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sciatrix...you get five exams turned to the correct set of pages in before you see a student who has written a desperate apology for his lack of studying and explained he stayed up to 4am the night before and then spent the intervening day working on a homework assignment that he was supposed to have completed before he left class the previous week. I hate notes like this because while I have a lot of compassion for students who are, for whatever reason, struggling... at this point in the semester, there is literally nothing I can do to help this student, I know my instructor has tried to figure out how to meet his needs all semester, and at the end of the day passing him out of sheer awkwardness and pity isn't actually doing him (or anyone else) any favors. I would rather set my students up for success, thank you, and I know for a fact my instructor feels the same way. Bless her.
Incidentally, yesterday's talk went pretty great, inasmuch as anything could given that technical difficulties meant that I didn't have the correct HDMI-to-VGA converter for the screen: I had forgotten that the room this seminar is in contains neither a built-in PC (as I am used to using in lecture rooms) nor any kind of video hookup that anyone has on a laptop these days: it only has a single, sad, VGA port. I could have sworn my boss, who runs the seminar series, had purchased a VGA-to-HDMI converter to sit in the room, but nope--so one of my labmates, bless him, volunteered to run to the front desk of the next building to go borrow a converter from them.
I own a converter now that will live in my bag so this never happens again, thank you.
After I stared, dead-eyed, at the audience for ten minutes after the talk had been supposed to start--I'd figured this problem out ten minutes prior but not been able to find a converter in that time--my labmate got back with a converter in hand, and we spent another ten minutes finding out that my laptop was incompatible with the slide display for some (probably Linux-related) reason.
Eventually I offered sheepishly to sign up for an early talk in the spring semester or possibly to convey my talk through the medium of interpretive dance, to which my boss pointed out "These aren't mutually exclusive..." I wound up giving a quick chalk talk instead, which went surprisingly well. Got a compliment on grace under pressure from another faculty member, even, which I am going to take with a warm sense of mortified gratefulness.
Anyway, I'm doing better housewise--got a storage unit in the front yard, getting nice burly men to move my shit into it, more on that later--and I've survived last week no worse for wear, so I can more or less breathe again for a bit. Finals are due this week, though, so I'll be spending much of my weekend grading. Fortunately I have time.
Oof. I'm getting a cup of tea.
Incidentally, yesterday's talk went pretty great, inasmuch as anything could given that technical difficulties meant that I didn't have the correct HDMI-to-VGA converter for the screen: I had forgotten that the room this seminar is in contains neither a built-in PC (as I am used to using in lecture rooms) nor any kind of video hookup that anyone has on a laptop these days: it only has a single, sad, VGA port. I could have sworn my boss, who runs the seminar series, had purchased a VGA-to-HDMI converter to sit in the room, but nope--so one of my labmates, bless him, volunteered to run to the front desk of the next building to go borrow a converter from them.
I own a converter now that will live in my bag so this never happens again, thank you.
After I stared, dead-eyed, at the audience for ten minutes after the talk had been supposed to start--I'd figured this problem out ten minutes prior but not been able to find a converter in that time--my labmate got back with a converter in hand, and we spent another ten minutes finding out that my laptop was incompatible with the slide display for some (probably Linux-related) reason.
Eventually I offered sheepishly to sign up for an early talk in the spring semester or possibly to convey my talk through the medium of interpretive dance, to which my boss pointed out "These aren't mutually exclusive..." I wound up giving a quick chalk talk instead, which went surprisingly well. Got a compliment on grace under pressure from another faculty member, even, which I am going to take with a warm sense of mortified gratefulness.
Anyway, I'm doing better housewise--got a storage unit in the front yard, getting nice burly men to move my shit into it, more on that later--and I've survived last week no worse for wear, so I can more or less breathe again for a bit. Finals are due this week, though, so I'll be spending much of my weekend grading. Fortunately I have time.
Oof. I'm getting a cup of tea.
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Date: 2019-05-11 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-13 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-11 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-13 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-12 09:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-13 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-12 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-13 07:41 pm (UTC)Moving gives me absolute hives, so this is going strangely nicely. Maybe it's just that I don't have to do any packing myself.
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Date: 2019-05-12 11:21 pm (UTC)Oof, I feel... bad for that student, because that was me. I had one professor give me what I assume was a pity D- for a course required for my major because I almost never came to class or did the work because of mental health, and even though it wasn't technically passing, all I needed in order not to have to retake it was a not-F. But at the same time, the professor was aware of how invested I was in the material and how much insight I had because of the way I would participate when I did show up, and I remember talking to him in passing once at an event a few years later and he was straight-up like "you didn't get a bad grade because you were bad at it, you got a bad grade because you never showed up" and it was actually a pretty touching moment for me to know that he recognized the difference.
I also one time elected to fail a course by default because quite a lot of personal and bureaucratic things went wrong all at once... sucked for my GPA, but I retook the same course with the same (amazing) professor and ended up properly retaining a lot more of the material and having a better time with it than before.
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Date: 2019-05-13 03:06 pm (UTC)In this particular case, from what I've heard discussing the specific student, it's not remotely that he's not putting in the work--he's working very hard, actually, always turns up to class, is a frequent visitor to office hours, and so forth. The problem is that he's got a ton of difficulty with the material itself, and I don't know if it's a failure of foundational education or a totally undiagnosed learning disability or what, but he's consistently struggling badly and he can't be happy where he is. In a case like that, I think that a pity passing grade can mean well but allow a student to retain false hope about their progress. In cases like yours, I think that they can be really motivating and heartening for students who are struggling badly! It's a hard line to walk from a teaching perspective.
I see a fair number of students who are set on pre-med in my class, either on their own or because their parents have assigned "doctor" as the only acceptable career occupation. It always makes me pretty miserable just to watch them.
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Date: 2019-05-16 03:20 pm (UTC)Misery for the students who might have a decade of medical education ahead, and for their future patients.
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Date: 2019-05-13 12:38 am (UTC)Good luck with the grading!
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Date: 2019-05-13 07:43 pm (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2019-05-13 06:03 pm (UTC)(My bad attitude is down to sitting in municipal meetings listening to traffic engineers read their powerpoint aloud.)
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Date: 2019-05-13 07:38 pm (UTC)I've taught with instructors who used the same approach before, and I love it. It's not as accessible to students who have a hard time with verbal information, but we've always used note-takers and videotaping for them, and in the past the approach has also meant that we only need to assign an optional textbook.
...I've been TAing Genetics courses for going on six years now, and I have so many opinions on how to teach that material and what to cover and how many things that are cool. I hope I get to teach it as an instructor at some point, honestly.
The liveliness of the drawn line
Date: 2019-05-16 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-13 08:47 pm (UTC)... my office laptop can't simultaneously use Airplay and connect to anything outside of the office. So I still have to do a wired connection.
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Date: 2019-05-13 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-15 01:31 pm (UTC)Also, sympathies on students doing poorly. You help all you can, but unfortunately you can't actually take the final for them.