physioprof, the two are actually related. I'll try to be brief, but the gist of what happened is that I had an assignment that did not go well---there were some issues that I didn't anticipate, and the students ended up doing way more work than I intended, for a negligible payoff. Big, big oops. I did a lot of damage control, I took responsibility, we had a most excellent class discussion about it, I got really excellent suggestions from the students about changes I could make to the assignment next time, I made sure that they knoew I was listening to them and *hearing* them and that I would take their feedback very seriously, they seemed to get that---everything was hunky-dory. Except apparently there is a (vocal) minority of students who just cannot let go of the fact that I made a mistake, even well after the fact. One mistake. One of these students confronted me in a, shall we say, not very nice way. I handled it as best I could. Now, in a normal department, I would have headed straight to the nearest senior faculty/mentor's office and said "here's what happened, here's what I did, now what did I do right and what could I improve next time?" Except that past experience with my "mentors" has shown me that the best I will get is "well, you didn't handle that very well" or "gee, I don't know", full stop, and that I will somehow get dinged for this later because I didn't know how to handle the situation. I don't know, I just feel like I have to figure all this out on my own, which, fine, but if I ask *directly* for help and if it's clear that I'm making the effort to help myself before I ask for help, well, then I don't understand why I'm not getting the help/mentoring I need. It's frustrating, because this kind of thing (not getting mentoring from my department) plays out over and over again, and I don't know how I can possibly be more explicit about what I need.

Hmm, I guess that wasn't very brief, was it?

Posted by: Jane | March 26, 2008 9:21 PM