{"id":2395,"date":"2008-03-19T10:53:34","date_gmt":"2008-03-19T10:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/19\/uncomfortable-questions-infuri\/"},"modified":"2008-03-19T10:53:34","modified_gmt":"2008-03-19T10:53:34","slug":"uncomfortable-questions-infuri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/19\/uncomfortable-questions-infuri\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncomfortable Questions: Infuriating Student Habits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anon_student asks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

You seem to enjoy teaching most of the time, but what traits\/habits in students absolutely infuriate you?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hoo, boy. There are so many, it’s hard to choose just one…<\/p>\n

If I’m allowed to group things together into a larger category of offense (and it’s my blog, so I can do what I damn well please), I would say that the thing I find most infuriating in dealing with students is a lack of respect.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I don’t mean “lack of respect” in the sense of “They call me ‘Mr.’ instead of ‘Professor,'” or anything cosmetic like that. I’m talking about general behaviors that fail to respect faculty as individuals.<\/p>\n

I’m talking about things like not responding to emails that specifically ask for a response. When I send a message saying “I’d be happy to meet with you tomorrow afternoon to talk about the homework. Does 2:00 work for you?” I expect a message back saying “Yes, see you then,” or “No, because I have class until 3:00. How about 3:15?” Not responding, and then just showing up at 3:15 indicates a lack of respect.<\/p>\n

Or there’s the habit of assuming that my sole purpose in life is to help answer questions. I check my email more frequently than most faculty, and I will usually respond to email requests, fairly promptly, but I get a little miffed when I wake up to find a cranky email message time-stamped 1am complaining that I didn’t respond to the earlier message set at 10:30 pm. That’s a failure to respect the fact that I have other things to do than to be on 24-hour call for homework assistance.<\/p>\n

There’s also disrespect for the course in general, such as the students who write lab reports containing things like “We calculated the speed of the ball leaving the spring-loaded launcher to be 10,542 meters per second. This is probably wrong, probably because we made a math error somewhere.” This is astonishingly common, and never fails to make my blood boil– it indicates that they don’t care enough about the class, their grade, or the person doing the grading to make the minimal effort of re-doing the calculation before handing in the report. In this case, at least I get the chance to return the disrespect in the form of a very bad grade, but that’s a small comfort.<\/p>\n

(I’ve toyed with the idea of doing the red-line thing to these papers– picking a point about halfway through and drawing a red line with a note saying “I lost interest here, and just made up a grade.” Somehow, I don’t think the point would get through.)<\/p>\n

If you’re a student reading this, here’s your take-home message: Show the faculty some respect. If you get email from your professor, send a response. If you make an appointment, keep the appointment. When you seek extra help, do it in a way that doesn’t just assume your professor will drop everything and answer your questions: Ask if it’s convenient, and allow a reasonable amount of time for them to respond.<\/p>\n

You don’t need to bow and scrape in class, or send thank-you notes for recommendation letters, but some basic courtesy and respect will put your professor in a much better mood when it comes time to determine your final grade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anon_student asks: You seem to enjoy teaching most of the time, but what traits\/habits in students absolutely infuriate you? Hoo, boy. There are so many, it’s hard to choose just one… If I’m allowed to group things together into a larger category of offense (and it’s my blog, so I can do what I damn… Continue reading Uncomfortable Questions: Infuriating Student Habits<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}