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

[dismalist]

I mean crud, the Parentheses Rule is taught in junior high school, isn't it?

What are parentheses?

[Parasaurolophus]

Someone emailed me today asking me how to solve for a simple math equation where the technique to solve it is normally taught in junior high school, or 9th grade, tops. He wanted to know if you completed math equations within parentheses before equations that weren't in parentheses.

I don't believe that in my entire 20+ years of teaching has any college student ever contacted me for help on how to do this. I'm now wondering if all of the high school seniors for 2020 were just passed diplomas carte blanche.

I mean crud, the Parentheses Rule is taught in junior high school, isn't it?

Yeah, but...

Mine always struggle with the brackets in intro logic. When I tell them to think of BEDMAS/order of operations, it helps a few. But most of them seem even more confused. It inevitably ends up being a 10+ minute conversation about starting with atomic sentences and building out to more and more complex expressions.

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally from left to right was seventh grade when I learned it.

Hah! I don't think I ever heard that one.

[the_geneticist]

It's the second quarter of entirely online classes here.  I got an email from a TA that said one of her students is colorblind and can't tell the difference between any of the colors in the videos, graphs, & simulations in this class.  It's really, really rare to have complete lack of color vision, but it is possible (1 in 50,000 people).

Student - why did you wait until NOW to bring this up?  Online learning must be awful for you!  Please, please contact the student resource center.

[mamselle]

Someone emailed me today asking me how to solve for a simple math equation where the technique to solve it is normally taught in junior high school, or 9th grade, tops. He wanted to know if you completed math equations within parentheses before equations that weren't in parentheses.

I don't believe that in my entire 20+ years of teaching has any college student ever contacted me for help on how to do this. I'm now wondering if all of the high school seniors for 2020 were just passed diplomas carte blanche.

I mean crud, the Parentheses Rule is taught in junior high school, isn't it?

Yep.

I saw that and immediately said, "Commutative and Associative Rules," and pictured our 8th grade math classroom with the historical mathematicians like Newton and Leibniz on the bulletin board as I said it to myself.

M.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Grading these tests is... painful.

How do students with zero basic Math skills get into Calculus-based Physics? How???

We had an advisor in academic success who would regularly override the Calculus prereq because, and I quote,   "The math requirement is stupid.  No one need Calculus."

All in the name of student retention and graduation rate.

Yep. Wouldn't be surprised if they do that here too.

[marshwiggle]

It's the second quarter of entirely online classes here.  I got an email from a TA that said one of her students is colorblind and can't tell the difference between any of the colors in the videos, graphs, & simulations in this class.  It's really, really rare to have complete lack of color vision, but it is possible (1 in 50,000 people).

Student - why did you wait until NOW to bring this up?  Online learning must be awful for you!  Please, please contact the student resource center.

On a side note, I've been going through modules here about adapting to online learning, and the thing that jumps out at me is that so much of the information about how to make online learning engaging basically ignores (or even contradicts!) accessability guidelines. I realize this was thrown together for covid, but it's kind of unsettling.

[apl68]

It's the second quarter of entirely online classes here.  I got an email from a TA that said one of her students is colorblind and can't tell the difference between any of the colors in the videos, graphs, & simulations in this class.  It's really, really rare to have complete lack of color vision, but it is possible (1 in 50,000 people).

Student - why did you wait until NOW to bring this up?  Online learning must be awful for you!  Please, please contact the student resource center.

I'm only partially color blind, and I occasionally have trouble with color-coded graphics.  The one time I went to New York City some years ago I had trouble reading the subway maps.  It's an often overlooked issue.

[Aster]

Stu Dent: "Professor, I noticed that I can't look up any of my quizzes in the online gradebook." RED FLAG #1.

Me: "Can you not click on the quizzes in your online gradebook?"

Stu Dent: "No. I mean, there's nothing there." RED FLAG #2

I check my Excel gradebook. Yup, this guy hasn't submitted anything for weeks. Let's see where this discussion goes...

Me: "Oh. If nothing is there, that means that nothing was submitted. You need to submit a quiz in order to review it later."

Stu Dent: "I'm pretty sure I took at least some of these. I'm going to contact BlackBoard support to see what happened." Pretty sure that you took some quizzes? And you're going to contact IT support *now* in the middle of the semester?? What are they going to do, conjure up some grades for you?? RED FLAG #3 and RED FLAG #4

What do you folks think are the odds that this student will even contact IT support? Myself, I call BS and give it 50/50.

So, Stu Dent contacted me today claiming this.

"I have contacted blackboard and they said they are not sure what to do for the missing assignments for the previous weeks, they stated that if the grades did not show or were not received it is your Professors choice to reopen the previous assignments/quizzes and allow me to resubmit them. Please let me know if you have received my course work from this week."

So I ran a full LMS access check for this student. Not only did he never even log in for the first two weeks of class, he's also not submitted a single thing all term. His LMS access shows that he only even activated three assessments, but each event lasted for "0:00" or "0:01" hours. I had to calculate what "0:01" hours even was because it was such a small number. Heh, 0:01 hours is 36 seconds.

I copied the student's log-in access report and emailed it back to him. Currently, he has a 0 in the class. I wonder if he actually thinks that I'll reopen all of his missed work for him? What do I look like, a sweatshop professor at University of Phoenix ?

[cathwen]

I'm bracing myself for a similar situation. 

My student has, however, taken one quiz out of five, plus the midterm exam. He has missed all discussion board assignments, plus the one major written assignment so far.  His average is 35%.  He had trouble logging on the first week of classes, then was confused about whether we were on Blackboard or Canvas (our university is transitioning).  But even after that was cleared up, he continued to do no work.  He's claiming difficulty with the internet, and while I do feel some sympathy for those working from home with shaky internet connections, the fact remains that if you are going to take an online course, you have to be able to get online.  Oddly, he seems to be able to get online to send me the occasional email.

I have been brutally frank with him (as well as his adviser) about his chances of passing.  I will send another message just a day or two before the withdrawal deadline urging him to withdraw or risk an F.  Sigh...

[Stockmann]

Someone emailed me today asking me how to solve for a simple math equation where the technique to solve it is normally taught in junior high school, or 9th grade, tops. He wanted to know if you completed math equations within parentheses before equations that weren't in parentheses.

I don't believe that in my entire 20+ years of teaching has any college student ever contacted me for help on how to do this. I'm now wondering if all of the high school seniors for 2020 were just passed diplomas carte blanche.

I mean crud, the Parentheses Rule is taught in junior high school, isn't it?

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally from left to right was seventh grade when I learned it.

My current seventh grader demonstrated it last week when we were reviewing his recent classwork for a different reason.

Perhaps I should get a seventh grader to guest lecture some of my students.
One of my head-banging moments was with a recent quiz question - literally all they had to do was multiply two numbers together, both of which were given in the question. The formula is one we've covered, and that is on the class materials they could look at during the quiz. It's also in the textbook and isn't obscure. Yet some managed to get the question wrong. In another head-banging moment, I had an email from a student who got a question wrong because she used diameter instead of radius. I get  not noticing the number given is a diameter rather than a radius as an oversight with the clock ticking, but she claimed that she'd checked the question again and was getting the same answer.

[AmLitHist]

Like some of the rest of you, I'm starting to hear from the "mathematically impossible to pass" students, but not nearly enough of them.

One guy emailed overnight, begging for me not to drop him.  (We can't drop anyone--trust me, Stu, if we could, you've have been gone weeks ago.)  He emailed because an advisor contacted him yesterday saying that I'm going to fail him.  This guy has been to maybe 3 of 16 Collaborate sessions ("live virtual lecture"); he's tuned in nary a word all semester, including the required in-class assignments; and now he's promising to have all the work from the first 8 weeks turned in to me by Monday morning.

Nope.  This is midterm, and I have a ton of work from serious students coming in this weekend, and I have to get grades to the registrar by 5 Monday afternoon. Besides being impossible to do all that work, even if he could, there's a no late work policy in place, and also, I have real work to do.

Funny, too, that he was completely fine with ignoring my 3 emails earlier across the semester, the previous 2 calls from an advisor, and the detailed email I sent him this week, explaining complete with the numbers why he can't pass this class. Of course, the upshot in this guy's version will be that I'm a mean, evil, uncooperative old witch. 

Whatever, guy.  I'm not even banging my head anymore; they're just all getting to be a real drag, and there are a lot more of this kind this fall than in recent semesters.  And, yippee, I have two 8-week Comp I classes starting on Monday.  Woo-hoo. Pfft.

[Aster]

Oh man, you're using the Collaborate platform?

My deepest sympathies.

[Langue_doc]

My sympathies too. The first time I used it, I found myself in one classroom and the students in another. After communicating through email for about 20 minutes, I had to resort to using the discussion board for the rest of the class session. The students survived, but I changed the format. Never again!

[Aster]

The Collaborate system is so lousy that many of the professors at Big Urban College opted to purchase their own personal Zoom accounts.

About a month after we were using Collaborate, there were enough complaints that our institution bought a separate Zoom license as a substitute.

[onehappyunicorn]

We are being "strongly encouraged" to use collaborate, thankfully I already have Zoom account so my wife can talk to her family that lives over 2,000 miles away. I had a training meeting via collaborate with our distance education team and the meeting was a mess from start to finish. We are all in on Blackboard as an institution though so I expect that we will end up expanding the mandatory certification to collaborate as well.