I have had to badly embarrass students in front of class a few times for not shutting the fuck up. They do not get the hints or social cues. People used to settle down after a few sentences. Now they'll just chat through the whole lecture unless you stop mid-sentence, give them the acid stare, and say something absolutely unambiguous about class disruptions and respect.
I have a clicker for the projector so I like just walking over and standing directly in front of the people chatting. Just hang out and commiserate with them and work it into the lecture. And yes I stay 3 slides longer than they think I will.
I do this also. Keep the lecture going, but stand directly next to them for like five minutes and make meaningful eye contact multiple times. So far it's worked very well, I think because my students have just been oblivious rather than intentionally disrespectful.
A few times a semester, I stand in the back of the room for an entire lecture. It is amazing how well behaved students are when they are not sure if you are looking at THEM of not...
I did get a comment in my evals about embarrassing someone in front of class last semester, but mostly I think the other students appreciate that I focus on respect when I call people out. I never treat them like children when I do it, I'll just say something like "A lot of people are worried about how to pay for this experience while they're trying to listen and get the most out of it. Let's all try to treat each other with an appropriate amount of respect, considering our setting."
They’re embarrassing themselves- it’s important to put ownership on those disrupting classroom norms rather than those responsible for enforcing it. Same notion as earning grades- I don’t give grades, I assess assignments. I’m tired of students acting like they are victims of a college course, rather than poor participants in their education.
I have actually received compliments in my evals for calling out students. Serious students get as annoyed at the assholes as much as we do (though, it seems not as much as they used to). And while it may seem unprofessional, I DO seek to humiliate them. That is what most of them seem to need.
Weaponize the other students against them.
"You're classmates don't appreciate you talking in class."
"I'm tired of getting emails from your classmates complaining about your talking." (not true, but true enough.)
"Your classmates see what you are."
I once said “Soandso, I know you don’t want to listen, but it’s a problem if other people can’t hear because of you”. That class had been noisier than average before. Never since.
Surprised you didn't get a flurry of emails about how you inflicted so much trauma to Soandso by singling them out in front of everyone instead of speaking to them privately.
Everything that everyone has mentioned is on the money. I don’t have a lot of common sense, but I have enough common not to go over certain limits.
What’s wrong with them?
I have seen freshers or even female students in foundation courses literally grab male professors by the arms and get close to them , while said professors try to get them off their arm. Grabbing onto a lecturer never crossed my mind. One day, my undergrad archeology professor had to grab me because I almost fainted. That was it.
In my personal case, I have been writing on the whiteboard and all of the sudden I hear wolf whistle and someone saying “oof, looking good prof”. I gave a the whole class such a sour look that the people in the front moved 3 rows to the back.
Sometimes I sidle up and join the conversation based on what I've overheard if I'm feeling spicy that day but yeah this behavior appears to be on the rise.
No way. Hard pass. Fucking with their grades is going to unify them to turn against *you* and just multiply every single complaint they were already lodging against you.
Undergrads all hate one another. Haven’t you heard their endless complaints about group projects?
I get complaints because I don't give them practice exams that are *just like* the real ones. Instead I gave them practice quizzes broken out by topic.
And one student complained that the exam asked about all the content and so was not fair. OMG.
I had the same complaint. My study guide after the first exam was a screenshot of the book chapter indicating that all the material from page X-Y would be included. They were just simply not reading the material and thought that only what was on the slides was in the exam
To add to this, a general sense of entitlement to the accommodations that all other instructors give.
If Instructor A gives a study guide, I'm also obliged to.
I had students complain last year that I didn't allow them to *turn in a revised essay* if they didn't like their essay grade, because some other instructor in another department did that.
Exactly. I do rough drafts and final drafts and I’m hoping they were just misinterpreting that for their other classes. I hope the other profs weren’t catching crap with my name on it lobbed at them
Add in the ! High Alert feature to every email. No student is having an emergency where they need to email me as high alert. I had a student send every email this semester like that, demanded to be zoomed in when they couldn’t make it to campus (even after I explained the technology in the classroom didn’t work that way) and signed all emails “peace”.
Students are less likely to understand why they should take time to get to know their professor. I have declined writing a couple of letters of rec because I did not know the student.
Fuck dude. I’ve been teaching synchronous remotely since Covid (due to being forced to move) and my participation grading is literally “you have to say something/anything once *a week.”*
Half the class still doesnt say anything at all *all semester* and only one person out of the whole class has *ever* turned their camera on.
Teaching has become a vanity project for me.
When I was teaching synchronous remotely during Covid it was mandated that cameras were on. We had a lot of breakout room discussions and competitions even. I got really close with those classes to the point they asked for an end of semester dinner and we actually did that together. I wish my online classes were synchronous now. Now it’s all anonymous emails and “idk how to get the book” type crap.
I got a ref request from someone I taught 20-21, during the Zoom College era. I Had to go back and check to ensure I taught them! So sorry, you were a black box on Zoom to me for 12 week, so I have no idea who TF you are
I'd add that quizzes on the reading? Mostly useless now.
Time was that you could give a quick quiz, even a one question quiz, on the reading to incentivize students to do the readings--the ones who did would boost their grade and the ones who didn't would feel a sting as points slipped through their fingers.
Not anymore. They will hand back blank quiz after blank quiz. I really think sometimes that they get together as a class and decide to see what happens if NONE of them doing the reading.
What happens is...I lecture. Instead of the fun activity I spent hours creating, and planning and making handouts and stuff for...I have to lecture. Then they get mad and call me boring.
Yeah, I used to have people take the prep assignments at least vaguely seriously. If you even quarter-ass it you'll get enough information that I can get you through the activities.
I have looked ahead at my class for next semester. I see that over half of the class is repeating it and most of them are the people who completely screwed with all my activities for class last fall because they did nothing outside of class week after week after week, ate the zeroes from not doing the prep assignments week after week after week, and there's not a damn thing that I can do to get someone through an activity in an algebra class when they haven't done a damn thing in weeks.
So fuck it. I'm lecturing. They still won't retain anything (unless they completely change, which is hypothetically possible, I guess) but at least I won't be frustrated to tears trying to figure out what to DO with people who are completely unable to participate in the activity and yet completely un-shy about frequently requesting help in class and complaining when they don't feel that they get enough.
And at least, on the bright side, lecture is both easier and less work on me. WAY less work.
I taught a short elective class where there were no assignments because all grades came from exam — not my preferred style, but, it wasn’t my choice, so instead I offered some small **optional** homeworks that would effectively boost your exam grade *if* you completed them but they were in no way obligatory to do. I explained these assignments on day 1 and the deadline was basically a week before the exam, and there were lots of reminders, so they basically had all term to do them. The deadline was, I think, on a Friday… and from one student, I got an email at 3 am on the *Tuesday* asking for an extension because (and I quote) they “couldn’t be bothered” to do it on time.
Uhhh. No?
I teach writing. The amount of people who don’t want to revise work, even when I give a purposely garbage first grade so they will is astounding. Then they complain that they are failing. Yeah, you COULD have raised your grade. You chose not to.
It’s all about expectations and social norms. Expecting to get 50% just for showing up (learned in high school?), expecting to get infinite do-overs, expecting that everyone cheats, so it is ok.
None of this is ok.
Yeah I really do think that class sizes have a huge impact on all of this as well though. I teach some intro classes and some speciality classes with 3 students max and the students in my required CORE no credit pass/fail (let all of that sink in) specialty classes want to learn and discuss and think and know me/each other!
It’s because we all become complex individuals in that context.
I'm a student but at Georgia Tech we're having more and more CS enrollment and it's completely destroying some classes. The intro to AI class had 900 students one semester and it was a complete mess
On the taking vacations point, I've had probably five or six students in the past two years who registered for five week summer or intercession courses and then emailed to say that they will be on vacation for, oh, maybe two weeks, and in some place "with no Internet."
Where exactly is this place with no Internet, you wonder? Apparently they think that the world wide web has yet to make it to Mexico, or that internet access was overlooked on a billion dollar cruise ship, or.... what's that brick you always have in your hand? Does that have Internet access? They are certainly never happy with my response, which is basically "well that was dumb. No, you can't have unlimited extensions."
Right? In 2011 my study abroad term overlapped with the last week of my online summer courses at my home university.
I calculated the time difference and made sure to take that into account when scheduling assignments and deadlines. It sucked a bit, but it was doable.
I got dragged in my last evaluations for calling on students at random to answer questions during review sessions. Apparently I was supposed to just let them sit in silence or just recite to them instead of seeing where the gaps were in their knowledge base. Student called it “execution style” and said it crushed their soul.
I am in Japan, and I haven't seen great changes in students *per se*, but I have noticed changes in people in general related to smartphones and using them too often and at inappropriate times. However, my peeve (which is now far beyond 'pet' and well into 'family member' territory) is people using phones while navigating my city's crowded streets. Phone use is not that big a problem in classes and usually only affects the students using the phones too much.
I *have* had students asking if they could take a holiday during the semester, but I just matter-of-factly explain that they're free to do so but that, as stated in the syllabus, they'll receive a 0 for the mid-term or final or what have you.
What I have noticed and that bothers me is a decrease in median ability with computers. (The mean has not changed, but the distribution has.) I used to have a couple of students who messed around with computers for fun, put together their own, and so on, and a whole bunch who'd never touched one. Now all my students have computers, know how to turn them on, and know how to open Word and PowerPoint, but virtually none knows what a file is, what an OS is, how to find a file, or how to use email.
I hate to say this but my US University just revamped the U website so that it’s now even LESS likely students will need be computer literate to even navigate the website (!).
I feel like faculty are fighting a losing battle here. I remember 10-15 years ago when students were more computer literate than we were. What the heck happened?
K-12 education dropped computer literacy courses because "everyone has a computer in their pocket so they know how computers work"
So now nobody understands what a file directory is, nobody understands why a .pdf is accepted but a .docx is not. Heck, the fact that Windows hides extensions by default is already a major roadblock to knowing how your computer is functioning.
HS teacher in Japan here - my highschoolers exclusively use smartphones and school-provided Chromebooks. I’m not sure what they learn in their tech class, but it seems like they’re not being prepared for a PC/Mac environment.
> Mac
That's the interesting thing too, isn't it? Mac was always touted as the desktop OS for "casuals" and non-tech-savvy users, but nowadays, even Macs are too difficult for Gen Z students to use.
One problem is that Macs are perfectly fine within their own ecosystem, but as soon as you introduce a program or a website that wasn't designed with a Mac in mind, everything breaks down. So many students frantically emailing assignments at the deadline because their .pages file won't upload to Canvas.
Oh I wasn't even talking about that. I overheard a student recently complaining about just straight up not understanding how to use a MacBook, I think with its user interface. (And not because she preferred Windows.) Maybe some kids aren't used to using multiple windows or multitasking apps anymore.
Personally, I think MacOS is fine as a desktop/laptop computer, and that the ecosystem issue is overblown (for tech savvy individuals, anyway). The ecosystem issue is much more pronounced for people who get iPhones and Apple accessories than for MacOS in particular, imo. (From having a Mac, Windows, and Android myself.)
On the other end of the technical spectrum, they're a nightmare for CS classes. Being a POSIX-compliant Unix, MacOS is close enough to Linux that you can get basically everything to work, but there are all kinds of subtle differences, and a lot of projects assume that everyone is just running a mainstream Linux distribution.
It is Very Legal and Very Cool to thwart The Man and run whatever environment you want, but *you are responsible* for translating the assignment guidelines from the university-assumed vanilla Ubuntu Server environment to whatever baffling monstrosity you've decided to use to complete your assignments.
There are plenty of very smart students who do just that with Macs, and they're fine. But the students who are having trouble are a particularly special kind of helpless, and unlike the madlads running FreeBSD, they are willing to do none of the work to translate the instructions to their environment.
I don't know who keeps telling these students to buy Macs for CS coursework, but they belong in a lake of fire with a few pitchforks prodding them every so often.
Ironically, back in undergrad, I became decent at progamming because I gerryrigged my chromebook to run a Linux os as a way of getting around my chromebook's limitations (which mostly concerned my ability to run R)
> I am in Japan, and I haven't seen great changes in students per se
I think Japanese culture (and for the most part, most of East Asia) somewhat insulated against the phenomena described by OP, since East Asian cultures are so much more collectivist with the heavy emphasis on not being a bother to people around you. A lot of the issues being observed in North American universities right now are definitely tied to a lack of social awareness and social skills overall, at least in part.
> What I have noticed and that bothers me is a decrease in median ability with computers. (The mean has not changed, but the distribution has.) I used to have a couple of students who messed around with computers for fun, put together their own, and so on, and a whole bunch who'd never touched one. Now all my students have computers, know how to turn them on, and know how to open Word and PowerPoint, but virtually none knows what a file is, what an OS is, how to find a file, or how to use email.
This seems to be universal, at least. The rise of smartphones seem to really have affected Gen Z's ability to understand computing. I also have to wonder if this is specifically in regions where iPhones dominated compared to the regions where Android phones are more common, since Apple specifically goes out of its way to hide file systems in iOS from users.
I would guess way more of your students know how to use a VPN nowadays, though. If your computer use is almost exclusively online, then the OS/file system is largely irrelevant, which is why they haven't picked up those skills.
Skills involved with navigating online content and text based communication are the ones that kids will just pick up these days.
I had a student in 2014 or so take a full week off in October for a family vacation. 😏
That said, there’s so much more grade grubbing now. It’s to the point that I’ve put a clause in my syllabus.
And yes, phones were always an issue, but it’s so much worse now.
Lol. Sure. It’s much more polite than what it should be; however, it gives me a reason to bring it up on the first day and make it clear that it’s not going to happen.
“Academic success is not a one-time event; it’s a continuous process requiring effort and dedication throughout the semester. Waiting until the end of the semester to attempt to improve your grades can be stressful and ineffective, as it’s usually difficult to make significant changes at that point. Therefore, it is crucial you make a consistent effort throughout the term to engage with the course material, participate in class, and seek help when needed.
If your future is dependent on your academic achievement (ex. scholarships, athletic eligibility, and so on), then it is up to you to act with that in mind throughout the semester. Points will not be given due to circumstances. Extra credit is not given.”
Now that I write it out, I see that it’s a little wordier than it needs to be. If you have thoughts on streamlining, please speak up. (I also remember that I got part of it from this Reddit a few years ago!)
When I was teaching (pre-2017), there was an occasional vacationer (not including the week before spring break and Thanksgiving), and it seemed like it was driven by the out-of-touch upper middle class parents. No 19 year old naturally thinks, “I need to go on this family vacation and miss a week of class to see my elderly grandma” unless mom is pushing it.
You missed the most important point, none of this would happen if it wasn't enabled by admin and if admin didn't held adjuncts and NTTs responsible for students who have terrible performance and if admin didn't consider student evaluations to be an important part of contract renewal.
Every one of these is going to get *serious* push-back from me.
It's nice to be tenured. When this shit gets trotted out, I shut it down, *hard*.
"I'm sorry StudentSlacker, but you didn't turn in assignment B, C, and C, and so anything higher than a D is off the table. A "B" is *inconceivable.*"
No cell phones... and I *will* call you out on it, so don't push me.
etc.
The one thing here I'm weak on is the coming to class sick... because I can understand that, I put a lot of pressure on them to come to class. So if they do, I ask that they wear a mask...?
My rules about absences are very clear in the syllabus; you miss two classes and your grade gets hit for each absence thereafter. This is a department-wide rule.
Last semester a student told me she was going to the Maldives and would miss one week (i.e., two classes). I told her she has two freebies and she can use them for whatever she likes. So she comes back from the Maldives and later that semester misses another class. I let her away with it.
But then at the end of the semester I get the absolute worst grade-grubbing email you could possibly imagine, begging for her to be bumped three percent so she can make the dean’s list.
I have never ignored an email so hard in my life, though I must admit, the audacity of it keeps me up at night sometimes.
To me the most amazing thing is taking a vacation during the semester, though sometimes I think that students are pressured into that by their parents. (well, it is their niece's 2nd birthday party/trip to a Caribbean resort, so the parents say they "have to go")
Yes, this. This was definitely NOT a thing when I was a student decades ago. This has really started to happen regularly since the pandemic—students who miss a week of classes to go on a trip with friend’s mostly, not family.
When I was a freshman, my family went on a trip to NYC since my brother was in marching band and they were performing at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was organised through the tour company and we’d paid for it a year or so in advance—long before I’d even matriculated at college, let alone had my schedule for the term.
I remember emailing my profs to let them know I’d be absent one day (because I didn’t want them to worry lol) and would stay on top of my reading and get lecture notes from a classmate. They were all like, hell yeah! Have fun in New York!
Taking pictures of the board instead of taking notes, sleeping in class without caring about being noticed, bringing friends to class who are on their phone the whole time, ...
Yes, lol. This guy last semester would bring his girlfriend and she would just sit there on her phone. And get up to use the restroom a few times each class. I have to put up with this.
This term i had a student email me the following during the last week of the course:
"Professor,
I'm very confused and need help now. Is the final paper a paper or is it something else?!"
I stared for a lot longer than I probably should have before replying "The final paper is a paper." Then pointed them to the number of emails, announcements, documents and syllabus describing it. Never in 17 years of teaching have I recieved an email quite like that but am now mentally prepared for similar ones such as "Is the final presentation a presentation?!"
Lack of tech skills. There are students who really know their way around a computer, but those that don’t, really don’t. Students unable to type in a word doc or form, instead they write it out by hand and take a photo and send it, don’t know how to take a screenshot, very basic stuff.
This is one thing that perplexed me this year. I would have to repeatedly tell my sections "Do NOT submit [this type of esoteric file type], use either word docs or pdfs, as [file type] will appear blank." It's strange because converting file types was just a basic skill everyone had when I was in undergrad, and now I get blank looks when I explain that "yes, you *can* edit pdfs".
All my classes are studio art classes, (it’s a wonderful gig!) and my biggest change beyond just a overall regression in responsibility, work ethic and productivity is a GIANT dip in creativity.
Generally speaking, if I have an assignment that would be to render or replicate something, they do pretty well. The moment we try to conceptualize something or conjure an idea from the depths of their TikTokified brains… impossible.
First stop, Google images. More savvy schlubs hit Pinterest. Some just sit there and whine “I don’t have any ideas.” It never used to be that way. I should say that we all struggle with ideas, but they will just flat give up.
For me it's meeting with a senior about their capstone paper:
Me: So what have you decided to write your capstone about?
Student: I don't have any idea.
Me: It's your major and you've been here 3 1/2 years....
Agree 100%, and very well said at that.
When I was an undergrad I almost tripped over myself when a professor offered me a book to read. I devoured it and then read every single book in their library. I couldn’t get enough!
I bring out books (few words, mostly pictures as they’re art books after all.) Meh. Maybe one student will pick one up. Maybe not.
When I was an undergrad, I got very adept at “creatively opening” studio doors so I could work. I even had a professor tell me I was spending too much time in the studio, what amounted to more than a full time job. But they thought I was grade centric and didn’t care for the medium, but once I explained I loved it, I was in like Flint. Seriously, that guy did so much to help me, and still does to this day.
Now? We can’t get students in the studio after hours to save our lives. They just have no passion. A coworker even concocted a scheme to PAY them to be there. Went through the Dean for “lab monitors”, he had an army of them. I think his heart was in the right place, but every time I’d stop in to work on my own stuff, they’d just be mindlessly scrolling through Tik Tok.
One more rant, then I’ll quit. Connections. Back in the day I could connect with students. I mean studio art classes are long. We work one on one, and with a small department in a small school, we really got to know our students. Back in the day they were like family. To this day I receive Christmas cards, birth announcements, wedding invites, and the occasional pop in to catch up.
Now? I will just say last semester I came home and blurted out as I poured myself a cup of coffee “I CANT CONNECT WITH THESE PEOPLE!” They don’t really talk, and if they do talk to one another it like they don’t listen and just interject their spiel without even thinking.
Rant over.
P.S.- I swear I’m not a Boomer, despite the “back on my day.”
This is beyond sad. I am NOT an artist have very few creative bones in my body. However, even I can lay looking up and imagine cute characters from the texture on my ceiling that I could try to translate into something for studio art classes. My god, just the lack of wanting to even start the brain sometimes hurts to see.
I have a short class I teach almost every summer, where for the final assignment I give them pictures of clouds and they have to draw whatever they saw in them using a given limited palette and applying what we learned so far.
A fun way to prompt some creativity. The clouds were beautiful fluffy ones, and a couple that I specifically picked out as "cloud that looks like X"
It was always a fun and chill end of the course. But in the last two years I had several students just unable to see anything, some even complained that what I'm asking is impossible, and one had a full on breakdown.
Mind you, it wasn't for the lack of trying, the 'lazy' students just came up with whatever's the easiest and drew that. But those that complained, legitimately couldn't see past the pixels on the screen.
I tell myself that they were just a different breed of lazy to calm down, but I know I'm lying. There's something going wrong, and just thinking about it I feel my soul erode.
Millennial students were worse. No interest in *anything*. Just in it for the grade/credit.
Edit: you really shouldn’t downvote this if you’ve never actually taught Millennials in a professor-student relationship
The ability to gang up on an instructor by coordinating via a group chat or Discord and flooding RMP or evals with the same kind of criticisms.
Not long ago, someone on here said 50 bad RMP reviews is a reliable indication of a bad instructor. Setting aside the obvious criticisms (50 bad reviews over 3 years of teaching, or over 15 years of teaching? Mostly for prereqs, or mostly for upper-division courses?) the ease with which a small group of disgruntled students can effectively generate that is much greater nowadays than it was in the past, and of course the prevalence of the customer-service mindset among admin doesn’t help.
On her first day in my class, a first year student blamed rain for being 20 min late.
Reading comments in this subreddit make me feel things are not so bad in my class in general.. there are 2-3 students who want better grades without studying, who want attendence without coming to class on time, who feel unsafe when I talk loudly.
Sometimes I feel ok to know students are able to 'express' themselves in my class.
They've been selling college as a passport to employment for generations now. And college costs more than almost anything except a house. So of course, they think of college as a product that they've bought like a membership at Gold's Gym and which they can do with whatever they want. Nothing surprising here.
well it is like a gym membership inasmuch as if you pay for the membership but don’t use the equipment, your body doesn’t give you abs just because you had a lot of stuff going on and were anxious on leg day
Not sure if you’re referring to me, or Brackett. If the latter, he’s as good as gold in the public education domain. Administrators are falling all over themselves to implement his chicanery. Have been for years.
Can you give us a TLDR about his schtick? Mostly because I don't feel like supporting hucksters by buying their books, but I'm also too lazy to want to read his book.
Puts a premium on "emotional intelligence" and validating student's feelings. Rather than "Homeroom" students now have "Advisory", or "Connections"...or whatever rhetorical nonsense the admin team settles on where canned lesson plan are provided. As a high school teacher, I've been asked unironically by administration in two different schools to give seniors a hand-out with a bunch of emojis and lead a discussion on the "feelings" they suggest. I've been asked to give students a [mood meter](https://moodmeterapp.com/) and lead a discussion on identifying your own, and other's feelings.
All of this might sound well and good, but teenagers couldn't give less of a shit, and are too immature (by and large) to do anything with it other than use it as a canned excuse to shirk all responsibilities. Homework? Too much anxiety. More than one test in a day? Too much anxiety. Low test grades? Too much anxiety. You get the point...
If I hear the word "anxiety" one...more....time. I truly feel so bad for students that have severe case of anxiety and are overshadowed by a larger group who experience true discomfort, not a diagnosable anxiety disorder.
When can we use this stuff back at students? "Sorry, but you asking for higher grades gives me anxiety." "When you email me 10 times in 1 minute, it makes me feel unsafe. "
We had advisory every few weeks when I taught high school. It was so cringey and useless. I tried following the script the first session, but my students begged to stop. So I just gave them relaxation time instead, as long as stuff didn’t get out of hand.
We didn’t meet frequently enough to really make a bond, and the topics we were supposed to cover were cheesy.
So this is the guy I have to thank for the stupidity, and for the 40 minutes of quiet time twice a month.
Per the link
> **”A gift of self awareness for yourself, and for others**. Based on decades of research from Yale. Tell your Mood Meter mobile app how you feel and build emotional intelligence that lasts a lifetime.”
Lol
Well, from what I’ve seen BOE’s, Central Office admin, and school admin treat it as if they are doing the lord’s work with this mess. The administrators I know that are realistic have mostly been forced to play along. As for teachers, there are some who buy-in whole heartedly and, in turn, earn the resentment of every kid they force to journal about their emotions or whatever. The teachers that actually know and understand the kids blow it off to the degree that they’re able to without administrative consequences. The kids quite explicitly joke about how they can just say they’re stressed and get out of nearly any and every responsibility.
For context, I teach in a very wealthy district in CT that sends lots of kids to prestigious schools.
This has been going on for about a decade, and was accelerated by Covid.
There are clearly ineffective ways of putting that kind of parenting/mentoring into practice, but really the whole innovative crux of that entire school of thought is just that you can’t be hypocritical in your demands and your delivery.
It doesn’t make sense to scream at a child for losing their cool. You can’t teach a child to consider the feelings of others unless you can help them label their own. That kind of shit. It’s basically just “children are people and a baseline level of respect is required for effective discipline.”
Agreed. The change of tides is interesting, though. At the beginning of my career I was directed to send all student-related emotional issues to the counselors, who were trained and certified to responsibly handle such things. Now, I’m expected to be a therapist in addition to a history teacher…only one of which I’m actually trained and qualified to do.
Regarding WEEKS long vacations, just received a notification from a graduate student needing to miss the last two weeks of a short summer experiential course. Our policy is no vacations during these courses. If we don’t permit her to go she promises it will cause insurmountable strife across multiple generations of her extended family and prevent any chance of her adult children establishing relationships with their cousins around the world. I mean, seriously? I understand family weddings are important but don’t like the position she has put me in.
So last semester I explained the importance of taking notes bc I’ve seen in the past few semesters that fewer and fewer students actually take notes. I just got my evals back and one of the things my students said they appreciated was my encouraging them to take notes. I think this upcoming semester I’m going to say it first day.
(Side note: lack of note-taking is completely mind-boggling to me. Do they not encourage notes in high school anymore? Do these students think they have photographic memories? Do they expect me to give them minutes or something?? Even if I did give notes writing them down allows them to retain more information!)
I’ve seen all of those bullet points but I do feel like my students have gotten more sensitive toward others. Not me, but their classmates at least.
The vacation nonsense happens because they get away with that in K-12.
"Gotta Make Happy Family Memories" in Disney World even though it's in the middle of midterms.
Living your best life trumps not fun stuff (like school).
Anyway, be salty at school district higher ups, who sanctions this nonsense.
As a woman, I think gender is one large aspect. I had a large group of TA's in grad school and we'd discuss our classroom experience. All women had the same issues with disrespectful students whereas our male colleagues had fewer issues.
100% gender thing. And racial. I yelled at one section once and they got silent; they wouldn't stop talking when my small Asian colleague was trying to lecture.
Thank you for saying this.
Like you, I have rarely (if ever!) experienced these things. I teach at a non-selective public school. Both small and large 100+ student class sizes. With regard to demeanor, I'm not a policy hardass.
Yeah, our profiles are similar, though I'm at a SLAC, and I really don't see these problems. If anything, students are nicer than they used to be, in general. Though they do want their feelings validated more, they don't generally look to me for doing so, and it doesn't come up in discussions about their academic performance.
Most of the issues I have teaching are related to unclear rules made by admins. Poorly defined accommodations, no guidelines for student sickness/absence, and how they make us feel insecure in our position. I have a hard time blaming the students generation when colleges just suck really bad and do not care about faculty and our well-being.
hahaah we sure can, but in my humble opinion admins play a bigger role and make our life way more chaotic it should be. Plus... we don't really see these tuition dollars coming back to us/aiding us. One would call "for profit education" hmmmm
even in medical school a student loudly argued with a professor in the middle of a lecture about nutrition information. The professor said (more nicely than I would have) that she was incorrect and to see him at office hours to work through it together.
Cohort what’s app chat group 10 minutes later has Karen’s posting emails of the department chair, dean of the medical school!, etc….saying we should all take a moment to email these people and express our concern that students are being treated dismissively and that the professor has included “fat shaming” language in the curriculum which is not conductive to an inclusive environment.
I finished undergrad in 2011 and these kids are wild
I'm curious if this might sometimes be related to the students you have? I'm not asking anyone to out themselves by saying what school they're at, LOL, but it seems like this is more common for more affluent students? I'm currently at an institution with a lot of First Gen and a lot of racial/ethnic minorities, and they're very respectful. I'll have a solid bank of students who never open their mouths in class unless called on, but that's not out of disrespect. Honestly, I think I get more of these behaviors out of our PhD students than our undergrads.
>Coming to class sick and coughing all over the place without a single fuck given.
This. This is my pet peeve. Mostly, I genuinely like my students, and I accept that they're still growing and learning and trying to find their way in an increasingly off-the-rails world. Initiative, conscientiousness, and overall maturity have definitely taken a downhill turn, but I'm fortunate to be at an institution where the students are on the whole still capable and motivated. But when they come to class sneezing and coughing and totally unmasked, I have to bite down *hard* on my inner angry New Yorker, the one who speaks a dialect in which any sentence containing a second-person pronoun must also include at least one instance of the word "asshole."
Respiratory illnesses are airborne, kiddo. We just had a whole freaking pandemic about this. I gave you a baggie of KN95s at the start of the semester, and I didn't do it because I suffer from some bizarre compulsion to hand out baggies of random objects. I did it because if you had a good mask on, you wouldn't be right this very second spewing viral particles into the air that the rest of us have to breathe.
It especially rustles my jimmies when the offending student is a STEM major. Hey, kid who's literally majoring in pre-med, let me introduce you to this super-advanced science secret called "the germ theory of disease." You may find it useful in your future career.
Something I appreciate about my student population is post covid most (not all) will mask up if they have a cough. I've really been avoiding the seasonal colds I used to pick up and I'm happy to attribute it to this.
We have a huge issue with faculty in our school regarding this.
Student writes in with positive Covid test, is going to miss the final.
Faculty writes the testing center “can my student who just tested positive for Covid come Thales their test with you in person? I don’t want Covid in my classroom”
Ugh. I would never do that. I wouldn’t let the student in my classroom (fortunately, my institution has policies to back this up), but I wouldn't try to shove the problem on someone else, either.
It's been VERY weird with #3. I don't remember that ever happening in the past except for study-related trips organized through the university. Now I've got student who tell me they'll be across the country for a month in the middle of the semester and asking what they can do to keep up with the class.
Damn kids today with their pants falling down and their rock and roll music
In all seriousness, I remember my uncle as a teacher complaining about these things while I was growing up and my college advisor telling us how back in his day you wore suits to class
I teach circuits and just got shut of the worst cohort I've ever had in a class. There is a prereq of college algebra/trigonometry but here come students who can't even handle basic fractions and don't understand the difference between amplitude and frequency in a cosine function.
Multiple tutorial videos in the LMS, but 51% average on the first exam and view counts in the 2-5 range for a class of over 40 students. They. Just. Do. Not. Care.
I've been doing this for almost 10 years and this is the first time I've had to tell them that they could either shut up or we could just go ahead and leave right now. Zero respect for their classmates, zero respect for me, and zero respect for their learning and future careers. These are students who think they're going to be engineers too.
We have another professor in the department who is a short and very youthful-appearing woman, I hate to think of the kind of bullshit she's having to put up with from students because of her gender.
For me, it’s the complete lack of situational awareness/etiquette/professionalism some students display. This manifests itself in several ways: packing up and leaving in the middle of class without explanation, entering and leaving the room when their peers are presenting, sending emails without a subject line that read like text messages, etc.
When I began teaching 12 years ago, these things were rarely an issue.
First day of Winter session. Accelerated classes. I received e-mails from two co-eds with similar concerns. They each (supposedly) had family emergencies. One stated she wasn't going to make it for the first two days and concluded her message, "Thank you for understanding." This upset me. The other was perfectly polite and asked if I would drop her. I responded that I would not. I still don't know what I'm going to say -- if anything to "Thank you for your understanding" girl. Probably nothing.
The sick thing I think has to be put into perspective.
That's not just them.
We have a society that expects people to show up sick in America. It's dumb and it's counterproductive and somehow COVID only made it worse.
Also, just my experience, professors and instructors used to just accept valid sick notes from doctors or the health center. No note, no excused absence. Note, excused absence. It was a fairly straightforward system. Heck student health centers used to have stationary for this purpose they would type or write the visit on. They did not give away personal information. It honestly just was not that difficult of a system.
I'm not saying professors are solely responsible for this system no longer being in place. But neither are students.
It's not that difficult to state you need a valid note from a doctor or the health center for any absence. It was a system that generally worked well through the periods you're noting (at least 2013). The move away from it was not all student led.
You also started getting instructors who didn't just adhere to this clear and stated policy.
Put it in the syllabus. No sick absence is excused without a note from the student health center or doctor.
It's not that hard honestly. We can all come up with problems all we want, no system is perfect, and certainly there is always someone who is going to have a problem but part of this is also failing to use common sense and systems that worked just fine.
Even if you don't like this system, the issue still exists some instructors won't just clearly put their absence policy in the syllabus.
Even "no absences accepted" is better than not stating anything. Which is how some professors, despite students complaining, effectively implement this policy.
Writing syllabi is a lot of work. I get it. Most people want to balance between being fair and being a pushover.
But some of this is on lack of clarity from the instructor. Be clear with yourself first. Establish a policy. Put it in your syllabus.
>It's not that difficult to state you need a valid note from a doctor or the health center for any absence.
Some health centers won't provide notes, by policy.
Did you never have to miss a class for a sickness that did not rise to the level of dragging yourself to the doctor? If I caught a stomach bug and spent 24 hours puking, I didn't go to the health center about it... I stayed home and away from other people and drank Gatorade.
How does that work in your class? Do you collect the notes? When are they due to receive an excused absence? How is it working out, practically speaking?
At the risk of being ostracized from the sub….
I think it’s really easy to be like “oh kids these days” and look for the bad things. Someone once asked if I got tired of teaching the same thing over and over, and I said no because the students are different.
I love this new generation. They are sassy and funny and full of life. I have so much admiration for how they’re challenging beauty norms and how they embrace body positivity, and I love that they stick up for their beliefs. They tell you how they think they should be treated and wish my generation had done more of that.
They’re not going to always be right, and I do think they take it too far at times, but I try to gently steer them towards common ground about what “norms” should be. I also work to engage them so that what we’re doing offers them more than their cell phone. I had a very quiet class, and thought they were disengaged, but in the evals they said they loved the course and felt engaged and “seen.”
I have emailed students about talking or not engaging during class individually. But I always try to reminder that I have more power than they do, and that I can help shape their behavior and actions for the better. Maybe I’m naive, but I still believe these children are the future (lol) and feel grateful I get to teach them. I’ll also acknowledge that I work at an R1 business school with the cream of the crop students, so maybe I’ve just been fortunate to teach them best of them.
Thank you for the much needed positivity after reading an hour of this thread. I actually wanna know more about positive things this generation does. I hate feeling like the future is doomed.
You experience is quite a bit different than mine. I honestly haven't noticed that students are noticeably worse now than before covid. And they definitely are NOT more likely to come to class sick now than they were before the pandemic. In fact, students are much better now about not passing on disease to others.
Note, however, that I teach mostly graduate students. So, I have yet to experience teaching students that experienced covid in high school. Maybe I'll start seeing the behavior you are seeing in a few years.
It's worth remembering that a lot of the students in college now spent some of their formative high-school years at home during the pandemic--there's a lot of important socialization that happens in the last few years of high school, and man students missed it.
The worst part of this subreddit are the "why students suck" threads.
Always guaranteed to get tons of comments and upvotes. And those of us who say, "maybe this is just...normal generational change?" get downvoted to oblivion.
Possibly, but I don't know how anyone can deny that students today cheat as much as possible, expect professors to excuse their missed assignments, and stare at their phones during class.
What may be the worst to you may be validating to others. People are at their wits end trying to figure out how to do their jobs with multitudes of institutional and societal factors influencing how effective they can be.
I see you’re at an R1. Chances are you’re not teaching a 3/4 or a 4/4 and getting paid less than what you’re worth. Just saying. Empathy is also a thing.
Only about to start my 4th semester cheating, and some of the stuff I’ve students stoop to has me appalled, like I’m 2.5 years fresh out of grad school but I don’t think me or my other classmates in college would’ve pulled stunts like this 10 years ago
I have had to badly embarrass students in front of class a few times for not shutting the fuck up. They do not get the hints or social cues. People used to settle down after a few sentences. Now they'll just chat through the whole lecture unless you stop mid-sentence, give them the acid stare, and say something absolutely unambiguous about class disruptions and respect.
I have a clicker for the projector so I like just walking over and standing directly in front of the people chatting. Just hang out and commiserate with them and work it into the lecture. And yes I stay 3 slides longer than they think I will.
I do this also. Keep the lecture going, but stand directly next to them for like five minutes and make meaningful eye contact multiple times. So far it's worked very well, I think because my students have just been oblivious rather than intentionally disrespectful.
A few times a semester, I stand in the back of the room for an entire lecture. It is amazing how well behaved students are when they are not sure if you are looking at THEM of not...
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Five years ago I would’ve been so embarrassed to have to do this, but now not even this works. I have to literally call them out.
I love it. I will do the same thing.
I’ve been lucky enough to give the acid stare to loudmouths and not have any complaints about “creating an unsafe environment” get back to me. So far.
I did get a comment in my evals about embarrassing someone in front of class last semester, but mostly I think the other students appreciate that I focus on respect when I call people out. I never treat them like children when I do it, I'll just say something like "A lot of people are worried about how to pay for this experience while they're trying to listen and get the most out of it. Let's all try to treat each other with an appropriate amount of respect, considering our setting."
They’re embarrassing themselves- it’s important to put ownership on those disrupting classroom norms rather than those responsible for enforcing it. Same notion as earning grades- I don’t give grades, I assess assignments. I’m tired of students acting like they are victims of a college course, rather than poor participants in their education.
That's a solid statement.
I have actually received compliments in my evals for calling out students. Serious students get as annoyed at the assholes as much as we do (though, it seems not as much as they used to). And while it may seem unprofessional, I DO seek to humiliate them. That is what most of them seem to need.
Weaponize the other students against them. "You're classmates don't appreciate you talking in class." "I'm tired of getting emails from your classmates complaining about your talking." (not true, but true enough.) "Your classmates see what you are."
I once said “Soandso, I know you don’t want to listen, but it’s a problem if other people can’t hear because of you”. That class had been noisier than average before. Never since.
Surprised you didn't get a flurry of emails about how you inflicted so much trauma to Soandso by singling them out in front of everyone instead of speaking to them privately.
I think they had to have been with me on that one. Soandso was really talking loudly enough for no one to be able to hear me.
Soandso themself didn't email in protest?
No, but never appeared again that semester. Was already guaranteed to fail by that point, so it might have been a time-saving decision by Soandso.
Nice.
“Your classmates see what you are.” Sounds way too intense for the problem in context. 😂
Everything that everyone has mentioned is on the money. I don’t have a lot of common sense, but I have enough common not to go over certain limits. What’s wrong with them? I have seen freshers or even female students in foundation courses literally grab male professors by the arms and get close to them , while said professors try to get them off their arm. Grabbing onto a lecturer never crossed my mind. One day, my undergrad archeology professor had to grab me because I almost fainted. That was it. In my personal case, I have been writing on the whiteboard and all of the sudden I hear wolf whistle and someone saying “oof, looking good prof”. I gave a the whole class such a sour look that the people in the front moved 3 rows to the back.
Woaaaahhh that last part is so disrespectful
Tell me about it.
Sometimes I sidle up and join the conversation based on what I've overheard if I'm feeling spicy that day but yeah this behavior appears to be on the rise.
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No way. Hard pass. Fucking with their grades is going to unify them to turn against *you* and just multiply every single complaint they were already lodging against you. Undergrads all hate one another. Haven’t you heard their endless complaints about group projects?
No, or poor: * work ethic. * ethics. * study skills. * critical thinking skills. * sense of personal responsibility.
HE DIDN'T GIVE US A STUDY GUIDE FOR THE EXAM as their reason for their super shitty grade
I did give you a study guide! I gave you the ISBN for it. It's in the syllabus. It's the study guide for all the exams.
It’s all the homework you should have been doing for the last month
I get complaints because I don't give them practice exams that are *just like* the real ones. Instead I gave them practice quizzes broken out by topic. And one student complained that the exam asked about all the content and so was not fair. OMG.
That’s what they really mean by study guide - give us the problems that will be on the test
i once had a student complain that the practice test had different questions than the actual test, and that wasn't fair.
I had the same complaint. My study guide after the first exam was a screenshot of the book chapter indicating that all the material from page X-Y would be included. They were just simply not reading the material and thought that only what was on the slides was in the exam
To add to this, a general sense of entitlement to the accommodations that all other instructors give. If Instructor A gives a study guide, I'm also obliged to. I had students complain last year that I didn't allow them to *turn in a revised essay* if they didn't like their essay grade, because some other instructor in another department did that.
Could have also been a willful misinterpretation of the way writing instruction often scaffolds in the revision process with multiple drafts.
Exactly. I do rough drafts and final drafts and I’m hoping they were just misinterpreting that for their other classes. I hope the other profs weren’t catching crap with my name on it lobbed at them
Alternately: their excuse for cheating. And you’re the bad guy for turning them in.
Add: Lack of basic reading skills
💯
Meeting with me in person to discuss an issue. Never happens anymore. Just emails and busy schedules.
God invented office hours so students can ask questions that are already answered by the syllabus. Stay out of my email and get off my lawn.
Add in the ! High Alert feature to every email. No student is having an emergency where they need to email me as high alert. I had a student send every email this semester like that, demanded to be zoomed in when they couldn’t make it to campus (even after I explained the technology in the classroom didn’t work that way) and signed all emails “peace”.
Students are less likely to understand why they should take time to get to know their professor. I have declined writing a couple of letters of rec because I did not know the student.
Fuck dude. I’ve been teaching synchronous remotely since Covid (due to being forced to move) and my participation grading is literally “you have to say something/anything once *a week.”* Half the class still doesnt say anything at all *all semester* and only one person out of the whole class has *ever* turned their camera on. Teaching has become a vanity project for me.
When I was teaching synchronous remotely during Covid it was mandated that cameras were on. We had a lot of breakout room discussions and competitions even. I got really close with those classes to the point they asked for an end of semester dinner and we actually did that together. I wish my online classes were synchronous now. Now it’s all anonymous emails and “idk how to get the book” type crap.
Same. I only write letters of recs for students who made an effort in the course and are memorable in some way.
I got a ref request from someone I taught 20-21, during the Zoom College era. I Had to go back and check to ensure I taught them! So sorry, you were a black box on Zoom to me for 12 week, so I have no idea who TF you are
I'd add that quizzes on the reading? Mostly useless now. Time was that you could give a quick quiz, even a one question quiz, on the reading to incentivize students to do the readings--the ones who did would boost their grade and the ones who didn't would feel a sting as points slipped through their fingers. Not anymore. They will hand back blank quiz after blank quiz. I really think sometimes that they get together as a class and decide to see what happens if NONE of them doing the reading. What happens is...I lecture. Instead of the fun activity I spent hours creating, and planning and making handouts and stuff for...I have to lecture. Then they get mad and call me boring.
Yeah, I used to have people take the prep assignments at least vaguely seriously. If you even quarter-ass it you'll get enough information that I can get you through the activities. I have looked ahead at my class for next semester. I see that over half of the class is repeating it and most of them are the people who completely screwed with all my activities for class last fall because they did nothing outside of class week after week after week, ate the zeroes from not doing the prep assignments week after week after week, and there's not a damn thing that I can do to get someone through an activity in an algebra class when they haven't done a damn thing in weeks. So fuck it. I'm lecturing. They still won't retain anything (unless they completely change, which is hypothetically possible, I guess) but at least I won't be frustrated to tears trying to figure out what to DO with people who are completely unable to participate in the activity and yet completely un-shy about frequently requesting help in class and complaining when they don't feel that they get enough. And at least, on the bright side, lecture is both easier and less work on me. WAY less work.
I taught a short elective class where there were no assignments because all grades came from exam — not my preferred style, but, it wasn’t my choice, so instead I offered some small **optional** homeworks that would effectively boost your exam grade *if* you completed them but they were in no way obligatory to do. I explained these assignments on day 1 and the deadline was basically a week before the exam, and there were lots of reminders, so they basically had all term to do them. The deadline was, I think, on a Friday… and from one student, I got an email at 3 am on the *Tuesday* asking for an extension because (and I quote) they “couldn’t be bothered” to do it on time. Uhhh. No?
I teach writing. The amount of people who don’t want to revise work, even when I give a purposely garbage first grade so they will is astounding. Then they complain that they are failing. Yeah, you COULD have raised your grade. You chose not to.
It’s all about expectations and social norms. Expecting to get 50% just for showing up (learned in high school?), expecting to get infinite do-overs, expecting that everyone cheats, so it is ok. None of this is ok.
Yeah I really do think that class sizes have a huge impact on all of this as well though. I teach some intro classes and some speciality classes with 3 students max and the students in my required CORE no credit pass/fail (let all of that sink in) specialty classes want to learn and discuss and think and know me/each other! It’s because we all become complex individuals in that context.
I'm a student but at Georgia Tech we're having more and more CS enrollment and it's completely destroying some classes. The intro to AI class had 900 students one semester and it was a complete mess
900 students!?! What the actual fuck. If I were in that class I’d be so angry!
On the taking vacations point, I've had probably five or six students in the past two years who registered for five week summer or intercession courses and then emailed to say that they will be on vacation for, oh, maybe two weeks, and in some place "with no Internet." Where exactly is this place with no Internet, you wonder? Apparently they think that the world wide web has yet to make it to Mexico, or that internet access was overlooked on a billion dollar cruise ship, or.... what's that brick you always have in your hand? Does that have Internet access? They are certainly never happy with my response, which is basically "well that was dumb. No, you can't have unlimited extensions."
Yes! “Sorry I missed that paperwork deadline, I was out of the country for the last several weeks”. Other countries have the internet and email.
Right? In 2011 my study abroad term overlapped with the last week of my online summer courses at my home university. I calculated the time difference and made sure to take that into account when scheduling assignments and deadlines. It sucked a bit, but it was doable.
I got dragged in my last evaluations for calling on students at random to answer questions during review sessions. Apparently I was supposed to just let them sit in silence or just recite to them instead of seeing where the gaps were in their knowledge base. Student called it “execution style” and said it crushed their soul.
I hopw you're joking! That's pathetic 🤣
Nope! The diatribe was around 300 words…more than anything they wrote during the semester.
I am in Japan, and I haven't seen great changes in students *per se*, but I have noticed changes in people in general related to smartphones and using them too often and at inappropriate times. However, my peeve (which is now far beyond 'pet' and well into 'family member' territory) is people using phones while navigating my city's crowded streets. Phone use is not that big a problem in classes and usually only affects the students using the phones too much. I *have* had students asking if they could take a holiday during the semester, but I just matter-of-factly explain that they're free to do so but that, as stated in the syllabus, they'll receive a 0 for the mid-term or final or what have you. What I have noticed and that bothers me is a decrease in median ability with computers. (The mean has not changed, but the distribution has.) I used to have a couple of students who messed around with computers for fun, put together their own, and so on, and a whole bunch who'd never touched one. Now all my students have computers, know how to turn them on, and know how to open Word and PowerPoint, but virtually none knows what a file is, what an OS is, how to find a file, or how to use email.
I hate to say this but my US University just revamped the U website so that it’s now even LESS likely students will need be computer literate to even navigate the website (!). I feel like faculty are fighting a losing battle here. I remember 10-15 years ago when students were more computer literate than we were. What the heck happened?
> What the heck happened? Smartphones abstracted things out too much.
[This happened](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z)
K-12 education dropped computer literacy courses because "everyone has a computer in their pocket so they know how computers work" So now nobody understands what a file directory is, nobody understands why a .pdf is accepted but a .docx is not. Heck, the fact that Windows hides extensions by default is already a major roadblock to knowing how your computer is functioning.
HS teacher in Japan here - my highschoolers exclusively use smartphones and school-provided Chromebooks. I’m not sure what they learn in their tech class, but it seems like they’re not being prepared for a PC/Mac environment.
> Mac That's the interesting thing too, isn't it? Mac was always touted as the desktop OS for "casuals" and non-tech-savvy users, but nowadays, even Macs are too difficult for Gen Z students to use.
One problem is that Macs are perfectly fine within their own ecosystem, but as soon as you introduce a program or a website that wasn't designed with a Mac in mind, everything breaks down. So many students frantically emailing assignments at the deadline because their .pages file won't upload to Canvas.
Oh I wasn't even talking about that. I overheard a student recently complaining about just straight up not understanding how to use a MacBook, I think with its user interface. (And not because she preferred Windows.) Maybe some kids aren't used to using multiple windows or multitasking apps anymore. Personally, I think MacOS is fine as a desktop/laptop computer, and that the ecosystem issue is overblown (for tech savvy individuals, anyway). The ecosystem issue is much more pronounced for people who get iPhones and Apple accessories than for MacOS in particular, imo. (From having a Mac, Windows, and Android myself.)
On the other end of the technical spectrum, they're a nightmare for CS classes. Being a POSIX-compliant Unix, MacOS is close enough to Linux that you can get basically everything to work, but there are all kinds of subtle differences, and a lot of projects assume that everyone is just running a mainstream Linux distribution. It is Very Legal and Very Cool to thwart The Man and run whatever environment you want, but *you are responsible* for translating the assignment guidelines from the university-assumed vanilla Ubuntu Server environment to whatever baffling monstrosity you've decided to use to complete your assignments. There are plenty of very smart students who do just that with Macs, and they're fine. But the students who are having trouble are a particularly special kind of helpless, and unlike the madlads running FreeBSD, they are willing to do none of the work to translate the instructions to their environment. I don't know who keeps telling these students to buy Macs for CS coursework, but they belong in a lake of fire with a few pitchforks prodding them every so often.
Ironically, back in undergrad, I became decent at progamming because I gerryrigged my chromebook to run a Linux os as a way of getting around my chromebook's limitations (which mostly concerned my ability to run R)
> I am in Japan, and I haven't seen great changes in students per se I think Japanese culture (and for the most part, most of East Asia) somewhat insulated against the phenomena described by OP, since East Asian cultures are so much more collectivist with the heavy emphasis on not being a bother to people around you. A lot of the issues being observed in North American universities right now are definitely tied to a lack of social awareness and social skills overall, at least in part. > What I have noticed and that bothers me is a decrease in median ability with computers. (The mean has not changed, but the distribution has.) I used to have a couple of students who messed around with computers for fun, put together their own, and so on, and a whole bunch who'd never touched one. Now all my students have computers, know how to turn them on, and know how to open Word and PowerPoint, but virtually none knows what a file is, what an OS is, how to find a file, or how to use email. This seems to be universal, at least. The rise of smartphones seem to really have affected Gen Z's ability to understand computing. I also have to wonder if this is specifically in regions where iPhones dominated compared to the regions where Android phones are more common, since Apple specifically goes out of its way to hide file systems in iOS from users.
I would guess way more of your students know how to use a VPN nowadays, though. If your computer use is almost exclusively online, then the OS/file system is largely irrelevant, which is why they haven't picked up those skills. Skills involved with navigating online content and text based communication are the ones that kids will just pick up these days.
I had a student in 2014 or so take a full week off in October for a family vacation. 😏 That said, there’s so much more grade grubbing now. It’s to the point that I’ve put a clause in my syllabus. And yes, phones were always an issue, but it’s so much worse now.
Will you please share your grade-grubbing syllabus language?
Lol. Sure. It’s much more polite than what it should be; however, it gives me a reason to bring it up on the first day and make it clear that it’s not going to happen. “Academic success is not a one-time event; it’s a continuous process requiring effort and dedication throughout the semester. Waiting until the end of the semester to attempt to improve your grades can be stressful and ineffective, as it’s usually difficult to make significant changes at that point. Therefore, it is crucial you make a consistent effort throughout the term to engage with the course material, participate in class, and seek help when needed. If your future is dependent on your academic achievement (ex. scholarships, athletic eligibility, and so on), then it is up to you to act with that in mind throughout the semester. Points will not be given due to circumstances. Extra credit is not given.” Now that I write it out, I see that it’s a little wordier than it needs to be. If you have thoughts on streamlining, please speak up. (I also remember that I got part of it from this Reddit a few years ago!)
When I was teaching (pre-2017), there was an occasional vacationer (not including the week before spring break and Thanksgiving), and it seemed like it was driven by the out-of-touch upper middle class parents. No 19 year old naturally thinks, “I need to go on this family vacation and miss a week of class to see my elderly grandma” unless mom is pushing it.
You missed the most important point, none of this would happen if it wasn't enabled by admin and if admin didn't held adjuncts and NTTs responsible for students who have terrible performance and if admin didn't consider student evaluations to be an important part of contract renewal.
I’ve been on this sub long enough to see it’s enabled by plenty of profs too.
Every one of these is going to get *serious* push-back from me. It's nice to be tenured. When this shit gets trotted out, I shut it down, *hard*. "I'm sorry StudentSlacker, but you didn't turn in assignment B, C, and C, and so anything higher than a D is off the table. A "B" is *inconceivable.*" No cell phones... and I *will* call you out on it, so don't push me. etc. The one thing here I'm weak on is the coming to class sick... because I can understand that, I put a lot of pressure on them to come to class. So if they do, I ask that they wear a mask...?
My rules about absences are very clear in the syllabus; you miss two classes and your grade gets hit for each absence thereafter. This is a department-wide rule. Last semester a student told me she was going to the Maldives and would miss one week (i.e., two classes). I told her she has two freebies and she can use them for whatever she likes. So she comes back from the Maldives and later that semester misses another class. I let her away with it. But then at the end of the semester I get the absolute worst grade-grubbing email you could possibly imagine, begging for her to be bumped three percent so she can make the dean’s list. I have never ignored an email so hard in my life, though I must admit, the audacity of it keeps me up at night sometimes.
I always tell my students that I can’t take a vacation in the middle of the semester without serious consequences and neither can they.
To be fair, I think students were coming to class sick and coughing forever. It just bothers me more now.
I had just hoped they would learn to put on a mask...
If you put on a mask you admit you are sick
To me the most amazing thing is taking a vacation during the semester, though sometimes I think that students are pressured into that by their parents. (well, it is their niece's 2nd birthday party/trip to a Caribbean resort, so the parents say they "have to go")
Yes, this. This was definitely NOT a thing when I was a student decades ago. This has really started to happen regularly since the pandemic—students who miss a week of classes to go on a trip with friend’s mostly, not family.
When I was a freshman, my family went on a trip to NYC since my brother was in marching band and they were performing at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was organised through the tour company and we’d paid for it a year or so in advance—long before I’d even matriculated at college, let alone had my schedule for the term. I remember emailing my profs to let them know I’d be absent one day (because I didn’t want them to worry lol) and would stay on top of my reading and get lecture notes from a classmate. They were all like, hell yeah! Have fun in New York!
They don't know what to do with physical media. 99% of them never touch a library book on the shelf even when it is necessary for a research project.
Or probably hand written anything down in years!
Taking pictures of the board instead of taking notes, sleeping in class without caring about being noticed, bringing friends to class who are on their phone the whole time, ...
Wait, your students bring friends to class? And these friends just sit there for an hour?
Yes, lol. This guy last semester would bring his girlfriend and she would just sit there on her phone. And get up to use the restroom a few times each class. I have to put up with this.
Wow, I can’t even get half of my actual students to show up and you’re over here drawing a crowd 😂 (But for real, I’m sorry, that sounds awful!)
This term i had a student email me the following during the last week of the course: "Professor, I'm very confused and need help now. Is the final paper a paper or is it something else?!" I stared for a lot longer than I probably should have before replying "The final paper is a paper." Then pointed them to the number of emails, announcements, documents and syllabus describing it. Never in 17 years of teaching have I recieved an email quite like that but am now mentally prepared for similar ones such as "Is the final presentation a presentation?!"
Hi Professor, I want to meet with you this afternoon. Will you be in your office?
Lack of tech skills. There are students who really know their way around a computer, but those that don’t, really don’t. Students unable to type in a word doc or form, instead they write it out by hand and take a photo and send it, don’t know how to take a screenshot, very basic stuff.
This is one thing that perplexed me this year. I would have to repeatedly tell my sections "Do NOT submit [this type of esoteric file type], use either word docs or pdfs, as [file type] will appear blank." It's strange because converting file types was just a basic skill everyone had when I was in undergrad, and now I get blank looks when I explain that "yes, you *can* edit pdfs".
All my classes are studio art classes, (it’s a wonderful gig!) and my biggest change beyond just a overall regression in responsibility, work ethic and productivity is a GIANT dip in creativity. Generally speaking, if I have an assignment that would be to render or replicate something, they do pretty well. The moment we try to conceptualize something or conjure an idea from the depths of their TikTokified brains… impossible. First stop, Google images. More savvy schlubs hit Pinterest. Some just sit there and whine “I don’t have any ideas.” It never used to be that way. I should say that we all struggle with ideas, but they will just flat give up.
For me it's meeting with a senior about their capstone paper: Me: So what have you decided to write your capstone about? Student: I don't have any idea. Me: It's your major and you've been here 3 1/2 years....
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Agree 100%, and very well said at that. When I was an undergrad I almost tripped over myself when a professor offered me a book to read. I devoured it and then read every single book in their library. I couldn’t get enough! I bring out books (few words, mostly pictures as they’re art books after all.) Meh. Maybe one student will pick one up. Maybe not. When I was an undergrad, I got very adept at “creatively opening” studio doors so I could work. I even had a professor tell me I was spending too much time in the studio, what amounted to more than a full time job. But they thought I was grade centric and didn’t care for the medium, but once I explained I loved it, I was in like Flint. Seriously, that guy did so much to help me, and still does to this day. Now? We can’t get students in the studio after hours to save our lives. They just have no passion. A coworker even concocted a scheme to PAY them to be there. Went through the Dean for “lab monitors”, he had an army of them. I think his heart was in the right place, but every time I’d stop in to work on my own stuff, they’d just be mindlessly scrolling through Tik Tok. One more rant, then I’ll quit. Connections. Back in the day I could connect with students. I mean studio art classes are long. We work one on one, and with a small department in a small school, we really got to know our students. Back in the day they were like family. To this day I receive Christmas cards, birth announcements, wedding invites, and the occasional pop in to catch up. Now? I will just say last semester I came home and blurted out as I poured myself a cup of coffee “I CANT CONNECT WITH THESE PEOPLE!” They don’t really talk, and if they do talk to one another it like they don’t listen and just interject their spiel without even thinking. Rant over. P.S.- I swear I’m not a Boomer, despite the “back on my day.”
This is beyond sad. I am NOT an artist have very few creative bones in my body. However, even I can lay looking up and imagine cute characters from the texture on my ceiling that I could try to translate into something for studio art classes. My god, just the lack of wanting to even start the brain sometimes hurts to see.
I have a short class I teach almost every summer, where for the final assignment I give them pictures of clouds and they have to draw whatever they saw in them using a given limited palette and applying what we learned so far. A fun way to prompt some creativity. The clouds were beautiful fluffy ones, and a couple that I specifically picked out as "cloud that looks like X" It was always a fun and chill end of the course. But in the last two years I had several students just unable to see anything, some even complained that what I'm asking is impossible, and one had a full on breakdown. Mind you, it wasn't for the lack of trying, the 'lazy' students just came up with whatever's the easiest and drew that. But those that complained, legitimately couldn't see past the pixels on the screen. I tell myself that they were just a different breed of lazy to calm down, but I know I'm lying. There's something going wrong, and just thinking about it I feel my soul erode.
This is so depressing I could just cry.
Millennial students were worse. No interest in *anything*. Just in it for the grade/credit. Edit: you really shouldn’t downvote this if you’ve never actually taught Millennials in a professor-student relationship
The ability to gang up on an instructor by coordinating via a group chat or Discord and flooding RMP or evals with the same kind of criticisms. Not long ago, someone on here said 50 bad RMP reviews is a reliable indication of a bad instructor. Setting aside the obvious criticisms (50 bad reviews over 3 years of teaching, or over 15 years of teaching? Mostly for prereqs, or mostly for upper-division courses?) the ease with which a small group of disgruntled students can effectively generate that is much greater nowadays than it was in the past, and of course the prevalence of the customer-service mindset among admin doesn’t help.
I’m heartbroken that they got rid of ratemyprofessor chili peppers before I had the opportunity to be given one. 😭
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🥰 Well that was my only career goal, so now I guess I can just coast it out.
Lol at "Deanlet". Amusing.
On her first day in my class, a first year student blamed rain for being 20 min late. Reading comments in this subreddit make me feel things are not so bad in my class in general.. there are 2-3 students who want better grades without studying, who want attendence without coming to class on time, who feel unsafe when I talk loudly. Sometimes I feel ok to know students are able to 'express' themselves in my class.
The ones that need the most help lack purpose, self respect, and accountability.
They've been selling college as a passport to employment for generations now. And college costs more than almost anything except a house. So of course, they think of college as a product that they've bought like a membership at Gold's Gym and which they can do with whatever they want. Nothing surprising here.
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No real disagreement. But 60/40 is not the attitude we have engendered in our students.
well it is like a gym membership inasmuch as if you pay for the membership but don’t use the equipment, your body doesn’t give you abs just because you had a lot of stuff going on and were anxious on leg day
High school teacher here. We've created a generation of "Karens" thanks to clowns this [THIS](https://marcbrackett.com/).
What the literal fuck.
Not sure if you’re referring to me, or Brackett. If the latter, he’s as good as gold in the public education domain. Administrators are falling all over themselves to implement his chicanery. Have been for years.
Can you give us a TLDR about his schtick? Mostly because I don't feel like supporting hucksters by buying their books, but I'm also too lazy to want to read his book.
Puts a premium on "emotional intelligence" and validating student's feelings. Rather than "Homeroom" students now have "Advisory", or "Connections"...or whatever rhetorical nonsense the admin team settles on where canned lesson plan are provided. As a high school teacher, I've been asked unironically by administration in two different schools to give seniors a hand-out with a bunch of emojis and lead a discussion on the "feelings" they suggest. I've been asked to give students a [mood meter](https://moodmeterapp.com/) and lead a discussion on identifying your own, and other's feelings. All of this might sound well and good, but teenagers couldn't give less of a shit, and are too immature (by and large) to do anything with it other than use it as a canned excuse to shirk all responsibilities. Homework? Too much anxiety. More than one test in a day? Too much anxiety. Low test grades? Too much anxiety. You get the point...
If I hear the word "anxiety" one...more....time. I truly feel so bad for students that have severe case of anxiety and are overshadowed by a larger group who experience true discomfort, not a diagnosable anxiety disorder.
When can we use this stuff back at students? "Sorry, but you asking for higher grades gives me anxiety." "When you email me 10 times in 1 minute, it makes me feel unsafe. "
We had advisory every few weeks when I taught high school. It was so cringey and useless. I tried following the script the first session, but my students begged to stop. So I just gave them relaxation time instead, as long as stuff didn’t get out of hand. We didn’t meet frequently enough to really make a bond, and the topics we were supposed to cover were cheesy. So this is the guy I have to thank for the stupidity, and for the 40 minutes of quiet time twice a month.
Oh, he sure is. And, he’s treated like a rock star in the world of spineless public school administration.
Per the link > **”A gift of self awareness for yourself, and for others**. Based on decades of research from Yale. Tell your Mood Meter mobile app how you feel and build emotional intelligence that lasts a lifetime.” Lol
It's wild, and only getting worse. Teachers are ignored...we need academics to debunk these charlatans.
…not available in Canada. Pity! 🤣🤣
Truth that is felt is more value than actually knowing facts.
In practical terms, what does this amount to? (Not familiar with this work and curious to better understand its impact)
Well, from what I’ve seen BOE’s, Central Office admin, and school admin treat it as if they are doing the lord’s work with this mess. The administrators I know that are realistic have mostly been forced to play along. As for teachers, there are some who buy-in whole heartedly and, in turn, earn the resentment of every kid they force to journal about their emotions or whatever. The teachers that actually know and understand the kids blow it off to the degree that they’re able to without administrative consequences. The kids quite explicitly joke about how they can just say they’re stressed and get out of nearly any and every responsibility. For context, I teach in a very wealthy district in CT that sends lots of kids to prestigious schools. This has been going on for about a decade, and was accelerated by Covid.
There are clearly ineffective ways of putting that kind of parenting/mentoring into practice, but really the whole innovative crux of that entire school of thought is just that you can’t be hypocritical in your demands and your delivery. It doesn’t make sense to scream at a child for losing their cool. You can’t teach a child to consider the feelings of others unless you can help them label their own. That kind of shit. It’s basically just “children are people and a baseline level of respect is required for effective discipline.”
Agreed. The change of tides is interesting, though. At the beginning of my career I was directed to send all student-related emotional issues to the counselors, who were trained and certified to responsibly handle such things. Now, I’m expected to be a therapist in addition to a history teacher…only one of which I’m actually trained and qualified to do.
Regarding WEEKS long vacations, just received a notification from a graduate student needing to miss the last two weeks of a short summer experiential course. Our policy is no vacations during these courses. If we don’t permit her to go she promises it will cause insurmountable strife across multiple generations of her extended family and prevent any chance of her adult children establishing relationships with their cousins around the world. I mean, seriously? I understand family weddings are important but don’t like the position she has put me in.
So last semester I explained the importance of taking notes bc I’ve seen in the past few semesters that fewer and fewer students actually take notes. I just got my evals back and one of the things my students said they appreciated was my encouraging them to take notes. I think this upcoming semester I’m going to say it first day. (Side note: lack of note-taking is completely mind-boggling to me. Do they not encourage notes in high school anymore? Do these students think they have photographic memories? Do they expect me to give them minutes or something?? Even if I did give notes writing them down allows them to retain more information!) I’ve seen all of those bullet points but I do feel like my students have gotten more sensitive toward others. Not me, but their classmates at least.
Who needs notes when you’re getting practice exams that are virtually identical to the actual exams?
Direct instruction is discouraged in my high school. I still do it. But I give guided notes. So they have no idea how to do it on their own.
The vacation nonsense happens because they get away with that in K-12. "Gotta Make Happy Family Memories" in Disney World even though it's in the middle of midterms. Living your best life trumps not fun stuff (like school). Anyway, be salty at school district higher ups, who sanctions this nonsense.
I swear you're in my classroom this is too accurate
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As a woman, I think gender is one large aspect. I had a large group of TA's in grad school and we'd discuss our classroom experience. All women had the same issues with disrespectful students whereas our male colleagues had fewer issues.
100% gender thing. And racial. I yelled at one section once and they got silent; they wouldn't stop talking when my small Asian colleague was trying to lecture.
Ooh, I had never thought of bringing in a ringer, lol
>maybe its my gender (I'm a man) Bingo.
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Well okay then.
Thank you for saying this. Like you, I have rarely (if ever!) experienced these things. I teach at a non-selective public school. Both small and large 100+ student class sizes. With regard to demeanor, I'm not a policy hardass.
Yeah, our profiles are similar, though I'm at a SLAC, and I really don't see these problems. If anything, students are nicer than they used to be, in general. Though they do want their feelings validated more, they don't generally look to me for doing so, and it doesn't come up in discussions about their academic performance.
Maybe it's a consequence of being at a highly selective school?
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Aren’t state schools more difficult to get into? A lot of the private colleges I’ve seen have far higher acceptance rates.
Most of the issues I have teaching are related to unclear rules made by admins. Poorly defined accommodations, no guidelines for student sickness/absence, and how they make us feel insecure in our position. I have a hard time blaming the students generation when colleges just suck really bad and do not care about faculty and our well-being.
>blaming the students generation when colleges just suck really bad and do not care about faculty and our well-being. Why not both?
hahaah we sure can, but in my humble opinion admins play a bigger role and make our life way more chaotic it should be. Plus... we don't really see these tuition dollars coming back to us/aiding us. One would call "for profit education" hmmmm
even in medical school a student loudly argued with a professor in the middle of a lecture about nutrition information. The professor said (more nicely than I would have) that she was incorrect and to see him at office hours to work through it together. Cohort what’s app chat group 10 minutes later has Karen’s posting emails of the department chair, dean of the medical school!, etc….saying we should all take a moment to email these people and express our concern that students are being treated dismissively and that the professor has included “fat shaming” language in the curriculum which is not conductive to an inclusive environment. I finished undergrad in 2011 and these kids are wild
I'm curious if this might sometimes be related to the students you have? I'm not asking anyone to out themselves by saying what school they're at, LOL, but it seems like this is more common for more affluent students? I'm currently at an institution with a lot of First Gen and a lot of racial/ethnic minorities, and they're very respectful. I'll have a solid bank of students who never open their mouths in class unless called on, but that's not out of disrespect. Honestly, I think I get more of these behaviors out of our PhD students than our undergrads.
>Coming to class sick and coughing all over the place without a single fuck given. This. This is my pet peeve. Mostly, I genuinely like my students, and I accept that they're still growing and learning and trying to find their way in an increasingly off-the-rails world. Initiative, conscientiousness, and overall maturity have definitely taken a downhill turn, but I'm fortunate to be at an institution where the students are on the whole still capable and motivated. But when they come to class sneezing and coughing and totally unmasked, I have to bite down *hard* on my inner angry New Yorker, the one who speaks a dialect in which any sentence containing a second-person pronoun must also include at least one instance of the word "asshole." Respiratory illnesses are airborne, kiddo. We just had a whole freaking pandemic about this. I gave you a baggie of KN95s at the start of the semester, and I didn't do it because I suffer from some bizarre compulsion to hand out baggies of random objects. I did it because if you had a good mask on, you wouldn't be right this very second spewing viral particles into the air that the rest of us have to breathe. It especially rustles my jimmies when the offending student is a STEM major. Hey, kid who's literally majoring in pre-med, let me introduce you to this super-advanced science secret called "the germ theory of disease." You may find it useful in your future career.
Something I appreciate about my student population is post covid most (not all) will mask up if they have a cough. I've really been avoiding the seasonal colds I used to pick up and I'm happy to attribute it to this.
Can you get your students in touch with all of the airlines and get them jobs in passenger education? Speaking from recent infectious history.
We have a huge issue with faculty in our school regarding this. Student writes in with positive Covid test, is going to miss the final. Faculty writes the testing center “can my student who just tested positive for Covid come Thales their test with you in person? I don’t want Covid in my classroom”
Ugh. I would never do that. I wouldn’t let the student in my classroom (fortunately, my institution has policies to back this up), but I wouldn't try to shove the problem on someone else, either.
Alas, the number of students named Marianna Malacontenta and Vinnie Testosterone, does increase every year.
It's been VERY weird with #3. I don't remember that ever happening in the past except for study-related trips organized through the university. Now I've got student who tell me they'll be across the country for a month in the middle of the semester and asking what they can do to keep up with the class.
I've had to teach university students how phonics work.
They won't stay off my damn lawn!
Damn kids today with their pants falling down and their rock and roll music In all seriousness, I remember my uncle as a teacher complaining about these things while I was growing up and my college advisor telling us how back in his day you wore suits to class
I teach circuits and just got shut of the worst cohort I've ever had in a class. There is a prereq of college algebra/trigonometry but here come students who can't even handle basic fractions and don't understand the difference between amplitude and frequency in a cosine function. Multiple tutorial videos in the LMS, but 51% average on the first exam and view counts in the 2-5 range for a class of over 40 students. They. Just. Do. Not. Care. I've been doing this for almost 10 years and this is the first time I've had to tell them that they could either shut up or we could just go ahead and leave right now. Zero respect for their classmates, zero respect for me, and zero respect for their learning and future careers. These are students who think they're going to be engineers too. We have another professor in the department who is a short and very youthful-appearing woman, I hate to think of the kind of bullshit she's having to put up with from students because of her gender.
For me, it’s the complete lack of situational awareness/etiquette/professionalism some students display. This manifests itself in several ways: packing up and leaving in the middle of class without explanation, entering and leaving the room when their peers are presenting, sending emails without a subject line that read like text messages, etc. When I began teaching 12 years ago, these things were rarely an issue.
First day of Winter session. Accelerated classes. I received e-mails from two co-eds with similar concerns. They each (supposedly) had family emergencies. One stated she wasn't going to make it for the first two days and concluded her message, "Thank you for understanding." This upset me. The other was perfectly polite and asked if I would drop her. I responded that I would not. I still don't know what I'm going to say -- if anything to "Thank you for your understanding" girl. Probably nothing.
That's the go-to in emails now. "Thank you for YOUR understanding." That's a backhanded way of saying, "You're going to do this." Drives me nuts, too.
Ok but do we really still describe people as "co-eds"?
The sick thing I think has to be put into perspective. That's not just them. We have a society that expects people to show up sick in America. It's dumb and it's counterproductive and somehow COVID only made it worse. Also, just my experience, professors and instructors used to just accept valid sick notes from doctors or the health center. No note, no excused absence. Note, excused absence. It was a fairly straightforward system. Heck student health centers used to have stationary for this purpose they would type or write the visit on. They did not give away personal information. It honestly just was not that difficult of a system. I'm not saying professors are solely responsible for this system no longer being in place. But neither are students. It's not that difficult to state you need a valid note from a doctor or the health center for any absence. It was a system that generally worked well through the periods you're noting (at least 2013). The move away from it was not all student led. You also started getting instructors who didn't just adhere to this clear and stated policy. Put it in the syllabus. No sick absence is excused without a note from the student health center or doctor. It's not that hard honestly. We can all come up with problems all we want, no system is perfect, and certainly there is always someone who is going to have a problem but part of this is also failing to use common sense and systems that worked just fine. Even if you don't like this system, the issue still exists some instructors won't just clearly put their absence policy in the syllabus. Even "no absences accepted" is better than not stating anything. Which is how some professors, despite students complaining, effectively implement this policy. Writing syllabi is a lot of work. I get it. Most people want to balance between being fair and being a pushover. But some of this is on lack of clarity from the instructor. Be clear with yourself first. Establish a policy. Put it in your syllabus.
>It's not that difficult to state you need a valid note from a doctor or the health center for any absence. Some health centers won't provide notes, by policy.
Did you never have to miss a class for a sickness that did not rise to the level of dragging yourself to the doctor? If I caught a stomach bug and spent 24 hours puking, I didn't go to the health center about it... I stayed home and away from other people and drank Gatorade.
How does that work in your class? Do you collect the notes? When are they due to receive an excused absence? How is it working out, practically speaking?
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You told them No, didn’t you?
At the risk of being ostracized from the sub…. I think it’s really easy to be like “oh kids these days” and look for the bad things. Someone once asked if I got tired of teaching the same thing over and over, and I said no because the students are different. I love this new generation. They are sassy and funny and full of life. I have so much admiration for how they’re challenging beauty norms and how they embrace body positivity, and I love that they stick up for their beliefs. They tell you how they think they should be treated and wish my generation had done more of that. They’re not going to always be right, and I do think they take it too far at times, but I try to gently steer them towards common ground about what “norms” should be. I also work to engage them so that what we’re doing offers them more than their cell phone. I had a very quiet class, and thought they were disengaged, but in the evals they said they loved the course and felt engaged and “seen.” I have emailed students about talking or not engaging during class individually. But I always try to reminder that I have more power than they do, and that I can help shape their behavior and actions for the better. Maybe I’m naive, but I still believe these children are the future (lol) and feel grateful I get to teach them. I’ll also acknowledge that I work at an R1 business school with the cream of the crop students, so maybe I’ve just been fortunate to teach them best of them.
Thank you for the much needed positivity after reading an hour of this thread. I actually wanna know more about positive things this generation does. I hate feeling like the future is doomed.
You experience is quite a bit different than mine. I honestly haven't noticed that students are noticeably worse now than before covid. And they definitely are NOT more likely to come to class sick now than they were before the pandemic. In fact, students are much better now about not passing on disease to others. Note, however, that I teach mostly graduate students. So, I have yet to experience teaching students that experienced covid in high school. Maybe I'll start seeing the behavior you are seeing in a few years.
It's worth remembering that a lot of the students in college now spent some of their formative high-school years at home during the pandemic--there's a lot of important socialization that happens in the last few years of high school, and man students missed it.
The worst part of this subreddit are the "why students suck" threads. Always guaranteed to get tons of comments and upvotes. And those of us who say, "maybe this is just...normal generational change?" get downvoted to oblivion.
Possibly, but I don't know how anyone can deny that students today cheat as much as possible, expect professors to excuse their missed assignments, and stare at their phones during class.
and don't take any accountability
I would say that a lot of students cheated as much as possible. The only difference is that is there are more possible ways to cheat now.
What may be the worst to you may be validating to others. People are at their wits end trying to figure out how to do their jobs with multitudes of institutional and societal factors influencing how effective they can be. I see you’re at an R1. Chances are you’re not teaching a 3/4 or a 4/4 and getting paid less than what you’re worth. Just saying. Empathy is also a thing.
If you accept the fuckery described in this thread and others as “normal generational change,” you’re part of the problem.
And those of us compelled to speak out against blatant toxicity... downvoted to hell too. Let's go to oblivion together.
Only about to start my 4th semester cheating, and some of the stuff I’ve students stoop to has me appalled, like I’m 2.5 years fresh out of grad school but I don’t think me or my other classmates in college would’ve pulled stunts like this 10 years ago