours a week and is a lot of record keeping.  And I'm still on probation for failing too many students and having too many negative evaluations.  Hey, it's a living!  For now, anyway.

[apl68]

That sounds like a heavy burden of reporting, fosca.  And you're mostly teaching freshmen?  That would mean you've got a lot of students who are finding college a challenging transition after a lifetime of spoon feeding and hand-holding in K-12 (Or, conversely, were waved on through K-12 without that much effort to teach them anything).  I would guess that your college is an open-admissions type of place.

[fosca]

Yep, mostly first-year (and any that aren't are unhappy that they actually have to work hard for a gen-ed course they expected to glide through).  And don't forget the dual-enrolled high school students who are taking the class as well.

I'm teaching some open-enrollment and some selective, and quite frankly I can't usually tell the difference between the two types (or between them and the high school students).

We're basically also expected to wave them through; it's a science-ish class, but we're told not to have the students use citations when writing.  I still expect them to do so if they copy word-for-word, but I'm expected to be told to not do it even then.  If I didn't try to hold them to the same standard that I held my community-college students in rural Florida, I expect my bosses would be a lot happier with me.  But I wouldn't be.

[downer]

Fosca, that's terrible. But increasingly common.

I take pleasure in teaching, and I focus on that. I'm lucky that I don't have to pass students who don't deserve to pass. The question of whether one can live with oneself if one abandons academic standards is one many have to face. If teaching becomes robbed of its purpose and meaning, then it is probably healthier to do something else that pays better.

[poiuy]

That sounds taxing for you fosca.   Do you have any kind of student success / support services you can refer students to before they start failing and get sent to the student portal? 
Do hold the line on citations for as long as you can. 

[fosca]

Do hold the line on citations for as long as you can.

That is the hill I plan to die on.  I learned how to quote and cite by middle school; I'll be damned if I am going to let college students get away with copying word-for-word and passing it off as their own.  And if they don't know how, I require them to watch a video that tells them exactly how to quote/cite/reference and also have information on that in every assignment. 

Unfortunately, I'm close enough to retirement that if I do get fired I doubt I'll get hired again for anything other than adjunct work, and I can't survive on that.  But that's my hill.  "The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!"--Jean-Luc Picard, "Star Trek: First Contact"  (which is the best citation I can do on short notice)

[dismalist]

Do hold the line on citations for as long as you can.

That is the hill I plan to die on.  I learned how to quote and cite by middle school; I'll be damned if I am going to let college students get away with copying word-for-word and passing it off as their own.  And if they don't know how, I require them to watch a video that tells them exactly how to quote/cite/reference and also have information on that in every assignment. 

Unfortunately, I'm close enough to retirement that if I do get fired I doubt I'll get hired again for anything other than adjunct work, and I can't survive on that.  But that's my hill.  "The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!"--Jean-Luc Picard, "Star Trek: First Contact"  (which is the best citation I can do on short notice)

From General Robert Nivelle at the Battle of Verdun Ils ne passeront pas. Shortened, here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_shall_not_pass#/media/File:M%C3%A9daille_de_Verdun_du_colonel_Br%C3%A9bant_(recto).jpg

[mythbuster]

I've had a really cruddy week in terms of work. It seems like our whole institution is falling apart and leaderless. So I watched Darkest Hour- the movie about Churchill, Dunkirk, and the start of WW2. His "we will fight them on the beaches" speech really cheered me up.

https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches/

We are here with you Fosca. We will fight together.