Ungrateful bastards, redux
Today was one of those "what the fuck am I doing here" kind of days. Things started out well. My student evaluations from last quarter came back this morning. The average score of all OSU professors/lecturers/teaching assistants (that's me) is 4.3 on a scale of 1 to 5. In one class I scored 4.1, and other 4.6. So I guess I'm on par with the average teacher, even though it was my first time. That bodes well, right?
During that evaluation session I had them answer the usual "what did you enjoy/not enjoy/what can the instructor do better" stuff. The biggest complaints were the class meeting time (8:30 am, like I have any control over that), too much reading (amen, brother!), and too many written assignments (I agree; I had to grade the damned things). The only one of those I had control over was the written assignments, so I figured I would cut back on those in my classes this quarter. Which also bodes well, right?
Then I went to those classes. Tuesday was actually our first meeting and only 3/4 of the students showed up for that meeting, and I foolishly assigned a chapter to read for today. The rest of the students showed up today but of course they knew nothing about the reading, and about half of those who had been there Tuesday hadn't bought the book yet. So, in all, about ten of sixty students copped to actually reading the assigned chapter (and tim_wright will say that even those students are liars), so I sent them all away and promised to send out an assignment for them to do over the weekend based on that chapter and the one due on Tuesday. Dammit. Forcing them to write out responses to the reading seems to be the only way to get them to do the homework, and I'm not creative enough (or too lazy) to figure out another way. And everybody reading this who has taught is just shaking his/her head and saying "get used to it, bro." Yeah, well, that's why I put my whining behind this cut, smarty pants!
After class I walked by the construction site where they're erecting (heh, that one's for you, theeugene) a new parking garage/something-or-other and watched some construction guys rivet a steel beam in place. Thought to myself, "now there's a real job, no getting up in front of indifferent students, no required reading, probably paid more than a history teacher, I should be a construction guy." Then I looked at my little weenie arms and decided to stick with grad school...