In which our genial host rants about his graduate students
Remember how I said my graduate students were sucking the life out of me?
It's only getting worse.
Let me offer you a bit of "dialogue" from my last seminar:
Me: Now here Aquinas appeals again to his crucial distinction between use or exercise and specification. I won't ask you what the distinction is, because the last time I asked a question like that I got burned. [pause] Oh, let me give it a try. What's the distinction between use and specification?
Students: [silence. shifting in chairs. hangdog expressions.]
Me: Oh, that's OK. He just makes that distinction [voice gradually rising in pitch and volume] again and again and again in our reading for today and relies on it crucially in several arguments. I can see why you might have missed it.
Heavy sarcasm is not actually a recommended classroom technique, and I had never resorted to it before in my nearly twenty years of teaching. But I'm running out of ways to impress upon these folks that they are nowhere close to meeting reasonable expectations of graduate students.
Or indeed sentient life forms of any kind.
Labels: The other career
posted by The Postulant @ 7:43 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Well, sometimes a little kick in the behind is appropriate.
This reminds me of a time in one of my courses on Eastern Christianity: Theology, History, and Practice, I tromped into class late--a bad habit of mine in my youth. Now being a favorite student of the Dominican (the Order of Preachers kind) professor, he asked me about our reading for the day by St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. To which I replied, I confess that I haven't done the reading for the day. He moved on without a blink. Now had I lied...made something up...or sat there in silence...I probably would have gotten a sermon.
I'm used to it from my first-semester freshmen, but I can't imagine grad students being so lax.
I'm a libertarian where college is concerned - no coddling if a student shows littler interest. After all, someone is paying good money for the course. It's up to the student, ultimately, to get whatever value s/he places on it. So if your students don't want to do the reading, pop quizzes etc., probably won't help much, esp. in graduate school. I would assume that things like recommendations are worth more than actual course grades, but presumably at the graduate level they all come together. I mean, you're not making them reading Acquinas in the Latin, are you? :-)
RFSJ+
If not, you should be--making them read Aquinas in Latin, that is.
Maybe they all have toothaches. That's been hurting my class participation lately.
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