Light at the End of the Tunnel

Well, the semester is nearly over. I have one exam next week, along with some grading to do. All in all, not a bad schedule. In my mind, I'm on break already.

It's been an . . . enlightening semester. I've learned a lot, both in my given field and in being a teacher. Should I ever become a professor, here are some things I am ready to apply:

• All of your students are weasels.

Some of them are more weasily than others, but make no mistake, they are all weasels. If they can get out of work, they'll try their best. Extra points? They'll forfeit any notion of dignity to whine and beg for them. Any sign of weakness, and you'll hear accusations of incompetence and ill intent.

And they'll do anything they can to convince you they should have points for a grade they didn't turn in.

• Your students are never prepared for class.

This is every teacher's bane, I suppose. Nobody reads the book. Then they complain when you expect them to come infused with, at the least, cursory knowledge of the topic at hand. I never realized how annoying this was until I actually was on the receiving end of it.

This goes beyond that, though. Students are never prepared for what class will require of them (tying into the weasel part). Your students will try to get as much credit as possible for as little work as possible. The problem will come when they suddenly realize that your idea of the "minimum" amount of work and their idea of the "minimum" are vastly different. They'll get angry (I did), they'll feel cheated (don't we all?), and they'll blame you (ah, memories). And they'll wonder why they received zero credit for turning in a lab report which reads, "This lab was too hard, so we couldn't do it."

• Preparation is the key.

Always know how to do the problems you expect your students to do. They get cranky when you try to remember it in the middle of class.

• Sometimes you have to have standards.

In some graduate courses, professors take a rather subjective view of grades. They base the letter assignments more around how much you comparatively learned as a group rather than look at a list of things they expected you to learn, since often times it can be hard to determine what it is you actually taught them. Yes, for some professors that is a problem.

However, this should not be the case for entry level courses. Putting the top 10% of students at an 'A' makes no sense if this is introductory material. It leads to awkward situations, like people with scores of 40% making B's and C's in a course, then moving on to the second part of the course and knowing nothing about the subject.

Finally,

• The internet is not the place to talk badly about people who control your grades. Especially if they can see it.
  

We covered this one already. Still, it doesn't hurt to restate the obvious.

So there you have it. Lessons learned.

Addendum

• If an exam is going to be all multiple choice, it is going to be scan-tron.

I'm not a happy grader at the moment.