Hieroglyphs

This weekend I've had the unfortunate pleasure of spending large amount of my time trying to decipher the most uninterpretable form of human communication ever devised, college student homework. It seems that along with not being taught how to do basic math, read properly or even how to use a textbook to find information they are apparently not taught how to right write in any clear form.

The calligraphy skills of some of my students rival only those of trained gorillas with crayons. I know that fine motor dexterity is supposed to be a hallmark of human evolution, but you wouldn't know this by looking at what some of my students can do. I really don't understand these students and the fact that they are willing to turn in such crappy looking work to me. I know that I certainly had more respect for my own work than to submit something so messy to one of my profs.

Of course there are the students at the other end of the spectrum. Those that insist on cramming multiple lines of a calculation into the smallest space possible. Some of it can get so small I'm not even sure what was written. Maybe there's a shortage of paper that I haven't heard about or maybe I just hate the environment enough to be willing to use an extra page. But clearly, as you can see from the sample photo to the right, I can't even get my camera (phone) to focus on the writing it's so small.

Add to the frustration that arises from seeing their inability to do multistep calculations with a calculator properly, retrieve the right value from a table, convert unit prefixes properly or even a little bit of deduction and you get an idea how fulfilling I find teaching to be at times. I clearly see that there is plenty that I could teach these adults (it's scary to realize that they have a vote) but I don't have the time to make up for the years of schooling they seemed to have slept through.

Yeah, I just realized that I must have posted something like this last year... it sucks that I keep going through the same feelings of helplessness with the quality of the students. Though I guess this is proof of some form of a systemic failure in the system prior to their arrival in my classroom.