For those of you who are undergrads, this is not meant as an insult to you. Though if the below applies to you, then feel free to pretend that I am glaring at you condescendingly.
So far in my graduate career, I have had the good fortune of being able to TA for quantitative methods. This class is intended for third year students, but due to an intense fear of anything with numbers in this department, most put it off until their fourth year and often their last semester. This creates a problem because it is also the most often failed course in the department. One of the professors that teaches it even remarked that they lose students from sociology to anthropology just because people are so afraid of this course. I have even had to deal with a student taking it for their fourth time (once you fail it three times you have to get special permission from the department to take it again, and it is the last chance).
With that lead up I imagine you are wondering why I would say that TAing this class would be fortunate in any way. My absolute favorite part is the hilarity of the students involved and their lack of basic academic skills even in their junior or senior years. While I have to say the overall level of students is higher than my previous university, the ones that are bad are REALLY bad. In the class we mostly do everything on SPSS and the first couple weeks are always dedicated to getting people familiar with the program and how to open data sets, save outputs, etc. So you can imagine my surprise when in the final weeks of the previous semester, at time in which students should be well into their final project, a student raises her hand and says "How do I open my data file?" Now this particular student was never terribly engaged and continually refused to get extra help when it was offered. When I came over to her desk she had no idea how this most basic of functions could be carried out. I explained it to her and helped her find her data file so she could continue her project. I use the term "continue" very loosely because clearly she had not done much up to this point.
Another thing that continues to amaze me about my students and students in general is their immense fear of their textbooks. They aren't assigned as a joke or as a paperweight; they provide relevant information about the class. On Wednesday the professor who I TA for was out of town for a conference (in the Bahamas... that bastard) and he asked me to present that weeks lecture to the class. It was on bivariate statistics, specifically correlation coefficients and t-tests. This is something that I am quite familiar with so I had no problem agreeing to present on it. I amended the power-point that he used last year for the class with some of my own work. Upon beginning the lecture is was clear that 90%-95% of the class had NO idea what I was talking about. This lead me to the depressing realization that the sorry sods had not even bothered to glance at their book prior to coming to class. Fernando (the professor) went out of his way to assign two textbooks for the class. One is your average introduction to social statistics book that can be dense at times. He also assigned a companion book which is much easier to read and covers the topics of the class but in less depth. This book is so easy to read that at times it nearly insults your intelligence. The lecture went well overall and I was able to get the few students that did read to answer the prompts for participation throughout the lecture.
Not reading your book in any class is something I can't understand. But in a class like quantitative methods where you can't fake your way through lecture is not the place to do it. You can probably B.S. your way through a social problems lecture, or maybe even a history or philosophy lecture, but if you don't even know what a correlation coefficient is your are pretty much screwed. The blank stares from the lazy majority made this clear. Luckily I noticed early and was able to adjust the lecture down a few steps to drag these folks along and hopefully I inspired them to at least find out where they stashed their textbooks (unlikely, I'd assume). Then in the lab in the afternoon one of my students asked me a specific question about one of the statistical tests. I explained it without thinking anything of the question. The student responded "how do you memorize all of the information about all these tests?" I told her that I use most of them in my thesis work but that I also skim the chapters prior to each lecture. One of my more hilarious students (one of his research questions is whether having sex increases someones self-perceived happiness using statistical analysis, and who also is in two bands, one a "lighter version of Marilyn Manson" and the other devoted to covering old Japanese pop songs) piped up and said "I haven't even read either text book." I should have been surprised by this comment but I wasn't. I remarked that it probably wasn't something I would admit. If you are paying to go to college and paying for your books you are just wasting your time by not reading your books. Even if you pull an A without reading, your comprehension of the material is much less than someone who engaged with the literature. While I understand that reading myspace/livejournal/facebook may be more exciting than reading your textbook, they don't make you look any less like a moron for failing a class for the second or third time.
4 comments:
Thank you Eagan for writing the rant that I have so wanted to write for the past 1&1/2 years. I will never understand how you can come to class with out having even glanced at anything the instructor has assigned. Take my ENGL 2010 class for example, it is pretty much discussion based off of the readings--it's been this way all semester. I haven't changed my methods, so they should know by now. Well, I assigned them to read selections on course reserves and showed them all how to access it and even sent a follow up email that explained that they needed to print off the readings and bring them to class to use for discussion, and I even reminded them that there is an English lab they can use that doesn't charge them for the print outs. However, 80% of my class did not read/print off the readings. When I could hear the crickets chirping after I posed the first question to the class, I wanted to scream at them and then walk out. Seriously, what a waste of my time. I don't spend time making lesson plans when I could be doing other academic work to have my students show up to class completely unprepared. Undergrads kill me sometimes.
Haha, Sarah I did think that you would appreciate the post more than most. I am glad you can relate (well actually I wish all your students were overachieving angels, but how likely is that). Ah ENGL 2010, that class was hilarious because we would talk about social issues and most of the people hadn't read the assignments and would make statements based on their opinions they had formed as an ag science major. For poli sci/sociology students these discussions were torture. It would have been like Heather and I giving random opinions on raising dairy cows. When we see you during the holidays I need gory details about your little morons.
Brian, rant away, because what else is the internet for?
I think you misunderstand my angst towards undergrads. It isn't towards undergrads in general. It is towards the folks I singled out in my post; the "inadequate imbecile ones" as you put it. I LOVE some of my students, the ones that put in the work, the ones that ask insightful questions, the ones who make me stretch as a teacher. Some of these folks are going to go on to do amazing things and I am proud to have had a tiny part in their academic development. Those these folks are a minority in the classes I have TAed for (and the classes I have taken as an undergrad). It is these people make the teaching experience worthwhile. I hear similar things from professors at both SFU and USU, that instead of focusing energy onbitching about bad students, they focus it engaging with those few willing to step up.
And as to the godliness of grad students, I could have an equally long post about how useless many of the folks in my cohort are. I am sure Sara has experienced this as well. Some people are extremely smart and just extremely lazy (or not so smart but still lazy). Even for my grad classes there were folks not completing readings (for a four hour completely discussion oriented class...). Luckily most of the class was theory based so they could kind of BS their way through it.
While I do not plan to be a professor, I can see why some people would enjoy it. It just isn't for me, and as for the professors I know they seem to bitch about their grads, undergrads and fellow faculty with about the same vigor.
I wish I would have followed the conversation here sooner. I just read over the other comments and I have to say that I do not want to generalize my students either. There are some that are amazingly brilliant and that challenge my teaching abilities, and I love them for it. As far as grad students being "Godly," we are not. The same crap still goes on in grad school. I simply directed my post towards undergrads b/c they were at the top of my "hit-list" that day. If you catch me on other days, I could tell you novels of information about how annoyingly lazy some of my fellow grad students are. I think that most people want to get away with as little as humanly possible in order to achieve some sort of success--everyone wants something for nothing. My students want an 'A' in my class, but if they aren't willing to put in effort to read the material or turn in papers on time, then it won't happen. Unfortunately, a lot of people are just lazy and annoying.
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