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

[kiana]

No. No. I am not resetting your deadlines so you can do the homeworks in your own time zone. Do them the night before. Everything is open for AT LEAST A WEEK and the late penalty is very generous.

No. No. I am not taking the photographs you sent via email and figuring out which problems they should be attached to. The late penalty is very generous.

[Parasaurolophus]

Students email me to say they can't access the course Moodle, which just isn't showing up for them (it shows up for some, but not everyone).

I tell them to ask IT.

IT tells them they can't do anything about it's, it's all down to me because I never made the course visible.

Of course I made the course visible. It's been visible for weeks. Besides which, most students can see it--so the problem is not that I failed to make it visible. Ball's in your court, IT.


(We've been having lots of issues with Moodle this week, including incredibly slow loading speeds. But why are we having Moodle problems? Surely most/all of these issues could easily have been anticipated?)

[mythbuster]

I also had a student who joined our Zoom meeting while driving. I had to turn off the video of her myself. We don't need to see that!

[mythbuster]

First exam of the semester today in Microbiology for Nurses and Public Health majors. So kinda relevant and maybe important to know right now? There is only so far that I can dilute this down, and I thought I had. So far the high is an 80 and there are waaay too many scores below 40.

It's going to be a long semester.

[Aster]

Most of the people in my remote classes this week turned in their homework.  90% or higher submission rates. That's pretty decent.

...except for one class section, which only has a 75% submission rate.

These classes are basically all identical to one another in pretty much every way. Instructions, postings, CMS layouts, the works.

This 75% class is upsetting my groove.

[polly_mer]

But if someone hated videos they could easily get the information they wanted by turning on CC and fastforwarding through.

This is how I do all my college-mandated idiotic training classes (one or two out of the 15+ we're required to take every year is worthwhile; the others, idiotic:  "When speaking with a student in a wheelchair, do not put your foot on the arm of the wheelchair, as this might be seen as offensive").  I either do the closed-caption fast reading, or I let the audio run and work on something else, then take te quiz when the talking stops. (These are all set so that the video must run the entire allotted time before we can take the quiz.)

Your mandatory videos just run for the full time?  We have a new management team who were on to the ability to fast forward or letting video run into the background.  Thus, the new mandatory trainings on the same topics have interactive parts where the buttons to go forward to the next two-minute video don't appear until you have successfully interacted.  The two-minute videos mostly read the words on the screen to us and again, the button for the next video/interactive part doesn't appear until the video finishes.

Good rules follower that I am, I wouldn't mind so much except it's so much slower than I can read, even while taking notes on the most important points that will matter to my job.  In addition, the interactive parts mostly didn't let me explore all the paths and answers to really learn the material.

I didn't try it on the training videos, but many informational videos from my employer will stop playing if one clicks away from the browser to do something else, even taking typed notes from the video.

[Hegemony]

Mythbuster (and everyone), I would make it an explicit point in the syllabus that if they have Zoom on while driving, they fail the day's assignment, or whatever you can fail them on. It is dangerous both to the student and to others on the road. Please do not let them get away with this. It is absolutely unacceptable.

[kiana]

Your mandatory videos just run for the full time?  We have a new management team who were on to the ability to fast forward or letting video run into the background.  Thus, the new mandatory trainings on the same topics have interactive parts where the buttons to go forward to the next two-minute video don't appear until you have successfully interacted.  The two-minute videos mostly read the words on the screen to us and again, the button for the next video/interactive part doesn't appear until the video finishes.

Good rules follower that I am, I wouldn't mind so much except it's so much slower than I can read, even while taking notes on the most important points that will matter to my job.  In addition, the interactive parts mostly didn't let me explore all the paths and answers to really learn the material.

I didn't try it on the training videos, but many informational videos from my employer will stop playing if one clicks away from the browser to do something else, even taking typed notes from the video.

Yeah, that's NOT what I'm trying to do. I hate that shit as much as everyone else. If they already know this part of the class AND are able to do the problems correctly using proper notation and they want to do it themselves and just fast-forward through looking for the couple of vocabulary items I asked for, idgaf.

It's the people that are guessing and pattern-matching their way to the correct answer and then giving me garbage on the handwritten items instead of just. copying. the. examples. that are frustrating me.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Ugh. Student just emails me to say that hu hasn't bought the text yet. Um, we're in the fourth week of class and you're telling me this now? I know the world is basically on fire (well on the West coast in the U.S.) and we're in the middle of a pandemic, but why wait until the fourth week to tell me?

Student should be fine though. Intro Physics hasn't changed in a long time, so really any Calc-based text is fine. I've been inundated by student email all day, so I suppose I'm just grumpy. Teaching six classes online doesn't help either...

[Anon1787]

I've been inundated by student email all day, so I suppose I'm just grumpy. Teaching six classes online doesn't help either...

How do you and others cope with the workload, especially if you are teaching online for the first time?

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

I've been inundated by student email all day, so I suppose I'm just grumpy. Teaching six classes online doesn't help either...

How do you and others cope with the workload, especially if you are teaching online for the first time?

I have taught online in the past, maybe 2 classes at a time- six is new for me. So, I am familiar with the interface, posting content, creating content, etc.

Here, most faculty have 5-6 (we focus on teaching not research) in the fall unless you can get a course release. How am I coping with it? Hmm, that's a good question. Right now, I've been trying to schedule specific hours for 'teaching' so that everything doesn't blur together (I have no weekends). Talking to other faculty helps. Most people I know are overwhelmed. 

[AmLitHist]

A student just tried in a response paper to convince me that there's a direct and obvious line connecting Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband" and Cardi B's "W.A.P." 

I'm sure Mrs. Bradstreet is spinning in her grave, and I'm ready to join her, since I've now apparently seen everything.

[spork]

I've been inundated by student email all day, so I suppose I'm just grumpy. Teaching six classes online doesn't help either...

How do you and others cope with the workload, especially if you are teaching online for the first time?

I have taught online in the past, maybe 2 classes at a time- six is new for me. So, I am familiar with the interface, posting content, creating content, etc.

Here, most faculty have 5-6 (we focus on teaching not research) in the fall unless you can get a course release. How am I coping with it? Hmm, that's a good question. Right now, I've been trying to schedule specific hours for 'teaching' so that everything doesn't blur together (I have no weekends). Talking to other faculty helps. Most people I know are overwhelmed.

I have been bundling my response to emails about the same topic from multiple students. E.g., putting an announcement about course exams on the LMS instead of replying to every student who has some kind of test-taking accommodation.

[mamselle]

A student just tried in a response paper to convince me that there's a direct and obvious line connecting Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband" and Cardi B's "W.A.P." 

I'm sure Mrs. Bradstreet is spinning in her grave, and I'm ready to join her, since I've now apparently seen everything.

I don't know Cardi B's piece, but I recite Anne Bradstreet's poem--a favorite--weekly in summers when there is no virus about to prevent me, at her father's homesite (it's too noisy to be heard well, where she and Simon lived).

M.

[marshwiggle]

A student just tried in a response paper to convince me that there's a direct and obvious line connecting Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband" and Cardi B's "W.A.P." 

I'm sure Mrs. Bradstreet is spinning in her grave, and I'm ready to join her, since I've now apparently seen everything.

I don't know Cardi B's piece, but I recite Anne Bradstreet's poem--a favorite--weekly in summers when there is no virus about to prevent me, at her father's homesite (it's too noisy to be heard well, where she and Simon lived).

M.

You probably would walk around reciting Cardi B's; at least not around other people.