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

[polly_mer]

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?

Ask your counterparts who do the first-year writing courses at your institution what reasonable expectations are for students who successfully completed their courses.

I received far fewer college student complaints with learned helplessness regarding activities my small, rural middle school required* when I showed students the statement from the writing folks on what was taught in their classes and therefore what a successful pass should mean in terms of knowing about citation, avoiding plagiarism, and structuring different types of writing assignments.  One particular regional comprehensive university started requiring writing samples from the local CC transfer students before awarding credit in the relevant courses because so few of those students were able to do what we expected from our native students.

While I have had to scaffold papers as Puget writes, I also know that the step-by-step, hard-to-fail-unless-the-student-does-literally-nothing scaffolding was only necessary for my science for teachers classes that had a lot of first-year students and the research methods class for graduating seniors in STEM.  The research methods class was indeed teaching a very different way of thinking/reading than skimming some mass media articles to summarize the filtered-by-non-experts, generally-agreed-upon-state-of-the-field-applied-to-a-given-common-question.  Trying to get students to dig in and question the reported results for every paper is much harder than summarizing articles that all say approximately the same thing or are very clear that X is still an open question with several likely hypotheses still under research.

* I remember having to write a literature research paper in 7th grade art class on Paul Klee and art was a required-for-all class, just like home ec, shop, and study skills.  That was not the first paper I ever had to do and was far from the last paper before going to college.

[Liquidambar]

A student e-mailed me wanting a copy of his graded midterm so he can study for the final.  I was perplexed because I uploaded all the graded midterms to the CMS last week, so he should already have it.  No, it turns out he wanted the first midterm, from pre-COVID, because he skipped class all the times I tried to hand it back and didn't bother to ask me about it until now.

Lucky for him, the exam happened to be in my binder so I scanned it.  If it had been in my office, I wasn't going to campus just to retrieve it for him.

[Parasaurolophus]

Yesterday, I did some work setting up the Moodle pages for my summer courses.

Today, I awoke to find that IT had deleted them entirely.

[teach_write_research]

That's horrible!

Is there any chance they actually exist but you don't have access and they can get the back for you?

Yesterday, I did some work setting up the Moodle pages for my summer courses.

Today, I awoke to find that IT had deleted them entirely.

I needed a place to say that the undergrad research student who I keep telling no really you've done enough this term you've passed we can't do the original plan no really you've done enough the disruptions have caused massive changes for the research and teaching/advising has to get done first, keeps asking to do a paper to earn passing credit. Which I've already said they have.

[Parasaurolophus]

That's horrible!

Is there any chance they actually exist but you don't have access and they can get the back for you?

Nope, straight-up fully deleted. It wasn't a ton of work, and IT did manage to re-instate it from a backup server (with no explanation but with the implication that it was all my fault somehow). It's just completely inscrutable from this end, especially since there's no maintenance or anything scheduled until a week from now.

I needed a place to say that the undergrad research student who I keep telling no really you've done enough this term you've passed we can't do the original plan no really you've done enough the disruptions have caused massive changes for the research and teaching/advising has to get done first, keeps asking to do a paper to earn passing credit. Which I've already said they have.

Ugh. Enough already!

[downer]

Yesterday, I did some work setting up the Moodle pages for my summer courses.

Today, I awoke to find that IT had deleted them entirely.

That's horrendous. It's another sort of reason I try to have most of material up on my own Google drive as shared documents with links from the LMS.

[FishProf]

My students are such bad cheaters. 

Now, they shall fail.

[Juvenal]

My students are such bad cheaters. 

Now, they shall fail.

But just recall that prisons are full of failed criminals.  The successful ones go from strength to strength.  Well, maybe after CV.  Virus infects the just and the unjust alike.

[FishProf]

I just had a student try to argue that the Quizlet cards I say she copied are ones she created!

Two years ago.  When she was in high school.

A white belt in Google-Fu could catch these.

[0susanna]

Student who had been doing quite well before pandemic/remote teaching transition, and even then submitted acceptable online discussion posts for the first couple of times. Ze went dark for a couple weeks, then submitted a series of assignments--three discussion posts and two essays--that had clearly been run through paraphrasing machines. I gave the assignments zeros and explained why, but refrained from submitting them to the usual academic dishonesty routine, because of the circumstances. I explained to student that while the circumstances might be stressful, plagiarism was still unacceptable. I found the sources for most of the material, but really didn't want deal with the rigamarole myself right now.

What response did I get from Stu Dent?

"I read your comments on my assignments, and I wanted to explain that because English is my second language, I often write assignments in [my language] and then run them through a translation generator."

Take the zero, young person. You do not want to pursue this.

[the_geneticist]

Student who had been doing quite well before pandemic/remote teaching transition, and even then submitted acceptable online discussion posts for the first couple of times. Ze went dark for a couple weeks, then submitted a series of assignments--three discussion posts and two essays--that had clearly been run through paraphrasing machines. I gave the assignments zeros and explained why, but refrained from submitting them to the usual academic dishonesty routine, because of the circumstances. I explained to student that while the circumstances might be stressful, plagiarism was still unacceptable. I found the sources for most of the material, but really didn't want deal with the rigamarole myself right now.

What response did I get from Stu Dent?

"I read your comments on my assignments, and I wanted to explain that because English is my second language, I often write assignments in [my language] and then run them through a translation generator."

Take the zero, young person. You do not want to pursue this.

I'd believe the student.  It's pretty common for non-native speakers to write in their native language and run it through Google Translate or some other program.  The clever ones will then clean it up a bit before submitting or ask a native speaker to proof-read.

[mamselle]

Yes, the first time I ran into this with a student whose native language was Spanish.

I truly thought he was on drugs....total nonsequiturs about the artworks (of scenes in his own country) that I'd asked him to visit in the nearby museum.

Then I had a Russian ESL/citizenship exam tutoring client who tried to use one of the little handheld translators to do her work, while I was in the room.

I kept trying to show her how it gave her wrong answers, and made mush of her sentences.

Then I realized that was probably what the other student was doing.

Waste of their money and time....the result is a mess, AND you don't learn anything by letting the machine (try to) do the work for you.

But they were both convinced they couldn't survive without them.

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

Everything is taking forever and it's nobody's fault but my own. Urrrrrgh!

[sprout]

Everything is taking forever and it's nobody's fault but my own. Urrrrrgh!

+1

[OneMoreYear]

Everything is taking forever and it's nobody's fault but my own. Urrrrrgh!

+1

Yup, cold have posted the same thing.  Prep is taking longer and I definitely got through less material in the remote version of my 3 hour class.  Though I don't have the official notification, this will likely be my last semester teaching for this university (and possibly ever, given current status of higher ed). I usually really like the classes I'm teaching this summer, and I did not want to go out like this, feeling like my teaching is barely approaching acceptable.  It's the last one more year in my moniker.