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

[the_geneticist]

This was one of my favorites from the original Fora:

Yes we have the favorite conversations and favorite emails and even the worse student sentences thread - but I thought I would pause for a moment, after wiping the blood off my desk and head to reach out to others who surely feel as I do at times that the light bulbs will never never never go on.

To my dear sweet YOUNG students - you have to read beyond the text!  You have to be able to imagine the world of the characters.  You have to be able to see the subtext.  these questions are designed to help you with that, and no, choosing to not answer them because "I didn't see anything in the script that told me what she wanted" does not work!  The whole entire play is about what she wants!  For gosh sakes - it is a freaking Neil Simon play - it ain't that deep!  What are you going to do with your final when we are working on "deep" plays?

Thank you, I will now return to grading these incredibly perceptive character analysis and try not to give myself a concussion.

My current head-banging moment:
A colleague sent me a puzzled email asking why so many students were begging to take their midterm on another day.
"I did not realize on time that scheduling an exam on Friday night was not a good idea."

Really?  You didn't realize that non-majors wouldn't want to stay around on a Friday for an exam?

[mythbuster]

It's midterm for us, so it's time to resurrect this thread. Based on my students graphing abilities, time is dependent variable to temperature. I know that time flies when you are having fun, but you CAN have fun a cold temp too.

[Parasaurolophus]

S: "Is there any way to practice problems at home?"
M: "Sure. Just do the problem sets in your textbook--there are lots."
S: "What textbook?"
M: "The one for this class. [Name.]"
S: "There's no textbook for this class."
M: "Yes, there is."
S: "How do I find it?"
M: "It's on the Moodle page."
S: "No, it isn't."
M: "Yes, it is. It's free, open-source, and online. There's a link to it on the syllabus. I posted a full copy on Moodle. And I posted each individual chapter on Moodle, too."
S: "So I have to buy it?"

...


It's five weeks in. Come on. I know you've checked the Moodle page before, because that's where the weekly quizzes are, and you completed them.

[Aster]

Stu Dent: "I read on the internet that this vocabulary word also means this. Would you change the exam question to make it more clear?"

I check Stu Dent's pasted weblink. He has sourced an article from a different academic sub-discipline. The linked article is also meant for schoolteachers to use, in a highly specific context for that audience.

Me: "This is why we have a mandatory textbook."

[Chemystery]

S: "Is there any way to practice problems at home?"
M: "Sure. Just do the problem sets in your textbook--there are lots."
S: "What textbook?"
M: "The one for this class. [Name.]"
S: "There's no textbook for this class."
M: "Yes, there is."
S: "How do I find it?"
M: "It's on the Moodle page."
S: "No, it isn't."
M: "Yes, it is. It's free, open-source, and online. There's a link to it on the syllabus. I posted a full copy on Moodle. And I posted each individual chapter on Moodle, too."
S: "So I have to buy it?"

...


It's five weeks in. Come on. I know you've checked the Moodle page before, because that's where the weekly quizzes are, and you completed them.

As part of a similar discussion this week, I learned that all of my students that purchased their books at the bookstore were sold a "required" study guide.  I have never required a study guide, or even listed one under the recommended materials.  My students were wondering how they should be using it.  I'm wondering why nobody mentioned it on the first day of class when I went through the list of things they needed to buy for my class and that wasn't one of them.

[mythbuster]

In my online Sophomore level writing for the major course, students had to take a quiz about Plagiarism. They had access to the course video and the relevant university policy on Plagiarism. This is a 10 question quiz with such great questions as True or False: You get a pass on plagiarism if it is unintentional.

The quiz is untimed and they have 5 attempts to earn a perfect score. They cannot submit any subsequent assignments until they earn said perfect score.

I now have at least 7 students who need more than 5 attempts. One student is on attempt #8! Apparently the question about recycling your own writing for other courses is a real stumper!

[marshwiggle]

In my online Sophomore level writing for the major course, students had to take a quiz about Plagiarism. They had access to the course video and the relevant university policy on Plagiarism. This is a 10 question quiz with such great questions as True or False: You get a pass on plagiarism if it is unintentional.

The quiz is untimed and they have 5 attempts to earn a perfect score. They cannot submit any subsequent assignments until they earn said perfect score.

I now have at least 7 students who need more than 5 attempts. One student is on attempt #8! Apparently the question about recycling your own writing for other courses is a real stumper!

To be fair, on the old fora there were lots of discussions about whether "self-plagiarism" is even possible. Using the same stuff in multiple courses may be forbidden by other rules, but that's a different issue.

[Puget]

In my online Sophomore level writing for the major course, students had to take a quiz about Plagiarism. They had access to the course video and the relevant university policy on Plagiarism. This is a 10 question quiz with such great questions as True or False: You get a pass on plagiarism if it is unintentional.

The quiz is untimed and they have 5 attempts to earn a perfect score. They cannot submit any subsequent assignments until they earn said perfect score.

I now have at least 7 students who need more than 5 attempts. One student is on attempt #8! Apparently the question about recycling your own writing for other courses is a real stumper!

To be fair, on the old fora there were lots of discussions about whether "self-plagiarism" is even possible. Using the same stuff in multiple courses may be forbidden by other rules, but that's a different issue.

Agreed-- I wouldn't call this plagiarism-- to me those policies exist because it defeats the purpose of learning something new in each course, and I only enforce them to the extent that that's the case. I had a student in my seminar last year who was very concerned that it wouldn't be OK for her to write papers for my psych class and a linguistics class (both about language development)-- I told her it was actually awesome that she was making connections across the curriculum and going deep from two different disciplinary perspectives  on the same topic.

[kaysixteen]

Don't most colleges have explicit rules against doing this, however?  Indeed, how is writing one paper for two classes adequately fulfilling the need to do work for each course?

[mythbuster]

Regardless if if it's plagiarism, it's prohibited by the university policy on plagiarism, which was the primary reading assignment for the quiz.

[Bede the Vulnerable]

On a different note:  I just graded a "paper" that seems to have been written by auto-complete.  My favorite statement:  "Many countries are under international pressure or have beef."

I have no idea what he meant to say.  But, technically he's right:  Many countries DO have beef.  Maybe most of them.  So half credit?

[Puget]

Don't most colleges have explicit rules against doing this, however?  Indeed, how is writing one paper for two classes adequately fulfilling the need to do work for each course?

Yes, but I think there's a big difference between literally turning in the same paper (hard to imagine that working unless the assignment was *very* open ended anyway) and building on/looking at from another disciplinary perspective the same topic across classes, which is something I wish happened a lot more. If they want to do that I'm all for it and I'm not going to worry about whether some bits of text end up appearing in both papers. After all, the goal is learning, not producing widgets (at least my goal).

[mythbuster]

Puget, this issue that we have is actually the first. Our senior capstone is essentially open topic and we have had a run of students who  take a paper that they wrote for a previous class, add a few paragraphs to it, and resubmit it. I have had them get flagged by Turnitin as 80% match or more!  Hence the emphasis on this being a punishable offence.  It's one of the many ways that our senior capstone course does not work the way it is intended to. But that's another issue.

[marshwiggle]

Puget, this issue that we have is actually the first. Our senior capstone is essentially open topic and we have had a run of students who  take a paper that they wrote for a previous class, add a few paragraphs to it, and resubmit it. I have had them get flagged by Turnitin as 80% match or more!  Hence the emphasis on this being a punishable offence.  It's one of the many ways that our senior capstone course does not work the way it is intended to. But that's another issue.

The fact that "adding a few paragraphs" to a paper would satisfy the requirements of a senior capstone course says more about the course than the students.

[mythbuster]

Like I said, that's a whole other issue.