What do parents want from Professors?

Parent Cafe
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<p>As I suggested before, writing-intensive courses are a different animal. Most courses, however, assign only 1 or 2 papers. </p>

<p>I am sorry to hear how hard some of you have to work to grade papers and essays. It is wonderful that you give your students great guidance for their writing assignments. However, the real problem has to do with how your university allocates resources. Writing-intensive courses should be smaller in size and/or professors should have TAs (grad students) to help with grading.</p>

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<p>You’re so determined to be right on this that you’re going to restructure the university? Grow up.</p>

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<p>collegehelp, I am a GSI (TA). There are 3 of us for this course of ~80 students. </p>

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<p>Why on earth would anyone be sorry about this? This is part of our jobs. This is what we do. I, personally, LOVE giving students feedback and improving their writing skills. </p>

<p>I second @WasatchWriter‌ </p>

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<p>Seems like time to fess up more, OP. What’s your familiarity with the reality of colleges, classes, etc? As one question gets its rotation, you then move on to the next. </p>

<p>The point isn’t the coddling. Next, will you suggest individualized exams and the choice to do an art project instead of a written test? Or do away with testing because they’re too stressful? </p>

<p>Where I work, grades are due 72 hours after the final. Would you solve this by ditching the final? Doesn’t leave much time for students who slouch. Oh, the poor dears.</p>

<p>Are you trying to write a book or some such? Seems all (most of) your threads solicit these general opinions.</p>

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<p>commenting on the work of freshman writers in order to help them improve is vital to their growth as college students in so many ways. Why on earth would you suppose it should be shipped off to overworked TA’s? It’s what I, as a trained, experienced writing instructor, am paid to do.</p>

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<p>No doubt an experienced writing instructor would be preferable to a TA. I agree. And, yes, I would argue that a professor needs help if they are so overwhelmed by grading and feedback that they can’t flex. The department should add another section of the writing course and hire or assign another professor. This is just good management. When the professor is stressed, students suffer. Cut the football budget and hire another instructor. Priorities.</p>

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<p>I suggest we ignore collegehelp. I agree with the actual college instructors and TAs who have responded to him or her, since while growing up, I saw my dad in action as a prof (next year will be his 50th anniversary as one). collegehelp obviously doesn’t have a clue as to what is involved with grading college courses and doesn’t care to learn from those who do.</p>

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<p>" No doubt an experienced writing instructor would be preferable to a TA. I agree. And, yes, I would argue that a professor needs help if they are so overwhelmed by grading and feedback that they can’t flex. The department should add another section of the writing course and hire or assign another professor. This is just good management. When the professor is stressed, students suffer. Cut the football budget and hire another instructor. Priorities. "</p>

<p>In this age of complaints about the rising cost of college, it’s really inspiring to read someone volunteering to pay more like this.</p>

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As several of us have pointed out, there are academic problems with the kind of “flexibility” you are talking about, in addition to the potential grading nightmares. Really, there are valid reasons why this kind of thing is not the norm.</p>

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<p>It seems to me that @collegehelp has decided that flexibility is more important than pedagogy, and that clearly those who perform pedagogy are too clueless to understand that (and perhaps have never even thought it through at all)—interesting point of view, to say the least.</p>

<p>I do wonder, however, where I’m going to find the extra time to grade all the assignments that come in the last day of the semester if I’m so busy answering all the emails I’m supposed to deal with during the weekend following.</p>

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<p>In a thread some years ago, collegehelp was looking at draw of colleges and was comparing (for example) the % of Harvard students who came from California versus the % of Stanford students who came from Massachusetts and was using those findings to draw conclusions, despite repeated explanations by multiple people that such a comparison made no sense when California is such a bigger state, both pop-wise and size-wise, than Massachusetts. There’s something just not quite right about analytical abilities here. </p>

<p>In the real world, which perhaps he’s not a part of, people have to get their work done / turned in at certain times. Indeed, that’s where weekend work comes from - because people take their work seriously enough to want to advance it on the weekends versus just let it languish and turn it in “whenever.” </p>

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<p>As a faculty member, I have to ask: As long as I turn the grades in by the time collegehelp graduates, that should be fine, right?</p>

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<p>As an employer I have to ask, as long as my young employees show up eventually, turn in their work by the end of the fiscal year regardless of when a colleague might have needed it, and attend their weekly staff meetings at least once a month- I should still get them their regular paycheck, right?</p>

<p>As it is, Gen X is having a hard time with the norms of the professional workplace- i.e. if a staff meeting starts at 9 am that means getting to the conference room at 8:55 so you aren’t breezing in, taking off your coat, slurping your latte, and trying to find your tablet in your backpack five minutes into the meeting. Gen X is having trouble understanding that employers don’t care if you were at a good-bye party for your roommate until 3 am Thursday morning so you can’t get to the airport for your 7 am flight to Chicago on time. Gen X is having trouble understanding that when you have a business dinner with the team you don’t bring your SO unless the invitation specifies that it is a social event to which SO’s are explicitly being included.</p>

<p>And now we want this new cohort to think that deadlines don’t matter because there’s always a default option for the calendar-challenged??? Good luck with that.</p>

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<p>Do you really mean Gen X? They entered the workplace in the 90s…</p>

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<p>I was going to say, Gen X is middle aged now. :). </p>

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<p>sorry- Gen Z or whatever we’re calling 23 year olds…</p>

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<p>I think they are called Millennials. </p>

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<p>I don’t think the comparisons between higher education and the business world are entirely apt. In higher ed the goal is to get knowledge and skills into students’ heads. That input process is different from the output process in business where you are interested in productivity. In higher ed you have to deal with all the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral factors that impact learning. Learning is much more complex than production. In higher ed, there should be a desire to instill a love of learning. If the experience is too painful, students will not acquire a lifelong love of learning nor a curiosity about a particular discipline. Furthermore, a school that makes the experience too painful is not going to produce happy alumni.</p>

<p>Students need some level of motivation or else they won’t work very hard. But, different kinds of tasks require different levels of motivation and different kinds of “psych”. If you are laying bricks, then high levels of emotion, motivation, even fear work alright. On the other hand, learning is a very complex task and the optimal level of “nervousness” is much lower than for, say, laying bricks. Students learn best when they have some peace of mind. Too much stress interferes with learning.</p>

<p>It is not as difficult to be flexible as some of you make it out to be. The sky won’t fall if you extend a deadline or give a make-up exam.</p>

<p>I have a theory about why some professors are more accommodating to students than others.</p>

<p>Some professors simply have more “law-and-order” kinds of personalities and other professors have more “democratic” personalities. The latter are less likely to abuse their power.</p>

<p>I also suspect that older, more experienced professors tend to be more sympathetic toward students than younger professors fresh out of grad school, especially if the professor has raised their own teenage children.</p>

<p>Then there are the institutional factors. I think professors at more selective school tend to be more collegial with students and faculty at less selective schools tend to be more adversarial.</p>

<p>And, perhaps faculty at research universities tend to be less accommodating than professors at LACs because of all the competing demands on their time.</p>

<p>Larger universities with larger class sizes might be less accommodating as well.</p>

<p>Some disciplines like business and engineering might be less accommodating to students than in disciplines like the social sciences, humanities, and arts.</p>

<p>All this is just speculation…a theory.</p>

<p>Some of you seem so unsympathetic and rigid about students that you would not be fit to teach.</p>

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<p>@collegehelp‌ wrote: “It is not as difficult to be flexible as some of you make it out to be. The sky won’t fall if you extend a deadline or give a make-up exam.”</p>

<p>Do you still not get it? Seriously—consider particularly the comments upthread about the fairness issues involved if, for example, a make-up exam gets taken after the answers to the exam have been discussed in class.</p>

<p>Not to mention that some of us teach at places where, either by policy or statute, an ad hoc accommodation on deadlines made to one students must be extended to all students. Sorry, but if we go down that path just because a single student isn’t together enough to get stuff in on time, at that point the whole concept of a “deadline” has disappeared.</p>

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<p>It is not adversarial when a professor publishes a syllabus in September which outlines the deadlines for the semester. It doesn’t show lack of flexibility when a professor refuses to make three different versions of a test to accommodate the kids who respected the deadlines outlined in the syllabus; the kids who are chronically unable to hand things in on time, plus the kids who might have a legitimate emergency (illness, death in the family, etc.) That’s reality. You’ve got the folks who get stuff in on time, those who have unforeseen emergencies, and those who suffer from “I’m a special snowflake” syndrome. I work with people like that- it’s not fun for the rest of us to have our own deadlines backed up because a team member thinks there will always be exceptions made for him or her.</p>