An exercise in futility

[Worn]

I got a paper back today that I had written for one of my classes.  The professor had gone on and on ad nauseum about how everyone always made the same mistakes, what the mistakes were and how to not make them.  She said everyone got C's and D's on this first paper.  So I followed her instructions.  I believe I did a pretty good job on the paper.  It would have received an A in any of my other classes.  Her comments on the paper were to discuss one aspect more and a comment that I could have added more in another area.  I got a C-, D+.  Two grades, I know, strange.  Most everyone else in the class got about the same grade.  I think there were a few B's. 

I worked hard on this paper.  I put in the effort and I followed her instructions on how to not repeat the same mistakes that previous classes had.  By her comments I believe I didn't fall far from this mark.  I read a couple other people's comments and they were more along the lines of 'Did you read the directions and do the assignment?'.  They got the same grade as I did (actually grades, I guess).  So if I had put absolutely no effort into my paper and not even done the assignment properly, two of the things she went on and on about, I would have gotten the same grade.  Bah, what is this!  A lesson in how life's not fair?  I KNEW that, lol.  No I don't want an A and I don't need a better grade to tell me that it was a good paper.  But some recognition that I did the work and followed her instructions to the letter would be nice. 

Ugh, old tapes play, 'why try, you'll never be good enough'.  My stuff, not hers.  I own it and I'm working on it. 

I want to go talk to her about it and ask, but then again I really don't.  My sister commented that her reaction to me bringing it up would say more about her than it would about me.  If I can get to that place where I'm sure I can remember that I'll go talk to her.  Otherwise I'm just going to leave it be.  Ok, I'm done ranting.  Worn

[Lollie]

Your sister may be right, but what if she isn't? What if you talked to your instructor and actually got feedback that made your next paper better?

[gratitude28]

Hi Worn,
One of the things I have finally learned to do (at age 40!!!!!!) is to ask things straight up. In your case, I would tell the professor that I was disappointed with my grade, and I would love to know how I could do better on the next paper. I would ask her what she is looking for and how I could write the kind of paper that she wants.
In that, there is no fault. You did nothing wrong. The fact is, for another professor, it might have been a 'A' paper. But you need to gear to what THIS prof wants. So... little lesson... and a life lesson if applied on a grander scale.
It's really something I had to learn on my own
Love,
Beth

[Worn]

Argh! So many upbeat people on this board!  I kid, I kid! 

I know, you guys are right.  I should go to her.  And I'll probably end up doing it.  I've heard so many negative things about how she handles students going to her, but all it is is hearsay.  I like your approach Beth.  If and probably when I do go, I'll use that as a model.  The entire semester has been taught with the message 'you guys can't win, you're all going to do terrible at this class' attitude.  Very negative teaching style from the prof, but she knows her stuff.  I usually like a challenge from a class, I approached my paper from that perspective.  Just kind of bummed my work didn't pay off.  Worn

[gratitude28]

Worn,
There always is the possibility she's a nutbag  If that's the case... so be it. If I did college over again, I would do it with my own resolutions, not trying to be what the teacher wanted me to be (or saying what the teacher wanted me to say). So if she is difficult, don't let it get to you. There is a percentage of people who use those positions to show how 'powerful' they are. Not to say that will happen, but it might. Also, again, I am guessing your work was valid - especially if you felt it was. For whatever reason... it's not what she wanted.
Love your sense of humor
Beth

[Worn]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure she is a nut.   But I gotta learn to deal with nutbags too lol.  I'm afraid of my reaction to what she tells me.  If she continues the same attitude of 'you can't win', I think I will become even less motivated in this class.  I have a feeling the grades on this first paper are arbitrary.  But she can't have her entire class fail.  So perhaps the grades on the next paper are not.  She is my advisor in the department also so I have to meet with her anyway before the semester is over.  I think I will use that opportunity to talk about the paper.  She has stated that we can.  Ugh, nutbags lol.  Worn

[SallyingForth]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure she is a nut.   But I gotta learn to deal with nutbags too lol.  I'm afraid of my reaction to what she tells me.  If she continues the same attitude of 'you can't win', I think I will become even less motivated in this class.  I have a feeling the grades on this first paper are arbitrary.  But she can't have her entire class fail.  So perhaps the grades on the next paper are not.  She is my advisor in the department also so I have to meet with her anyway before the semester is over.  I think I will use that opportunity to talk about the paper.  She has stated that we can.  Ugh, nutbags lol.  Worn

Hi Worn,
Reminds me of a teacher I had in junior high. She was a pain, telling everyone in the class she never gave above a B/B on any paper. And she regularly gave low grades on the first assignments, usually no higher than C/C-. She had been a college prof at one time and decided to go back to teaching junior high. I was her favorite mental/emotional punching bag until one writing assignment. Her bent on me was that dark writing never gets published. HM... Stephen King... She'd ridicule me in front of my classmates. Well, this assignment was about rewriting the ending on an Edgar Allen Poe story. I excelled. The story was dark like my life. A new ending was easy. The teacher had to eat her words as her grade on my paper was A+/A+, the highest grade she had ever given out to any student.

Hey, I am editing a dark novel right now and have two more in their first draft stages. I still love writing dark stories.

[Logy]

Worn and Sally,

This is an exercise in DO NOT LET ANYONE ELSE DEFINE YOU.  YOU are valuable.  Anyone else's statement about you is just that, their opinion.  If someone tells you that you "can't win" they are saying you can't win by their rules.  But what makes their rules the best?  They are another human being, just like you.  You are a student but it is her job to teach you and to motivate you to want to take that next leap.  I feel I learn more from my students than they learn from me.  They teach me how to interact with others.  Discover other people without judgement.  Something NM never knew how to do and that I was never taught how to do.   

[Sealynx]

Worn,
As a college professor I want to share a few things with you.

1. We seldom get what we want. Some of us have been teaching long enough to know that what is in our head after years of study is not yet widely disseminated in the classroom...some of us are new to the game and have unreasonable expectations about "what people should already know".

2. The grading of papers is subjective. I am often harder on the first paper I grade then the last because I see everyone has made the same mistake. Usually that tells me I was unclear or failed to get a point across to my students. I usually try and go back and adjust grades. I don't always remember the papers I need to adjust. Not everyone does this but many teachers will consider raising a grade if you come to them with one of these papers.

3. Normally when students come to see me I try to tell them exactly what is missing from their paper in terms precise enough so that they can literally write it down. One way to deal with a teacher who is known for not addressing student issues is to ask her to give you a hard copy of what a correct response might look like so you can study it. If it was an essay, ask her for an essay that she thinks is really good.

4. Some people are style freaks. They have an image in their head that you have to match...but it doesn't always come out of their head!!! Strategy number three works well on that kind of teacher.


I'd go see her and ask for help. We are required by our jobs to keep office hours and help students. You paid good money to be able to talk with us. Is this English? Let me know and I'll shoot you some websites with good guidelines.

[HeartofPilgrimage]

I am such a perfecto-freak that I actually reconsidered rewriting a B paper a few months ago (I had built that into the contract the professor and I agreed upon). He actually told me: I know it is in the contract that you can rewrite, but you did well enough to get credit and if it were me, I'd accept the B and move on. I actually listened ... probably because I was just too tired to keep on with the insane perfectionism. The paper was approximately 35 pages, 12-point font, double-spaced, long (not including references). Even CONSIDERING not accepting a B on that much work is insane.

I say that certainly not to say, "na na na na na na, I got a B and you got a C-" but rather to say ... "when you're a perfectionist, when you think other people's evaluations of you ARE you, you will NEVER be good enough."

I have taught college courses too ... and for the most part, something is screwy with this teacher's system if everybody got under a C. Especially if this is not the first paper for the class and if this is a recurring pattern. I don't believe that you should just give grades away, don't get me wrong, but every class is normally a mix of high-ability and low-ability, high-effort and low-effort, highly-prepared and not-prepared people. Everybody consistently flunking means that your teacher is not teaching so hot. (Of course, even when there is a reasonable grade spread, the system COULD be screwy).

The paper I got a B on --- I spent months researching it and writing it. I knew the professor I had contracted with was a hard grader. I sweated bullets over that paper and learned tons. I will be able to apply all the knowledge I gained. The paper itself rocketed my knowledge in that particular area to a much higher plane. I still got a B on my transcript.

By contrast, after that experience I contracted with a different professor in a different subject area. I learned a lot researching that paper too ... but was exhausted by that time and just wrote the dang paper. No sweating bullets, no obsessive rewriting and making sure every point was exhaustively discussed. Wrote a rough draft, rested it a few days, went back and did a bit of reshuffling and corrections and sent it off to be graded. Told a friend that if I scraped by with a passing grade I would just be relieved to be done, all I wanted was not to have to do a rewrite, I was too tired. My grade? A+! WTH? Different teachers. Different appreciation for what I do.

Bottom line? Make sure you're expending your effort on something you care about. Learn. Pass. Try hard enough to make good grades when the system is reasonable. Let the rest go.

I plan to reread this post next time I don't do so hot on something I care about ...

[Worn]

I've come to believe this professor is just crazy.  The grades were, pretty obviously, arbitrary.  She asked the class after receiving our papers if we had any questions.  People asked why they got such low grades.  Her answer was 'What were the comments on your paper?'.  She said if we received comments that we didn't finish the assignment, didn't follow instructions, etc that it was obvious why we got low grades.  As she's going down the list of comments I'm thinking, yep, I had none of those on my paper.  My two comments were discuss one area more and a comment at the end that I could have included a civil rights aspect in my argument.  I've talked to two other classmates that also did not receive any of the comments she mentioned but got the same grade as the people who did. 

Wednesday in class she was handing out homework papers.  She called my first name and said my last name's initial.  She's made kind of a joke about pronouncing my last name wrong all semester.  I laughed and said yep and pronounced it the way she had been doing.  She said, 'Whatever, it starts with a g.  That's all I know about you and all I ever want to know.'  She's my adviser for the department I'm in.  This is not a big class, there are about 15 people in it.  It's a senior level class for my major.  This just seemed a little weird to me.

Today in class she came in 5 mins late and just started casually discussing the healthcare bill that passed yesterday.  She didn't announce that class had started and seemed to be casually chatting to a few students on what they thought about it.  There were a couple alternative conversations going on among some of the students.  I wasn't paying attention and was reading over my notes for my next class.  All of a sudden it goes dead quiet and all I hear is someone stomping out of the room in a huge huff and then slamming the door.  I look up and it was the prof.  People are in shock.  Everyone just sits there stunned for a couple minutes then the prof knocks on the door.  It had locked behind her!  One person lets her in and she comes back and is shouting at people about how rude it is to her and to their classmates to talk while she is talking.  She is completely irate by this time.  This issue is disrespectful, true.  It has only been addressed minimally before this episode.  It was not a longstanding discipline thing, just a minor problem that when she addressed it, stopped.  She just completely lost it this time.

This so reminded me of how my nm would react to being 'disrespected'.  Just totally losing it.  Anyway, there's no way I'm going to her to be belittled about this paper.  It's 15% of my grade so for me the possible payout is not worth the possible risk.  Sometimes dealing with nutcases means staying out of their way.  Oh well, thanks for the support and advice.  Worn

[Logy]

Worn,

Yup.  A nut.  Sounds like the week I had with my boss.  Just pass the class and move on.

[HeartofPilgrimage]

 

[Hopalong]

I do sooooooooo hope there are student evaluations.

The professor is crazy, somewhat abusive, and not doing the job she's supposed to do.

I'm glad the class is almost behind you.

There will be joy in all the good professors ahead, because you'll be so grateful for the contrast!

You're an intelligent woman, Worn. You can dig into your education and make it your own.

(She was, actually, a learning experience too. EWWW!)

Hops

[gratitude28]

Worn,
You had a Life Test, and I think you passed with flying colors In my old days, I would have blamed her behavior on myself. You are smart and strong enough to put the blame where it belongs - on her lame behavior.
Kudos!!!!!!!
Love,
Beth