I have office hours twice a week, office hours to which no one in this class has come, not even once this quarter.
Today they have their first midterm. Over the weekend I received the following email:
Dear Angry Professor,
Could you please schedule a review session, a time when you could meet with us and help us go over all the material? Or maybe give us a review sheet that will help us focus on the most important topics? There is so much material and I really need help. Can you tell me what I should study for the exam?Sincerely,
Nervous Nelly
You mean, will I set aside a few more hours to meet with you and review all the material and tell you what will be on the exam? Sorry, no. But I can tell you what to study: all of it. All the material will be on the exam.
10 comments:
I have started replying to such requests this way:
"I held 150 office hours this semester. Did none of them work for you?"
Yes, 150. We're required to hold TEN office hours each week.
OOOoooo I love that reply! Thank you very much, Terminal Degree!!!
There is a proverb in the bible, I cannot find it right now, but it goes something like this, "Woe to the slothful man (or woman) who will not raise their hand from their bowl to their mouth." You have, so to speak, laid the banquet out on the table. You have organized by food group, with nutritional analysis, with the food cut into bite size portions, with instructions in what order to eat the meal, and made sure the meal is warm enough to eat.
This girl is to lazy to pick up what is in front of her. She needs to pick up the Fork and eat. Maybe a Failing grade will help. She might actually figure out that Fork and Fail start with the same letter and that a Fork beats a Fail every time.
TD for the win! (TEN hours of office hours/week sounds painful!)
When I draft my course syllabi, I am grateful for my former career as an attorney. Disclosures about grading policy (including percent distribution), rights of students, rights of professors, disability rights, cheating policy, academic freedom -- I've needed to draft with the attention and nuance of the most over-paid law firm partner. I suppose I'll now add a clause about my rights if I think a student is a gun-toting maniac.
But, my all-time favorite student email (from the far too many thoughtless ones I receive is): "Dear Professor. Sorry I couldn't make it to yesterday's class. Did I miss anything important?"
I actually have a similar problem in reverse this semester - after arguing with me for almost 45 minutes early in the semester over what plagiarism is (yes, really!), one student has decided to absent herself whenever we talk about proper citation in my class! I'm an historian, and I insist that my students use Chicago style for papers in my class, because that is the standard format for historians. Today, for the third time this semester, this student left the room as soon as we started going over the right way to cite material in footnotes (they have a big research paper due at the end of the week). What, does she think she doesn't have to use Chicago if she's not in the room?!
Btw, I am *so* ready for this semester to end - can you tell?
Barb
On behalf of MK, a determined non-participant in the blogosphere, I hereby post her reaction:
"I don't even answer emails like that except occasionally to say: 'This is a great question for me in my office hours.' "
For my own part, I hope you're sitting more comfortably these days, and thus now feel safe in asking: Given that you are the Angry Professor, why did you not title one of your recent posts 'Roid Rage?
Oh, man! What a great title that would have been!
TD, you rock.
This is Finals Week at my uni, and I've so far held 13 office hours THIS WEEK (big research paper & portfolio due on Friday at 3pm). So far I've seen, oh, 20 of my 75 students. And when the other 55 show up on Friday an hour before the deadline...they'll be s.o.l. I've been in my office all week, and 5 hrs/week all semester long.
I just don't answer these. I'm busy too. I also give my course evals as early as possible so they can't bitch in writing that I "wasn't available."
I keep approximately 50 office hours per semester. Maybe two students have come to see me?
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