Stratego.

I'm betting we all get at least one of these emails every semester:

Professor,
The drop date already passed for freshmen. Can i email you before the final to see if you can tell me how much more or less I will need to score on the final to pass your class because I really want to pass. If I need a higher score, I will look over the information more for the final.

I replied, "You need a higher score. Look over the information more for the final."

I mean, that kind of request just BURNS ME UP. It's very much in line with this post from Rate Your Students:

Here's the deal. Know the shit I taught you. Read the material. Stop trying to second guess what's on the fucking examination and apply your pea-sized brains to learning what you ignored all term. I swear I could give you all the questions in advance, and that a third of you would find a way to fail anyway. Stop being so strategic about your "education."

I truly don't understand that "strategic" tendency of some students--the ones who want to know their exact numerical value in the class so they can "aim" for an exact numerical value on the final--as if that were possible!--so that they can pass the course with a bare minimum of 59.6%.

I mean, if you've been scoring 50s on all your essays this semester, and are clearly failing, in no uncertain terms, by the end, WHY would you be concerned with exact percentages on the final? Wouldn't you just want to do the damn best that you can in your effort to salvage the course???

Some cheer during a tough time in the semester.

I want to post this email I just received from a student, because this kind of email is so very very rare.

I gave my students a worksheet full of horribly incorrect sentences that they were to correct as an exercise in proofreading. The sentences were compiled (mostly) from student papers from last semester.

This particular student--the absolute brightest student I have had the pleasure of teaching--just wrote me to say that she had finished the exercise, and:

HOW DO YOU EVEN GRADE THESE??! These sentences are ridiculous. I don't understand how these kids graduate from high school when they can't even put together a clear, cohesive, complete sentence! I'm sorry, it just blows my mind. Is it because they're just lazy, or do they really not know how? It seems like they really don't know how. Now I'm even MORE depressed!

This is why I could never be a teacher - I lack the necessary patience and understanding. You're my hero.

Aside from my feeling rather self-satisfied right now--isn't it SO NICE to hear a student view the classroom from our perspective?!

P.S. I wrote her back to tell her, among other things, that I have no such "necessary patience and understanding." I just fake it well. :-)

Video on the state of higher education.

I don't even know how to introduce this. Please watch:



I need to gather my thoughts, but I think it says some interesting and powerful things (and some things I disagree with as well).

I think I am going to assign some kind of extra credit assignment to my students in conjunction with this video.

Isn't that something we learn in K-12?

I was writing my husband an email this morning--I talk to him frequently about teaching issues--and was musing on the difficulty some of my students have had understanding certain elements of persuasive writing. In particular, it strikes me as funny that the information I am teaching is almost as new to me as it is to them, so I'm copying what I wrote him below (lightly tweaked, of course):

This demonstrates to me what an education truly does. In four years of private undergraduate education and two years of Ivy League schooling, not ONCE was I taught argumentative structures, or any kind of persuasive writing whatsoever. [In college I skipped out of freshman English because of AP credits, and in grad school I took only one course that required a final paper from me (all others were creative). Yet, I have a job teaching a course that I never took myself, and, in fact, never formally learned.]

In teaching this material to my students, I'm only a few days ahead of them--I read the textbook, learn the information myself, and teach it back within 48 hours. [And while that is a bit embarrassing to admit, the truth is that I know my shit, and believe I teach it well.]

Why does it work this way? Because those six years of education taught me how to learn. The specifics of the content of those six years are generally irrelevant, but because I went through it, I know how to be a student; I know how to read; I know how to interpret, analyze, synthesize, rephrase, and rethink. Which means I pick up just about any material 20 times faster than my sophomores.

Okay, perhaps my class prep is a bit reckless, and certainly I don't have this problem with courses I have taught more than once. But otherwise--don't we often complain that our students' problems are that they "don't know how to be students"? If only they understood that I don't assign them readings because the content will matter to them years down the road, but because the skills they acquire in doing the readings will matter, oh, FOREVER. It's not like we ever stop learning--even in the corporate world, there are certifications and training! The ability to learn seems a rather important idea that perhaps students never really realize..

Oh, thank god, it's not just us.

Sorry to post again so quickly, but I just HAD to include this video. It's from February, so you may already have seen it or heard of it, but it was new to me:


Generation Me

Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions.

Another link, this one to a political theory professor. I think what she's saying here about students asking questions is related to my previous post about class discussions:

Learning how to ask the question, figuring out what a good question would look like and to whom and under what conditions is hard. In part, it's hard because it involves risking the stupid question. It can also be hard when the circumstances are new--different contexts have different norms and expectations. When so-called educators lie about stupid questions, we undermine students' actual knowledge that figuring all this [out] is a challenge. In this way, we deny their very real knowledge of risk and context, their knowlege about the conditions of learning. [my emphasis]

I think we'll all agree that we hear stupid questions ALL THE DAMN TIME from our special snowflakes, but what ARE these questions? The last one I got was in an email, something to the effect of, "Hi can you tell me what page numbers have the works cited information?" I wrote back, "Have you considered checking the table of contents?"

I think most of the stupid questions I hear are related to the nuts-and-bolts workings of the course--and usually they're only stupid questions because the answer has been given to the student repeatedly, and in writing.

But as for the class discussions? I don't get a lot of stupid questions on the material. And a student with a question at least indicates a CERTAIN level of thought and engagement--enough engagement to show confusion. (Some days, I'm grateful just for that.) Anyone else see something different in the "stupid question" issue?