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

[polly_mer]

Again: 1) Save the form.  2) Fill out the form. 3) Save it with the name I sent in the email.  4) Email me that saved form.

I remember one spectacular end-of-semester when I was in charge of collecting information from faculty and nearly everyone failed on these four steps.  I ended up visiting nearly every office to sit with them to ensure the form (an Excel table in that case) was returned to me in a format I could use.  The next term, I started early with "Shall we make an appointment to fill out the table together again or will you get it to me by <date>?"  Amazing how many people didn't need me to sit with them a second time, although a couple people did request it because they so seldom used Excel or indeed tables at all.

For several terms, I was the point of contact to collect all the senior capstone papers to be used for assessment.  It was very illuminating information on how many average times I bounced back the submission with "please follow the file naming convention: lastName_firstName_term" along with how many people ended up not sending it to me at all until the registrar refused to accept their graduation form because they didn't yet meet all the graduation requirements.

The names of people who got it right on the first go tended to correlate well with the people who showed up on the career services first destination survey as having a college-degree-required job or other good first destination after college.

[Liquidambar]

Whenever I ask students to send me a published paper (e.g., a source they've found for a class project), a lot of them send me a link to the journal's website instead of attaching a pdf.  Okay, I get that the link works when we're on campus, and they probably live on campus, so it probably doesn't occur to them that the link won't work for me at my house.  However, campus is shut down now!  Nobody is accessing any of these papers without going through our library's website.  Why are they still sending me links to papers?

While I'm complaining, what's up with students not knowing how to "reply all"?  I e-mailed a group of students about their group project since they wanted to set up a meeting.  I asked what times the whole group is available.  One student replied (not copying the others) and set up a meeting with me.  I assumed she was speaking for their group.  No, the next day the others were upset because they didn't know the meeting had been scheduled and then weren't available at the time the first student had picked.

[marshwiggle]

Whenever I ask students to send me a published paper (e.g., a source they've found for a class project), a lot of them send me a link to the journal's website instead of attaching a pdf.  Okay, I get that the link works when we're on campus, and they probably live on campus, so it probably doesn't occur to them that the link won't work for me at my house.  However, campus is shut down now!  Nobody is accessing any of these papers without going through our library's website.  Why are they still sending me links to papers?

While I'm complaining, what's up with students not knowing how to "reply all"?  I e-mailed a group of students about their group project since they wanted to set up a meeting.  I asked what times the whole group is available.  One student replied (not copying the others) and set up a meeting with me.  I assumed she was speaking for their group.  No, the next day the others were upset because they didn't know the meeting had been scheduled and then weren't available at the time the first student had picked.

You mean "digital natives" aren't all tech savvy???? Not possible!!!!

[spork]

[. . .]

  Why are they still sending me links to papers?

[. . . ]

This might sound facetious, but it's not meant to be. They are sending links because they can. You can solve the problem by attaching a grade to their performance of this task. Not a pdf? Zero.

[FishProf]

Spork is right, mostly.  I have that policy.  It helps.  But it is not foolproof.

[Liquidambar]

[. . .]

  Why are they still sending me links to papers?

[. . . ]

This might sound facetious, but it's not meant to be. They are sending links because they can. You can solve the problem by attaching a grade to their performance of this task. Not a pdf? Zero.

It's not graded, though.  These are heavily scaffolded projects, and I'm trying to help them in the ways that I normally would through office hours.  I guess I could just refuse to help.  I hate to do that, though.  Working on projects with them is the fun part of teaching.

[smallcleanrat]

TAing a gen ed course linking the arts/aesthetics to psychology and neuroscience. Most of the students are Freshman performing arts majors. At the end of term, they need to have completed a term paper on a topic of their own choosing (essentially a literature review; they need to look up articles from academic journals and give an overview on the scientific research related to their topic).

Recently I've been trying to gauge how much guidance the students in my discussion sections are going to need during the writing process. When I asked if any of them had written a research paper before (i.e. a paper in which they had to organize and summarize information from multiple sources) only 1 out of 25 said they had (in high school). Everyone else looked bewildered.

For context, this is at a highly-ranked, selective public university, supposedly one of the best in state. Entering students should have had relatively rigorous college prep during high school.

Is it not typical for students to write term papers in high school? I recall having to write at least one every year for English classes.

I'm a bit surprised they didn't have to write a research paper in Fall or Winter term courses.

How much is reasonable to expect from a Freshman? I don't want them to feel completely adrift, but I also didn't expect to potentially have to hold their hands through every step (in addition to helping them understand the actual course material). We've added scaffolding milestones at my suggestion so we can offer them guidance as they write, the professor sent a link to the university writing center to all the students, I've demonstrated how to use online databases for their literature search, but many students still seem daunted and a bit clueless.

How much should I help with the basics of how to write a term paper, and how much should the students be responsible for utilizing the writing center and other student resources for this?

[Aster]

This will mostly depend on the academic selectivity of your institution. R1 students on average are much better academically prepared average R2 students, R2 students are on average much better academically prepared than students at open enrollment institutions, etc...

If you're at an open enrollment institution, Don't expect anything from 1st semester freshmen, other than the most basic literacy and math skills.

Whereas it would be unusual to find a freshman at an R1 institutions who did not have at least some practice writing essays, report, and term papers.

When in doubt, ask your PI or department head about local institutional norms.

[Morden]

Hi Smallcleanrat, It's worthwhile considering that different disciplines go about writing papers differently. If these are performing arts students, they may be a lot more comfortable writing "an essay" than a "term paper" that summarizes different articles like a literature review. There are a number of online resources to help undergraduates write a literature review like https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/types-of-writing/literature-review/
/https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/literature-reviews/
Maybe you could direct your students to them.

[smallcleanrat]

This will mostly depend on the academic selectivity of your institution. R1 students on average are much better academically prepared average R2 students, R2 students are on average much better academically prepared than students at open enrollment institutions, etc...

If you're at an open enrollment institution, Don't expect anything from 1st semester freshmen, other than the most basic literacy and math skills.

Whereas it would be unusual to find a freshman at an R1 institutions who did not have at least some practice writing essays, report, and term papers.

When in doubt, ask your PI or department head about local institutional norms.

We are an R1.

The professor is leaving a lot of judgments like this up to the discretion of the TAs to be based on our experiences with the students during discussion sections.

I'm not sure how best to respond when students email me questions like "Can you help me come up with a topic?" without giving me any info about what they've come up with so far from their own brainstorming and readings. Sometimes they have a broad topic but will ask something like "But it's a big topic. What should I put in the actual paper?"

I've been directing them to type key terms regarding their topic of interest into the databases of scholarly journals (to which I already devoted a significant portion of a discussion session explaining) and to read through review papers and the titles/abstracts of research articles to get a sense of what kind of questions are active areas of inquiry, come up with a list of some of these more specific questions that they find interesting, and then come back to me if they want more help focusing their ideas. So far I haven't heard back from any of these students.

Hi Smallcleanrat, It's worthwhile considering that different disciplines go about writing papers differently. If these are performing arts students, they may be a lot more comfortable writing "an essay" than a "term paper" that summarizes different articles like a literature review. There are a number of online resources to help undergraduates write a literature review like https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/types-of-writing/literature-review/
/https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/literature-reviews/
Maybe you could direct your students to them.

Fair point, Morden. But I would have thought in the arts there are still times in which the students would have to do some reading from multiple sources and synthesize? I'm thinking analysis of the works of specific artists or styles, topics in history of the arts, etc... would have involved this kind of writing? Or are the educational experiences of performing arts majors quite different from, say, someone pursuing art history or literary criticism?

[Puget]

TAing a gen ed course linking the arts/aesthetics to psychology and neuroscience. Most of the students are Freshman performing arts majors. At the end of term, they need to have completed a term paper on a topic of their own choosing (essentially a literature review; they need to look up articles from academic journals and give an overview on the scientific research related to their topic).

Recently I've been trying to gauge how much guidance the students in my discussion sections are going to need during the writing process. When I asked if any of them had written a research paper before (i.e. a paper in which they had to organize and summarize information from multiple sources) only 1 out of 25 said they had (in high school). Everyone else looked bewildered.

For context, this is at a highly-ranked, selective public university, supposedly one of the best in state. Entering students should have had relatively rigorous college prep during high school.

Is it not typical for students to write term papers in high school? I recall having to write at least one every year for English classes.

I'm a bit surprised they didn't have to write a research paper in Fall or Winter term courses.

How much is reasonable to expect from a Freshman? I don't want them to feel completely adrift, but I also didn't expect to potentially have to hold their hands through every step (in addition to helping them understand the actual course material). We've added scaffolding milestones at my suggestion so we can offer them guidance as they write, the professor sent a link to the university writing center to all the students, I've demonstrated how to use online databases for their literature search, but many students still seem daunted and a bit clueless.

How much should I help with the basics of how to write a term paper, and how much should the students be responsible for utilizing the writing center and other student resources for this?

In my experience even quite good undergrads need a LOT of scaffolding to do this type of scientific writing passably well. (We all did once, we've just forgotten). Even if they've done other sorts of papers, I can almost guarantee they never had to do a lit review of primary scientific literature in high school, and that is a very different type of writing (and reading).

None of this is really in your control since you are the TA (though if you can offer them some models and scaffolding that would be very appreciated I'm sure), but just for future use or anyone who might find it useful--

I've been teaching the same advanced seminar every spring for the past four years, with a lit review paper as the major assessment (30% of the final grade), and every one of the first three I added more scaffolding (and these are mainly upperclassman and generally very strong students).

I now have them do 5 scaffolding interactive lessons starting early in the semester, that take them through how to read a journal article, picking a topic, doing a lit search and making an outline, how to do synthesis, evaluation and connections to theory, and revising. They also turn in paragraph paper proposal, a detailed outline, and a self-evaluation of their draft (using the grading rubric-- this is my trick to get them to pay attention to the rubric and how they are currently falling short on it) throughout the semester. This has the added benefit of making sure no one waits to start their paper until the week before it is due, which would be disastrous.

I also give them example outlines and papers from previous students who did really well (with their permission of course), so they know what they are aiming for. We do individual paper conferences when they are at the drafting stage, and I often end up meeting with quite a few of the students individually at other times as well.

This is admittedly a fair amount of work for me, and a few students may be annoyed at these "hoops",  but most seem relieved to have clear direction and structure, they learn more, and I get papers which are much less painful to read and sometimes downright delightful. Since a good chunk of these students will end up as someone's grad student, and publishing papers,  I also consider it service to the field ;-)

In terms of where my responsibility ends and the writing center's begins, I think everything field-specific is my responsibility and anything that applies to any document in English is there's-- so if they have problems with syntax, sentence structure, punctuation, word use etc. (mostly but not exclusively international students) I suggest they go to the writing center. Our librarians are also very helpful with search strategies, especially the science librarian.

[the_geneticist]

I don't think all students realize that with online classes I can easily tell if they have accessed an assignment.  I know that most students are honest and with nearly 1000 of them in my classes there will be outliers, but it's still a bit of a surprise to me that students will just outright lie.  I've had a few emails this week from students claiming that the course website wouldn't load or that the assignment wasn't available.  Both of these are easy to check (and it's suspicious when only ONE student sends an email about an assignment not being available).
Their requests to do something to make up the points disappeared when I showed them their user logs showing they hadn't even logged in to the class on those days.
I know they are stressed, I know they might be in a bit of a panic over forgetting a deadline, but I'd prefer they were honest.

[teach_write_research]

"Professor for the assignments where do we find the underwater basket-weaving examples."

Dear Student,
In the book we are reading for these last weeks of class, titled Underwater Basket-Waving: A book of examples.

Sigh. I get the stress and asking before thinking. It's just so disconcerting when they forget/avoid some of the core cultural practices of education - read the book and use the course materials for the assignments.

[Aster]

I don't think all students realize that with online classes I can easily tell if they have accessed an assignment.  I know that most students are honest and with nearly 1000 of them in my classes there will be outliers, but it's still a bit of a surprise to me that students will just outright lie.  I've had a few emails this week from students claiming that the course website wouldn't load or that the assignment wasn't available.  Both of these are easy to check (and it's suspicious when only ONE student sends an email about an assignment not being available).
Their requests to do something to make up the points disappeared when I showed them their user logs showing they hadn't even logged in to the class on those days.
I know they are stressed, I know they might be in a bit of a panic over forgetting a deadline, but I'd prefer they were honest.

After about 10 years of anecdotally tracking this across two different institutions, I can reasonable state that my percentage of "documented liars" ranges between 10-15%. It's on the higher end for the general education classes, and for classes that have lots of online homework. It's generally on the lower end for classes with less than 15 people, and majors-level courses where students have already completed at least one majors per-requisite course.

But then when most studies of college cheating and academic dishonesty report sky-high levels, I'm not surprised at all.

[polly_mer]

I've had a few emails this week from students claiming that the course website wouldn't load or that the assignment wasn't available.  Both of these are easy to check (and it's suspicious when only ONE student sends an email about an assignment not being available).

Unfortunately, it's much harder to check that an individual browser has cache or other issues so that items legitimately won't load.  I've put in more than one phone call to IT for a website that I use all the time that has somehow become dysfunctional by being open too long in the computer that I only restart after power outages, an update that I couldn't control while it was open, or something else that means the website that worked last night is not working this morning.

I have nothing for you, though, if the assignment was open for a week and students didn't contact you immediately several days before the assignment was due with questions about not loading/not available.