Monday, August 26, 2013

Delayed Reaction to Sunday Night Flakemail

Fellow CMrs, I’ve been bad. Just how bad, I wonder.

With the first homework set due Monday afternoon, Sunday at 10:00 PM I got the usual flakemail: waaah, waaah, problem 48 isn't like anything we did in class, can you give me a hint? Sure thing, little snowflake, but I don’t have the book here with me. Let me get back to you tomorrow morning, okay? And I did, and sent him a detailed hint (no thank-you email, of course).

I try to be nice, but…it’s not natural. Something inside me is saying `I need to do something about this, today’ as I prepare the notes for the class. Hence the first page they see:

HOMEWORK HELP (POLICY)
  1. Problems due on a given Monday will be posted by the previous Wednesday.
  2. You may ask HW questions during recitation, or go to your TA’s office hours. E-mailing the TAs is also OK (Monday through Friday only).
  3. Some of the HW problems may deal with material not introduced in class. There will be enough information in the text.
  4. Some of the HW problems may be unlike any examples seen in class, or in the text. If you really understand the material, you should be able to think independently about it.
  5. “Getting help” to solve a problem is second best; avoid it if possible. There is tremendous learning value in figuring things out on your own (and it builds self-confidence.)
That’s it. And even as I gave the this isn’t high school anymore spiel to go with it, I was thinking oops, this is overkill. Some looked stunned, others did the what-a-dick eyeroll, two or three got up and left, right there. It certainly got their attention.

Now, there is nothing wrong with what I said, and it’s something they should hear at some point; apparently it falls on me to say it. But it’ll take a couple of lectures to get the temperature back to normal.

15 comments:

  1. I wholeheartedly approve. Consider those two or three who got up and left, right there. If they try that when they have real jobs in the real world, they won't have those real jobs for long. But of course, you may be the very first person they have ever met in their entire lives who wants them to think independently and build self-confidence, the hard and practical way. They're used to having their self-esteem massaged for free. That this isn't high school anymore I don't think is overkill: mathematicians are known for their love of precision, and this says what's happening here, precisely.

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    1. It used to be (even fifteen years ago) that when teaching sophomore-level Calculus to prospective Engineering majors one could assume they had seen a little Physics in high school: equilibrium of blocks hanging from cables, inclined planes and so on; so one could draw on "applied" examples of a certain kind freely. Every time I teach this kind of course I have to remind myself this is no longer the case: that a sentence like "set up the vectors so that their resultant is zero" is Greek to most of them.

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  2. Peter, I second Frod!

    Also, love love love the graphic!

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    1. Yeah, great graphic! Only the windmills are missing.

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  3. Dear Snowflakes,

    There is value in failure. Do it how you think it might work, get it wrong, and learn how you went wrong. You will be better because of it.

    The Lost Art of Learning

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    1. The comment system appears to be flaky today. It ate my last one.

      Anyway, I was just making the point that students have been trained by the expectation of grades and constant "assessment" to be cautious on homework, because they know they'll lose points if they get it wrong. The way to fix that is not to grade homework, but they've been so trained by our stupid assessment culture, that they'll just not do it then.

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    2. I've tried testing whether they're doing the homework by giving quizzes based on them. It doesn't work: about half of them don't look at the homework, take their chances and bomb the quizzes. They must know I'm the one who will be blamed if a large percentage of the class gets low grades, even if they bring it on themselves.

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    3. When I was teaching language courses, there were some assignments or portions thereof that I would grade according to effort, not rightness. As in: skip that "hard part" and get no credit, or demonstrate some effort to stumble through it, get your credit, and then we go over the exercise all together in class.

      It's not a model that works for everything, but once they got used to it (and realized that yes, I really would dock major points if you just skipped it entirely) many actually looked forward to the in-class debriefing. And so did I!

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  4. An experience like this is what taught me to include a policy in my syllabus I call "sanity protection." Among its several provisions, it mentions that I do not work on Sunday -- no email, no grading, no class prep. If I make a pious face and say "Oh, I'm sorry, I take the sabbath off," no one ever questions it.

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  5. I've also been forced to include on my outlines clauses stating things like at what point in the day (or evening) e-mails will not be answered that day, etc. Otherwise you get some very huffy students expecting you to reply to a 9:00 pm e-mail that evening. I also have to say that I won't reply to e-mails coming from addresses that aren't my institution's (because I don't know if it's spam etc.), that don't have the student's full name, etc. etc. I think it's slowly sinking in....

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  6. Wait, the 2-3 students just got up and walked out of class? Without prompting from someone? That's likely the most initiative they'll ever take in life. Mine all wait until class ends and then never return. I wish they'd get up and leave while I'm in mid-sentence so I can ask if they plan to return and, if not, give their seats to someone else who is begging to get in.

    I have a clause in my syllabus like Doctor BPD. But the fact that we keep adding to our syllabus because of flakes is just tragic.

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  7. They needed to hear it; you said it. Good for you. Even if the temperature stays cool all semester, you've done the right thing (and are giving them what they paid for, whether they really want it or not: an education).

    Also, this would be a lot easier for individual proffies if more of us (and more K-12 teachers) did it.

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    1. I know; but I need to work on my delivery. A little more smiling and less sturm und drang. The vast majority of them will stay, play by the rules and do the best they can. And then exercise their right to vent through evaluations. That's really the entire role of evaluations: giving students a vehicle to get back at proffies who tell them things they don't want to hear, or make them work harder than they want to.

      As for my colleagues, they're happy to adapt to the students, stay under the radar and let me be the one used by the dept chair as exhibit one for "we take teaching seriously".

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