And this is the kind of person who should never be allowed to teach:

And because I had spent the weekend in MyKindaTown with friends, drinking and laughing and having the kinds of conversations about art, music, philosophy, and sex that I cannot have with these children I teach four days a week–I lost it.

“What the hell are you two talking about that is so important?? I AM TALKING HERE. SHUT UP AND LISTEN. If you cannot do that, I will separate you permanently for the semester, or I will ask you to leave, because you are incredibly irritating and rude.”

And without skipping a beat, continued to explain the pertinent changes to our schedule before firing up my lecture for the day.

I don’t feel like I was out of line. I feel like they are fucking lucky that I don’t believe in physical violence, because this is the second time since the start of the semester on 9/8 that I have to call the two of them out and I was really feeling like just cracking their heads together like a couple of coconuts.

Can anybody tell me if in other occupations it is as acceptable to flaunt this kind of complete and utter lack of professionalism, or is it only the teaching that is blessed with having huge numbers of incompetents flocking to it? I don’t care how tired, miserable, depressed and stressed out I get, but if I ever allowed myself to behave in this disgraceful manner to my students, I’d consume myself with shame, guilt, and feelings of complete worthlessness. Any teacher who is worth a dime knows at least a dozen ways to get students to stop talking to each other and listen without these public fits of hysteria.

I believe that there is absolutely no excuse for “losing it” with the students. Feel miserable? Go to the Dean’s or the Chancellor’s office and scream at the people who are not in a subordinate position to you. And if you are too chicken to do that, then just stuff it.

I have no doubt that this person spends a lot of time whining about how s/he is unappreciated and downtrodden at work while happily stomping on people who cannot afford to yell back.

P.S. If the website where this was published realizes how horrible this post is and decides to pull it before you get to see it, you should know that I got it from College Misery.

The following question came up on College Misery:

When did you realize you wanted to teach for a career? Before you entered grad school or after your first TAship? Or, at another time?

It was obvious that I was going to be a) a teacher and b) a scholar of literature before I reached the age of ten. Everybody is a teacher and a voracious reader in my family, so all I wanted to do as a kid was to read and play school. When I was five, I would create notebooks for all of my dolls and write their homework in them. Some dolls were smart and did great but some made mistakes and got bad grades. I can’t really even remember a time when I didn’t have a red pen on me to mark students’ assignments.

At the age of nine, I read Aleksey Tolstoy’s play The Death of Ivan the Terrible and then Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Both works deal with the same time period but in very different ways.

I was very shocked to discover that two works of literature approached the same events in such different ways. It was even more surprising to me that Pushkin, the most important Russian writer ever, was, in my opinion both then and now, vastly inferior to Aleksey Tolstoy (not to be confused with Leo Tolstoy), a fairly minor author. Of course, I immediately started to bug my father about this discovery.

“Daaaaaad,” I would whine. “But why does Pushkin say here on page 128. . .”

Eventually, my father got fed up and said to me, “Why don’t you just go ahead and write down everything you think about these two works of literature?”

So I did, and that was my very first work of literary criticism. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been preserved for posterity. 🙂

It’s only the second week of classes, and already I’m quite seriously behind. The reason is that there is so much remedial teaching I have to do that I keep running out of time before getting to the subject of the course.

It would be great if the students knew what the Roman Empire was, realized what the term “the Middle Ages” refers to, could find Mexico on a map, didn’t mix up Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, and were aware of the fact that the US did not exist in year 711. There are also problems with vocabulary, and I have to stop every two minutes to explain words like “indigenous,” “feudal,” “aqueduct,” “nomadic,” “synagogue,” “lyrical,” etc. Several students didn’t know how to spell the word “Muslim.” The weirdest version that it took me a while to decipher was “moslium.” Maybe this student thought I was referring to a chemical element like potassium or cadmium. Several students didn’t know what a mosque was.

Explaining all this devours class time like I can’t begin to tell you.

So I’m reading the Stupid Motivational Tricks Blog where Jonathan describes his system of grading students’ papers. Students send their papers to him by email and he enters corrections as comments in the Word document:

I never print anything. Students never print anything. I never have to struggle with my own handwriting. Students never struggle with my handwriting. I never lose a paper. Students never come late to class because they are still printing the paper due that day. I never struggle with a paper printed with an exhausted toner cartridge. Students get their papers back even if they are absent on the day papers are returned. I have an electronic record of the grades on each paper. The turn-over on papers is faster and more efficient. I never spill coffee on a student paper. Students can revise their papers by accepting my changes and going from there.

I never use this system. To the contrary, I’m a martinet when it comes to the way students hand in their papers. I insist that they never ever ever submit an essay in a file attachment. Essays have to be printed out and handed in to me in paper form. Then, I have to lug a heavy stack of essays around and try to fit my comments in between lines and on the margins.

And do you know why I use this inconvenient system instead of doing what Jonathan does and making my own life easier?

Because when I was a student my professors always insisted that papers be handed in to them in the paper format. I have no idea what the motivation behind this policy was (maybe people were simply uncomfortable with the Internet). I simply heard the exhortations not to send essays to the professor as a file attachment so many times that I started copying this practice in my own teaching.

Just think about how often we do things just because we’ve seen others do them and we simply imitate their actions unquestioningly.

I love my students and everything, but there is one question that they tend to ask that invariably annoys me.

“I haven’t been in class since the semester started,” a student tells me. “Have I missed anything?”

Oh no, not at all. These five lectures we have had since classes started? We just twiddled our thumbs in complete silence. That’s what I get paid for, you know. For not communicating anything of importance to the students over the course of 5 class meetings. It’s actually so rare that I manage to contribute anything of value to the classes I teach that you should feel free not to show up for as long as you wish.

Couldn’t the question just be worded in a less annoying way? Like, for example, “Could you tell me what I missed?”

Or, better yet, “What can I do to catch up?”

Or, best of all, “What can I do to catch up with all the extremely important, fascinating and crucial material that you have been delivering with a great passion and profound knowledge of the subject matter during every class meeting and that I had the horrible bad luck of missing?”

I won’t repeat what I said before about the importance of having some training in pedagogy before you teach if you want to become a good educator. I now want to address the issue of how not knowing anything about the methodology of teaching makes one a bad colleague to one’s fellow educators.

What you always hear during methodology of teaching courses is that you have to make sure you don’t invade the students’ time. You have to arrive for your class when it’s scheduled (and not 15 minutes before) and finish the class when it should end (and not 5 minutes later.) If there is a break in a longer session you are giving, you need to leave the classroom. Students need that time to themselves without you hovering in the background.

Of course, teachers want to have 5-10 minutes before the beginning of class to connect the equipment, open the notes, arrange the materials on the desk, etc. However, you can’t do that at the expense of students and colleagues.

To give you an example, the moment I finish my lecture on Hispanic Civilization, I have the prof who teaches right after me enter the classroom, plant herself next to me and start placing her cell phone, notes and textbooks on the table. The same table where I still have all my stuff spread out.

I never detain students a minute longer than the scheduled class time. To the contrary, I always finish 1-2 minutes earlier to be able to gather my stuff, pack up, and leave in peace. If I have to break my lecture mid-sentence to stick to the schedule, that’s what I do. This means that there are still 10 minutes between my class and the next scheduled class after I go away. I need to be able to take a couple of minutes to get my things, log off the computer, talk to students who come up to me, etc. It’s important that I do it without an inconsiderate colleague breathing down my neck.

Dear colleagues: you only need to be in the classroom during scheduled class time. This is what you are paid for. Coming to the classroom  early and staying there late doesn’t make you a better teacher. It makes you an inconsiderate professor and colleague.