The semester is over!
Published on May 11, 2007 at 6:06 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under college teaching.
Back when I was a student, I struggled at the end of every semester. There was too much due at the end, and the exams were all high pressure, and there were a lot of them all within a few days. How terrible it seemed! And, I thought that my professors didn’t understand. I felt that surely once I got to be a professor, the end of the semester wouldn’t be so tough. WRONG.
I think that it is now even worse! Not only do I have a mountain of papers to grade (all that stuff due at the end that students want to turn in at the end if I make it due earlier), but I have to write the exams, and then grade them. So, once the exams are done, I am still busy! After grading them, I have to compute grades, and then turn in the grades. At my college, there is also a mountain of paperwork that needs to be turned in with the grades. So, I had to turn in over 80 pages of stuff. And, it was all pointless stuff that nobody will ever look at. This paperwork fetish that our administration has got has got to stop! It is costing the college a lot of money to produce all this pointless paperwork. There is paper, printer cartridges, and even the cost of storage. And that doesn’t even take into account the time and effort of people producing the paperwork. It would be different if anyone ever looked at any of that stuff, but they won’t.
And, then there are the phone calls. Students that I have not heard from all semester (and have hardly seen all semester in class) suddenly care about their grades. One student came by wanting to know if I could change my grading policy just for him. You see, he realized that he wasn’t passing, and wanted to know if I could let him just write a paper or something. Besides it being unfair to the rest of the class to give him a separate evaluation criteria, there is no way that he could write a good paper in so short a time. He’d have to research and write the paper in just a few days. That paper would have to demonstrate a full knowledge of physics, complete with derivations and solved problems. He would have to do something that was equivalent to the class. Heck, even I couldn’t pull off a paper like that in only five days!!!!!! Well, at the end of the semester, his course grade was a 13. Yes, that is 13 out of 100. Wow. That would have had to be one heck of a good paper!
This has been a tough semester, and I am glad that it is over. I have a couple weeks now to catch up with myself and get ready for the summer term. Oh, and I actually do have publications of my own to worry about. But, I started them a month ago!
-Astroprof
Seeking Solace on May 11, 2007 at 7:27 pm: 1
The paper would probably be from one of those “Research Papers R US” websites and would be “C” work at best!
Hang in there!