Tag: teaching

Yes, I’m in a Crabby Mood

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

What I miss on this blog is the mood update option, like they reportedly have on Facebook.

The first day of classes did not go as planned. First, I discovered at the worst possible moment that somebody messed up and let me down in a very big way. Then, I had to spend the entire day redoing a shitload of work to correct their mess-up. I hate it when people mess with my plans. I’m extremely well-organized in everything that concerns my work, and it annoys me when anybody interferes.

And now my beautiful, perfectly planned syllabus is a flaming mess.

And there is a book that came out tonight that I’d been waiting for since 2010, but I couldn’t read it as planned because I had to correct somebody else’s huge mess-up.

And at this moment I can’t even enjoy the book because I’m still annoyed about how the day went.

And I couldn’t work on my midpoint tenure dossier because of redoing a shitload of work.

And the professorial bathroom has not been repaired since last semester, which annoys me.

So I made reservations for a Peruvian restaurant for Saturday. The really great restaurant in St. Louis I visited last time wasn’t featured on the blog because it was romantically dark and the pictures of food didn’t come out right. Instead, I’ll try to take photos of Peruvian food.

We’ve been to the only Peruvian restaurant of Chicago, and it wasn’t good at all. We have Peruvians in the family, so I know good Peruvian food from fake Peruvian food. Now let’s see how St. Louis stacks up in this area.

P.S. One good thing, though, is that I’m not teaching freshmen this semester. And what joy it is to have normal, alive, curious, engaged students for a change. They kept asking questions and even laughing at my jokes (in Spanish). After a semester in silent classroom filled with comatose freshmen, I feel transported to heaven.

OK, I feel less crabby now that I’ve shared. Blogging helps.

Clarissa Rules!

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

So. I have graded everything. And calculated the final grades. And entered the final grades into the system. I have also created the syllabi for the next semester, planned the first week of classes, and printed everything out. I’m done, people.

The secret to finishing the grading and the course preparation for the next semester so fast is Ally McBeal. I watched the entire first season while I was grading. I hate this show. It is the most inane TV show I have ever seen. It is also offensive to women.

The strategy was to have it play next to me on my Kindle Fire while I grade. I dislike the show so much that I was motivated to finish everything as soon as possible so that I don’t have to watch any more Ally McBeal. And it worked.

I’m now completely and utterly free from anything teaching-related until January 10. Yippee! I totally rule.

I Don’t Care About Your Needs

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

In find it especially lovely when the day before the final exam, a student sends me the following email (this is the entire text of the email with no editing on my part):

i got a zero on the final essay so what am i suppose to get a bad grade or what i need a good grade in this course so what do i do now

Not to get all Ayn-Randian on people, but I find this reference to what the student needs to be especially jarring. Why exactly am I supposed to care about your needs, you strange creature? Have you done anything to motivate me to care about what you need? I needed you to participate in your class sessions and I assigned 20% of the final grade to participation to motivate you to speak in class. I needed you to write a final essay and offered all kinds of assistance. I also needed you to learn how to write an acceptable email in an academic setting and I dedicated 30 minutes of class time to a Power Point presentation on the subject.

So what exactly is supposed to make me care about your unreasonable needs right now?

Current mood: very annoyed.

P.S. Three hours before the final exam, I meet this student in the hallway. He pretends not to notice me. It’s a really smart move to be rude to a professor on the day of the final when you know you’ve already failed the essay.

P.P.S. I’ve scheduled a spa session for next week because teaching freshmen this year has made me kind of bitter. People used to call me Little Miss Sunshine, which was annoying to a woman of my age, but I’d rather be that than Old Mrs. Winter Storm.

The Good Students

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

I publish so many stories about the weird things students say and write because I want to entertain my readers. This, however, might create an impression that all of our students suck. That is, of course, not the case. The egregious cases happen but they are not the majority. This is why I want to publish a post about the great students we have.

Today, I attended the presentations by our graduating students. I am exhausted and can hardly move I’m so tired. But listening to those presentations was profoundly inspiring. A student who barely spoke Spanish at all when he came to our department delivered a brilliant analysis of the philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard in fluent Spanish. I still remember him struggling with the present tense conjugations and now he can read, analyze and explain such complex texts. And you know who got him interested in Spanish philosophy? Khm, khm.

Another student did really stunning research on the drug wars in Mexico. He rattled out the presentation at a break-neck speed because there was so much fascinating material he had to deliver.

We also heard very insightful analysis of Spanish movies that try to recover the historic memory of the Spanish Civil war.

These students come to us mostly unaware that other cultures exist. They speak no foreign languages and their vision of the world is extremely limited. We teach them to speak languages, get them to travel, and introduce them to the artistic production of other countries. And it’s so beautiful to see how country bumpkins who are not sure if femicide is good or bad and think that Argentina is a province of Spain are transformed into citizens of the world.

How to Write Emails in a Professional or Academic Context

~ Clarissa ~ 18 Comments

I just received the following two emails from students and I’m sitting here, fuming.

Email 1.

I’m read the material need for the final paper but I do not understand it. I am confused and is unsure how to start my Final paper.

Email 2.

Do to my computer internet not workin at home, I was not able to send it to you at the moment you requested. Sorry for the inconvience but i made sure i sent it as soon as i back.

That’s all the emails contained. I did not edit them in any way. There is no signature or any information that would allow me to identify these students. I have no idea which of my courses they are taking. There was no subject line, either.

Mind you, these students know how to write a correct sentence. We’ve done enough written assignments in both of my courses for me to know that I don’t have students who always write as badly as this. It’s just in the email format that they regale me with something like this. Why, people, why? And this is the technology generation we have been hearing about?

I’m so fed up with getting this kind of email that I just devised a PowerPoint presentation for them on how to write emails in a professional context. I know that the PowerPoint sounds snooty and patronizing, and I hate doing that to students. But I can’t face a flurry of such emails at the end of the semester, and I know they are coming.

Here is the presentation if you are interested:

How to Write Emails

Is there anything I should change or add?

Finals

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

Fellow blogger Nominatissima requested that I write about the finals. I think that many people will find this topic relevant at this moment. Final exams are also something of a sore point with me, as people will see presently.

I hate finals. In my country, everything is always 100% about the final exams. You can never show your face in class, then ace the final exam, and get a top grade. I studied within this system for 4 years and it made me realize that the system is absolutely not conducive to any actual learning.

For the first 3 semesters I taught at my current school, I never offered finals. Then, my secret was discovered, and I caught hell. We passed a resolution at a departmental meeting that I have to give final exams in all of my courses. It was even mentioned that literature courses needed to have final exams, which I find to be very strange. Then, I got an official letter to the effect of finals being crucial and warning me that I was obligated to give them. I’m also forced to give the finals during the finals week, so scheduling them differently to ease the burden of the students who end up having 5 or 6 finals in one week is also out of the question.

So if you are a student and you think your prof is being mean by scheduling a final exam, you need to know that s/he probably doesn’t even have a choice in the matter.

I still try to make the finals as painless as possible. Usually, students come to the week of the finals completely exhausted. They simply don’t have the energy to bring their best to the final exam. I believe that it would be completely unfair to structure the grade in a way that would prevent a student who worked hard during the semester from getting an A just because the final exam was not spectacular. In all of my courses, you can fail the final but still get an A if you worked extremely hard during the entire semester.

Since I’m convinced that memorization of huge quantities of information is not a useful skill nowadays, my finals are not cumulative. I don’t want students to have any intense cramming sessions before my finals. Ideally, I don’t want them to prepare for the final at all. As I always tell them, “You can’t compete with Google.” This is why I don’t really care if my students don’t remember the year when Spain lost its last colonies. It is a lot more important that they manage to discuss why the Spanish-American war was crucial both to Spain and the United States.

It seems strange to me to grade people on how good their memory is. Some people simply have a bad memory but it says nothing about their intellectual and professional future. As a result, I construct my final exams in a way that requires no memorization and no guess work. Usually, I provide an excerpt from a text or a photo of a work of art (a building, a painting, a sculpture) and ask them to engage with it critically.

I have a feeling that many of the students would prefer to cram and then reproduce the “correct” responses during the finals. Analyzing is a lot more difficult than memorizing. But if I’m forced to offer final exams, I will at least try to make sure that they have some actual educational value to them.

In the second part of this post, I will offer advice to people who are preparing for their finals right now.

What If the Students Just Can’t Be There?

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

The following question has recently appeared on College Misery:

What do I say when students ask me to loosen the attendance policy for them, their emergencies, the things that get in the way of their attending class? These range from “Baby Daddy is in jail and I had to bail him out,” to “My job with the transit authority changed hours on me for 2 weeks.” These are often good students, hard workers. Their excuses seem real. I tell them the policy and they stare at me with big eyes and say, “Well, how am I supposed to be in class when I have to pick up my kid?” “How could I make class at 9 when my shift changed?” “Did you want me to leave my brother in the emergency room so I could come here for a quiz?”

I know exactly what this prof is talking about. Most of my students don’t live on campus. All of them have at least one part-time job. Many work full-time. Quite a few are primary caregivers for ailing elderly relatives or small children.

Traditionally, campuses were structured around the lifestyles of students who lived in the dorms, maybe did a few hours of work in the cafeteria or the bookstore, and used the college years to slowly mature intellectually and personally. Today, with the advent of what we call non-traditional students (low-income, blue collar, black, Latino, etc.), we have to accept that students are often prevented from being on campus because of the pressing personal concerns and work obligations.

I know my students and I know how hard their lives are. This is why I never ask them, “Why did you miss the mini-quiz?” Instead, I ask, “When will you be able to come by the office for a make-up mini-quiz?” I now have make-ups for all of my exams and mini-quizzes because I know I will have to accommodate students who simply can’t be there. I also make sure that the grade distribution is designed in a way that a student who is forced to miss quite a few classes but is willing to do extra work outside of the classroom can get a good grade.

I don’t remember a single occasion when I didn’t let students take make-up quizzes or exams. If a student tells me that she couldn’t sleep all night long because the baby was sick and crying non-stop and this is why she didn’t do well on the exam, I always let her rewrite the exam. If a student says he will have to miss 3 last weeks of class because he needs to drive his father to chemotherapy, I deliver the material to him outside of class hours or online.

And I find that when you treat students like human beings and show that you understand their hardships, they never abuse your trust.

Freshman Seminars

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

I now understand why people do not get assigned to teach Freshman Seminars every semester or every year. I also have come to understand why people treat a colleague who teaches a Freshman Seminar like s/he’s sick and needs to be comforted and approached very gently.

I don’t mind having had the experience of teaching a Freshman Seminar but I can’t wait to go back to my juniors and seniors. The vacuous stares, the silence, the exasperated sighs, the absence of any questions about anything and the general environment of passivity and boredom are getting to me. You can bring all the enthusiasm in the world into the classroom but trying to transmit it to people who have no use for it on a regular basis gets very daunting. I just miss hearing questions, seeing some interest in something, anything, whatever it may be.

I’ve tried everything in this course, people. Poetry, beautiful works of architecture, powerful documentary footage. I talked about politics, music, traveling, television. I even tried discussing video games and fantasy literature. But students just yawn, fall asleep at their desks, or stare vapidly. I understand how a class on the uses of the subjunctive might bore people. But how is it possible for anybody not to get excited about the indigenous civilizations of the New World, Columbus’s journey, Cortez’s first impressions of Tenochtitlan, Cortes de Cadiz, the Modernist art, the poetry of Alfonsina Storni, the political manipulation of sports, Subcomandante Marcos, the ideology of bullfighting, and all the other fascinating things we discuss in this course?

Mind you, I’ve been teaching this course to upper-year students for years, and they love it. It’s just the freshmen who are indifferent to everything. I can’t even make a joke in the classroom because nobody reacts. Ever. At all. This is the only classroom where nobody greets me or acknowledges my existence in any way when I come into the room. The students remain as silent as they are before I come in and continue to stare straight ahead of them.

I’m Haunted by Mexicans

~ Clarissa ~ 26 Comments

Whenever my students are writing about Cubans, Uruguayans, Spaniards, Dominicans, Argentinians, Venezuelans, Colombians, etc., I always know that by the end of the essay, all these people will be mysteriously transformed into Mexicans. Often, I read statements like, “Jose Marti was an important Cuban thinker and the fighter for Cuban Independence. He loved his country of Mexico and worked hard to make it independent from Spain.”

The culmination of this trend was achieved in the passage I read today: “Jose Enrique Rodo, a thinker and educator from Uruguay, hated the United States and Mexico. Mexico was part of the United States, which is why he hated it. As a Mexican, he hated his own nation and wrote critically about it.”

Is there a way I can politely bring to my students’ attention the Earth-shattering news that not all Spanish-speakers are Mexican?

Two Sides of Autism

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

Today, I had to record an audio of a lecture for my students. For ten minutes, I struggled with the microphone because I had no idea how to put it on. I used a mirror, I turned it every which way, I stared at it, trying to understand how it worked. Nothing helped. Finally, I had to ask N. to come and put the earphone with the mike on me.

Here is the microphone I struggled with

N. found my struggle with the mike impossible to understand. He thought I was kidding when I said I couldn’t figure out how it worked. For me, however it was truly a daunting task. Now that I have taken it off, I still have absolutely no idea how to put it back on.

However, I then managed to record my lecture from beginning to end, using no notes or memory aides, never stopping or pausing (except where the context required it, of course). I wanted it to be about 30 minutes long and it ended up being 33 minutes long, so no editing will be needed. It came out exactly as I wanted, and the effort that went into it was minimal.

This is how autism works, people. A task that involves a minimal degree of manual dexterity and a basic understanding of left and right is impossible for me to carry out. At the same time, a much more complex intellectual task is effortless.