How is your term going?

[Pancakedayisthebest]

I'm feeling a bit broken! I lost my mojo for teaching in COVID and now feel like I go through the motions. Students are quite challenging, some great participation, others just stare at phones. I'm planning on a device free week at some point to see if they start interacting a bit more.

My mid term feedback comments focused on room size, lighting and the recording equipment failing. So I'll probably be hauled in on final module evals if they're under 4/5 to explain myself and how I will address it next year.

I guess my answers will be to carry a lamp at all times, buy a TARDIS and drop all students hour long voice notes in case they, shock horror, have to resort to listening first time around.

I've just emailed the HoD for the relevant department suggesting, basically, he tell his students to pull their socks up.

This is so irritating. This is exactly the kind of thing that drags down our module evaluation scores, but which is totally out of our control. So academics get penalised for something which is in the remit of the IT people, the central admin people, the estates and buildings people - in other words people who're absolutely lauded as heroes and face zero consequences for their failings.

And don't get me started on how the NSS results that departments have to respond to are dragged down by the Students Union, which receives by far the lowest scores of any category in the survey (around 30-40% in my place) . . .

Help me get out of my funk with my first year group. There's such a bad vibe in the class now. I think the bad vibes pre-date my class and is just the result of poor cohort gelling in the first semester, but the bad vibes are making me dislike them as a group and it's affecting my own attitude towards them in class, thereby reinforcing the general bad vibes. It's a bad vibes vicious circle.

The vast majority of them do no preparation, and while they talk in class, it's coffee shop chat for the most part. I wouldn't mind that so much if they had a harmless attitude, but there's an unpleasant undercurrent of hostility towards the topic, and towards me in particular for no reason really that I can fathom, other than they simply do not buy what I am selling (this is a humanities class, so basically what I am selling is a relatively harmless "hey, lets look at this cool stuff, but we have to read into it, ok"). I know I probably need to crack down and be a bit harder on them, because the nicey-nice approachable persona is not working with them at all, but I feel like that will be the final nail in the coffin of this module. They have an assigment due in by 11.59 today and I can see a grand total of 9 out of 20 submissions, which I think is a good indicator of their engagement and interest tbh.

This term cannot end soon enough.

One more week to go and I’m done teaching for this academic year 😁

Two more weeks for me. I have a mountain of corrections to do though.

Me too!

That's shit, I'm sorry you're experiencing that. I had exactly the same with one of my seminar groups (social sciences) this term. It turned out it was all emanating from two or three students - there was one week when they didn't turn up and the seminar was absolutely wonderful.

Here are some ideas:
a. Throw a surprise test at them - individual, no phones, no conferring. The mark each others, best score get a cheap, pound shop prize.
b. If they do no preparation in advance, get them to read in silence in the session, and then discuss. Tell them you'll keep doing that every single time that they don't prepare in advance, so if they don't want boring seminars then do some pre-reading.
c. Get them to do an activity with no group work so there's no space or time for group coffee shop chats. I have some ideas, happy to DM about them.
d. Put them into groups to discuss things and hover, whenever you hear them launching into coffee shop chat, swoop down on them with a pointed "Everyone okay here, what are you discussing?"

How many submitted their work in the end?

Thanks @KStockHERO - those are great suggestions. I have done (b) - very grumpily, and didn’t seem to make much difference the next week, and (d) - let to much side eyes and smirking, which I KNOW I should not be affected by but yet still am. I will DM you for the (c), thanks!

I think there are similar dynamics at play in terms of ‘Big Personalities’ determining the vibe. There are two guys who positively reek of “worst guy in your creative writing class” energy, and have surrounded themselves with a few adoring acolytes and things are significantly worse when they are there and sitting together. I feel sad for the class though, as genuinely this is usually a fun class and I feel like they are being cheated out of a nice experience. Or cheating themselves out of it, I guess.

As for the assignment - 12/25 by the deadline, and 7 more trickled in over the last week. I will follow up with the non-submitters at the end of the week. I’m usually very flexible on CA submissions but am tempted to hold fast to the two week window in the regulations. I’m going in to mark them today - dreading it, as this is the “critical” one where they have to use a scholarly essay to talk about a concept. Since they can’t be bothered to read 5 pages of critical work for seminars, I’m not sure how they’ll manage a whole article…

I feel your pain re the assignments @medb22

I currently have 110 assignments spread over two classes awaiting correction. All I've done so far is check out the turnitin reports. One of the classes got serious training in academic integrity as part of their induction and yet I am seeing over 40% similarity index in some of them, which probably works out at 20-25% of the content not paraphrased adequately. It's depressing.

Oh no @OchonAgusOchonOh . There was so so much AI in the first batch of CA for this group, and that assignment was a complete gimme - they just had to choose their own case study and answer three basic questions about how it reflected some concepts. So I’m dreading what I’m going to see on this “harder” assignment…

I set a close reading in-class exercise precisely to avoid essays written by AI, but obviously this was taking place on laptops in the classroom, and two people clearly still ran it by AI, which meant I ended up with bits of fairly basic close-reading interspersed with gnomic generalisations from AI on the novels from which the passages had been taken. Groan. I am now going to see everyone individually for feedback purposes, because actually I am significantly under-employed.

Last lecture done. Only 40% of them showed up, which seems to be the pattern nowadays. They had to give an (non-mandatory) group presentation and this morning two of the four groups sent me a message saying they would not present due to anxiety/other assignments due/ unable to meet up with other members.

This is very disappointing and when I asked the students why they said it was because the presentation was not marked... I am not allowed to give a participation mark as that drives up our marks too much apparently .

Next year I will just lecture during all sessions and all the student participation/flipped classroom can go to hell. I also ran several journal clubs to help them with their critical evaluation and even fewer showed up for those sessions.

I was so pissed off with them that I didn't even run the in class feedback session. Lecturing is already not my favourite activity but it's not helped by the poor quality of students (post covid). Plus a lot of them are from a culture where speaking up does not seem to be common...

That is so frustrating.

Re the AI - I require them all to do a screenshot of the relevant pages of each source they use and to highlight which part of the page they used. They include that in an appendix, with next to no extra work for me. It's a bit of extra work for the diligent students and at least eliminates the fake references from AI and for real references forces the less diligent students to find the source and at least skim read it.

All these students sound like they shouldn’t be at university at all. What is the point of them getting £50k+ in debt for this when they can’t even be bothered to read one paper 🫤

maybe we should go back to 20% of students attending uni

Try Ireland. We have so thing like 80% going on to third level. That's all third level, not just uni so would include diplomas etc.

Far smaller fees, though. But, having said that, in relation to @PinkMildred's point, a friend has taught on two of the top-rated creative writing MAs in these islands, one in England, one in Ireland, and many of those students are paying extortionate overseas student fees and still don't do the work, or bring in work to be workshopped on schedule, even though they've travelled from another country precisely to be taught by her (well-known novelist) and the other teachers.

Yes, I know. My point was we have even more students in third level who might be better suited doing something else. There is no way 80% of school leavers are suited to university.

That said, I think even when fees were free in England, we still had a higher percentage going on to third level. Education has always been highly regarded in Ireland. It possibly harks back to the days of the penal laws and hedge schools.

I have a lot of international students and, up until the last few years, they have tended to have very good attendance and engagement. The last few years they have been dreadful. I really don't understand it. They are paying a fortune and really not getting the benefit of it.

Oh, I don't disagree.

Most of my current visiting students are one-semester Erasmus, and are great, but I did teach a summer school of very committed Americans last year. I'm feeling challenged by the differing cultural styles of some nationalities in the MA teaching I am doing. Despite English language stipulations, some don't really seem able to follow what's going on, and are silent in class, so it's difficult to check they understand texts.

Yes. The Chinese students in particular seem to struggle with understanding what is going on. I've had a couple of excellent Chinese students but they had had exceptionally good English. I would say my accent isn't particularly strong or difficult to understand but, like most Irish people, my speech is reasonably fast. I do try and slow it down but that then becomes frustrating for Irish students.

Edited to say my Erasmus students are fabulous this year. Really engaged and interactive.

I have a wonderfully direct Dutch student who looks at the native cohort in a seminar and says 'Why aren't you saying anything?' while I try to conceal laughter behind a hefty copy of the set text.😀

Also in Ireland. We have quite a few American students here, mostly good and engaged, and they tend to write well as a rule, even if they aren’t great on content (lots of them are not from a Humanities background and are taking our courses for interest). Erasmus students are more uneven, and in the last couple of years there’s been a massive increase in non-attendance from them, though they do tend to submit work. We suspect most of them don’t actually move here (accommodation costs are astronomical) and work only from what’s available on the VLE.

Yes, I had a very nice American last year taking one of my modules, as he cheerfully told me, to complete the final credits (some kind of random humanities requirement) to complete his degree in 'forensic science with a minor in marketing'.

Is that for people who want to run their own forensic analysis lab but need to advertise as "Bloodstains R Us. No bloodstain too big or too small!"