Things not to say…..

In another week, my Baby Girl and I will be off to her college orientation.  In honor of that occasion, and the millions of teenagers just like her who will be embarking on their college careers this fall, I thought it might be helpful to review a list of things that you should never say to your professor/instructor.  You might think some of these are painfully obvious.  Once upon a time, I did, too.  Then I lost count of how many times I heard these things, just in one semester.  So here’s my Top 10 List of What Not To Say, Part I.

1. I wasn’t here on Monday.  Did I miss anything?

I’m astonished at how this one persists, even though I’m utterly certain that every student has heard admonishments not to say this and the inevitable joke “No, we realized you weren’t here so we all went home” or something to that effect.  First of all, it sounds as though you believe that life doesn’t really go on as usual in your absence.  It takes a special kind of egocentrism to imagine that everything stops when you decide to go elsewhere—the kind usually only awarded to 3 year olds who are cute enough to pull it off.  More importantly, though,  the question is a little offensive.  It implies that at least some percentage of the time what’s going on in class is useless—and that the instructor is well aware that it’s useless and is just doing it to fill time.  You may not see the value of what’s going on in class, but you should at least have the sense to acknowledge that the instructor does.  Frankly, we just don’t have the time or energy to waste on thinking up busy work for you.

2. I wasn’t here on Monday.  Can you tell me what we did?

Better, but still not ok.  This assumes that something of some importance went on in your absence, so that’s a step in the right direction.  It took 50 minutes for the rest of the class to go through whatever it was that happened on Monday; what makes you think I can distill it down to 2 minutes for you right now before class starts?  You might be brighter than everyone else in the room, but I’m guessing you’re not THAT much brighter.  If it were possible to cover the material in 2 minutes, that’s what I’d have done on Monday.

3. My flight leaves on Wednesday afternoon for Spring Break.  Is it okay if I’m not here that Friday?

The short answer, of course, is sure!  Knock yourself out.  In Loco Parentis stopped applying the day you got that high school diploma, Snowflake, and I’m not your mom.  Also, I don’t pay your tuition. You don’t HAVE to be here any day.  You already paid for this class.  What you’re really asking is, can I get credit for being here and still go on vacation early, and the answer to that is an emphatic no.  Here’s why—the dates for spring break are set years, seriously, years in advance and are published.  They’re on the school web site. They’re on your syllabus.  They’re plastered all over campus.  This is a little like saying to your boss “I’ve used up my vacation days, but I REALLY want to go to Cancun with my friends?  Is it ok if I don’t show up for work next week?”  The best answer your likely to get here is “Sure.  It’ll make payroll that much easier this period if we don’t have to pay you for next week.”  The likely answer is “Ok, but if you’re not here next week, don’t bother being here the week after, either.”  You get a week off.  If you want to take more, that’s up to you, but you’re not going to get special allowances to be able to do it.  You’re asking someone else to do more work so you can go play early. That never goes over well.

4. How much do I have to write?/How many pages does this have to be?

Ok, I get that a lot of students ask this question because they’re anxious about doing well and want to make sure they’re putting in the right amount of effort.  What this sounds like, though, if you’re on the receiving end is “This assignment is so far beneath me that I need you to tell me the minimum amount of effort I need to put in to get credit before I can move on to really important things.  Like who Snookie is sleeping with.”  There are a number of students who ask this question who are thinking this very thing (with some variation on the really important thing); you may not be one of them, but you sound like them when you ask this.  There are better ways to get the information that you really want: “I’m trying to gauge the level of detail you’d like in our responses. Do you have a maximum page limit for this assignment?”  or even “Would you mind looking over a draft of my response so I can get some feedback as to whether or not I’m on the right track?”

5. I just figured out my grade and it turns out I’m failing, which is a HUGE shock to me because I only missed the first 2 weeks of class and then those three days before break! I swear I’m a really good student and I NEVER do this badly in class.  What can I do to get more points in the last 3 days before classes end???

Again, there is a short answer to this question and you probably already know what it is: Nothing.  You had 14 weeks to prove to me what a great student you are, and you did.  What you’re really asking here is that someone else do more work to make up for the fact that you did less than what was expected of you for the last 3 months.  If you were truly that conscientious about your grades, I doubt you’d be this shocked, SHOCKED to find out that there’s a failing grade going on here.  You’d have already known after the first test and taken steps to correct the problem then.  How do I know?  Because at least 1 of your classmates did exactly that.  

I do occasionally hear this request for special extra credit from students who are doing very well in the class and want to create a buffer to be sure they get the highest grade attainable.  My response to them is that I don’t report total points or even percentages when I turn in grades. The registrar asks for your assigned letter grade—that’s all.  No one will ever know that you got a 99% instead of 105%.  Honest.

Toddler Benchmark

My New Year's Resolution this year was to not accept any behavior from students that I would not accept from my own children.  This doesn't seem like it should be a very high bar to reach, given that my youngest child is not yet 2, but you'd be surprised.  Or maybe you wouldn't.  My sisters, Real World Skipper and Stacy, tell me horror stories about colleagues and subordinates who think "I lost track of time." is a legitimate reason for a 3 hour coffee break or that sharing the gory details of your last vodka binge with a virtual stranger is an appropriate work behavior.  So now I am on a quest: to do my best to make sure that the young people who pass through my door are at least marginally prepared to go out into the world and, if nothing more, pretend to be grown ups (which in reality is what most of us are doing anyway--pretending).

My first battle in this war has been over cell phones.  Now don't get me wrong; I love my phone.  Well no, I love the concept of having a cell phone, but I'm not particularly enamored with my current model. That's not relevant.  The point is, I have no objection to the concept of a cell phone.  What I do object to is having to send messages like the following:

Just a reminder that cell phones/smartphones/Blackberries should be turned off during class time.  Midge (obviously not the TA's real name) and I have both received emails sent from a student's Blackberry during class time this semester, something that is not an appropriate use of classroom time.  From now on, emails sent during class will not receive a response.  If you have a question or problem related to class material or an assignment, please ask during class or speak to us afterward, otherwise please wait until after class to send emails.


What is troubling is that I'm not sure whether it bothers me more that this student was obviously way too busy texting during class to bother stopping to ask her question in real time, or that it did not occur to her that the message was going to come in stamped with both the time it was sent and the ubiquitous "Sent from my Blackberry" signature.


Then there was the conversation I had with an otherwise very bright young woman after I asked her to put her phone away during class.  She came up after class was over to apologize for texting during class and then added "but I was really angry about something and I couldn't stand it, so I HAD to get it out," which left me wondering what would have happened if she hadn't had a cell phone handy.  Would she have exploded?  Would she have suddenly jumped out of her seat during class and begun screaming about whatever made her so angry?  Probably neither.  She would probably have come to class, complained to the friends sitting around her briefly, and then either seethed about it during class or been distracted by work and forgotten about it until she left. 


And THIS is what it is that bothers me about cell phones--confusing immediate with imperative.  Just because you CAN broadcast every thought that wanders through your head at the nanosecond that it does, does not mean you have to.  Just because you don't have to wait to transmit whatever it is you've just now thought of, doesn't mean you shouldn't.  The idea that my phone is ringing, I MUST ANSWER IT NOW baffles me. Human ingenuity invented answering machines for land line phones to avoid this very idea!  Your phone and mine and pretty much every other cell phone traveling around in someone's pocket or bag came with this very cool feature.  If you don't answer it, a very nice lady will answer on your behalf and tell the person calling that you are unavailable and will record whatever it is they have to say for you to listen to at some more convenient time.  Preferably a time when you are not sitting in class, taking an exam, driving down the interstate, checking out at the grocery store, or sitting at the dinner table with your family.  And texting is even better, because there is no middle man (so to speak).  The message goes right to your phone and there it sits, patiently waiting for you until you get around to reading it, again, preferably not at any of the aforementioned times.  Honest.  I swear.  They do not have expiration dates.  I know this because I have text messages left in my inbox from 3 years ago, and they're still sitting there waiting to see what I will ultimately do with them.  They've go nowhere else to go.


Perhaps I should have mentioned all of this to the young woman who was called into my office to meet with me after she plagiarized not one but two papers and skipped two exams in class.  When she showed up in my office, a minor miracle in and of itself given her difficulty in making it to the classroom, she waltzed in and sat down while she was talking on her phone.  I instructed her to please go back outside and finish her call before coming in to meet with me.  She stood up, sighed, rolled her eyes, walked just outside the door and while looking at me said "I gotta go, Babe.  She's making me hang up the phone."  I considered telling her I was not making her do anything; she was welcome to go elsewhere and carry on her conversation.  I also considered yanking the phone out of her hand and tossing it out the office window.  In the end I did neither, because I recognized that someone who feels put out by being given the chance to salvage their college career after plagiarizing two papers and skipping multiple exams is well beyond the aid of voicemail.

Transparency and Textbooks (or The Real Reason Your Major Matters)

A provision in the Higher Education Opportunity Act requires colleges and universities that receive federal aid to disclose what textbooks are required for each class and the standard retail price of that textbook on our electronic schedule of courses and on the course syllabi.  Eliminating the step of looking at the required textbook on the course syllabus or book list at the bookstore, and then looking up the price is somehow supposed to make college more affordable.  Don’t get me wrong; I like the spirit of this provision, but I’m not at all certain of what the outcome is supposed to be.  If the goal is to force me to require a reasonably priced textbook for class, I’m not at all sure this provision can accomplish that.  For one thing, forcing me to choose a text immediately after being assigned to teach a course, means that I have very little time to review textbooks and consult with colleagues and select the most reasonably priced book that will serve the needs of my students.  It means that an instructor is more likely to choose a book that another instructor has used in the past or the first one that comes to my attention (often through publishers’ advertisements) that looks as though it will do the job.  I can spend a few weeks and hunt down a good $60 text (assuming one exists), or I can choose the $100 one that the publisher just sent me a flyer advertising.  Requiring that this information be posted with the schedule of courses as soon as that schedule is posted does nothing to ensure that the best, most reasonably priced materials are selected.  In fact, it nearly ensures that a more costly text will be chosen.

The second problem with posting this information on the schedule of courses is that there seems to be an underlying assumption here that students can shop for their course work based on how much it will cost them to take a particular class.  So the idea is that my students sign on to the schedule or courses, look at the required class and decide “A hundred dollars for the text?  I don’t think so,” and change their major to pottery?  It’s possible that for the few general education classes where the students have a broad range of options for class, they might choose not to take the architecture class with a book that costs $120 and instead opt for the sociology course with a text that only costs $75.  That could happen, and I supposed it’s no worse a means of selecting a course than ratemyprofessor.com, but if you’re going to major in chemistry, you’re going to have to take some chemistry classes.  I suspect the chem department has some specific ones in mind and I’m sure they all require expensive texts.   Knowing the book costs $150 won’t get you out of introductory inorganic chem., nor will it make it any less expensive or painful.

That brings me to another problem with this regulation.  Knowing that the text for one course is expensive, doesn’t really tell you much at all about the cost of the class.  My younger sister, Skipper, was a science major.  I, because I really have very little grasp on reality much of the time, minored in arts and humanities.  We used to argue over who had to pay more for textbooks.  One book would routinely cost her $150.  One of mine would routinely run between $9 and $15.  Problem was, any given humanities course required at least 8 books, while that $150 book of my sister’s was the same text for at least 2 classes.  We sat down and figured it out one semester (because we’re both dorks.  It’s genetic.  I have a textbook that says so.) and within about $5, we were spending the same amount of money on textbooks.  My stat textbook in graduate school cost $160.  I never considered not taking the analysis of variance class for which I bought the book, regardless of the cost, because it was a skill I needed for my career.  That book was also the text for a regression analysis course and a multivariate analysis course, making the textbook cost per class about $53.  Having the cost of that book on the syllabus would not have given me that insight.

The stated purpose of this requirement is to make the cost of college more “transparent.”  It reminds me of one of my all time favorite movie lines from The Princess Bride:  “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it does.”  I’m not sure the person who wrote this legislation knew what they meant by transparency, because stating the cost of the textbook on the syllabus or even the schedule of courses doesn’t gain you transparency.  Students could always access that information before they signed up for a class by simply going to the bookstore and poking around for a few minutes, or more directly, ask the professor who usually teaches the course.  Requiring me to tell my students what the book costs gives them no more information than they would have had before, and doesn’t make the cost any more transparent.  It does no good unless the textbook companies are required to explain why textbooks cost as much as they do.  To be fair, one provision of the HEOA does require textbook companies to provide information on the expected cost of the text and the copyright dates of the last three editions of the text to prospective instructors.  I have occasionally seen the prices listed (a step in the right direction) but I have yet to see a publisher volunteer the copyright dates of previous editions.  Why is this important?  Because publishers often put out new editions of textbooks for reasons that aren’t really related to updating old information.  Sometimes it’s because they want to include a new author whom they expect will be writing future editions or other texts.  Sometimes it’s to include new technology (a new DVD, tie ins to Facebook and Twitter, etc.).  Sometimes it’s for something as mundane as updating the graphics or illustrations in the book.  Each new edition is typically more expensive than the older edition, and once a new edition is out, it’s often difficult to purchase large quantities of the old edition.  Students who wish to “sell back” their textbooks at the end of a semester often find that they are unable to sell back books for which there is a newer edition, or if they can, they are paid virtually nothing for it.

I would love to see textbook prices become more affordable.  Many of my students come from working class families and I feel a strong responsibility towards them and their education.  I know that many of them do not buy the books that they feel they can get by without because of the cost.  I try very hard to make sure that I am selecting a textbook for my classes that I believe is reasonably priced and useful for my students, and I believe that most of my colleagues do the same.  This bizarre regulation seems mostly to be designed to make someone feel as though they’ve taken a stab at a serious problem and at the same time lined up a suitable scapegoat to blame when the problem mysteriously continues.