Uncomfortable Questions: Infuriating Student Habits

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Re: Mr./Dr./Professor... I work at a college where the institutional culture is FIRST NAMES for professors. I've given up fighting it, because I'm concerned about the appearance of not being a team-player, but... I HATE IT, HATE IT, HATE IT!! Every time a student calls me "Dave" I cringe inside.

Do you consider sleeping/resting in lecture to be disrespectful? I do that a lot, and sit right up front most of time ...

I'm a big jerk ...

Sciencewoman did a riff on the unprofessional email thing recently. It's not just your students, or students in general. I have colleagues suffering from the same lack of awareness.

email etiquette is the kind of thing that some pick up along the way, while others remain clueless.

I have to say that I would give the "10,452 meters/second" situation partial credit for at least having the common sense -- and the recognition that common sense can still apply when math is involved, which is rarer -- to recognize that their answer was ludicrous, rather than blindly trusting the calculator. And yeah, lots of points off for not redoing it. But I was in a similar situation in grad school -- the end of an eight-hour take-home exam, and I'd just calculated from first principles that the hydrogen-burning limit (the minimum mass for a star to start fusing hydrogen and actually be a star) was somewhere around the mass of the moon. No time to find the error at that point, so I was left with "Well, I was okay in part 12, and somewhere between there and part 15 it went awry" as the best I could do under the circumstances. The situation you describe is certainly very different -- the time limit is a lot looser, mainly, and if they were up against a deadline it was their own fault -- but since what enraged me most was students not actually engaging their critical thinking skills and happily turning in ridiculous answers (my favorite was the calculation that the number of marbles in a large beaker was "10^-15 cm") the recognition of ridiculousness would be a big positive for me.

I've had my share of students who don't show respect in e-mails, but the opposite can be as bad. I recently received a message that began:

"I realize that I'm not your top student and I shouldn't be bothering you with questions, but [...]"

We all get this once in a while. Respect is one thing, but cringing deference is another. Some students are afraid to ask questions, even though I make it clear that I'm happy to help them out if they're having trouble. They're shocked to find that can be their ally, not the enemy wielding the red pen.

And the cranky instant-answer students are probably pissed off because they waited until the last minute, too. I remember the last time I was in school, there were message boards and mailing lists where the students could help each other a bit. Say class was on Wednesday-- there would invariably be some goobers, about 10% of the class, who were posting frantically to those boards on Tuesday nights looking for help... and testy about it because we weren't hovered over our terminals looking to enlighten them.

It's not just you these punks disrespect, it's everyone they interract with.

(And I'll admit, I've occasionaly done the, "I have no idea where this went wrong," thing, too. I have a clear memory of getting a negative value for a resistor on a test as a sophomore. Not my finest moment. Did I mention I design military hardware, now? I hope that is the scariest thing any of your readers read, today....)

"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."

You know, I've been that guy a couple of times. I've never said "probably", but I've had an answer that's blatantly wrong on a lab report or exam, said it's blatantly wrong and why I know it's wrong, and shown my observations and my calculations after checking them repeatedly to make sure I can't find the error.

And, frankly, being able to say "This is wrong, here's why, I can't get the numbers to make sense" was usually worth points. Not as many points as a right answer, of course, but points.

Also: Going to a Professor with your lab results, bad math, and saying "what am I doing wrong?" That was simply Not Done, and with a very few exceptions, no Professor in my undergrad career would give you the time of day with a specific problem like that. And going to the TAs was even worse, because it *was* their job and they *were* supposed to help with exactly this kind of thing, but they never liked doing it and about 70% of them didn't speak English or French well enough to understand the question you were asking and form a useful response. Assuming you could find a TA, which was never guaranteed.

Also Also: Redoing the experiment/question from scratch often would take more time than we had, and we'd be left with either an obviously wrong answer on a question worth 2%, or an unfinished project worth 5%. I know what I tended to pick, given that selection.

What I mean to say, here, is that it's not always disrespect for the course. Sometimes it's just the best of a bad set of options.

Unfortunately, the failure-to-respond issue is becoming more common professionally too. I'm always amused when someone replies that they're *planning* to respond to an easy question: it conveys way less information than a straight "yes" or "no", and it takes longer to type.

As a more general point, I've also started replying to select students with a modified "how to write a good email" primer attached- it's amazing how many students don't recognize their own bad habits.

(Does anyone really benefit from a half page/one-paragraph unsigned email detailing the traumatic death of a hamster, with the actionable request buried in the middle?)

How much do you like: "Is this on the test?"

To clarify: The "I got [nonsensical answer] which I know is wrong" thing that drives me nuts is not when I get that on an exam. On an exam, I realize that time may just have run out, in which case that's just what you have to write. I'll give an extra point or two for recognizing that the answer is nonsense.

What drive me nuts is when students write that on a lab report. They get a minimum of a week in which to write up their lab reports, and I tell them I'm happy to look at draft reports up until two days before the due date. The only way time can run out on somebody doing a lab report is if they put it off until the last possible minute, and are looking at the data for the first time the night before the report is due.

I have zero sympathy for that. If you have a week to do freshman physics data analysis, there's no excuse for having an answer that's wrong by three orders of magnitude due to trivial algebra error. There's ample time to do the calculation over, or discuss it with lab partners, or ask me for help. There's no excuse for throwing up hands and saying "I don't know."

Re John@7, at least some of the frustration seems to come from how the acknowledgment of the error is expressed. The quote Chad gave seems to say, "Eh, this is probably wrong, but I don't care enough to try to figure out why," which is different, at least to my mind, from "This is a clearly nonsensical answer, for this reason, but I've rechecked my work several times and can't find the error, and I don't have time to go back and redo it from scratch." Conveying the impression that you've at least made an effort to understand what's going on, for example by explaining why the answer you have can't be correct, and possibly pointing out at what step you think you might have gone astray, can make a significant difference to the person trying to gauge your understanding. Also, in an introductory lab, which is what that quote sounds like, there's usually someone around to answer questions, help with equipment problems, etc, who may well be able to help with errors of that sort, and a response like the one quoted gives the impression that the student didn't even care enough to just ask the TA, or whoever, for the right answer (not that I'm actually advocating that, it being one of my pet peeves). Of course, that's no help on an exam, but I'd generally say that the forgivability of that sort of response is inversely proportional to the time allowed for the exercise.

And the corollary to #9:
(From the back of the room as the professor is drawing a graph):
"Will there be graphs on the test?"

Bonus points if the class is Econ or Trig.

I was a TA for pre-med physics labs for 3 years as an undergrad and saw many instances of "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."

There's nothing wrong with working through a problem, coming up with a nonsensical answer and not knowing why. (Well, there is something wrong, clearly, but you know what I mean.) But Chad's specific example shows an important point. It's a spring-loaded launcher! It is probably a one inch ball bearing being launched at an angle with distances measured with a meter stick and being timed by a stop watch or perhaps some sort of laser timer. It's a simple problem, which requires the use of 2 or 3 basic physics equations, and about 5 or 6 steps of algebra. In a homework/group lab setting there is simply no excuse for saying "we probably made an error." It's an algebra error and it probably isn't more than 2 inches from their statement.

When I was a TA, students would write stuff like this, despite the fact that I'd been standing within 20 feet of them for over 2 hours. It was very, very rare that a student could frustrate me because they couldn't understand the material (though it happens). But I have a lot shorter fuse for students who simply didn't want to bother trying and were just content to throw something out and brush it aside saying "it's probably wrong, but I don't care why."

I have definitely written lab reports like this. Perhaps I am obscuring my undergraduate laziness in hindsight, but as I recall this was generally the result of an insane and/or impossible assignment (usually involving a computer-based "Dynamic Physics" experiment), the impossibility of getting four people to show up simultaneously to write the report, and the failure of the professor and the TA to explain things properly. Furthermore, I know the life of an undergrad seems leisurely to everyone else, but a lot of the time it was an exhausting haze of deadlines, exams, and sleep-deprivation, and sometimes minor assignments were postponed or shortchanged not out of indifference but because there simply wasn't time to give every course top priority. I'm sure, given you are at a school that emphasizes teaching, that you are conscientious about all these things, but if you have students regularly throwing up their hands at your assignments, perhaps there is some way you could help them be better prepared to complete the work.

When I was a TA, students would write stuff like this, despite the fact that I'd been standing within 20 feet of them for over 2 hours. It was very, very rare that a student could frustrate me because they couldn't understand the material (though it happens). But I have a lot shorter fuse for students who simply didn't want to bother trying and were just content to throw something out and brush it aside saying "it's probably wrong, but I don't care why."

That's it exactly.
When 16 of 17 students in the class have managed to do the derivation correctly, including the lab partner of the student writing the report, "I don't know where the error is" is equivalent to "I can't be bothered to care about this class."

In lab reports, whenever there is a clear problem with the answer, I think it makes sense to admit that you know something is off with the data and to try to suggest why. However, when I notice something is off, I usually redo the calculations to make sure they are right. You have lots of time to redo calculations, but it's hard to redo a whole lab when your data is messed up.

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.

I once had a student send a complaint email about me to my Dean, saying I had failed to answer a question the student had emailed to me. The times on the email to me and the email to the Dean were three minutes apart.

I agree that there is a relevant distinction between "It's probably wrong, but I don't care why" and "I know this answer does not pass my common sense check, but I've searched for the error many times and can't find it". I can see why the first annoys you, but I don't know that the # of other students in the class (who have managed to do it correctly) is an extremely relevant fact in distinguishing which sort of attitude you are dealing with. Sometimes, we all miss things. It's more blatant in English (which is why you should always get multiple eyes to copy-edit a paper), but we see what we expect to see.

As a related point, I think "disrespect for the course in general" is something you should try not to let upset you too much. Not everybody takes a particular course because that course is their life's ambition, and you are their absolute ideal teacher, and it is offered in the exact format most suited to their learning style. There are plenty of things that cause resentment/lack of respect toward a course. Personally, I think respect toward people matters, respect toward abstracts (such as 'a course') do not. So you need to perform well enough to show you respect your own time investment, and you should of course respect your instructors time- but that's different than respecting 'the course' broadly.

Students who take a cavalier attitude toward appointments drive me nuts, too. I've lost count of the number of times I've had students make appointments with me for extra help, and then just not show up. It's mildly annoying if the missed appointment is during my regular office hours, but infuriating when it's during a time I would not otherwise be around.

The thing that annoys me a lot is when students tell me to do something rather than ask, especially when it involves bending university or class policy. "I showed up to this section, because I scheduled a lesson during my section." If this student had asked if s/he could come to the earlier section, I'd give permission gladly. But just showing up and still not asking if that is alright, that is disrespect.

But sometimes a disrespectful comment is riding on the surface of an ocean of stress. Today a student was short-tempered in class, but afterwards broke down stressed about hir workload (which is very great for sophomore performance majors at this time of year). This is understandable, and deserving of forgiveness.

Chad (and anyone else reading comments): One great book on this topic is I'm the Teacher, You're the Student, by Patrick Allitt, a history professor at Emory. I took one of his courses nearly twenty years ago, and he was just wonderful. His writing is just as good, telling stories of the joys and frustrations found in teaching while maintaining a good (if acerbic) sense of humor.

As a student, I actually agree with you on all of those. I'd add a couple of suggestions for faculty, though, based on my calculus professor last semester: give some indication in emails that a response is required (either by making it obvious or stating it explicitly), don't punish students for doing what you told them to (via the class policies in the syllabus) instead of what you wanted, and don't preemptively treat your adult students like bratty children. :/ (Full story here.)

on the lab report thing, if it's that blatant??? I'd draw a red line there and say "you stopped thinking here, and I shall stop grading". If they show what they did in detail, some credit, but a nice red or purple sentence "why didn't you get help earlier?".

They want us to encourage "critical thinking" in higher ed, and thats one way I do it.

Active learning is another biggie. So we have small group things, interactive clickers, all kinds of stuff to break up a lecture and handle short attention spans. I tell the folks thats what we are doing and why. Then I tell them that I am not the only one that needs to be active. Active learning means reading the book before class. Asking questions in class, or before or after if you are shy, and making a legitimate shot at the homework on your own or in your group. I also tell them not to tell me "I worked 8 hours on that problem and I couldn't get it....". I tell them they have wasted 6-7 hours, they should have stopped and moved on to something else and/or gotten help!!!

If you have half a brain, you can succeed by starting on assignments as early as possible, doing a little bit each day, and not being afraid to ask for help. After 20 years of college teaching, aside from natural genius, those are the keys. You either have to be real smart, or work fairly hard and continually, has to be at least one of those or some combination. To paraphrase Dean Wormer, "ignorant, stubborn, and lazy is no way to go through life".

For some reason those are hard things for some folks to do or understand. I take great pains to tell my students that it's OK to come and say "I have no idea how to do this problem". I'll help them get started. But if they send an email I read 5 minutes before class when its due, I can't help at that point.

And I tell students, I will NOT be checking email after 9PM at the latest, and that they can count on a response if I recieve it before 6PM. I ain't wearin a beeper folks......

Also if they have a problem with a grade, I tell them they have 10 days or two weeks (it varies) to address. No coming to me at the end with a pile of stuff looking for that one point.

A colleague takes his grade scale and multiplies by 5 or 10 (finishing with 1-2000 points for the semester) and assigns grades in chunks of 5-10, so no one is only 1 point away. He says it works wonders! I guess if they cant figure a percentage they deserve it, but I don't do that.

And Azkyroth? You run on our schedule OK??? That is the default where we start. Don't tell me at spring break, "I'll miss Friday before break cause I already bought a plane ticket". Wait till you have the academic schedule to buy the damn ticket already. This is your job right now, this school thing. IF your grandma dies or something, hey we will work it out. I will give you a calculated score, no make up. You get 89% of the class average on 3 tests, but missed one, WITH a legitimate excuse??? then you get 89% of the class average on that 4th test. Now of course these are EXACTLY the kinds of things one does put in a syllabus, whatever the requirements are, so that on the first day of class you can decide if you can follow the rules or not. But once you decide, that's it man. It is a contract in my mind, and I tell folks that that is the way I think of it, and ask that they treat it the same.

If you have a work schedule problem that does not run all semester, we can talk. One can always make legitimate accomodations, but the default for me is that you let me know well in advance, and don't treat it as your god given right to miss an exam and tell me after the fact. Nope. But your calc teacher did not do what she should have in my mind.

As a teacher I am a coach. I can tell you what to do, and explain it is often as you need, but I can't run your laps or make your free throws for ya.

My ninth graders do the "well, we may have made a math error somewhere" thing, too. I deduct points from their lab reports and point out that that kind of "experimental error" is easily correctable. And I compare the mistake to leaving spelling errors in a term paper.

Other signs of disrespect: texting or otherwise using your cell phone during class; using your laptop to "take notes" while surfing the Web; failing to put forth a reasonable effort to learn the material, whether you like the subject or not; talking to your neighbors.

They can call me John, Wheaton, Wheatdogg, Wheatie, or whatever. Just respect the subject and the learning process.

Don't read the newspaper while I'm lecturing. If you prefer to read the newspaper, there are more comfortable chairs elsewhere where I won't be distracting you with my interminable talk of physiology. If I see you reading the newspaper while I'm lecturing, I will throw an eraser at you and despite my advanced age I've still got a decent arm.
Thank you.

I agree that lack of courtesy is a major irritation; things like arriving late to class, frequent absences followed by complaints that I have not explained adequately and wandering in and out of class while it is progress. I'm seriously considering locking the door to put a stop to it.

There is also the 'I don't care' attitude (I am working in a small community where it is a carry-over from the local schools). I recently set an assignment (first for the course) in which they had to find information on the internet. When I gave it, I suggested search terms and sites that might be useful. Not one assignment was handed in when I asked for it on the due date. When I probed, I found out that only one student had started on it because no-one else had searched on the internet before and not one cared enough to be willing to ask about it. I might add that in classes I try to solicit input from the students, avoid put-downs and try to never seem surprised no matter how much lack of understanding is shown by a question. In the end, after a double-extended deadline, I had about a 30% completion rate.

Andrea said: my favorite was the calculation that the number of marbles in a large beaker was "10^-15 cm")

My favourite, from a very basic mathematics course to adults, was that the number of 2 oz paper cups that could be filled from a 750 ml carton of juice is 6,000 (this is in Canada where the metric system has been used for decades).

I teach high school math. It's amazing to me when we're, say, calculating the point of intersection for a system of linear equations, where all the student has to do to get an idea of whether their answer is right is plug the numbers into both equations and see if they make each true, but that is too much work.

But what I really hate, is when I see a student sit through class staring into space, not taking any notes or attempting any examples I give and explain, yet then come later and ask me if they can get help during my planning period or after school. That's my time and they want to take it because they didn't do anything during the time they were in class. It is unreal sometimes. I actually have given a test in a class where I reviewed the actual questions on the test (without saying so explicitly) and left the answers on the board while they took the test and still had students fail.

And Azkyroth? You run on our schedule OK??? That is the default where we start. Don't tell me at spring break, "I'll miss Friday before break cause I already bought a plane ticket". Wait till you have the academic schedule to buy the damn ticket already. This is your job right now, this school thing. IF your grandma dies or something, hey we will work it out. I will give you a calculated score, no make up. You get 89% of the class average on 3 tests, but missed one, WITH a legitimate excuse??? then you get 89% of the class average on that 4th test. Now of course these are EXACTLY the kinds of things one does put in a syllabus, whatever the requirements are, so that on the first day of class you can decide if you can follow the rules or not. But once you decide, that's it man. It is a contract in my mind, and I tell folks that that is the way I think of it, and ask that they treat it the same.

If you have a work schedule problem that does not run all semester, we can talk. One can always make legitimate accomodations, but the default for me is that you let me know well in advance, and don't treat it as your god given right to miss an exam and tell me after the fact. Nope. But your calc teacher did not do what she should have in my mind.

Oh, yeah.

Read students' messages before responding to them.

That's always a good piece of advice.

(Seriously, 90% of what you've written here wasn't remotely applicable to my actual complaints or actions, a further 9% was orthogonal to the main thrust of them, and 0% had any cited justification other than an implicit "might makes right" by which, had you read my post here and the one I linked to, you could probably have inferred I'm much impressed).

(correction: "NOT much impressed.")

(Just out of curiosity, perry, did you literally copy and paste that screed out of a standard response to "least charitable possible interpretation of a stereotypical student complaint about deadlines [which everyone knows only lazy and self-absorbed idiots ever have any issues with]"? And how would you react to a student who scribbled in this kind of generic response on an exam without even addressing the actual nature of the questions and doing their best to trivialize the test-writer by any means necessary?)

I'd also suggest, on our part, a little more sympathy for the students. As much as we want to think that they'll spend the proper time on their assignments and reports, the reality is that most undergraduates are taking 5 or 6 classes a term, and this material is much harder for them than it is for us.

I remember when I was an undergraduate, and a lot of my work involved homework-triage: "I have 4 assignments and a lab report due on Friday, these assignments are worth 10% of my class mark, and this one is worth 5%, and this report has a 2% per day late penalty, so I'll spend my time on this, and do this other one if I have the chance, and hand this one in two days late..."

Not every poorly done assignment is a personal insult, and we should never by jerks when marking them. A little respect is important in the student-teacher relationship, but it goes both ways.

I'd also suggest, on our part, a little more sympathy for the students. As much as we want to think that they'll spend the proper time on their assignments and reports, the reality is that most undergraduates are taking 5 or 6 classes a term, and this material is much harder for them than it is for us.

I can't speak for anyone else's students, but the normal load for Union is three courses per term. Engineers take four regularly, as do some students in our honors program. Nobody is taking five or six courses per trimester.

Now, our insane calendar does mean that there's a lot of stuff packed into those classes, but none of our students are legitimately that overworked. And again, my problem is not so much with students handing in wrong answers, as with students handing in wrong answers that indicate that they didn't make the trivial effort to avail themselves of the resources provided.

no cut and paste Azkyroth. Not really directed at you per se. I have students that work but very few, we have mainly traditional students. I do work with those things and try and work things out. My main thrust is that one needs to work these things out in advance really, that's all. I am so tired of folks just assuming that my world revolves around theirs in terms of schedules, even when they get THE schedule on the first day of class. Sorry to have upset you, I did say that your teacher did not go about things right, going to school and raising a family is tough.

You run on our schedule OK??? That is the default where we start. Don't tell me at spring break, "I'll miss Friday before break cause I already bought a plane ticket". Wait till you have the academic schedule to buy the damn ticket already. This is your job right now, this school thing. IF your grandma dies or something, hey we will work it out.

I'm not directing my comment at Perry or Azkyroth specifically, but I see far too much of this at my university. I'm not personally affected since I'm not faculty, but my colleagues who are report that so many students take off for vacations (Thanksgiving as well as Spring Break) a day early that they feel unable to teach their courses, even when they are in the morning. I agree with Perry that this is a bad attitude for students to take. I'm at a state university in a not very large state (even the out-of-state students are seldom more than 6-7 hours drive from home), so I don't see why the students feel they have to get away from campus early. If I had a class to teach on the Friday before spring break or the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I'd go ahead and teach it--any students who feel compelled to miss can get the notes from one of the students who showed up.

As a student with a doctoral level degree forced to take bachelor-level classes for a certification, I would personally recommend you for sainthood if my classmates could read this. I am in the midst of group projects with my fellow students and am amazed by their lack of foresight and time management skills. As I am generally the one with the final report portion of the project, this leaves me holding a nearly empty bag in the hours before our projects are due. I am also surprised when they complain about receiving assignments; I have been under the impression that giving assignments is the sort of thing professors do to help the students learn something in their class. I thought that was the point of the exercise.

I wonder if your experience with non-traditional students such as myself shows similar levels of disrespect.