And
of course we correct them firmly when they break the rules.
And
of course it is absolutely ridiculous and should not happen.
And yet it
does happen!
As far as any sort of discipline is concerned, we are severely hobbled by administrators' fears of angry and potentially litigious students and parents. When I first started teaching in 1972, we could actually throw a student out of class for being disruptive. Although I never had that problem myself, I know of a couple of cases where it did happen.
But now we have to take a formal complaint to the chairman, and he has to go through all sorts of complex and time-consuming procedures, and removing the student isn't even an option on the table unless he threatens actual violence.
Something as relatively benign as being naughty or thoughtless enough to pull out your cell phone in class doesn't even register as a significant offense. We are pretty much on our own in dealing with such things, and if we deal too firmly, a complaint will go to our department, and we will get into serious trouble.
Understand that many of us teaching in college now do not have the protection of tenure, no matter how long we have been there or how much we have done for the department. (There is another DU thread on this issue.)
Juts to give you an example of how little authority or power a teacher has:
This semester I have received a series of bizarrely insulting e-mails from a student in one of my classes. Now, I am a very popular teacher, and my evaluations are overwhelmingly positive, despite the fact that I actually try to apply some academic rigor to my grading policies.
But there is no way to please everyone all the time, especially if you require students to do the work, to follow rules, and to meet certain standards of performance.
In my “Introduction to Poetry” class I allow students to submit a draft of their essays before the due date, to get some feedback that will, it is hoped, enable them to improve their papers before they have to be graded on them. This is not required by my department. In fact, the department rather prefers that we not allow revisions, though they do not actually forbid it. Furthermore, I spend an incredible amount of time marking papers so that students know exactly what they need to do to improve their writing. Adding an extra draft of each paper for each student literally doubles my workload.
In other words, the students don’t actually have a “right” to this early submission and chance for revision. It is something I do at some real cost to myself, simply because I believe it is essential to their learning process.
I also have some requirements for their essays’ formatting, and those requirements are in writing, both online and in the introductory handout that I pass out at the beginning of the semester. Nothing bizarre, just standard stuff: double-spaced, typed on only one side of the sheet of paper, stapled in the corner. My only unusual requirement is actually a departmental standard wider than normal margins (1 ½ to 2 inches), to allow room for my copious comments. The formatting requirements are there simply to make it possible to read and mark their papers.
This girl turned in her paper with margins so bizarrely wide that the text of the paper occupied only 1 ½ inches in the center of the page. No line contained more than 4 small words, and many lines contained only 2 or 3. If a single word was even a little bit long, it didn’t fit and had to be hyphenated. Imagine, lines of text without even a single whole word! Needless to say, this made it very difficult to
read her paper. As for marking it, the darned thing was also single-spaced. She is not a good writer. Every single sentence had errors that needed to be corrected. Her essay’s focus, organization and development were weak, so they also needed to be commented on as the paper progressed.
I was annoyed and frustrated at this nonsense, of course. But I tried anyway to comment and correct. But after about three pages (which did not take me far into a paper, since each line contained so few words), I gave up. Not only was it just too hard to make corrections when there was no room between the lines, so that everything was connected to the margins with arrows, but also the margins were turning into a holy mess, a pile of red scribbling. I know that
I would not be able to use such a mess to correct my own writing, and I was quite certain that it would be discouraging and not at all helpful to her, either.
So I wrote a note at the top of the paper saying,
I am sorry. I can’t mark this paper in this format. The narrow text makes it nearly impossible to read, and the single spacing makes it nearly impossible to mark. E-mail me tonight to remind me, though, and I will send you a set of notes to help you understand the aspects of the poem that are giving you trouble. I will be in my office tomorrow if you want to come in and discuss any other problems you are having with the paper.
The e-mail I got back from her was astonishing! It was so bizarre that I took it to the director of Freshman-Sophomore English. First off, at the first sign of trouble, we all know now to begin immediately the process of documenting every thing that passes between ourselves and such a student. In the second place, I wanted to know if there was a way to get this student out of my class and into someone elses’s. She had already poisoned the well. I am very fair. I don’t grade students on whether I like them. But as I have said, she is not a good writer. Yet her e-mails (that one and subsequent ones) make it clear that I “owe” her a good grade in this class, and that she has no intention of settling for anything less. She has no sense, though, that
she might have some responsibility in the matter of earning a grade.
As she put it in her first e-mail, “
I pay
YOU to teach me!” She has this idea that as her teacher, I am like a waitress. I am there to serve her, and if she feels the service is inferior, she has a right to insult me and chastise me for not jumping when she, the customer, says, “Frog.” (And we all know about customers who feel that a waitress owes them a very high level of fanny-kissing.)
Naturally I now Xerox and keep on file everything that passes between us, including her papers and my comments on her papers. Maybe she will get a good grade this term. I am a good teacher. A lot of people improve dramatically over the course of a semester, if they pay attention to what I am teaching and make some effort. But I haven’t seen that sort of effort or improvement in her work yet. In fact, I have not even seen her as often as I should, since she has a tendency to cut class. But when she gets her grade at the end of the semester, if it is not as high as she feels she has
paid for, I am sure the department will hear some noise from her.
The fact that my department told me that there is nothing I can do about her is the real point here, though. She can write e-mails telling me what a crappy teacher I am and lecturing me about how she pays me so I have to do what she says, but I can’t correct her or sanction her in any official way, no matter what she does, and I can’t even ask her to leave my class.
Under circumstances like these, do you honestly think a teacher has any power other than admonishment to prevent a student from playing with his cell phone in class? I have it in writing on my introductory handout that if they are physically in class but clearly doing other things like chatting, writing letters home, doing crossword puzzles, etc., it will count against them, because they will not be counted as actually attending class.
Just last Thursday, I had to admonish a different girl who was messing with her cell phone in class. She had the grace to look embarrassed and put it away, but this very same girl on Tuesday had to be told to put a magazine away. A week earlier, she had pulled out her compact, held it up in front of her face, and started refreshing her lipstick.
This student isn’t a trouble-maker like the other one. She just doesn’t have the self-discipline to refrain from doing whatever the impulse of the moment drives her to do, no matter how inappropriate her behavior might be to the fact that she is in a college classroom. Until about 9 or 10 years ago I never saw
anything like this in my classes. But then it started, small at first, but building up gradually over time.
Maybe your son’s teachers have more administrative back-up than we do if they want to sanction students who pull out cell phones. Or maybe all of the teachers he has are actually tenured, so they have more job security and don’t need as much back-up. But I am not lying (and I rather resent the implication that I am) when I say that students pull out cell phones in class. I don’t put up with it, but they do it and I have to tell them to put the things away (which of course they do, looking sheepish about it all). But the fact that I won’t tolerate it doesn’t prevent them from actually doing it in the first place.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
