All Posts Tagged With: "professors"

We’re good enough already, says Prof. Pettigrew

Over in the UK, there’s more talk about university professors needing formal teacher training. One hears similar proposals more and more lately in this country, too. But in the end, it is, like so many ideas about higher education, a meretricious scheme masquerading as commonsense reform.

On the surface, the notion that university professors should have some kind of formal Education credential has a certain appeal. Professors, after all, spend a lot of their time teaching, why wouldn’t it make sense to require them to have the same level of training as other teachers? Just because you know about your discipline, the thinking goes, doesn’t mean you know how to teach it.

Continue reading Why profs don’t need more teacher training

Website offers profs group therapy

Photo by Laura Mills

June Madeley is annoyed with the increasingly rude demands she gets from students at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Ten years ago, it was common for them to see her during office hours when they had a question. “Now there’s an expectation that we’ll answer their emails immediately and meet them whenever there’s a good time for them.” And as surely as the leaves pile up on campus each October, the communications professor knows her inbox will soon fill with complaints about mid-terms scheduled for the week after the Thanksgiving holiday. “There are a lot of people who feel they can’t make the exam because of travel arrangements,” she says. “And others who think it’s unfair that they have to study that weekend.”

But when Madeley gets frustrated, she doesn’t fire off a snotty email to the student. She logs on to “That’s ‘Professor’ Uptight to You, Johnny,” a Facebook group with 297 members, all of them teaching at universities and colleges. The members-only site is a place where university educators can vent in the form of steaming emails they wish they could write to their students but can’t because that would be, well, rude. Madeley, who says she hasn’t posted yet, enjoys reading the rants from her colleagues. The site is run by Khrystyne Keane, a Connecticut-based editor for a non-profit group, who took over its administration as a favour to a professor friend. The logo—a unicorn standing under a rainbow—is a jab at students, some of whom feel they are every bit as special as the fabled one-horned horse and the multicoloured arc.

The posts are all written to anonymous Janeys and Johnnies, but they share one trait: carefully crafted sarcasm. “Dear Johnny, I suspect that if you had spent as much time and effort on your last assignment as you did on the long flaming email you just sent me, this whole ‘conversation’ would never have happened,” reads one. “Dear Janey, I want to assure you that we didn’t do anything important in class. We just stared out the window for three hours in silence,” reads another.

Nothing riles a professor more than asking about material covered in a skipped lecture. But Joey O’Kane, a vice-president of the University of New Brunswick Student Union, thinks it’s no big deal. He also thinks it’s reasonable to expect email responses from profs within 24 hours, preferably 12. “Professors have a pretty good gig,” he says. “You put in some office hours, you teach for a few hours and then you end up with a decent paycheque, so taking 10 minutes out of your day to respond to a few emails . . . I don’t think that’s asking too much.”

Kevin Maness, another Facebook member from Eastern University in Pennsylvania, recalls a student who emailed him a couple of weeks after the last semester ended and asked if there was anything he could do to increase his grade because he had been “too busy” playing basketball. Incredulous, Maness wanted to shoot off a caustic retort. Long before he had even heard about That’s “Professor” Uptight, someone else had addressed the same complaint with a post that read: “Dear Johnny, Just tell me the grade you want and I’ll change it in the book, because it doesn’t really matter anyway.” After joining the group last month, Maness has found it to be “great group therapy.”

When Maness attended the University of Pennsylvania in the early ’90s, he accepted that professors would challenge him. In return for doing the coursework, he was rewarded with the grade he had earned. Now, if he hands out a C-minus “it’s almost like a complete shock to them.”

So why the attitude? In their book Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education, University of Western Ontario sociologists James Côté and Anton Allahar say it started when higher education became purely a financial exchange. Funding pressures forced universities to accept as many students as possible, even those who weren’t suited to academics, says Côté. That crowds lecture halls with students who shouldn’t be there.

At the very least, one educator feels students should learn to mind their manners. At the University of Minnesota, law professor Michele Goodwin added “civility” to her course requirements this September. “Failure to follow this guideline will affect your final grade,” she wrote in the class syllabus, explaining that emails should include the basic salutation “Dear Professor Goodwin” and not “Hey Prof.”

She even assigned practice email as homework. “It’s a bit awkward for professors to think, wow, this is actually my job now?” says Goodwin, who blogs for industry publication The Chronicle of Higher Education, “but it’s necessary.” If the new rules don’t work out, at least she has a place to commiserate. The professor can always join That’s “Professor” Uptight to You, Johnny.

Editor’s Note: I wrote this story for the print edition of Maclean’s. As both Profs. Maness and Magatha have pointed out in the comments section, it should have included more nuance. For one, I should have made it more clear that every single professor I spoke to for this piece exuded passion for teaching. Indeed, research shows that North American professors work on average around 55 hours per week and many of those hours are dedicated to helping students learn beyond the classroom—something they get little credit for. The profs. also made it clear that there are many students who don’t fit the stereotype of entitled. I agree. While it’s a challenge to decide what to include in the space allotted, I should have done a better job. I also want to note that there was a factual error in this story that was introduced in the editing process. Maness did not read a complaint “months earlier” from another professor who sarcastically offered to change a student’s grade. That was merely what he said he might have written had he know about the page at the time.

These things annoy Prof. Pettigrew far more

Photo courtesy of Sergey Vladimirov on Flickr

Last week I wrote that banning bottled water from universities was environmentally sensitivity gone too far. I hinted that there were other things much worse, and if we are going to start banning things, water should be way down on our list. Just to show that I am not entirely a spoil-sport when it comes to forbidding things, I offer 10 other things that I would rather see disappear.

1. Cheap cologne. While cheap perfume for women seems to be on the decline, cheap cologne for men seems to be making a comeback. Bottom line: I don’t want to smell you. Period.

2. Asking a professor where another professor is or when another professor will be back. It’s always the same: student arrives at Professor Hallcross’s door and knocks. No answer. Knocks again. No answer. Comes to my door: “do you know where Professor Hallcross is?” No. How would I know? Do you think we professors have some kind of universal academic GPS? Do you think I have a magic map showing his footprints moving through the Hufflepuff common room?

3. Non-specific email help requests. EG: “I don’t understand the assignment you gave us. Can you explain it?” No, because I don’t know what course you are in, which assignment you mean, or what part of it you don’t understand.

4. Pretending you didn’t know plagiarism was wrong. You cheated. You got caught. At least own up to it.

5. Walking in large groups slowly down the hall. Some of us have places to be. And for that matter, don’t you have somewhere to be? The library? Class?

6. Doing homework from one class in another class. You’re missing my thoughtful comments on Oscar Wilde, and I’m distracting you from memorizing brain anatomy. Why bother?

7. Asking what you need to do to pass the course after the course is more than half over. Think back to the beginning of class and you’ll recall that I told you what to do to pass the course…

8. Asking for a higher grade so that you can keep your scholarship or get into a program you want to get into. Those scholarship and admissions committees rely on me to let them know how you’ve done. If I raise your grade to the line they have set, it defeats the purpose of the line.

9. Bird courses. If there’s no way a student can try hard and still fail, then it’s not a serious course. This is mostly the fault of professors, but hey students, don’t feed the birds! Challenge yourselves.

10. Asking your course adviser which profs are the “good” ones. I don’t know what you think a good prof is. Do you mean funny? Conscientious? Easy grader? And even if I did know what you were looking for, I don’t see other professors in the classroom. Most times I don’t know if they’re what you’re looking for. Even if I did, I’m not going to bad mouth my colleagues. Well, except one.

Once we’ve gotten rid of all these things, then you can talk to me about water.

Professor Pettigrew proposes an entirely new system

Photo courtesy of j / f / photos on Flickr

A few years ago, a colleague told me that when he was a TA, he was told never to give a grade below 45. The reason was that students earning a very low grade would dig themselves into a hole and wouldn’t be able to pass the course.  At the time, I scoffed at such a practice. After all, it’s unfair to give a student who did next to nothing a 45 when another student who just fell short the same 45. And what if the student doesn’t turn in the paper at all? A 45 for nothing?

Another way to view this problem, as Douglas Reeves has argued, is to note that the standard A, B,C, D, F grading system over-punishes missed assignments which get graded at zero. Actually, it’s worse: any serious failure is systemically unfair because the F range is, compared to other grades, huge.

Still further, the traditional scale forces professors to grade with a very narrow range. Most papers are somewhere between D- and B+, a range that uses only thirty points (50-79) out of one hundred.

The solution is to revise the percentage system to equally distribute grades over the whole range from zero to one hundred. We change to old system:

A=80-100

B=70-79

C=60-69

D=50-59

F=0-49

to a new system:

A=80-100

B=60-79

C=40-59

D=20-39

F=0-19

Now, I’m not suggesting that a failing paper that used to deserve a 40 under the old system would now pass. What I mean is that the paper that deserved a 40 under the old system would now be given a 16 in the new system. The numbers are different but represent the same thing, just as 0 Celsius is no colder than 32 Fahrenheit.

The new system means that one disastrous failure or one missed assignment in an otherwise decent performance doesn’t cause a student to fail the whole course. For instance, imagine a student, Mishrump Middleton, who has four equally-weighted assignments in his course and earns a C- on the first three but fails to turn in the last one.

Mishrump is no Rhodes Scholar, obviously, but he probably doesn’t deserve to fail the course. But, under the old system, Mishrump gets a 45 as his final grade —  an F — and fails because that single zero drags him down. But under my system, Mishrump gets a 30 which, remember, is now a D and so still gets credit for the course, which, intuitively, he probably deserves. Put another way, Mishrump gets the equivalent of the old 55 instead of the old 45 because the grades are more logically distributed.

But how can I use my new system? I can’t simply give a C- student a grade of 40 and expect everyone else at my university to know that what I mean by 40 is not the same as what they mean by 40. And even if I could get my whole university to switch over to my system, it might be confusing to others if Cape Breton University’s transcripts showed a middling student with a 45 average instead of a 62. The whole country will have to make the switch.

In the meantime, I have a solution for my own classes. I will give students letter grades but calculate their grades using my new scale. Then, at the end of the course, I will translate those grades back into the standard percentages. It will be more work, but it beats giving every failing paper a 45.

It may be more than you guessed. Click to see where your school stands.

Professor photo courtesy of Rainer Ebert on Flickr

What does your professor make? Assuming he or she is a full (tenured) professor, it’s probably more than you guessed. The median pay among full professors at 31 Canadian schools is $128,480, according to a recent study.

That said, if your professor is at the University of Northern British Columbia, she likely makes a far less than if she’s with the University of British Columbia. A report by Culture, Tourism and the Centre for Education Studies shows that salaries in the 2009-10 school year followed no apparent pattern. Some highly-ranked schools pay less than not-so-prestigious schools. A few smaller schools — Trent for example — pay profs much better than bigger neighbours. The report presented data from 31 schools. That’s fewer than half of the 81 schools profiled in the Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities, meaning this list is far from comprehensive.

It’s worth reiterating that these figures are for full professors only. Assistant professors, associate professors and contract faculty make much less and many academics work for more than a decade before getting full status, if they ever do. Still, these numbers show that professorship is a lucrative career from coast to coast.

Trent – 158,876

Calgary – 154,008

British Columbia – 151,145

Alberta – 145,585

Athabasca – 144,689

McMaster – 144,366

Lethbridge – 144,255

York – 143,091

Wilfrid Laurier – 142,905

Windsor – 141,831

Ottawa – 141,417

Guelph – 139,934

Lakehead – 137,827

Manitoba – 137,765

Brock – 137,666

UOIT – 135,000

St. Mary’s – 129,603

Victoria – 128,122

UPEI – 126,903

Memorial – 126,623

Nipissing – 123,754

New Brunswick – 123,546

St. Thomas – 123,307

Brandon – 117,494

Acadia – 110,000

UNBC – 103,796

Cape Breton – 102,622

Mount Royal – 101,974

OCAD – 101,086

Kwantlen – 84,896

Trinity Western – 78,778

You can’t quite put your finger on it, but there’s something annoying about the professor.

You have to think like a prof.

There has never been a shortage of advice for university students, some of it good, most of it obvious. Keep up with your readings, get plenty of sleep, and so on.

One bit of advice that you hear less often, however, might be the most valuable of all.

Understand how professors think.

For the most part, after all, professors don’t think like you, because you are a normal person and they are intellectuals, driven by the need to argue, and discover, and innovate, finding joy in exploring the tiniest reaches of the most obscure subject. And as such they want to be valued for their intellect, because there aren’t that many places where intellect is valued.

Now, I am not advocating outright sucking up, but seeing the prof’s side of things might change your academic approach. For instance:

1. If you have to skip class, never skip the last class of the week. Professors tend to plan their courses by week and so as the week draws to a close, they will try to fit everything they can into that class.

2. Unless you are scheduled to do some kind of presentation, never tell your prof that you won’t be in class for whatever reason. Similarly, don’t explain your absences. To you, it seems respectful and open, but most professors take pride in not being high school teachers and not having to deal with attendance and other similar vulgarities. By providing an explanation, you are implying the professor would want one, and this will offend his sense of laissez-faire academics. He wants to be able to say, “My students are adults, and it is not up to me to keep track of their comings and goings,” and you up in his face about your son’s soccer game is cramping his style.

3. See your prof in person. Email is convenient and sending an email message might seem like it would make the professor’s life easier. And you probably are. But what you don’t realize is that professors are generally contractually required to be in their offices for so many hours a week, and it is discouraging when no one ever shows up. Getting there in person shows you really care about the subject matter and makes the professor feel like she’s changing your life. We love to feel like we are changing your life.

4. Never tell your prof that you are willing to settle for a middling grade. To you this might sound like you are being reasonable and that you are putting your prof at ease by showing you are not going to be too demanding. But remember that nearly all your professors were straight A students when they were students, and not wanting an A will seem like laziness, apathy, or a sad lack of ambition to them. Better to stroll your way to a  C and let them think you were doing your best.

5. Never ask more than two questions per hour in class. Professors like a certain number of questions because it shows enthusiasm and interest, but too many questions from one person makes other students tune out and your prof will become annoyed by the growing restlessness in the room.

Of course, you will have to adjust the particular approach depending on the kind of program you are in and the kinds of instructors you have. But the basic idea is the same. Try to see it from their side. Doing so may not convince your instructor to give you an A you didn’t deserve, but it will build good will and good will can give you a benefit of the doubt here, and extra helpful tip there. And it all adds up.

Related: Having trouble? Talk to your profs

‘Long answer’ and ‘thought’ questions? I’m doomed.

When I woke up this morning, I realized to my horror that three weeks have somehow gone missing. Overnight.

Three of my midterms are scheduled for October 26, 27, and 28. At the end of September, before October had completely disappeared without any warning, they were all safely in the category of “meh, I’ll worry about these later.” I had almost a month to study and catch up with the readings. No problem.

Now it’s suddenly October 25 and my Molecular Biology midterm is tomorrow, and the next day I have a Developmental Biology midterm, and the day after that, a French midterm. And a Biochemistry lab report. And a quiz. And a French assignment.

This sense of impending doom kind of gives me a feeling of deja-vu. Except last semester it was an organic chemistry exam.

The semester before that, it was a microbiology exam.

And the semester before that, it was a physics exam.

In the end, all three of them weren’t nearly as bad as I expected. The problem is, there are two crucial differences between those exams and my upcoming midterms:

1) I’ve already used up all my brownie points with the Exam Gods.

Last semester, three days before my Organic Chemistry final, I prayed to the Exam Gods to forgive my procrastinating ways and let me pass. I swore that for the rest of my life I would diligently study every single night. I even offered my younger brother as a sacrifice, if they would just show me some mercy and let me pass.

2) All of those other exams were multiple choice.

Whenever I was confronted with a question that was beyond the scope of my last-minute cramming, I could use the process of elimination or the process of closing my eyes and choosing whichever option my pencil lands on.

Both of the upcoming biology midterms, on the other hand, are made up of “long answer” and “thought” questions.

Personally, I think the professors are being unfair with this whole “thought question” business. In order to do well on that kind of test, you actually have to understand the material. You can’t just ingest the textbook and then regurgitate it on the exam.

What the heck are these professors trying to do? Teach us something?

-photo courtesy of purplepick

Five reasons why university is a happy place

For some unexplained reason, lots of high school teachers describe university as a scary place. Sometimes, after assigning a ridiculous amount of homework, they’ll say something like “I’m just getting you ready for university.”

Yeah, sure.

Why not have a bulldozer smash half your house off before a tornado strikes, just so you’ll be “more adjusted to it.” You know, in case it ever happens.

There is a lot of work in university, but here’s the part your high school teachers aren’t telling you: for a million different reasons, university is way better than high school.

Here’s the top five:

5) You set the pace

How much homework do you have in university? To a certain extent, it’s up to you.

On the first day of classes, most professors give out a detailed course syllabus. There’s a list of readings and study questions, which help prepare you for the midterm and the final. In some courses there aren’t any assignments, essays, or research papers- for the whole semester, you’re preparing for two major tests.

Yeah, I know that doesn’t sound like a good thing. It might seem a bit scary to have your entire mark resting on two tests, but it gives you a lot of study flexibility. In university, you’re given lots of tools to succeed: in addition to a detailed schedule of readings, you’re often given study questions and practice quizzes. When you’re preparing for a midterm or exam, you’ll know exactly what you need to do, and you’ll know when you’re ready.

This might sound extremely lame, but in university you’re given a formula for success. There are a certain number of steps you need to take- reading the textbook, doing the study questions, looking over the practice quizzes- and then you’re ready.

4) Bully teachers are a thing of the past

In high school, everything depends on your teacher. It doesn’t matter if you normally love a certain subject: if your grade 12 biology teacher is a bully who decided on the first day of class that she simply doesn’t like your face, or the way you exhale, you’re not going to enjoy biology very much that year.

In university, things are different.

Sure, there are lots of professors who are worth seeking out because of their enthusiasm and engaging teaching style, and there are some professors who should be avoided at all costs because they’re boring, or make it clear they’d rather be anywhere else but standing there in front of 500 first-years.

But unlike in high school, your professor doesn’t determine whether you love or hate school. You’re an anonymous student in a sea of hundreds and hundreds of first-years. It’s never personal.

3) University is a safe-haven for nerds

In university, there’s room for everybody. If you want to party, there are definitely plenty of opportunities available. But if you’d rather study and get good marks, nobody will hold it against you.

2) Four months of summer vacation

May, June, July, August. Seriously, I’m not kidding.

Sure, most of us have part-time jobs year round, and full-time jobs during the summer. But four months away from school is still four months away from school.

1) Three day week? Totally possible.

In high school, you don’t have much control over your schedule. Once you’ve filled in all the mandatory courses, you get to choose between visual arts and music.

University is completely different. Depending on your program, you still have a certain number of mandatory courses. But there’s even wiggle room when it comes to these core courses: you can often choose between a one-hour lecture three times a week, or a three-hour lecture once a week.

And the rest is completely up to you.

University gives you a chance to pursue your interests and passions, with a range of courses spanning dozens of subject areas.

Or, if you’re anything like me, you can score a three day week.

In my first year, I managed to cram all three of my labs and my physics, chemistry and biology courses into a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule.

Of course, university is an opportunity to expand your horizons and challenge your ways of thinking. But why not expand your horizons while maintaining a three day week? Just something to think about.

And in later years, there’s always the possibility of a two day week…

-photo courtesy of dave_mcmt

A “take” is the opposite of a mistake. Did you get that OED people?

In my last post, I urged new undergraduates to avoid some of the mistakes I made in my own undergraduate career. This post relates some of the strategies that served me well — takes, if you will –and should serve you well, too.

1. Study what you love. It sounds a bit trite, I know, but I really was one of those people who followed a dream. I had trouble settling on a major until I happened upon the English and Drama program at the University of Western Ontario where I was studying. By happy circumstance, I got to know some of the senior drama students and that year’s director-in-residence and knew I wanted to be one of them. Many people, no doubt, worried about what was going to become of me with such an artsy major, and my grandfather was recruited to gently urge me on the path towards high school teaching, but I knew that I was learning a lot and when the time came I would somehow end up in a career that let me do what I loved. And here I am. And no, being a professor is not like being a high school teacher, thankfully.

2. Find new, smart friends. In a comment on my previous post, a reader urged me to not to neglect the social aspect of university life, and I certainly agree that social interactions are a key part of the experience. But by “social interactions” I do not mean getting drunk and falling down a flight of stairs every weekend. A university undergraduate is one of the few people for whom it is not unforgivably obnoxious to question everyone about everything. Find people who want to talk about big ideas. Talk about religion, talk about politics. Talk about all the things that you won’t feel comfortable talking about when you are at an office cocktail party ten years later. Many of my ideas about ethics, government, law, and art took shape during raucous, impromptu debates with classmates, roommates, friends — even strangers. For those of you attending your small, local universities, try to find some friends that you weren’t friends with in high school — you’ll be amazed at what other people think.

3. Never underestimate the value of thirty minutes. My roommate and I had a regular TV schedule that had us watching one show from 7:00 to 8:00 and something else at 8:30 (kids, “TV” was a kind of internet that you couldn’t control). In the interval, I would go upstairs and do homework for half an hour. My roommate marveled at this, partly in admiration at my discipline, and partly in incredulity that I thought I could get anything worthwhile done in half an hour. In fact, you can get a lot done in half an hour. You can read a chapter of a textbook, proofread the draft of a short paper, organize your schedule for the coming week. And, in practice, an undergraduate often has a half an hour here and there between classes, before the bus comes, and so on. But I think a lot of people assume that if you only have half an hour, there’s no point in getting to work. Wrong. Find something you can do, and do it. An extra half an hour a day is an extra 84 hours in an academic year, not counting exam periods. That’s more time than all the classes in a full-year course.

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