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

[Caracal]

Please,please, please, students with the C's on the last exam, STOP emailing me with all of your exciting creative Ideas for how I can produce all kinds of extra credit assignments, that are obviously not a part of the syllabus, just for you to get a better score. I do not want to ever open that Pandora's box.

A better use of your time would be to study.

Yes, and it's one of those things where all my incentives line up. Why would I want to grade extra assignments?

[onehappyunicorn]

Student who got a 58 on the exam emailed as soon as grades were posted to say there must have been a mistake with the grading or it got switched with someone else because she studied really hard and "is absolutely sure I got at least in the high 80s". I refrained from referencing Dunning-Kruger in my reply.

I just had almost the exact same scenario. "I studied really hard for this test so I don't think my grade is right, I want to see the test".
I was more than generous on the grading.

[Puget]

Student who got a 58 on the exam emailed as soon as grades were posted to say there must have been a mistake with the grading or it got switched with someone else because she studied really hard and "is absolutely sure I got at least in the high 80s". I refrained from referencing Dunning-Kruger in my reply.

I just had almost the exact same scenario. "I studied really hard for this test so I don't think my grade is right, I want to see the test".
I was more than generous on the grading.

Student has now dropped the class, before even getting the exam back. Better than continuing to make a fuss about the grade I guess.

[paddington_bear]

I feel like this might be blasphemous, but some students are just stupid. They don't have learning disabilities. They're not lazy. They're not academically delayed. They're just legitimately stupid.

[sinenomine]

I feel like this might be blasphemous, but some students are just stupid. They don't have learning disabilities. They're not lazy. They're not academically delayed. They're just legitimately stupid.

I had a student a few years back who couldn't find my office despite being in the correct building. I pointed out that it was in the middle of the second floor. With a surprised expression, the student said, "There's a second floor??" I guess the stairs weren't a clue...

[Caracal]

I feel like this might be blasphemous, but some students are just stupid. They don't have learning disabilities. They're not lazy. They're not academically delayed. They're just legitimately stupid.

If we are trying to be kinder, some students just have a hard time with a particular subject. The problem is when they don't have the self awareness to understand that. Some of the most annoying students I've had were ones who actually did seem to be putting a reasonable amount of effort into the class and probably did mostly get good grades, but just seemed to be missing the point of assignments. That would be fine-not everybody needs to be good at everything and plenty of students are perfectly happy to just decide that they they will just put enough effort to get a passing grade and move on with their lives. Others decide they need to figure out how to do better and really put a lot of time into it, which is great, obviously. It's the ones who can't seem to make either of those choices who are annoying. Instead they blame me for denying them the grade they think they deserve

[Caracal]

I feel like this might be blasphemous, but some students are just stupid. They don't have learning disabilities. They're not lazy. They're not academically delayed. They're just legitimately stupid.

I had a student a few years back who couldn't find my office despite being in the correct building. I pointed out that it was in the middle of the second floor. With a surprised expression, the student said, "There's a second floor??" I guess the stairs weren't a clue...

My sense of direction is too bad to judge. I frequently walk straight by my classroom in the middle of the semester, go the wrong way in the hall and enter the wrong classroom by mistake.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

I feel like this might be blasphemous, but some students are just stupid. They don't have learning disabilities. They're not lazy. They're not academically delayed. They're just legitimately stupid.

I had a student a few years back who couldn't find my office despite being in the correct building. I pointed out that it was in the middle of the second floor. With a surprised expression, the student said, "There's a second floor??" I guess the stairs weren't a clue...

Wow...

[mythbuster]

I had that issue once with a student. They asked (mid-semester!) if we had a textbook to go with the class. Rather surprised, I mentioned the campus bookstore. The students response was that they went there once and they only sell T-shirts. This is because the textbooks are on the second floor! There is a big staircase in the middle. But the student never asked or wondered then why it was called the "bookstore"? Clueless and passive is a dangerous combination.
   Hopefully my information for them helped them find the textbooks for all of their classes.

[apl68]

I feel like this might be blasphemous, but some students are just stupid. They don't have learning disabilities. They're not lazy. They're not academically delayed. They're just legitimately stupid.

If we are trying to be kinder, some students just have a hard time with a particular subject. The problem is when they don't have the self awareness to understand that. Some of the most annoying students I've had were ones who actually did seem to be putting a reasonable amount of effort into the class and probably did mostly get good grades, but just seemed to be missing the point of assignments. That would be fine-not everybody needs to be good at everything and plenty of students are perfectly happy to just decide that they they will just put enough effort to get a passing grade and move on with their lives. Others decide they need to figure out how to do better and really put a lot of time into it, which is great, obviously. It's the ones who can't seem to make either of those choices who are annoying. Instead they blame me for denying them the grade they think they deserve

I'd like to be kinder and try to avoid terms like "stupid," but some students do have a lostness about them that goes beyond struggles with a particular academic subject.  In my TA days I and a fellow TA in the class were discussing a certain student.  I commented that he "didn't seem very aware" about such-and-such.  My colleague said "What you just said--I don't think he's very aware."  For whatever reason, some are just like that.

Mythbuster's student who didn't know that the bookstore had a second floor with actual books on it reminds me of the college-age staff member at our library whom I asked to add up and summarize some monthly circulation reports for me.  I showed her where on one of the statistics sheets to find the data.  No actual math was needed--she just had to plug figures into the calculator.  Later that afternoon I found her in a hopeless panic, unable to move forward on the assignment.  The sheets I gave her had two sides.  She picked up the first sheet wrong-side up and couldn't find the data she needed, and just sat there at her desk in a panic.

It never occurred to her to at least try turning the sheet over to see whether there might be something there.  She spent much of the afternoon hopelessly locked up, like a science-fiction robot stumped by a logic problem.  This was a student from an intact, reasonably well-off family whom I am told had good grades through high school.  It's as if there's something cognitively missing from a disturbing number of our young people.  I don't know whether it's due to excessive exposure to smartphones and the like at an early age, helicopter parenting, K-12 pedagogical methods that totally suppress the development of initiative, or what.  Whatever the cause, there are so many who just aren't very aware.

[fosca]

I've run into a lot of students like that: they run into an issue, and if they can't Google the answer or don't have someone around to show them exactly how to do it, they just freeze and don't even try.  It definitely seems to have gotten worse with the rise of cell phones in general and smart phones in particular; being used to having answers to everything at their fingertips seems to have robbed many of a chance to figure things out themselves and learn that way. 

[marshwiggle]

I've run into a lot of students like that: they run into an issue, and if they can't Google the answer or don't have someone around to show them exactly how to do it, they just freeze and don't even try.  It definitely seems to have gotten worse with the rise of cell phones in general and smart phones in particular; being used to having answers to everything at their fingertips seems to have robbed many of a chance to figure things out themselves and learn that way. 

I don't think it's just the chance to figure things out; they have just assumed that any answer is googleable. The idea that the answer is not already out there only needing to be looked up would make their heads explode. They don't believe they would ever need to formulate an original solution to anything; the bots will do that.

Wall-E is a documentary.

[Caracal]

I've run into a lot of students like that: they run into an issue, and if they can't Google the answer or don't have someone around to show them exactly how to do it, they just freeze and don't even try.  It definitely seems to have gotten worse with the rise of cell phones in general and smart phones in particular; being used to having answers to everything at their fingertips seems to have robbed many of a chance to figure things out themselves and learn that way. 

As always, I'm skeptical. Of course, some students are like this, but I suspect some students have always been like this. We can create these narratives about how it's gotten worse because of smart phones, but professors have been complaining that their students are worse at everything then they used to be because of the decadence of modern life since Socrates.

[marshwiggle]

I've run into a lot of students like that: they run into an issue, and if they can't Google the answer or don't have someone around to show them exactly how to do it, they just freeze and don't even try.  It definitely seems to have gotten worse with the rise of cell phones in general and smart phones in particular; being used to having answers to everything at their fingertips seems to have robbed many of a chance to figure things out themselves and learn that way. 

As always, I'm skeptical. Of course, some students are like this, but I suspect some students have always been like this. We can create these narratives about how it's gotten worse because of smart phones, but professors have been complaining that their students are worse at everything then they used to be because of the decadence of modern life since Socrates.

One thing that has changed over my approximately 4 decades of teaching is that students have gotten much more shameless about asking for ridiculous accommodations. The person who has skipped all of the lectures and thus has missed the 20% of their grade that was for lecture quizzes shows up in the last week to see if he can make up the quizzes. That amount of chutzpah was much less common even 20 years ago. (It's not just post-covid, but still fairly recent.)

[apl68]

I've run into a lot of students like that: they run into an issue, and if they can't Google the answer or don't have someone around to show them exactly how to do it, they just freeze and don't even try.  It definitely seems to have gotten worse with the rise of cell phones in general and smart phones in particular; being used to having answers to everything at their fingertips seems to have robbed many of a chance to figure things out themselves and learn that way. 

As always, I'm skeptical. Of course, some students are like this, but I suspect some students have always been like this. We can create these narratives about how it's gotten worse because of smart phones, but professors have been complaining that their students are worse at everything then they used to be because of the decadence of modern life since Socrates.

I really must disagree here.  No, it's not something we haven't always had to deal with, but I really do believe it has gradually gotten worse in recent decades.  I and fellow employers of youth find so much of this.  It's a big part of why we hear so many complaints by employers about the newly-graduated products of K-12 of colleges. I try to resist simplistic monocausal explanations--It's all the smartphones!  It's all the helicopter parents!  It's all the schools' fault!--but I believe we are dealing with a genuine and widespread phenomenon.  Something seems to be slowing down young people's cognitive development and maturing process.  They tend not to be where people a generation or two ago were at their ages.