They just keep complaining

So the semester is finally over. I may have mentioned that in the last post but now it’s official, all exams have been marked and the grades have been submitted. But of course that doesn’t mean anything to my students.

In this modern age I can submit my students grades and within minutes they can access them online. Worse still, I was dumb enough to email them after I had finished, which I’m sure prompted some to check right away. So within a few hours of submitting the grades I received an email that I will paraphrase below:

I was shocked that you dared to give me an A-. I’m deserve an A. I want to know how far from an A I was. And despite all the work it is for you to create assignments, grades and labs, you should make me some special little project that I can do after the semester is done so that I can get special treatment and get the A you cheated me out of.

I really don’t understand what goes through the minds of these students. I certainly never contested a grade while I was a student, I figured that the prof knew what they were doing and allocated the grades fairly. Sure I may have thought that I did better, but I figured that my subjective measure of my performance wasn’t the same as the empirical measurements the prof was making. Actually that’s full of shit, I never put that much thought into why I didn’t question my grade. The reality was that I trusted my profs and I never even considered begging for a better grade.

Now, to be fair I can understand the logic of asking for some additional work or a change of grade, but only when a student had been doing well and bombed the final, and the result was a failing or near failing grade. But to try and get your grade raised when you already have the second highest possible grade is just galling.

Being Evaluated

So I’m almost at the end of the semester. It’s rather nice to be nearly done with a year of teaching and at a point where I’ll be able to put more focus on my research for a while. I’ve enjoyed the teaching for the most part this year, though there have been some instances that certainly make it seem less rewarding than it could be; namely being told that I suck and that I’m a disgrace.

Of course, those comments weren’t made to my face, nor in any formal evaluation (yet), they were posted anonymously on Ratemyprofessors.com I keep an eye on the site because I think it can be insightful, and I’m kind of curious to see what comments come up. But I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting to see the three very negative ones that were posted Friday. Now I’ve been tempted to respond to the comments, but it’s not worth it, we all know the joke about arguing on the internet. But since I have my own forum here I feel like taking a moment to make to some general points.

1. If you are going to complain that things are too hard in your course, regardless of the subject matter, your case is best made with full sentences, proper grammar and punctuation. Incidentally, capitalize the first word in all sentences, not just the first one in a paragraph.

2. Yes, I do make up the homework and exam questions. I’m not the first person to ever do this, all professors do it! If this is the first time in your life this has ever happened I suggest you demand a refund for all prior courses you attended, clearly they did not try to teach you.

3. Yes, I do have a Ph.D. but I do not believe that you have miraculously skipped years of college to reach my level of understand of analytical chemistry. I do however wonder how you have managed to skip all chemistry classes since high school to reach my class, because you still cannot deal with the basics of my class, the same material I learned at your level, about 7 years before I got my Ph.D.

4. You should also learn to recognize the difference between difficult subject matter and a poor professor. I do not claim to be a great professor, but if your only basis for calling me a disgrace is your inability to understand the subject matter I have to say that this is some rather specious reasoning. Now if I were picking my nose all class, or came in without pants, then I could agree with you that I was a disgrace.

5. I guess it’s only fair that you make fun of me, I’ve been making fun of you since I graded your first assignments and realized I know high school students who can do this work better than you can. I guess were even, unless you are dense enough to ask me for a letter of recommendation.

Finally one word of advice. I may be a bit older than you, but I’m part of the internet generation. I’ve know of ratemyprofessors.com almost since its beginning. Posting very negative comments about me four days before the final exam is not very wise; particularly in light of the fact that I told all of you that had yet to finish writing the final.

Now I will end this post with the concession that I recognize that the few ratings of me are likely from the same individual, I know that there are always some who will dislike my teaching style. And perhaps it is true that I am a very poor teacher, though official evaluations have yet to indicate that. Finally I will not make the exam harder because of the comments, I’m not making the course hard to punish the students, I’m pushing them to learn and think, some will, some won’t, that’s just life, suck it up.

I can't stop bicycling

So a while back I learned something rather interesting about myself, I tend to bike in my sleep. I never realized that I do this but apparently Deirdre has noticed that nights after I have been out bicycling my legs tend to pedal a little while I sleep. It really is rather odd, after all you would think that I was already tired from the ride, why would my legs want to keep pedaling?

I do wonder if there are any positive benefits to this freakish behaviour? It is common for cyclists to take a light ride the day following a hard one to "flush" the junk out of their legs. Our legs literally will feel heavy after hard days of riding and these low intensity rides really do seem to rejuvenate the muscles. So perhaps my body has adapted to to my irregular riding habits by giving me a virtual ride at night. I should wear my heart rate monitor to bed one night and see if I'm getting any aerobic benefit from this. It certainly may help to explain why I'm so skinny.

Oh, in case you were wondering it turns out that I do seem to pedal at a very regular cadence. Deirdre couldn't say if it was 90 rpm or not, but I figure it was probably in that range, after all it's the only logical cadence to have while pedaling in your sleep.