The Feminist Backlash

In my last post, I mentioned how a lot of people still seem to be against being unionized. This makes me think of how so many of my younger students are against feminism. They proudly state that they don’t need feminism. Some of them, especially the women, even go so far as to say that they don’t want to be associated with intellectuals or with lesbians or with man-hating, as though all feminists are those things. A number of my female students say they want to wear short dresses and make-up and find men so they can be stay-at-home parents, and they claim that feminism has nothing to offer them. Except, obviously, they wouldn’t be at university without the work early feminists did to demand equality for women, and they wouldn’t be in a position to choose what to wear or how to live without feminism. They’d simply be expected to be pretty housewives rather than being empowered to make that choice.

What has caused this feminist backlash? We still have imparity in the world, and feminism is about challenging and fixing inequity. I try to explain this to my students, but they seem to think the world – or at least their narrow area of it – is completely fair now, and that there is nothing more to fight for. And they certainly don’t want any part of feminism.

--Curly

Sick Students

Sometimes I complain about students skipping class, but now I must complain about those who come to class even when sick. It’s great that they show dedication, but then they cough and sneeze all over me and their fellow students. I’ve been sick since the beginning of the term, primarily because of my students and all their germs. I get over one cold and then get a different one.

Stay home if sick!

--Curly

University is for Socializing, not Studying

The new semester is under way and I’m already getting annoyed with my students. They get a clear time-table listing the hours of class, and they receive a detail syllabus too, with info about when class is and where, and what they need to do in preparation for each class.

And yet the students feel the need to email me to ask when and where class is and whether they need to attend. Some even say they have other plans. I do know they have to work, although one would think they’d arrange their work schedules around class. But sometimes they admit these plans are social.

Are they are university to socialize or to study? Why should I have to explain over and over again that if class is listed as being from 9-12 or 1-3 or whatever it is that is when students need to come? Is it that hard to understand?

--Curly

Ranting about Students: Part 6

I thought I would take a break from ranting about students, but as the summer is getting on and students are looking for jobs and/or are applying for the next level of education, I have more to rant about.

Some students tell you they’ve used you as a reference after the fact; i.e., they casually mention that they’ve put you down as a reference after they’ve already submitted their applications. Some don’t even tell you that much, so that sometimes you end up getting asked questions about a student or asked for a reference and you aren’t prepared for it at all.

If you are going to use someone as a reference, I think you should ask for permission first. Then, with the person’s approval, list his/her contact details, not before.

--Curly

Raving about Students

The term is nearly over now, and there’s just marking left to do, so I will stop ranting about students for the time-being (I’ll have some more rants in the next semester!). Instead, I will point out that a lot of undergraduates are going through many major life changes, and I see it as part of my job to help widen their perspectives and to offer them support. So I’ll close this series of ranting posts about students on a positive note by saying that some of my students have really impressed me this year with their dedication to their work and their willingness to be exposed to new ideas.

In a couple of my classes, the students started off with some extremely naïve, occasionally even prejudiced, views. By the end of the semester, they were looking at and discussing topics in a very different manner. I was quite pleased with their progress. And seeing students really get something is what teaching is all about, and hopefully it’s part of what attending university is about for them too.

--Curly

Ranting about Students: Part 5

As the weather gets warmer, my students get more and more undressed. I am looking out my office window as I type this, and I’m surprised by the states of underdress, nearing undress, that I see. There are guys without their shirts on (women couldn’t get away with that). There are girls in skirts so short I could probably see their thongs if I squinted. There are bare legs and bare toes. There are sweaty armpits and there are tattoos and piercings that are in locations rather more intimate than I expected to see. Is university really the right place for such fashions (or, rather, for such lack of fashions)? Or am I just too curmudgeonly?

--Curly

Ranting about Students: Part 4

Something odd happened one week in one of my classes. None of the male students turned up (see my earlier post about them having better things to do than attend class!), and the students who were there suddenly spoke much more and seemed significantly more confident. The discussion was livelier than usual and the students appeared to be having a lot of fun.

This is to say that on a day when there were only women in the room, the class was better. At the end of the seminar, I mentioned the fact that the ladies had been more talkative when no guys were around. The women looked guiltily at each other and finally one said that they didn’t talk as much when the entire group was there because they didn’t want the men to think they were “feminists.” The others concurred and said that if they monopolized the discussion, or even just contributed to it more, the male students would think bad things about them. In other words, women attending a selective university are still afraid to speak up, lest men find them less attractive for doing so.

There’s something wrong with this, isn’t there? How can we change it?

--Curly

Ranting about Students: Part 3

I’ve complained about texting-style language before, but it also is relevant to my spate of student-related peeves. Students should not be sending me emails in text format, such as “Can u rmnd me of hmwrk? Thanx!” I also find it a bit strange when they sign their emails with kisses. Informality is fine, but only up to a point.

--Curly

Ranting about Students: Part 2

In my last post, I ranted about students and their seeming problems with time. This issue doesn’t stop with them being unable (or unwilling) to turn their work in by the due date. Sometimes they simply don’t have the time to come to class prepared (i.e. having done the work required in order to participate). And sometimes they simply don’t have the time to come to class at all.

Students only have a few hours of class a week (generally 8 or so in my literature department). That leaves plenty of time for partying (and, ideally, for doing work), but I guess the remaining 160 hours are just not enough, so students feel the need to skip class as well.

Obviously, if someone is truly sick, he or she should not come to class. But I’ve had students claim to be sick and then, just a few hours later, I see them drinking and dancing at the pub on campus. They can’t have been too sick in that case, so clearly they just didn’t feel like spending an hour or two in class.

--Curly

Ranting about Students: Part 1

As a university lecturer, I experience peeves very frequently, perhaps more frequently than I ought to. In the next few posts, I’ll explore a few of the ones related to my students.

A big annoyance is students not turning work in on time. In two of my classes, the students had a weekly assignment. It was always due on the same day of the week, at the same time, and in the same location. And yet, over and over again, I was getting assignments late (sometimes even an entire day late) and in the wrong place (by email, for example, or slipped under my door versus put into my pigeon hole). How many times did I have to remind them about the due date?

And what about essays and other larger assignments that they have been informed about weeks, even months, in advance? Students might complain they didn’t know about the assignments (even if they were listed on the syllabus) or that they couldn’t find a printer or that they couldn’t get access to the materials they needed. All of these excuses are, frankly, unacceptable. Maybe I sound overly strict, but I do think that if the students have been informed about due dates in advance, they should find a way of managing to get the work in on time.

--Curly

Texting, Texting, 1, 2, 3

Ah, text speak! That's the short abbreviations and sloppy mannerisms people employ when their word count is strictly limited (unlike on a blog, natch). That’s fine when you’re texting, I suppose, even though I still prefer a slightly more formal style, but it is definitely not fine in: emails, letters, essays, articles, and other more serious venues. I really dislike getting messages from students or friends in “text type,” because it suggests carelessness. And I know I’m not the only one who would judge potential partners on their language skills, which means I tend to run from people who message or email me with a sentence like, “U r cute. How r u? I’m tired. LOL!”

No, I’m not laughing out loud at your text speak; instead I’m wishing you could take the time to write a proper sentence. Call me curmudgeonly, but there it is.

--Curly

One Reason I Left Full-time Teaching

So it wasn't just my imagination. The maddening sense of entitlement--sheer entitlement to high grades--which so many of my students seemed to bring to my classrooms when I began teaching really was the start of something. Something infinitely more insidious than anything I'd seen among my own undergraduate cohort a decade earlier. I thank The New York Times for exposing "student expectations" as the source of the problem.

--Prunella

A Peevish Professor Speaks Out--And Suffers for It

Where to begin with this one? I'd have to quote nearly the entire essay to show how much of Professor "Smith"'s experience resonates with me, the many ways in which his disillusionment with college teaching echoes my own record. Instead of quoting, I'll just refer you to the full piece.

I guess I'm happy he's the one who penned it and I did not. That's because he really suffers some strongly-worded negative comments from readers. I guess not everyone takes peeves and rants with the consistent good humor Curly and I do! ;-)

--Prunella

A Plethora of Peeves

From one of the Chronicle of Higher Education's contributors:

It is my job, as I see it, to combat ignorance and foster the skills and knowledge needed to produce intelligent, ethical, and productive citizens. I see too many students who are:

*Primarily focused on their own emotions — on the primacy of their "feelings" — rather than on analysis supported by evidence.

*Uncertain what constitutes reliable evidence, thus tending to use the most easily found sources uncritically.

*Convinced that no opinion is worth more than another: All views are equal.

*Uncertain about academic honesty and what constitutes plagiarism. (I recently had a student defend herself by claiming that her paper was more than 50 percent original, so she should receive that much credit, at least.)

*Unable to follow or make a sustained argument.

*Uncertain about spelling and punctuation (and skeptical that such skills matter).

*Hostile to anything that is not directly relevant to their career goals, which are vaguely understood.

*Increasingly interested in the social and athletic above the academic, while "needing" to receive very high grades.

*Not really embarrassed at their lack of knowledge and skills.

*Certain that any academic failure is the fault of the professor rather than the student.

About half of the concerns I've listed — punctuation, plagiarism, argumentation, evaluation of evidence — can be effectively addressed in the classroom. But the other half make it increasingly difficult to do so without considerable institutional support: small classes, high standards, and full-time faculty members who are backed by the administration.

Well, this writer has summed up, impressively, most of the aspects of teaching at the undergraduate level (and, for that matter, studying alongside a particularly cohort of "peers" on the graduate level not too many years ago) that have most peeved me.

--Prunella

The Classroom is Not a Democracy

I love these paragraphs in a new Poets & Writers article billed as "A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes":

This is a good time to mention a criticism that I’ve received not once, not twice, but several times on teaching evaluations: “The problem with Professor Barden is that he acts like he knows so much more about writing than we do.”

That could be the whole essay right there, don’t you think?

Part of the problem is a populist idea of democracy, a sacred cow in the academy, as elsewhere: We are all equals in our pursuit of literature; everyone has something to offer. One teacher friend of mine whose opinion I solicited on this topic said of his students, “They still teach me as much as I teach them.” What do they teach you, exactly? How to fall in love stupidly or that you should drink a lot of water during a rave?

In one memorable workshop, I spent a fair amount of time teasing out from my students the difference between a “master,” which was the degree that I had, and a “bachelor,” which was the degree that they didn’t yet have. Oddly enough, several students have expressed gratitude for that particular rant.

I'm grateful, too. It validates my own feelings too often in my own experience as a college-level teacher (not just in writing classes). But yes, it affirms some feelings I've had about writing workshops, too.

Read the entire article here.

--Prunella

Typology of Irritating Professors

I laughed aloud when I read Margaret Soltan's post outlining a "typology of irritating professors." Any of these academic specimens sound familiar to you?

--Prunella

I Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

It's always validating to find well-written expressions of thoughts/experiences that I've struggled to articulate. Over the past few days I've found two examples of such writing. And guess what--their subjects are not unrelated.

The first piece speaks to the general dumbing-down of the next generation. And the other recounts the experiences of a young faculty member who has suffered adverse consequences for her intense work ethic and high academic standards.

In the past--thankfully, not in my present job--I've been on the receiving end of treatment similar to what the second author describes. Often, that treatment has resulted from the very effort of trying to correct the sad situation the first one presents.

Which makes me sympathetic to their well-reasoned, well-written rants.

--Prunella

How Not to Ask Questions on Academic Listservs

This week I caught a post over at The Little Professor, providing sage guidance on "how to ask questions on academic listservs." And it made me smile.

For it reminded me of a pet peeve from my teaching days at Very Prestigious University (VPU). And while Little Professor's post addresses students in particular, the author rightfully notes that "students are not the only ones" who can benefit from her counsel. To which Prunella says: Amen.

For Little Professor brought me back to the days when I was ranting to anyone who would listen (who was not my colleague at VPU) about the sloth on display within my department listserv. Now, back then we were just getting acquainted with the listserv concept and practice, so perhaps some slack might be cut.

Or maybe not. Because some of the posts from my colleagues demonstrated such amazing laziness that I still feel outraged. (Sure, I like to sleep late on Saturdays as much as the next person, but come on--don't people become academics in the humanities because they actually find the work of research appealing?)

One such post still stands out in my mind. The gist of it was (and I'm paraphrasing only slightly): "Can anyone recommend readings on Famous American Novel?" To which I wanted to type back: "Have you heard of the MLA database? For starters?"

The posts also belied the idea that we, and the students who were choosing to take independent study or seminar courses in our department, also liked to read. Memorable example (with slight disguise): "I'm running into a problem with a student in an independent study on The Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel. We want to include Famous Novelist Whose Books Easily Exceed 1000 Pages, but we don't have time for anything long." (Worse, our chair, a Famous Literary Scholar in his own right, then chimed in with a "helpful" suggestion.)

So, Little Professor, Prunella hears you. And appreciates your post.

--Prunella