And Yet, I Still Miss Teaching

A slightly redacted version of my favorite student complaint ever:

My Teacher,

I appreciate you taking your inconvenience to instruct us but I really had some problems in your class and I would like to explain them to you now.  Every day I wanted to discuss with you about the way you grade my papers and the way you teach the class, but I could not because the things you say in class and your words disturb me so much I can not.  You make me completely uncomfortable with the little things you say in the class like how you talk about television or how you talk about when you are grading our papers and trying to be fair.  You do not seem to care about our grades only that they are up to your too high standards and I can not talk to you because you make me completely uncomfortable.  For example, you say you will talk to us about our grades but you really will not because of how uncomfortable you make me feel with your words and what you say.

I will plan to contest the grade you have given me in this class when I get it because I know it will be much higher with any other teacher.  I am a very religious man and you are not a bad person but you do not choose your words with enough care like a teacher should.  You try to be objective and the very attempt becomes your flaw because you try so hard to grade fairly and comment wisely that you become biased to your own ideas.  You criticize our writings because we are college students and young but do not realize that you offend most of us when you do this.  I am always offended when I go to your class and have been on many occasions but I never tell you of my offense because you make me completely uncomfortable so I never say a word.

You like to lead discussions and that is bad because it is the entire means by which we learn but we do not know what you want from us on our papers.   I have honestly no idea what I learned from you in this class because so much time was spent discussing the tiny details in the passages in the book and so if I learned anything it is how to read things in too much detail.  I could have read books in too much detail on my own but that is not what I came to college to do because I already know how to read and I would have told you this but you make me completely uncomfortable with your words so I never said a word.

By doing this you give us no guidance on our papers.  I thought it was lame that you decided to show a movie and a cop out because you chose not to give us any instruction.  I know that it was a movie based on the story in the play we read but it was not teaching to show it to us when you could have been teaching us to write what you wanted us to write on our papers instead.  The movie was completely racist and very offensive because it contained cultural stereotypes that are often used in disrespectful jokes about people who have their feelings hurt all the time.  I was offended by this racism and in the movie and had my feelings hurt by it.  If that was supposed to teach me something about the class I completely do not understand.

After this quarter I am hurt and tired and feel like talking to you now will do me no good.  I wanted to go to your office hours but I could not find the time or make myself because of your words.  I feel like my paper was written to the best of my ability in reference to your teaching skills in the discussions.  You grade my papers poorly but do not realize that you do so because they reflect your teaching skills.  Other people may have done well with your skills but I did not and would have talked to you but what you said about grading fairly made me uncomfortable.  I take my responsibilities as a man and I have never complained about my grades but this one I will because I did not need you to teach me how to read or to write.  I have made very high grades in all my other writing classes and even though I had many disputes with those instructors we always settled them to my happiness.  Now for the first time I can not talk to you to settle my grades because I am uncomfortable to talk or even write to you.  I should have stayed strong and like a man no matter how much your words and what you said offended me.  I do not blame you because when there is error there are two to blame, the perceiver and the target.  I do not know what this email does but I have to get my feelings off of my chest.  Thank you for reading this and I am sorry if what I feel has shown you disrespect but these are my feelings and I feel by your words you did not respect them.  I love everyone and believe you to possibly be a great person but with your words you have treated me completely unfairly.

I am a very religious man and I love every one but I will forward this letter to the head of your department so he can see that I am a serious student who does not deserve the grade you will give him because I write so very well.

First, a Reply to Some Criticisms.

Second, Other Teacher/Student Interactions You Might Enjoy:

• jimy666izstoned@gmail.com: an Epistolary Romance
• A Lexigraphical Lament about Probationer Prosody

Finally, check out the "Best of Acephalous" for more things that make you uncomfortable with their words and what they say.

Comments

[A White Bear]

Oh, Scott. I cry a little now. This had all the markings of a very good recent Asian immigrant writer.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"the student is, in fact, a native speaker"

Man. I bet that if I'd decided to beg for a grade (something I'd never done, despite or perhaps because I was as much of a slacker as a physics major could be) I could have done better with something like that Poe parody than with something like this. Doesn't anyone ever try humor?

Wait a minute. I did beg to be able to retake a senior-level midterm once after I slept through it. But then I think I just relied on bathos.

[Flavia]

Dammit, Scott: now you've got me WEEPING with laughter just 20 minutes before I have to go hurt some students with my words! Have some consideration, man.

[Kevin]

It's almost poetic.

I was reading this in my feed reader and had the same thought. Whitman kept coming to mind. Glad I clicked through and saw that I'm not the only one.

I had a feeling this was a native speaker. "Lame" and "cop out" were dead giveaways.

You have to tell us what "racist and offensive" movie you showed. I'm dying to know.

And seriously? When did students start complaining about watching movies in class? If there's a movie version of a book I'm teaching I always try to show it. I figure the students are happy not to have to listen to me trying to get them to read "in detail" for a day or two.

Regarding TAs: at my school, it depends. If you're teaching a class, you're considered a Graduate Instructor. If you're actually assisting a professor with a Lecture class (grading papers, leading discussion sections, etc.), then you're considered a TA.

[bitchphd]

One last hope: did the student have a learning disability, to your knowledge?

[John Emerson]

No time to write this morning, but let me say this: the student is, in fact, a native speaker of the upper-class, Wonder Bread variety.

I can't believe this. If so, he must have spent the last ten years in a personally-customized dream world of the D&D, SCA type.

[A White Bear]

I think the most frustrating thing about this letter for me as a teacher is that it perfectly expresses that students who don't get good grades simply have no idea what it is they think you could have done to help them. You taught them how to read too closely, but you also didn't tell them what you needed them to learn. You were too critical of their writing, but you didn't give any instruction about what you wanted. You were too lazy and vague as a teacher, but also way too specific and demanding. And you were really terribly offensive, but not in any way that one can remember or point to or quote from. All the student ends up knowing is that he did not get the grade he wanted, so you must have fucked up somewhere!

In my class right now, my students complain that my directions are too specific, and that my questions are too clear. But I explain that when I am not clear, students complain when they get bad grades that I didn't guide them enough. So what they really want is just to write whatever the hell came to mind when you said there was an assignment, and then to get an A for it. "No, you can't write about two novels from someone else's class for the poetry analysis." "But I already did it! And I worked SO HARD on it!"

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Whitman kept coming to mind."

No, I can't picture Whitman writing a poem about being completely uncomfortable or one that's one long passive-aggressive complaint. Maybe Ashbery, in a comic mood?

Or, given the repeats of "what you say" (you knew this was coming):

This Is Just To Say

I have wasted
the brain cells
that were in
my head-box

and which
you were probably
training
to write things

Forgive me
I do not understand
so tired
and I want a better grade

[Liz Y.]

I was also convinced that this writer was an Asian immigrant and was feeling sorry for him. My question is why are the other professors giving good grades to kids who write like this? I am just glad I didn't go back to school until I was of the "non-traditional student" age. I do have sympathy for them because they are so very young. I was a complete clod at 20 years old. I am still not all that bright, but at least I can form a coherent sentence. Sometimes.

Honestly this makes me wonder why anyone would want to teach these days. But you're a good one, Scott, you should still be teaching.

[Hattie]

It's basic writing, folks. I love the way he is saying he writes well enough for a real man.
I get this all the time in my writing classes up at the prison. Aside from not having that aggrieved sense of entitlement and being poor spellers, most of my students write just like that young man.
Perhaps this young gentleman would consider a career in corrections or in the armed forces. His talents would probably suffice.

[neil]

I thought of Faulkner, myself.

[DominEditrix]

Wait until you experience, as I did at UCI, a student's criticism that flunking him [and two friends] for submitting the same frat-archive paper was "extremely unfair", as no TA in any other class had done so.

Now, had he not also tried to scare me by bringing a snake to my office [poor baby - the snake that is - a young boa who had evidently been toted around in a backpack all day], not knowing that I'm actually rather fond of them, I might not have made the effort to elicit his class schedule and dash off a note to my fellow over-worked grad students in other departments... [Note: This was in the ancient and halcyon days before the advent of e-mail and other conveniences.]

[dead polar bear]

Yeah clearly a native speaker. The repetitions are a little odd and the religious man bit I have not seen before, but it's all consistent with emotional stress.

Ditto white bear -- you get students saying "just tell me what you want" with no idea what a paper is for. One of the things that happens -- and there are hints of it here -- is they decide they must figure out the professor's views and repeat them, so they get frustrated when either they can't figure out your views, or they decide you're a standard-issue PC academic and write some PC-sounding meaningless rubbish and you say to them this is meaningless rubbish. But once they're locked into that mode, convinced that they simply have to find the right line and they'll get an A, that everything else you're telling them is some kind of smokescreen, it's hard to get out.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Kerry, some of the lyric quality may be my fault. I redacted it in the style of the student, so only about two sentences made it in without some alteration in placement, grammar, or style. The diction and circularity, however, belongs entirely to the student. The best comparison is a cover song, in which the (dubious) brilliance of the original is largely responsible for the quality of the cover.

Rich and eb, good show!

Mike and Kevin, I don't want to specify the film so as to preserve the kid's anonymity. Needless to say, the film itself wasn't racist, but there were racists in it. Think, like, Beloved.

Dr. B, no learning disability. I try to avoid making fun of the disabled whenever possible.

History Geek, to call the student an entitled brat would not be a stretch. Frequently absent, and when in class the kind of student who raised his hand and said things which demonstrated 1) little familiarity with the assigned material and 2) a fixation on a few extremely idiosyncratic topics which he always thought were relevant.

John, ten years ago this kid was likely taking his toys and going home.

Liz, the reason people give kids like this good grades is that, at least until they get to upper level courses, they're often being taught by harried first year graduate students or desperate lecturers. The graduate students don't have time to deal with this kind of student; the lecturers don't want to rock the boat, as any attention is likely to be bad attention and they won't be hired by that institution again. Some students have learned how to game the system. Do they know that's what they're doing? Probably not, but they have practice.

As a side note, one other thing that empowers students these days is that they write all the time: email, in chats, on their blogs, &c. Some times, this makes for a better writer; others, it instills unwarranted confidence in the quality of their prose. The way I see it, if you become more confident the more you write, you are not (and will never be) a good writer. Writing requires effort, no matter how frequently you do it.

[snowqueen]

Priceless. One of our students is currently appealing against a grade on the grounds that the lecturer gave them clear advice on how to pass the resubmission and they still failed. It takes a while to get your head round that one.

[Jonathan Dresner]

Thanks, Scott. That just captures the essence of most of the complaints and evals I've ever gotten. Unhinged.

[Kevin]

No, I can't picture Whitman writing a poem about being completely uncomfortable or one that's one long passive-aggressive complaint. Maybe Ashbery, in a comic mood?

I was thinking less about the subject matter and more about the rhythms and repetition; but you're right, Ashbery in a comic mood is a much better picture.

Mike and Kevin, I don't want to specify the film so as to preserve the kid's anonymity. Needless to say, the film itself wasn't racist, but there were racists in it. Think, like, Beloved.

Understood. I was thinking something along the lines of Huckleberry Finn, where the characters often say "nigger" and everyone thinks it's racist rather than simply historically accurate.

Liz, the reason people give kids like this good grades is that, at least until they get to upper level courses, they're often being taught by harried first year graduate students or desperate lecturers. The graduate students don't have time to deal with this kind of student; the lecturers don't want to rock the boat, as any attention is likely to be bad attention and they won't be hired by that institution again. Some students have learned how to game the system. Do they know that's what they're doing? Probably not, but they have practice.

And I'd add that grad students get teacher evals too. Those of us in the Humanities are going to have a hard enough time getting a job as it is. A lot of grad students (especially those that are into their research, but hate teaching) are going to want to have as many positive evals as possible in order to increase their job opportunities. Give the poor student As throughout the semester and you're guaranteed a good eval. I think this "gaming of the system" often works both ways.

[sevanetta]

Holy jeez. Where have all the commas gone?

Add me to the group of people saying... 'In my day...' I'm 25. But then, the entitlement attitude doesn't seem as common in my country.

[Liz Y.]

"And I'd add that grad students get teacher evals too. Those of us in the Humanities are going to have a hard enough time getting a job as it is. A lot of grad students (especially those that are into their research, but hate teaching) are going to want to have as many positive evals as possible in order to increase their job opportunities. Give the poor student As throughout the semester and you're guaranteed a good eval. I think this "gaming of the system" often works both ways."

I understand and sympathize, but don’t the department heads also look at grade distribution? I believe there is a concern now with grade inflation—especially in the Humanities and in lower division classes. I would think that they would be taking this into account if you're giving everyone As. Does C no longer mean average?

[Sisyphus]

This isn't so much Faulknerian (unless it was written by Anse Bundren) as like the Beckett you quoted here a while ago. Ah, the absurdity! The soul-crushing existential absurdity! If you don't laugh at it you will be forced to weep in futility.

By the way, if you miss grading the way you miss teaching, I have this stack of finals...