To expect my students to show a teensy amount of initiative?

[dontrunwithscissors]

I'm an academic in the Humanities. I'm currently teaching a third year class & they're driving me mad. (I work in Scotland so their degree results are based on grades in years 3 and 4.)

In order to make life as 'easy' as possible, the tutorial reading is either available digitally or I provide a photocopy. They're usually expected to read 40-50 pages so hardly a huge amount.

At the start of the semester, I warned them that there had been some issues with the digitisation license and that it was possible that some materials may end up not being available. I also explained that I don't get any notice in situations like this & to let me know straight away if there were any problems.

So, it turns out that the main text for today's class has disappeared from the digitised texts. The only person on the course of 23 students emailed me to tell me at 4pm yesterday. Class is at 10am today. There are 3 students giving class presentations today that's worth 15% of the final grade

AIBU to expect students to have bloody well pulled themself together and 1) attempted to access the reading earlier; 2) highlighted the problem earlier. I'm particularly shocked that none of the people presenting this week figured to ask for it.

I'm pissed off with students being 'babied'. It gets worse by the year. They want everything on a plate and go running to mummy and daddy when they don't get the 2:1 they assume they will get. They can't be arsed to read (keeping in mind that this is a humanities degree so reading widely is a basic requirement.) Ive even had notes from parents explaining that their snowflake should be allowed to submit work late becauSe they're not good at planning or had to go to a wedding...

Apologies for typos. I'm on my phone + on the bus n

I was at uni a few years ago and remember one of the lecturers being really shit - as in, frequently didn't turn up and gave no notice, or left halfway through to pick up his kid from nursery. Clearly couldn't give a shit.

But I also remember a lot of spoonfed snowflakes that thought mumsy and dadsy should be sorting everything out for them - in at least one case, actually writing their essays for them.

I later worked in a uni and dealt with special circumstances. There was one that applied because she'd had a raging hangover - she'd gotten drunk the night before the exam 'to calm her nerves', and another that struck me as a grief tourist - she wanted special circs because someone she knew slightly from the pub had died. I couldn't work with that!

Marina Warner has it: the real problem in universities isn't students, it's the philistinism of managerial culture. This sets an attitude that poisons everything that used to be good about higher education.

YANBU. Definitely absolutely not.

Students today are often needy, whining, and entitled, egged on by parents demanding their "rights" because they "pay for it."

They should have been preparing for the seminar and doing the reading at least 6 days beforehand - that is, straight after the previous seminar, if not earlier. Scheduling reading less than 24 hours before the seminar is not only bad planning, it is bad for their learning - no time to read, think, reflect, and learn.

Gosh, in my day, no digitisation - 1 or 2 copies of each book to read in Short Loans/Express Loans, with a 3 hour loan period and 50 other students wanting it!

Hell, we actually bought books. The ultimate radicals!

I think you are within your rights to have a serious talk with your seminar group - why were they so ill-prepared? Why weren't they planning their reading more methodically? Why were they leaving it to the last moment? Why weren't they looking for alternative reading in the Library?

They need to know that their approach to their own education is unacceptable - or rather, they can choose to be chaotic & unprepared, and then they can take the consequences. I tend to ask students who are not prepared to leave the seminar for that session. Those are the consequences.

But you don't know when the text disappeared? Isn't it possible that some of them printed it off before it disappeared? I mean I'm sure they didn't all do that but you might as well give the presenters at least the benefit of the doubt before assuming they are without exception lazy good for nothings?!

I can think of many many students who absolutely don't fit that description shove and to say that most of us don't have outside passions or a spark or that we're basically a notch above brain dead is just insulting. Most adults in my family, so a different generation to mine, have been to uni and their experiences don't sound that different, except that nowadays we do more travelling. If anything theirs sounded more coddled because they had so many more contact hours & weren't expected to dig for themselves. My mum is horrified at how few hours I have and finds it strange how much independent work you need to do to get even the minimum.

(I mean I'm not disputing the general argument about students being babied / lazy as you and lots of other posters know much more about it than I do but just wonder whether the specific students here might possibly be unfairly maligned!)

Students always get a really rough time on here. It strikes me as fairly rude sometimes.

You never hear nice stories about the students who run societies, do RAG week, get involved in open days etc etc and then get up at 6 to go to the library & search for internships (which I can tell you do take effort to get hold of). Maybe people at my uni are uncommonly focused and special? No, I don't think so - it's just that among students, like with any other group of the population, there are lazy and driven people.

With respect, velour, might I point you to the usual MIL-related response? Which is that people who adore their MILs don't tend to come on to post about them, only those experiencing problems. There would be no reason to come on and post about your good students, who are getting on with things, running stuff, getting decent work in on time, not getting their parents to attend office hours and query their grades. I appreciate them, of course I do. In fact, as this semester (after a colleague retired with ill health and another is off longterm sick) I have inherited a number of extra classes, the good students are what keep me going. You are appreciated.

And yes, of course, to what Maud (and Marina) say. Management at my current institution is particularly terrible, concerned with 'growing the brand' abroad, while instituting a culture of extreme surveillance hedged around with disciplinary measures for academics. Members of my department are quitting in significant numbers, and two who left last year in their early 50s aren't moving on to other academic jobs - they've quit the whole field.

I'm a relatively new academic. I've heard stories of parents ringing up lecturers about their snowflake. How can anyone possibly think that's appropriate?!? I'd laugh down the phone. And probably get in trouble for it. Honestly, I'm only 10 years older than my students and the difference in maturity of 18 year olds is astounding. I don't know what's happened. What has happened?!? Trying to imagine my 18 year old self telling my mother to ring up my lecturer and complain. It's like something from a bad farce. My mother had only the vaguest, politely sanitised idea of what I got up to at 18, when I was on the other side of the country at university - surely that's normal!?!

• Caveat. I'm not talking about all of them. There are plenty of very nice, sane, independent young people at college too.

There were never many more contact hours in humanities, velour. 7/8 hours a week has been standard in my subject for decades. Students need time to read, and think, and read a bit more, and think a bit more.

Independent learning is what higher education should be about.

they are so very, very docile nowadays too, with little spark of radicalism or rebellion or even of the kind of creativity that says 'I'm going to do OK in my degree, but develop a real forte in drama/music/art'. In some cases, as you say, they don't even seem to be able to manage basic tasks any more. Yet all of this doesn't seem to come with some enjoyment of laziness, or some wider, enriched experience where they are trading their degree grade against a passion for drama or creative writing or art. In fact, many of them seem almost pathologically anxious

shoveteholly this is one of the best things about students/universities I've read. Thanks for pinning so succinctly what I see each day.

Look, most students are hard-working, entrepreneurial (yes, even Arts students!) and clever. A lot of them - most of them - are genuinely bright & curious, and lovely people. But they've been examined to within in inch of their lives, and I also get the feeling a lot of them carry their parents' burdens of expectations, and/or sense of entitlement. I teach in an RG, and the causal relationship between economic advantage and educational achievement is often very clear.

But with all but the brightest and/or most mature, the sense of dependence and neediness is sky-high. Not helped by some of parental attitudes I often see here on MN, I'm afraid to say: over-invested parents, who talk about their child's education in first person plural ...

that is a good point Cotton and I'm not sure why I'm getting so het up about this thread. But the tone of the thread is very much "all students are this" as a blanket judgement, would be easy to pop in some positive anecdotes.

ABeta…I was being a little bit facetious and trolling in my original flippant remark.

I studied engineering at a good old fashioned red brick, graduated in 1998.

There was an expectation on my course that new undergrads would not need spoon feeding or constant prodding with a pole, if you failed to hand in a report or assignment you would fail that particular module of work, if you failed to attend a lab, lectures or tutorials after an initial absence warning the university would notify your local authority to inform them that you were a lazy sod. Don’t get me wrong, if you struggled with understanding something they would be awesome in terms of getting you back on track, but you had to meet them halfway. Like you I remember lecturers swanning into a room and spending 90 minutes belting out theory and formulas on a board and you having to jot down everything in time before the board got wiped clean. No nice ready made handouts. You had maybe 5 mins between lectures to grab a coffee before another barrage of note taking, my brain was mush at the end of the day.

It is sad to hear your experiences of engineering students these days being a bit crap. One thing I thought that discipline taught you was strong analytical abilities and the skills to articulate your findings into a concise coherent report.

I think I was just jealous of people studying humanities as they all seemed to have about 5 hours a week of lectures and they were mostly attractive young women.

My parents had no idea what I was up to at University and had no input into where I went or where I studied. I even drove myself to open days. This was 25 years ago.

I am always shocked by the number of parents on here determined to 'manage' their child's university career. I do suppose it is because they are paying for it.

Having said that I fully support tuition fees and think that fewer kids should go to University.

velourvoyager Yes OK - but sometimes it's hard to remember the good students when we are judged on things such as a student comment in a course questionnaire a friend of mine told me she received (she teaches at a vair naice university) that she was patronising the students by mentioning in lectures books they hadn't read.

Ummm... yes, and the point of a History degree is ?

Academics' career progression can be based on immature & ignorant responses such as those.

Maud yes humanities are special, that is true, so re: my parents' degrees it is different to my case, but my grandmother took culture/politics type classes at Sciences Po & had many more hours than I do. anyway, I take your point that we're not necessarily stretched more than my parents' generation was, but I certainly don't think we're stretched significantly less, here in the UK at least.

I agree that fewer people should go to university, and that there are plenty of other worthwhile things for 18 year olds to be doing. Not everyone is cut out for academia, and there should be absolutely no shame in that.

However, tuition fees is not the way to lower numbers. On the contrary, the more institutions charge, the more managerial boards manipulate standards to increase intake, particularly for foreign students who pay more and often don't have the requisite English skills. It's just bad for everyone. In my ideal world, there would be no fees, much more rigorous entry criteria, and proper advisory channels for 16/17 year olds with realistic options presented.

Having said that I fully support tuition fees and think that fewer kids should go to University

Problem is, that the ones missing out/who would miss out are the children of poor parents, non-HE educated parents, children in care, and mature age students. Possibly, those that would miss out are those who most need to go to university. And whom we, as a society, most need to be educated.

Education - just for itself alone - is a public, social good. I'm with von Humboldt all the way on this.

But those being educated, at taxpayers' expense (because we're all still paying at the moment) should remember all the time, that a university education is a rare privilege, and one they should be grateful for (to their society). It should not be wasted. Too many of them waste the opportunity .

But as shovetheholly says, they are educated into an instrumentalist approach to their own self-development (education), and see doing courses as a route simply to getting marks. It's cart before horse.

The problem as I see it is extra tuition during GCSEs and A levels so they get the grades. It's a road I'm glad I didn't go down. My dd2 choose the university of her choice and continues to do well, fingers crossed. She got her library card immediately, because her degree demands a lot of reading and research. And the pre visit did stress this was a absolute requirement.

A friend's daughter, whose dregree also demanded reading and research, didn't join the library until her second year. She was tutored for her A levels and relied entirely on bought books and Kindle throughout her university. She now wants employment that demands vigorous research skills...

In my ideal world, there would be no fees, much more rigorous entry criteria, and proper advisory channels for 16/17 year olds with realistic options presented

Can I join you in that Utopia?

And for those asking about contact hours in current Humanities courses, why is the Oxbridge model never used as an example of a very high quality education, with very few required contact hours? Our students really do "read" for their degrees in humanities.

Pan - I suspected you were being facetious.

Glad to see you had the full rigour of a proper university course.

One of our lecturers didn't go to the trouble of writing on the board but literally skimmed pre written acetate slides over the OHP faster than she could talk. She was infamous for the incomprehensibility of her lectures as well as her stern demeanour during practical classes.

I once watched her dispatching guinea pigs during a practical class and draining their blood before their hearts had ceased to beat. Woe betide any student who failed to hold their test tube still enough or arrived a moment too late to catch the precious fluid coursing from the neck of the unfortunate beast.

No hand holding there.

I think it is worth re iterating what a pp said - current school exams positively punish initiative, and given the stresses teachers face are you going to ask them not to teach their students how to pass exams?

Also comparing sciences and the arts is a bit unfair. In my third year I had 4 hours of contact time a week, and was given nothing. I also had to find all my own my texts from the reading list and read around. The science students I knew had at least 4 hours every single day and much more given to them, not just text, but equipment and so on. I know I had access to the journals etc, but so did they. It did feel unfair. Now it's 9 grand a year, it's not unreasonable for students to want to feel it's worth their money.

I'm not saying there isn't a good point here, I teach MA students and see this all the time. Just that the context is not irrelevant.

Andfaraway A history degree a Manchester Uni can land you a post graduate career starting at £45,000 (doing law).

That should be University of Manchester.

A history degree a Manchester Uni can land you a post graduate career starting at £45,000

I imagine that you might have people in Law telling you to read books you haven't read before

I graduated from a redbrick last year (humanities degree).

I never turned up to lectures/seminars or did the reading and came out the other end with a high 2:1.

I just didn't see the point of doing a reading that would let benefit my essay?