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

[mamselle]

My head-banging is over a parent stomping into his kid's music theory class--with other students in attendance, on Zoom--and yelling very rudely at the kid, who's just told him that class is going on. (In past times, when I was teaching in their home, this would also happen, so it wasn't a one-off situation).

This is one of the bright, very good kids who's fighting several inner demons--and clearly, at least one outer one.

He turned off his screen and came back a bit later, very muted and fidgety. And then proceeded to nail all the chord identities once he'd calmed down.

Wish I could say: "Just because you engender someone doesn't mean you get to be nasty and mean to them."

What I will say: Nothing, because it would make things worse.

But I will need to let his mom (one of my adult students) know, because there have been ongoing issues around his mental health and the way his dad treats him--withdrawal is, after all, a sane response to attack, and a kid shouldn't have to fear his dad like this.

M.

[Caracal]

My head-banging is over a parent stomping into his kid's music theory class--with other students in attendance, on Zoom--and yelling very rudely at the kid, who's just told him that class is going on. (In past times, when I was teaching in their home, this would also happen, so it wasn't a one-off situation).

This is one of the bright, very good kids who's fighting several inner demons--and clearly, at least one outer one.

He turned off his screen and came back a bit later, very muted and fidgety. And then proceeded to nail all the chord identities once he'd calmed down.

Wish I could say: "Just because you engender someone doesn't mean you get to be nasty and mean to them."

What I will say: Nothing, because it would make things worse.

But I will need to let his mom (one of my adult students) know, because there have been ongoing issues around his mental health and the way his dad treats him--withdrawal is, after all, a sane response to attack, and a kid shouldn't have to fear his dad like this.

M.

Not your fault, of course, but this is one of the things about online classes. For some kids, the best the thing about school is that it isn't in their house.

[mamselle]

In this case, it's almost never in his dad's house (they're divorced now, thankfully) because of just this issue; his mom and I talked about it and recognized that it was asking too much of him to concentrate when he's in a constantly acidic, dripping, environment like that.

Just every now and again, when scheduling requires it, he's ended up at his dad's at a time when his lesson is set, and it's too late to change things.

But, yeah, I really wish for his sake that visiting rights for certain parents wasn't a thing.

I've dealt with one other situation, a longer time ago, that was worse: I had to throw a "social worker" (not really one, as it turned out) that the father had retained to GO IN THE MOM'S HOUSE AND WATCH WHAT THE KIDS WERE DOING ALL THE TIME so he could 'get dirt on her' to reduce her visiting rights and his alimony. (this was a well-paid commercial pilot who'd pinned her down on the floor and almost choked her to death in the kids' sight, then nearly thrown one of the kids over a chasm while the family was out skiing--but no, he didn't have 'anger issues').

I informed the putative "social worker" that, no, she couldn't be typing on her laptop while I was explaining seventh-chord arpeggios, it was distracting--and that, yes, we most often did the kid's lesson in French because the kids were trilingual (the mom was Polish, and they attended a French bilingual school).

In fact, it was so I could tell him without her listening in and reporting it, that I understood the degree of stress he was under and that he didn't have to put up with stuff like that, and that I wasn't going to, and we were going to have a good lesson in spite of anything.

After sitting on her hands, and putting up with a long explanation of the fingering of the various arpeggios, she left. 

M.

[OneMoreYear]

Dear student,
No, I am not going to create additional assignments in this already assignment-heavy skills class because you did not complete the previous assignments that were listed on the syllabus. if you did not do the work I assigned previously, why should I assign you more work?

Dear colleagues,
I would never presume to tell you how to run your class, so I am asking you respectfully not to tell me how to run mine.

Dear other colleagues,
This, this is what you want to spend energy fighting about?!  You have got way more mental space that I do and clearly a lot more free time on your hands. Can I interest you in some grading?

[Zeus Bird]

Dear colleagues,
I would never presume to tell you how to run your class, so I am asking you respectfully not to tell me how to run mine.

Faculty colleagues can choose to be generous with their own time.  They have no right to be generous with my own time.

[fishbrains]

Twenty years of teaching, and back-to-back sections of the exact same course still sometimes produce radically different levels of work, like I keep stepping through some rift in the space/time/basic skills continuum in the ten minutes between the two classes.

[EdnaMode]

Twenty years of teaching, and back-to-back sections of the exact same course still sometimes produce radically different levels of work, like I keep stepping through some rift in the space/time/basic skills continuum in the ten minutes between the two classes.

At least it's not just me experiencing this phenomenon. Most fall semesters I teach 4 lab sections of the same course. I always have one section (no consistency on time, day of the week, etc.) that will be 6-8 percentage points lower in their median grade than the three other sections that are typically within one point of each other.

[marshwiggle]

Twenty years of teaching, and back-to-back sections of the exact same course still sometimes produce radically different levels of work, like I keep stepping through some rift in the space/time/basic skills continuum in the ten minutes between the two classes.

At least it's not just me experiencing this phenomenon. Most fall semesters I teach 4 lab sections of the same course. I always have one section (no consistency on time, day of the week, etc.) that will be 6-8 percentage points lower in their median grade than the three other sections that are typically within one point of each other.

These kinds of situations are great examples of why statistical sampling to get something "representative" or "unbiased" is so hard.

[apl68]

Twenty years of teaching, and back-to-back sections of the exact same course still sometimes produce radically different levels of work, like I keep stepping through some rift in the space/time/basic skills continuum in the ten minutes between the two classes.

At least it's not just me experiencing this phenomenon. Most fall semesters I teach 4 lab sections of the same course. I always have one section (no consistency on time, day of the week, etc.) that will be 6-8 percentage points lower in their median grade than the three other sections that are typically within one point of each other.

K-12 teachers will sometimes tell you that there are whole student cohorts that are like this all the way through school.  Some years ago our local schools produced a cohort that was already notorious in grade school.  Teachers in upper grades observed this group's gradual progress toward their own grades with growing dread.  I think they've all now graduated--or otherwise concluded their schooling.

My own HS graduating class, and that of my brother, who graduated the following year, showed quite dramatic differences in post-K-12 educational and career achievement.  I'm at a loss to explain the difference, in the absence of something obvious like a war or a depression that suddenly sabotaged the second group.  I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell would be happy to identify a simple, plausible-sounding factor that explained all the differences, but I'd probably take whatever he found with a grain of salt.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Student emails me wanted to clear up 'confusion' about the lab. This lab was two months ago...

[mythbuster]

In out intro course we frequently see the lab sections that are "late additions" - those that open for enrollment the week before class starts are significantly worse performance wise than those sections that filled during standard registration.  It can also be an issue if there is some other course that students often enroll in during the same semester. The scheduling of that other class may be selecting for all the better students to be in one time slot vs another.

[Caracal]

Twenty years of teaching, and back-to-back sections of the exact same course still sometimes produce radically different levels of work, like I keep stepping through some rift in the space/time/basic skills continuum in the ten minutes between the two classes.

At least it's not just me experiencing this phenomenon. Most fall semesters I teach 4 lab sections of the same course. I always have one section (no consistency on time, day of the week, etc.) that will be 6-8 percentage points lower in their median grade than the three other sections that are typically within one point of each other.

K-12 teachers will sometimes tell you that there are whole student cohorts that are like this all the way through school.  Some years ago our local schools produced a cohort that was already notorious in grade school.  Teachers in upper grades observed this group's gradual progress toward their own grades with growing dread.  I think they've all now graduated--or otherwise concluded their schooling.

My own HS graduating class, and that of my brother, who graduated the following year, showed quite dramatic differences in post-K-12 educational and career achievement.  I'm at a loss to explain the difference, in the absence of something obvious like a war or a depression that suddenly sabotaged the second group.  I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell would be happy to identify a simple, plausible-sounding factor that explained all the differences, but I'd probably take whatever he found with a grain of salt.

I would bet on some combination of random variation and observer bias. My guess is that the perception of groups of students is heavily influenced by the outliers-very talented students on one end-and on the other end students who cause problems on the other. At least in college teaching, classes usually work well when I have a few really good students who set the tone and encourage other students to participate. If there's just nobody who is willing to do that, or only one student who is, that can make things hard. On the other side, if you have a few students who are actively disruptive, it makes things much harder.

[marshwiggle]

In our intro course we frequently see the lab sections that are "late additions" - those that open for enrollment the week before class starts are significantly worse performance wise than those sections that filled during standard registration. 

This specific issue has come up before on here; students who are not pro-active routinely perform worse than those who are.

[Sleepy72]

My first post here and of course it's in this thread!

We have two sessions a week, a student came up to me at the end of our lecture on Thursday (end of week 7) worried because she didn't have a group for the assignment and she had only just found out it was a group assignment. When I pointed out that I told them in both sessions of the week1 that it was a group assignment and they needed to form groups, I reminded them again in week 2 and asked them to let me know who was in their groups. I went through the assignment in detail during our session in week 6 and held then held tutorials in week 6, the assignment details are in the course handbook and on Canvas! All she could do was stand there and say "I missed my tutorial and I didn't know about the assignment".  I didn't know how to reply! I've put out a call via Canvas for anyone else without a group and asked everyone in our session on Monday. I've got a tutorial booked with her for Thursday before our lecture so I'll see what happens then!

[mamselle]

How did she find out there's breakfast in the dining hall every morning?

(Or did she?)

M.