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

[fishbrains]

I got an email a few nights ago from a student: "I do not understand the final project."
I wrote back immediately offering to address specific questions hu had over email, but if hu needed more help, we could talk over the phone.
Last night, the student responded, "Call me tomorrow night at this number at 7:30 PM."

I do not work that way - I am not at someone's beck and call. If they want to meet, I need some options into the future because my schedule tends to book up about a week or two out. The student's message was so vague, and I (unfortunately) already have night meetings with students, classes, or doctoral cohorts. I asked hu to please send me different day and time options so we might both be available to meet. Sigh.

Another concern: I wouldn't talk to the student on the phone at all because there would be no record of the conversation. I would record a Zoom or do it through email.

My general experience with students who send "I don't understand anything about the assignment" emails is that they are fishing for future excuses ("I asked Dr. DSN to call me and help me but they refused!") or seeing if the instructor will complete half the work for them. I could easily be wrong, but I'd still want a record of my discussions with the student.

[onehappyunicorn]

I got an email a few nights ago from a student: "I do not understand the final project."
I wrote back immediately offering to address specific questions hu had over email, but if hu needed more help, we could talk over the phone.
Last night, the student responded, "Call me tomorrow night at this number at 7:30 PM."

I do not work that way - I am not at someone's beck and call. If they want to meet, I need some options into the future because my schedule tends to book up about a week or two out. The student's message was so vague, and I (unfortunately) already have night meetings with students, classes, or doctoral cohorts. I asked hu to please send me different day and time options so we might both be available to meet. Sigh.

Another concern: I wouldn't talk to the student on the phone at all because there would be no record of the conversation. I would record a Zoom or do it through email.

My general experience with students who send "I don't understand anything about the assignment" emails is that they are fishing for future excuses ("I asked Dr. DSN to call me and help me but they refused!") or seeing if the instructor will complete half the work for them. I could easily be wrong, but I'd still want a record of my discussions with the student.

+1 to this.
I had a student send me an email at 8pm on a Friday night asking me to send them a Zoom invite so we could meet right then. They seemed to think that because it was an online course that meant that I needed to be accessible all the time.

[the_geneticist]

I got an email a few nights ago from a student: "I do not understand the final project."
I wrote back immediately offering to address specific questions hu had over email, but if hu needed more help, we could talk over the phone.
Last night, the student responded, "Call me tomorrow night at this number at 7:30 PM."

I do not work that way - I am not at someone's beck and call. If they want to meet, I need some options into the future because my schedule tends to book up about a week or two out. The student's message was so vague, and I (unfortunately) already have night meetings with students, classes, or doctoral cohorts. I asked hu to please send me different day and time options so we might both be available to meet. Sigh.

Another concern: I wouldn't talk to the student on the phone at all because there would be no record of the conversation. I would record a Zoom or do it through email.

My general experience with students who send "I don't understand anything about the assignment" emails is that they are fishing for future excuses ("I asked Dr. DSN to call me and help me but they refused!") or seeing if the instructor will complete half the work for them. I could easily be wrong, but I'd still want a record of my discussions with the student.

+1 to this.
I had a student send me an email at 8pm on a Friday night asking me to send them a Zoom invite so we could meet right then. They seemed to think that because it was an online course that meant that I needed to be accessible all the time.

And that is why my syllabus includes my availability. 

Know how & when to contact your instructors.  We are not "on call" 24/7.  Plan accordingly.

and

Students should contact Dr. Geneticist [email] using their official [campus] student email address.  If you email during office hours, you will get a reply during office hours or soon after.  If you email between 9:00am & 4:00pm Monday-Friday, you can expect to get a reply the same day.  If you email at other times Monday-Friday, then you can expect a response within 24 hours.  Dr. Geneticist does not answer emails over the weekends.

[mythbuster]

     Has indenting paragraphs died? Because none of my students do it anymore. So everything looks like on giant run on blob. I'm here to mourn for the old school carriage return.

[Ahania]

Based on some of my students' papers -- yes, indenting paragraphs is no more. I have continually commented on it and I finally had one student tell me he didn't know how to do that.

[ergative]

I've noticed a quite interesting--and, if I'm honest, logical--pattern in some of my students.

For paragraphs that belong in what we would call a subsection, they do a single return (and, sometimes, even indent). For paragraphs that span a larger topic shift, they do a double-return. Effectively they've intuited that certain topic shifts are bigger than other topic shifts, but they haven't been taught sections and subsections (and those would be silly in a 1200-word paper anyway), so they've invented a new way of signaling structure.

I mean, it's wrong, of course, but also at a more abstract, functional level, not wrong.

[fishbrains]

When I look at the online material students read, there are rarely indented paragraphs in it. Even when students access short stories and other academic material online, the preferred style seems to be adding an extra space between paragraphs instead of indenting for a new paragraph. The same goes for library database material when they research, packaged online material from "book" publishers, or, for that matter, even writing in online forums like this one).

First the young-uns stopped writing in cursive. Now they aren't indenting for paragraphs. Pretty soon these young whippersnappers won't know how to tan their own leather or fix a damn wagon-wheel! :)

[mamselle]

     Has indenting paragraphs died? Because none of my students do it anymore. So everything looks like on giant run on blob. I'm here to mourn for the old school carriage return.

Block paragraph changes has been accepted style for over 20 years now.  There should indeed be paragraphs when the main topic of the discussion changes, but indentions, while possible in MSWord, etc., are not accepted or expected style in written work now.

I know because when I indented something on a job I typed for someone over 20 years ago they yelled at me to get with the program...

(Sorry...)

M.

[robear]

I long ago adapted to the double line space rather than indentation to signal paragraph changes. The problem now is that in some platforms, when I hit return to create a apace to indicate a new paragraph, whatever I've written is immediately published in text, or WhatsApp, or whatever. Drives me crazy.

[the_geneticist]

And I just submitted the paperwork for "alleged academic misconduct" for a student who posted each and every single exam question on Chegg. 
What the student doesn't know is that there are 8x more possible question combinations than students in the class.  So, it wasn't hard to find them, even in a class of more than 500.

[darkstarrynight]

I got an email a few nights ago from a student: "I do not understand the final project."
I wrote back immediately offering to address specific questions hu had over email, but if hu needed more help, we could talk over the phone.
Last night, the student responded, "Call me tomorrow night at this number at 7:30 PM."

I do not work that way - I am not at someone's beck and call. If they want to meet, I need some options into the future because my schedule tends to book up about a week or two out. The student's message was so vague, and I (unfortunately) already have night meetings with students, classes, or doctoral cohorts. I asked hu to please send me different day and time options so we might both be available to meet. Sigh.

Another concern: I wouldn't talk to the student on the phone at all because there would be no record of the conversation. I would record a Zoom or do it through email.

My general experience with students who send "I don't understand anything about the assignment" emails is that they are fishing for future excuses ("I asked Dr. DSN to call me and help me but they refused!") or seeing if the instructor will complete half the work for them. I could easily be wrong, but I'd still want a record of my discussions with the student.

+1 to this.
I had a student send me an email at 8pm on a Friday night asking me to send them a Zoom invite so we could meet right then. They seemed to think that because it was an online course that meant that I needed to be accessible all the time.

And that is why my syllabus includes my availability. 

Know how & when to contact your instructors.  We are not "on call" 24/7.  Plan accordingly.

and

Students should contact Dr. Geneticist [email] using their official [campus] student email address.  If you email during office hours, you will get a reply during office hours or soon after.  If you email between 9:00am & 4:00pm Monday-Friday, you can expect to get a reply the same day.  If you email at other times Monday-Friday, then you can expect a response within 24 hours.  Dr. Geneticist does not answer emails over the weekends.

I definitely need to work on my boundaries. My spouse thinks I am terrible at this. All of my evening optional zooms have had very low attendance, plus we have two different doctoral programs that have monthly evening meetings. I have 7 PM meetings two times a week it seems. I am so over it. My spouse told me I should not do evening optional zooms after this semester. I started doing them last summer during the pandemic because students were so disconnected from other humans. They were really successful in the summer but I suppose not so much in Fall or Spring, even when I featured guest speakers. I do answer emails on nights and weekends because most of my students are distance students and work full-time. I believe that if they are emailing me about an assignment, they are likely working on it then so I respond on nights and weekends.

However, in this student's case, hu wrote me tonight (24 hours after my response for more options) that hu is only free in the evenings so I need to let hu know when I can call hu when I am available in the evening. Hu still did not provide any specific questions about the assignment. Sigh.

[downer]

Listen to your spouse!

[marshwiggle]

All of my evening optional zooms have had very low attendance,

Not trying to be snarky, but my immediate response on seeing this was, "How is this a surprise?????"

Students avoid "optional" things like the plague, and especially during non-class time.

[Parasaurolophus]

All of my evening optional zooms have had very low attendance,

Not trying to be snarky, but my immediate response on seeing this was, "How is this a surprise?????"

Students avoid "optional" things like the plague, and especially during non-class time.

Sometimes it's a feature, not a bug.

[marshwiggle]

All of my evening optional zooms have had very low attendance,

Not trying to be snarky, but my immediate response on seeing this was, "How is this a surprise?????"

Students avoid "optional" things like the plague, and especially during non-class time.

Sometimes it's a feature, not a bug.

Sure, but not something to sacrifice personal time and space to provide.