You are all a bunch of condescending assholes. Now that I've got that out of the way, let me explain.
Today's recipe is quite simple. You'll need four boneless, skinless chicken breasts, half a stick of chilled butter, one large egg, 1/4 cup of milk, 3/4 cup of fresh breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, fresh parsley, and a few tablespoons of vegetable oil.
Obviously these students are willing to put in more effort to get a better grade, so why not let them put in more effort? Maybe let them turn in some extra special assignments?
Pound the chicken breasts thin between two pieces of waxed paper. They should be about 1/4 inch thick.
The problem with professors is that they really suck at teaching, which in my opinion and in my experience, is the single biggest reason why not every student is able to get an A. I had some very good teachers in highschool [sic] who utterly surpass any instruction [sic] I received in college(as evidence I cite the fact that many of my classmates and I earned a score of '5' on the AP physics exam). I'm more of a science person, but I had excellent English teachers as well.
Season the breasts with salt and pepper. Cut the butter into four long "sticks" and place one stick at the edge of each breast. Sprinkle each breast with about one tablespoon of fresh chopped parsley.
I think they really cared about us as individuals, which should be a prerequisite to accepting students. In fact, if I were a teacher I would think of each of my students as an apprentice rather than a student. The word 'student' has developed an impersonal and uncaring connotation in my mind over time as I've been more exposed to the educational system.
Roll each breast around the stick of butter, sealing in the ends as you go. You should have a fat log of chicken when you're done. You can secure the edge with a toothpick if you want, but if you pounded the breasts thin enough you shouldn't need to.
In highschool [sic] it was possible to study the teacher's notes, memorize them and apply them to the quizes [sic] and exams. But when I went to college(UCLA if you must know) it was complete chaos. The notes were complete crap and in most cases were irrelevant to the exams.
Beat the egg in a small bowl and add the milk. Coat each rolled breast in the egg and then roll it in the breadcrumbs. Make sure you have a nice, even coating that covers the ends and the rolled edge. Put the breasts on a plate and chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
Note to teachers: if the average score on your exam is 40% then you suck at being a teacher. And sadly I've seen much lower averages then that.
Heat a frying pan well and add the oil. Fry each breast until golden brown and the juices run clear. Serve with buttered egg noodles and your favorite veg. This recipe serves four.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Angry Professor's Chicken Kiev.
A reader, Bertrand, writes:
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32 comments:
Best served with a side of vitriol. Mmmm-mmmm good.
I love any advice that starts with "If I were a teacher....." hahahahahaha! Teaching looks so easy to anyone who's not a teacher. "If I were a teacher, I would give everyone a second chance. As long as they're trying, that's all that matters." "If I were a teacher, I would accept late work anytime. The main thing is for them to do the work." "If I were a teacher, I would treat each student as an apprentice." Mmmhmm. Welcome to college, big boy.
"If I were a teacher, I would treat each student as an apprentice."
and does Monsieur Bertrand think every student wants to be an apprentice academic? Because let me tell you, it sure as hell changes your attitude to class assessments, when suddenly it's no longer a matter of marks on paper, but what you want to do with your life...
In highschool [sic] it was possible to study the teacher's notes, memorize them and apply them to the quizes [sic] and exams. But when I went to college(UCLA if you must know) it was complete chaos.
The thinking! It burns!
It burns...probably hot enough to cook the chicken!
One day last semester, while my class was being observed by a tenured member of my department, one of the students announced that the reason he never missed class was because I "wasn't a crap teacher." This bit of customer feedback was somehow NOT reassuring.
I felt a tiny bit of pity for him until the part about "the teacher's notes."
"The notes were complete crap and in most cases were irrelevant to the exams."
Professors at UCLA make notes for you? Seriously?
Mmm... I love chicken. Even more so when accompanied by a delicious "Let me tell you how to teach" letter, seasoned in the traditional style with self-promoting tidbits from the writer's academic background.
You can really taste the richness in the butter and the "Hey,I got A's in high school, so I know what's what."
Ah... so good.
Was this letter sent to you directly? In any case, great entry. And blog.
All neurosurgeons suck! I've watched every episode of E.R., House, Grey's Anatomy, and St. Elsewhere. If I were a neurosurgeon, I would use sharper scapels, and i would finish surgeries much faster. By the way, i did meet a surgeon once and even had dinner with him. He sucked too. As a surgeon I wouldn't sleep with the interns. That sucks! I would do my job and actually finish up surgeries so i could get some sleep from time to time. On television surgeons are always at the hospital. For what? They aren't doing surgeries, they are lounging around and spreading rumors. All the surgeons i know suck because...because they suck. Of course, i'm referring to the ones on televison. I'm so much cooler than all of them.
AP, posts like this are why I [heart] you.
Hrm, upset that college is not just like high school? That you have to develop new ways of learning and growing? Hrm. Troubling. Very troubling. I see your point.
Let me guess. Your "condescending asshole" professors at UCLA did not listen to you when you carfully explained that you had earned all A's in high school and therefore you could not possibly receive anything lower in college?
I'm glad that my grades depend on my efforts as a student, and not on whether the teacher cares about me. I, too, would have a very difficult time getting good grades if it was all up to someone else. Must be tough for him.
I once tried to explain to my college students that professors have advanced degrees, that we generally are not trained to be teachers, and that we are experts in our fields sharing our knowledge and experience with them.
Most of them didn't get it. To most undergrads, a teacher is a teacher, and I *obviously* wasn't as qualified to teach as their high school teacher...you know, the one with a BA in education and what probably amounted to a *minor* in the subject of instruction...
Yeah, those extra 10+ years of education and scholarship just didn't matter when they were txting in class.
I mean, how *dare* I expect them to take their own notes!
In summary:
Bertrand, you're a dumbass. Pull your head out of your bottom and wake the fuck up.
I had a student stop by my office fuming about the C she'd gotten on a very average essay.
She said, "But every essay I wrote in high school got an A."
I replied, "Someone was lying to you."
We got along well after that.
From an undergrad's perspective here: I don't think many of us young ones realize that when all is said and done, for those who pursue careers in their chosen majors, the time will come when you need to answer questions for the big boss without having the luxury of cramming the night before. And if you can deliver in the real world, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't have gotten that A or B in college, without extra credit or begging for points or sacrifices to the gods.
A prof at my school said it best: who wants to be treated by a doctor who should have failed Organic Chemistry in college, but passed with a C because of the professor's leniency?
Bravo. All I could have added is 1/4 teaspoon salt to the egg wash.
The single most infuriating aspect of teaching is constantly hearing from non-teachers how I should do my job and why. This is usually rooted in some idealistic bliggety-blah that dismisses reality and reason in favor of making me work even harder for my shit pay.
I teach because I care; it's certainly not the money. No one holds students accountable for not caring; it's always the teacher's fault. We didn't motivate them enough. We didn't employ "edutainment" enough to keep them interested. We didn't have the right schema. We didn't do this. We didn't do that.
If you can't motivate yourself to get off your ass, come to class, and learn, you do not belong in college. End of story.
So what about the following sins:
1. The professor who is so boring that nobody can stay awake in the class.
2. The professor who reuses tests so that all one has to do is study previous years tests.
3. The professor who doesn't prepare for class and tries to wing it. The lecture is totally disorganized and either is short of material and finishes 20 minutes early (including pleas for questions) or is so busy and only half the material gets covered ("the rest you'll have to review yourselves").
4. The professor who doesn't provide comments on written work and does not provide a key to exams. Corollary is not handing back the work at all.
5. The professor where every class is a guest lecturer and then the TA writes the exam.
6. The professor who figures that any of these multiple sins will be and should be forgiven as long as they are an easy grader.
7. The professor who gives an exam that the TAs would have failed.
8. The professor who incorrectly grades the answer on the exam wrong, but will not change the grade because everyone's test was graded the same so it would be unfair to the students who didn't complain.
9. The professor whose accent is so thick that all one's concentration goes into deciphering the words rather than the actual concepts.
10. The professor who refuses to use the technology (as inadequate as it may be) so that they are the sole faculty member who does not have their presentations online.
11. The professor who requires their textbook for the course which is only available at the campus bookstore because no other school in the nation uses it.
12. The professor who is writing a textbook so that the textbook is the cumulation of the sheaf of papers handed out each class. Extra credit is awarded to those students who catch the typos.
13. The professor who believes every complaint by a student about their teaching style or grading policies is because the students are whiny weasels.
14. The professor who lectures about everything but the subject matter including their personal biography, students from the past, personal problems, etc.
15. The professor who doesn't care about any of the above because, after all, they really pay me to do research, not to teach. Corollary is that their secret hope is to be called in by the administration and told they are not going to be allowed to teach any more undergraduate courses because the teaching evaluations were so bad.
Add your own, but all of us have been on both sides of this equation.
Completely unrelated to this post, but after reading a bit of your blog, I think you'll enjoy this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=RFO6ZhUW38w
Sample lyrics:
And if anyone can show me one example in the history of the world of a single
Homeopathic Practitioner who has been able to prove under reasonable experimental conditions that solutions made of infinitely tiny particles of good stuff dissolved repeatedly into relatively huge quantities of water has a consistently higher medicinal value than a similarly administered placebo
Seems to me, there are thousands of web sites where people complain about teachers. Very few actually turn the mirror on the students:
1. Drink more caffeine. And if you think I'm boring, you should've seen the teachers I'm trying NOT to emulate.
2. That's technically academic dishonesty on the part of the student. No one is holding a gun to your head and telling you to use your greek organization's extensive file system of old tests and papers to cheat. Except maybe your greek organization. When they're not encouraging you to bong something instead of, you know, learning.
3. Tough to conduct a full class when students don't bother reading the assignment and therefore don't come to class with any questions. Also students are told at just about every university that they should prepare for many hours of studying outside of class, hence the reviewing on their own thing. But students usually forget that part.
4. Could be that the prof is tired of students just studying the old exams or turning in papers written by previous students. The lack of comments comes from writing the same things on the same students' papers and seeing no improvement from assignment to assignment because the students don't look at the comments and instead just care about the grade. You don't care, I don't care, and I'm not going to come to your house and teach you how to avoid comma splices.
5. Doesn't happen unless the prof is on sabbatical or something, and there isn't a TA unless it's a bigger class. Go to a school with smaller class sizes. Withdraw. You always have a choice, so stop bitching.
6. Being a hard grader doesn't help either. Students won't do the work properly either way.
7. Always a pleasure to read complaints about how the class material was too much for the meek undergrad. They're so helpless.
8. Professors like this typically give extra credit at some point to overcome minor points issues like this. Students typically do not do the extra credit.
9. The student who has never encountered someone from outside his/her hometown will no doubt struggle to understand people from other cultures. Learn how to communicate with people of different cultures. See them after class for clarification. Ask questions. E-mail the teacher. Get the notes from someone else. Record the lectures. You have options.
10. Sorry for the inconvenience but you need to be here to take notes. I'm not putting everything on line for you because this isn't a correspondence course. Besides, even if I did put them online, people would still e-mail asking me for the notes and what we did in class.
11. New books often equal new information. We could make you re-buy the same overpriced, marked up and highlighted used text we've been using for a decade with outdated information, refusing to do new prep work for any class. Also: What books aren't available on Amazon?
12. Writing a textbook usually involves some sort of expertise in the area. If you don't want information from someone with expertise, go back to high school. Also: Bonus points are optional. Just don't do them, and then complain and grub for a higher grade later when you miss an A by a tenth of a point.
13. Students are preparing to go to work in a field full of people of varying communicating and learning styles. If they can't adjust to a professor, they need to learn how to use their resources (see above). Time spent complaining is time spent not taking responsibility for your own progress.
14. This is usually all students can remember from a class anyway, so it's good they can bitch verbatim about how a prof talked about his family but then can't remember what the prof said about the chapter or what's going to be on the test. Selective listening is a bitch. Get over your own problem.
15. You mean teachers try to get out of doing work just like everyone else in the free world, ever? Huh. I never could've imagined such a nightmare scenario. This can't be because teachers are human, right? Because they're not. They're superhuman. They should spent 18-20 hours per day working, and time spent not working is just time wasted sleeping. And they have to deal with the same BS year after year? No way. Not like every other job in the known universe. Teaching is different and special and everyone knows how to do it because it involves no talent whatsoever, and that's why we don't pay them anything.
Suckers!
Also: Knowledge is stupid.
And let's not forget that, often, for every idiot who gripes about the *horrible* class a professor just subjected him or her to, there is often one student who found it to be the most enlightening, fulfilling educational experience of the semester.
It's when the gripers become dominant [either vocally or numerically] that a problem emerges for instructors.
And I am quite sure the gripers have no idea what they missed out on during that semester.
Btw, I think I have a crush on Anonymous 11:40.
Hmm. Actually, I must defend elliott against Anonymous 11:40. I've seen all cases except #8, 11, and 14.
Of course those cases were exemplified in far fewer than twelve professors.
Having said that, elliott, your comment is not at all relevant to Angry Prof's guest post by Bertram (we can't quite call it a roast, can we?).
Reminds me of one semester's evaluations (this was back in the halcyon days of grad school). The lone education major in my Intro Science Lab class wrote a scathing review of me. Something along the lines of, "I've studied teaching, and I'm sorry but you really don't know how to teach!!" All the other students gave me ridiculously high marks (e.g., "You're the BEST TA ever!!" "Don't change a thing!"), which led me to the following hypothesis. Either:
a) I taught a different lab section to this one student, which happened to meet at the same time and location as my other section.
b) Self-entitled students like to blame others for their own failings.
While I was teaching at UCLA--first as a graduate student, later as an adjunct--I was lucky enough to meet many hard working undergraduates.
And many students like Bertrand.
I am also friendly with instructors in several humanities departments at several schools. We don't do elliot's #10, for specific and obvious pedagogical reasons. It has nothing to do with our ability to use technology. I now ask students why they want my presentations on line. I'm waiting for a good reasons.
He has a point: While I have yet to meet a professor who is not very, very good at the area he's teaching in (and other's besides) not all of them are capable of teaching.
They are so good that they sometimes simply do not see that a tiny little fact is in fact not immedately understood (or worse, misunderstood). Most of these facts involve math.
Math btw is my pet hate: Not only has my university the habit of hiring foreign professors* to do the teaching, no, the fundament layed down by schools prior to entering university is absymal at best. It is uncommon that when two graduating classes at same school had different math teachers the will actually know the same.
Our current is very good, landing big grant money consistently, but handicapped twice:
First: Her/his school math education was vastly better than ours so there is often "What do mean you did no that?" moments.
Second: Over a decade here and still not capable of speaking clearly the local language (german). This particular class student and just whining about subject matter but also that 1. can't understand her (Stop sitting in last aisles, there's plenty room upfront, it's math afterall noone here) and 2) can't understand her (Accent + almost whispering = bad) and 3. Does not know enough german to answer complicated questions regarding higher math - Students do not understand enough english/russian.
(Aside: Long term students/profs claim that fluency stayed the same since arrival).
Yes, students have to work to understand the subject matter. But profs should also at least arsed enough to not just their copy projection/script spelling mistakes and all very year time and time again. And saying "It's in the book" may be a valid answer but when it gets asked time and time and again, think of a better answer. Even if you did write the book in question.
I think I taught that guy in my AP English class, and he hated me then. So, now he thinks he had good English teachers in high school after having been in college? Ha! He was whiny then, and he's whiny now.
As I constantly tried to tell my students when I taught high school: your job is to figure out how to read, write, and think critically and also how you learn best. No one can really teach you those things, but they can try to set up a situation where you'll have to sink or swim. In high school, we keep it to about a 3.5' depth--you can drown, but you have to work at it. In college, you're in the deep end, and if you can't swim by then, well, there are lifeguards and such, but you'll hurt a lot by the time they get to you. It's best to learn how to swim in high school, but you'd be amazed at how many refuse to do it there when it's a safer and more supportive environment. Then, they whine about how their high school teachers were awful, how the college profs are mean or bad teachers or whatever, and how it's everyone else's fault.
Look, bad teachers exist. So do bad doctors, bad lawyers, bad businessmen, etc. If you're stuck with one such specimen, drop the class or figure out how to learn best in that class anyway. It's that simple.
Yes, but do you have a recipe without the butter and bread? I will write a rant for you in exchange.
Helpfully yours,
Grandmother
It's very easy to get a 40% or below average in a class. I was one of those lazy-ass, unmotivated students both in high-school and the first time around in college. With a few exceptions, most of my teachers were good at what they did; however, that's just not enough to help students who aren't willing to do the work themselves. I wasn't stupid, I just didn't care...which actually was quite stupid. So unless every single student in the class ends up with a 40%, it doesn't mean anything other than you aren't trying hard enough.
And when did teachers start taking notes for students? That doesn't make any sense. I thought that the act of taking notes in a class was another way of absorbing the information. Yes, having notes to use to study for tests is easier than rereading the textbook each time, but that's more of a side benefit to the note-taking process and not the main purpose.
I did learn from my mistakes and went back to school in my late-thirties. I graduated with the highest grade point average in my class because I was motivated. I took lots of notes (which I still refer back to when needed) and met with instructors when I was having trouble understanding the topic. I worked hard for every single grade I received, regardless of what it was. Maybe age has something to do with it, because I would have been very disappointed if grades were just handed out instead of having to earn them. And sadly, I know I wouldn't have felt that same way when I was young.
Bertrand, you are a bigger ass than I was at your age. Even I knew better than to blame someone else for my poor grades.
Wait a second here, isn't the butter in chicken Kiev supposed to be herbed? Dill, or maybe tarragon or something like that if you're feeling adventurous?
But I do appreciate the whine selection - a tasty chateau d' Undergrad. Probably needs a few more years in the cask, though :)
Bertrand Russell?
On the sublime art of whining.
It seems like everyone here speaks of whining pejoratively as though it were a bad thing. Didn't your annoying fathers ever tell you the tale of the squeaky wheel and his grease getting escapades.
The central theme here seems to be that college is a place where one is supposed to learn(aside from the actual curriculum) personal responsibility. If the professor decides to give a lecture on cake baking in pig latin to an econ class, so much the better for the students; just more lessons in a grin and bear it stoicism that will most certainly aid them far more in the future than a clear engaging and lucid presentation of the subject matter ever would. Taking the basic premise of some of the comments here to an unreasonable extreme, one might suppose that the best professors of all would eschew showing up to class entirely and instead bury their books in Indiana Jones' Temple of Doom so that their students could get the full benefits of truly working for an education.
There are most certainly terrible teachers according to the only relevant metric one can use: how much more understanding that professor's students have of the professor's area of expertise at the end of the course multiplied by a student incompetence coefficient. I will go out on an ad hominem limb and say anyone who disputes that is delusional. There are also really great teachers as well as really middling teachers, like anything else in reality.
So whining?
Uhm. Basically when one is faced with adversity, one can profitably take the route advocated in this discussion: suck it up, grow some balls, it's only a flesh wound, etc,(which is not a horrible lesson to learn) or one can even more profitably engage in the time honored tradition of whining. In other words one can engage the problem head on, do their best to dissect its root causes and come up with some means of effecting a solution. The best way to do this as a student with a bad teacher is to communicate to said teacher that "your job is to teach. Here is how you are currently failing in that task and here are my own (possibly horrible) suggestions on how you might change that." Teachers are are infact human beings though with bruisable egos so lots o' diplomatic gymnastics might be in order. In Bertrand's case, though admittedly he went about it with less than what could be called tact, he still was trying to address issues that he felt were important and needed changing and it is almost always better to give voice to your concerns even if you aren't the most well spoken person and doing so will annoy, insult, infuriate those to whom you are speaking.
Of course this goes %100 percent in the other direction. As it is the sole purpose of a teacher to teach, it is also the sole purpose of a student, while in a course, to learn. And any good teacher faced with a student who is not learning as they could should rightfully whine: "you spoiled ingrate, you're an adult now and the world doesn't owe you a damn thing." (of course sugared with all the diplomatic niceties that any personages involved might benefit from)
Ultimately "whining" is a useful tool for both the student with a bad teacher and the teacher with bad students but never should placing the onus of learning on a student remove the onus of good teaching from a teacher. To say tat it is not my job teach to the best of my ability according to the resources(time, intelligence, patience) i have at my disposal because learning is the student's job, is ridiculous.
i apologize for almost al of the typos in the above comment(or rather i issue a surrogate apology for the inadequacy of my 7th grade "life skills" teacher who obviously didn't do his job correctly)
Wow, cole.
Pretty much by definition, "whining" is the exact OPPOSITE of meeting a problem head on, thinking about the causes, and working toward a solution. That's good. Professors love it when students do that, maybe the student might come in and say "when you use abbreviations on the board, I have a really hard time following the lecture." That's not whining. Now, when it's a chem course, the only possible answer from the prof *still* might be, "well, to have learned chemistry and move onto the next chem course you need to have these abbreviations memorized, but for class why don't you write yourself a quick reference sheet to keep on the desk." And the student says "okay, I'll do that and spend some time with the flashcards before the exam."
Whining: "why does he use these abbreviations? I can't understand these abbreviations! He just wants us to fail because we have to memorize something we could look up! I'm never gonna have to know this in real life!" etc.
Why do our pay raises depend on evaluations from students who are too stupid to go to a better college? Why do students get to evaluate professors when they don't know anything about teaching, the subject, the college canon, anything about anything?
They are destine to become college administrators.
One day I will lose it in the middle of one of these idiotic rants. Right from behind my little podium I will say, "And fuck you, sir."
Having gone to UCLA as well, I can confirm some of what Bertrand is saying.
I did have a number of professors there who were perhaps not cut out for teaching. In particular:
- A professor who had no preparation for lecture and spent each class period facing the board, writing on it, and mumbling under his breath without ever turning to face the students.
- A professor who used the class as an excuse to talk about how much he hated Keynesian economics and to teach us about a new theory of money he was writing a book about.
- A professor who, despite his obvious love of teaching and interest in the students, had such a heavy accent that he was impossible for me to understand. I had many professors with heavy accents, but for some reason I had a very very hard time with this particular man. (I didn't stay in the class and whine about how my grade was suffering: I dropped it the instant I knew I wouldn't be able to learn well from him)
These were the exceptions, however. Most professors were knowledgable, excited about their subjects, coherent, and intelligent.
This is what people need to understand about college:
College courses aren't (or shouldn't be) about memorizing some magic information and regurgitating it on tests. They are about actually LEARNING something and demonstrating a knowledge of it and being able to apply it to new situations. In most cases, if you think the notes/lectures are irrelevant to the exams, it's because you don't understand what is going on and are looking for "magic answers."
Additionally, if the average on an exam is 40%, that probably means the exam was HARD. People who are insufficiently prepared do VERY badly, bringing the average way down. If you have no clue what is going on, you can't scrape by with partial credit and BS in a class like this. You fail.
Even in classes where I thought the professors were terrible, I sucked it up and did the work and got an As. I was there to learn something, and I wasn't about to let my disatisfaction with someone's particular teaching methods stop me. If the class was hard, I studied more. If the professor taught poorly, I paid more attention to readings and figured things out myself. If I didn't understand something, I went to office hours or researched online. If I felt that I could not learn under the circumstances of a particular class, I dropped it.
People need to quit whining, put on their big kid pants, and take responsibility for their own success.
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