After writing this post, I found “Dear Professor: I Hate You” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here, professors mention the cruel or strange comments they have received in evaluations from students. The article definitely compliments what I mention about my relationship with one nasty class.
Just thinking about that awful class in writing “Rubric’s Cube” brought back a lot of memories. I had a really cute and clever title and a great example of a horrendous experience that taught me to be better organized and put some time into my classes. With the adjunct lifestyle, this can be quite a challenge, but the customers, I mean students, can be merciless. They may not know if a professor is an adjunct or full-time. Even if they do, they may not care. I never did, but I treated my teachers with respect when I was in college. Now that I’m on the other side, I must keep in mind that not all students are like me.
The nightmare class I had several semesters ago was one of those linked classes, which means another professor shares the same group of students with me. I previously said the course was a freshman composition class, which it essentially is, but it really is the remedial¹ course if the student doesn’t place into transfer-level composition. They needed help with college writing skills (where I come in) and reading for college. Ideally, the linked courses should be a great tool for student success, but teaching in a linked turned out to be a nightmare for me.
The comparisons between the other professor and me were inevitable. She was a full-time teacher who had the curriculum for the reading course for quite some time and she always gave them “packets” so that they could understand the books they had to read. In comparison, I was much less put together and they saw it. Even if I had a valid approach to something, they challenged it. One time, I told one of my students not to be so cynical, and he asked me what that word meant. I told him to look it up and his response was that the other professor always used the word in a sentence (which I took to mean that she taught them the meaning of some words through context). My cynical assessment is that they were too lazy to even use a dictionary.
From one student, whom I’ll call Dillan², I got a dose of adolescent contempt, where she has made up her mind that I was an idiot and she treated me as such. There was one essay she never turned in and when I asked her about it, she said she didn’t even bother doing it because she didn’t understand the prompt and I didn’t explain it well. She was the type of person who’d rather take an F than try to communicate with a teacher she didn’t like. She didn’t see any point in it and it was my fault.
There was another time where I told the class to read a chapter from Punching In, and Dillan yelled at me because she thought I told them to buy a new book and read it for homework. Afterwards, when it was clear to her that the book was in the syllabus, she was still unrepentant about her outburst. Later, when I tried to take Dillan aside (right at the start of class) to talk about the issue, she refused, feeling that the discussion should occur in front of the class. She said that she couldn’t talk without the class. Of course, this meant that she had an audience, which became much clearer when she relented in speaking with me outside of the class (with a witness present). She said the entire class felt similarly to her (dissatisfaction), so there was no point in keeping such a discussion private. She then upbraided me for not finding her twenty minutes before class and talking to her about the issue then, when she was hanging out nearby the classroom. Somehow, my idiocy included not knowing what she was up to at any given moment.
That class was like a boat I didn’t feel safe traversing the ocean in. If the situation with Dillan was one hole that was uneasily patched up, then there were a few other leaks that threatened to sink me. One young woman angrily confronted me about a paper of hers I couldn’t find. Somehow, I don’t think a benefit of a doubt grade would have satisfied her. Then, someone told me to watch my back as Fiora, who often left class early to pick up her mother from work, was stirring the class against me. Later, some students told the dean that there was a final exam I didn’t show up for. I didn’t set the date up, so I’ve always suspected it was a group effort. Another student revealed at the end of the semester that some tried to get her involved in their discussion on how to get me fired, but she would have no part of it. According to her, they even thought about ways to make me look bad in front of the dean when she visited my class for an evaluation. While they may have not succeed in making me leave the class, they definitely made me not want to return for any more. I had barely made it to shore in a boat with a hull in very bad shape.
I remember a case from last year where a lecturer at Dartmouth tried to sue her students for being causing her emotional distress. The way she has been portrayed in several blogs and periodicals make her seem unhinged. That she e-mailed her students threatening a lawsuit didn’t help matters much. Whatever the cause of her dispute with her students, she definitely felt she was in a hostile work environment. Typically, bosses or coworkers are the perpetrators of the hostility, but the source can also be the customer or client.
It’s hard to satisfy a customer once they’ve decided they’re not pleased with you. Whether I was wrong or not in the situation didn’t matter. No matter how much I tried to teach better or improve with them, it was not enough. I never went back to that college after my semester with the monster class was over. It wasn’t a shop I felt comfortable working in.
- Remedial is an older term, now politically incorrect, for developmental classes. Essentially catch-up courses.
- Creative misspelling for a name. Who knows what goes on in these mothers’ minds when they do this.
