What Is Communism?

The following dialogue took place in both sections of my literature course.

Me: This philosopher says that the masses are stupid. In his opinion, the masses are incapable of governing themselves, which is why every society needs a strong governing minority that will direct and guide the stupid masses. How would you characterize the political stance of this philosopher?

Students (in unison): He is a Communist!

Me (baffled): No, actually such views belong on the opposite end of the political spectrum. If we have Communism on the far left, then which political system belongs on the far right?

Students (in unison): Socialism!

Those pesky Communists and Socialists seem to have colonized the entire political spectrum in my students' opinion.

End of Semester Correspondence

I wonder why some students choose the end of the academic year to get on a prof's nerves in the most inventive ways imaginable. It has to be pretty obvious that a professor will be extremely thankful to anybody who doesn't waste her time in any way and might even cut such considerate students some slack. Apparently, most students don't see it this way because I keep receiving emails from students that would try the patience of an early Christian saint. Here are some examples of what I've been dealing with in the past two weeks.

A) Dear Professor Clarissa, You said that today is the cut off day for the lab and I know that the lab is worth 25% of the final grade. I haven't done any lab since the beginning of the semester and I'm getting kind of worried. Should I worry about it or is it OK?

B) Dear Professor, I'm writing to tell you that you are the bestest, most amazing prof ever. I absolutely LOVED your class this semester. Your lectures are always so interesting and fun!!! I know I missed 11 classes this semester (out of 24) but I know that if I'd been there I would have loved them. So I hope that you don't hold my absences against me.

C) Hi. I'm wondering what my grade is at this point. Please send me what my grade is before the final exam. I need to know how much to prepare for the final exam. Thanks.

D) Dear Clarissa, I know you talked about the final exam in class today but I wasn't listening. Could you tell me what it is you said?

E) Hi prof, I know I missed the oral exam today and I'm sorry. Is there any way I could do a makeup exam and submit it to you by email?

F) Dear professor, I know that I spoke a lot of English during the oral exam today and that resulted in a very low grade. I just wanted to explain to you why that happened. I really love Spanish and want to learn it but speaking English is so much easier! So that's why I spoke it during the exam.

G) Hey Clarissa, thank you for giving us this great study guide for the exam in our literature course. I find it very helpful. The only problem is that I can't find the answer key. Did you forget to hand it out or did I misplace it?

I've been trying to figure out which one is my favorite but it's too hard to choose one. Which one do you like the most?

How to Talk to Students Without Getting in Trouble, Part II

Another important rule of interacting with students is that, no matter how close your relationship with a student is, it is never a good idea to comment on the student's weight or physical attributes. I had this male professor who kept bugging his female students with questions like, "How much do you weigh? Have you been gaining weight? Are you sure you don't eat too much?" I am blessed with having a very healthy attitude towards my body, so whenever this professor greeted me with "You are getting really fat, Clarissa. Why are you so fat?", I had no problem responding in a jocular tone, "Well, I never be as fat as you, professor" or "You know how much I admire you, so I'm trying to emulate you and get as fat as you are." However, students who had body image issues or even had a history of eating disorders suffered greatly. 

It's a good idea to avoid touching students when it isn't absolutely necessary. There was this professor who really liked my hair. I like my hair, too, and I understand how one might feel the compulsion to touch it. However, it would get really annoying to be sitting at the library or working in the stacks and feel somebody grab my hair and tug it. I'm especially sensitive to people touching my head, so it was extremely annoying. I couldn't do the same thing to the professor to teach him a lesson because he had no hair I could tug.

Self-deprecation is a tool that many professors use to show students that they are human and to make the students like them. I, however, believe that self-deprecation is counter-productive in the classroom. Not only all of my colleagues, administrators, staff members and janitors are completely 100% fantastic, but so am I. If there is something that I don't know or forgot to do, I just say so without engaging in a self-deprecating rant that would only make everybody feel uncomfortable. Students are not my therapy group and it is not their job to make me feel better about myself. 

It is often hard to keep one's cool, especially at the end of the semester when work accumulates and tempers get frayed. I saw a very soft-spoken and polite colleague last week yell at a student in a way that made even me feel scared. I'm sure that the student really messed up to make the professor this angry. I also think that yelling is a completely normal and healthy way of venting one's frustrations. However, I believe that it is only permissible to yell at people who have no problem yelling back at you. When you have a person who is powerless in their relationship with you, raising your voice is just abusive. When I feel that I'm about to explode, I just leave and take a walk around the building while trying to breathe very deep. This usually helps to contain the anger. Blogging about it is another great venue of releasing pent up anger.

You can find the first part of this post here.

And on My Birthday, Too!

There is this student who is actually quite bright who keeps taking my classes and then disappearing after the first couple of weeks. We have quite a long window of opportunity for students to drop courses with no penalties attached. This semester they had until March 21 to do so, for example. The student in question fails to avail herself of this opportunity. She then emails me either after the end of the semester or, like in this case, two weeks before to ask what she can do to pass the course. Which annoys me greatly because the suggestion that my courses can be passed through handing in a few written assignments by a student who has never been in class is quite offensive.

It's annoying to see otherwise intelligent, promising students self-sabotage in this way. It is equally annoying to have to explain to the same student over and over again that this is not the way to get an education. The most frustrating thing, though, is to see people who, for all means and purposes, are adults act in such an immature way.

Pregnant Student versus a Hungover One

Reader J. kindly sent me a link to a blog post of a woman who is going to college while pregnant. This blogger / student felt sick and had to leave class early. The professor took off participation points. Now the student is planning to complain:

 I have to keep going to class until I’m really in labor, and school is pretty far away.  My Tuesday class is a reasonable half hour away, but my Wednesday class is 90 minutes away in traffic.  If I started hard, active labor at school, I have no idea what I would do.  Also – get this – I left class early last Tuesday because I was so sick I couldn’t see straight, and my professor actually had the balls to dock me 20 out of 25 possible Participation points just because I had to leave.  Clearly she’ll be docking me ALL 25 Participation points for each class I miss while I’m doing a silly little thing like trying to have a baby, so I cannot take off a single extra day other than what is absolutely necessary.  (And yes, I am SOOO writing a letter about that.)

Now before I proceed to comment on this post, I need to explain that I'm the most laid-back professor in the world. If the students tell me they need to miss a quiz or an exam or that they can't hand in the paper on time, I never even ask them why this happens. I just reschedule. Every single time. My students see that I do everything I can to accommodate their needs, so they never abuse my niceness.  There was a single instance in my entire teaching career when I didn't accept a student's final essay that was handed in late. The reason why I made an exception for that student is that he handed in the essay a week after the date when I had to enter the final grades into the system. Other than that, I have not been known to make students' lives difficult.

Participation grades, however, are a different matter. In order to get your participation points, you need to . . . well, participate. In discussions. In class. I once failed a student who handed in perfect written assignments but missed 80% of classes in my Advanced Spanish Conversation course. As hard as I tried to explain it to him, he refused to realize that a course on conversation implies engaging in conversations and participation involves participating. As understanding as one might be of the students' personal circumstances, one cannot give participation points to somebody who was absent. Participation in absentia is not possible. It defies all logic to give participation points to someone who is not in the room.

The reason why I never ask students for the reasons why they need to miss class or hand in assignments late is that I have no interest in working out a hierarchy of special needs or problems. In the discussion thread that follows the post I quoted (if you manage to wade through the childish vocabulary and infantile oohs and aahs), several commenters refer to this woman's situation as being "special" because she is pregnant and, as a result, different from the situations of those students who can't come to class because they are hungover from their last night's party.

There is no doubt in my mind that her pregnancy is very special to this woman. It must also be very special to her relatives and friends. For strangers, however, of which her professor is one, it is neither more nor less special than another student's hangover. Both the pregnancy and the hangover are the results of the choices these students made as adults. In my capacity as an educator, I don't think it's my place to judge whose choices are more legitimate and deserve of greater consideration. All I need to know is that the student wasn't there and, as a result, didn't manage to participate. 

We all would like the world to stop and pay special attention to our all-important issues. And, of course, everybody is intimately convinced that everything to do with them is especially important. However, adulthood consists of realizing that we are not the center of the universe and the world at large couldn't care less about our pregnancies, hangovers, illnesses, absences, or grades. 

You Know Who Annoys Me?

Students who tell their professor that they really really need to meet with her before 10 am on a Monday morning, which forces said professor to drag her sickly self to campus (instead of staying in bed and nursing her sick ear) at an ungodly hour of the morning of a day when she is not even supposed to be at work, and then fail to show up. 

Is there anything less intelligent than antagonizing your professor in this way at the very end of the semester?

Talks With My Students Series

"Why are you learning so many languages?" I ask a student.

"Because learning a new language helps me grow as a person, understand the world and myself a lot better," he responds in perfect Spanish.

Teaching is really worth all the effort one puts into it if you get a student like this one at least every once in a while.

A Difference Between Freshmen and Juniors / Seniors

I graded 37 essays this week. Their quality varied from abysmal to fantastic. Still, there was one important characteristic these essays shared: they were all original. Not a single student tried to plagiarize. It is obvious that they did what I asked and abstained from opening their Internet browser the entire time they were writing their essays. The difference between these juniors and seniors on the one hand and the kind of students we get in our freshman classes on the other couldn't be more glaring. Sometimes, as many as 60% of first-year students hand in plagiarized work.

I have written before about the extremely low graduation rates at my university. We enroll a huge percentage of students who shouldn't be in college at all and then both professors and students themselves suffer through  their freshman year. These are the kids who don't know the names of continents, don't know which countries border the United States, and don't even consider the possibility that a written assignment can be written rather than copied from the Internet. These students literally have zero cultural capital, which is something that cannot be remedied during the first semester in college. (Here you can find a great post that explains what is meant by the term "cultural capital.") Before their first year in college is over, they drop out and we are left with students who can and will benefit from a university education.

We offer freshman seminars to our students. These seminars are supposed to prepare them to be in college. Next semester (in the Fall) I will be teaching such a course for the first time. I hope that I will be able to salvage a few of the students from dropping out. Many, however, cannot be helped even by the best course in the universe. The cultural capital is simply not there. Those who believe that "Africa is a country in Latin America" cannot be salvaged.

Why Is It Always a Grandmother?

I have no idea why students keep sending me emails explaining why they can't come to class. I don't really care what the reason is. An absence is an absence. I never refuse to accept any written assignment that is being handed in late, though. My position is: make up your mind, show up, don't show up, live with the consequences, it's all up to you. We are not in high school, and I have no need to know why any particular student couldn't drag himself to class. I keep explaining to students that the best thing they can do to get me into a good, positive, friendly mood is avoid wasting my time. I'm always available to talk about the course material. However, I seethe with anger when I'm forced to go over inane explanations of students' car trouble that prevented them from showing up.

Still, students keep sending in excuses. These excuses have a strange tendency to multiply right before spring break or on days when essays are due. I don't want to be cynical here, mind you. It is more than possible that relatives fall sick in droves, cars break down massively and alarm clocks fail by the thousand on the day before spring break. Who am I to say it can't happen?

There is just one question I have. Why is everybody's sickly relative who develops serious health issues on the day of the midterm always a grandmother? In the past three weeks I had three grandmas sick and one dead in my classes. Not a single grandpa, aunt, uncle, etc., though. It's not like I wish any harm upon these relatives, of course. I'm just wondering why grandmothers always fall sick according to such a convenient schedule.

CV vs Resume

I just discovered that my students are not aware of the word "CV." Only one student in a group of 24 finally figured out that it means the same as "resume." Is it some new generational thing? Is the word "CV" not in use any more? If so, then I have a problem because the word "resume" is one of those words (together with "focus" which I always make sound like "fuck us") that I haven't been able to learn to pronounce well in English.