r/Professors

I get a lot of dual enrollment students in my summer course so I am often the one who gets to introduce them to college. The first person to hold them to deadlines and take an actual late penalty. The first person who doesn't accept "I was confused" as a reason why a student thinks they should be permitted a re-do on an assignment they half-completed after not asking a single clarifying question about it. Etc. But the ones that make me chuckle the most are the moments where I get to be the first person to break it to students that we can see what they access in the course on our end.

So, no, dear student who has accessed the course 9 times since last Friday: you don't get an extension on last night's assignment since you "just opened the course for the first time today." Aside from the fact that - even if that were true - you signed up for the course and that's on you to log in for the first time prior to 5 days into the course. But more importantly, here is a screen shot of your user history that shows that you opened that exact assignment 4 different times over the last week. Welcome to college.

Hey professors,

So, to help me get tenure, I was told I need to do more campus service. So, because of that, I am now on a bunch of hiring committees across campus; our university always has at least one person from an outside department. Joy.

As we are sorting through resumes for some summer hires, I am seeing SO many PhDs from Liberty, Walden, etc. Mostly received it online and are associated with whatever industry they supposedly come from.

While I am not going to bash someone's degree, not all degrees across academia are made the same—degree mill or otherwise. But some of these Liberty PhDs come in with like no teaching experience and minimal, and frankly, basic research presentations or publications.

I've asked if this is common to receive this many from these sorts of programs, and a handful of colleagues have mentioned an uptick.

Well, on one of the committees, there is a push to interview on campus someone who got their master's at Walden and a PhD from Liberty.

I am really against. I cannot fathom I would vote for them, and do not want to waste their time.

Thoughts? Are you seeing applications from these programs?

EDIT: And if there are people on the faculty with these degrees, I am sorry! I am just unaware of people from these programs involved with higher education robustly.

Hey folks,

I’m a new Ph.D. grad and landed a tenure-track job in August. My Ph.D. was at an R1 and I knew that I did not want that environment at my job, so I’m at a great teaching university. I’ve taught for eight semesters across three different schools (R2, R1, T1), so the teaching is no problem. Did some service in my Ph.D. and plenty of research.

While I have a summer to prep, what are some things to work on and be prepared for in my first year? Any tips, tricks or pitfalls I should know about?

I wanna see more professor memes to get me through all my duties. I promise we will will post them in proper APA style.

Edit: Errata: thank you for all the wonderful memes it made my night

Tenured, I luckily just have to look at my evals to make sure the numbers aren't crazy low or anything. (If they were, I might have to include a sentence or two of explanation in my annual report thingy. "I tried X, it didn't work, in the future I'll do Y.") So, mostly I focus on teaching well and being fair to all students and to the world that will receive them. (Though I don't do stupid things to alienate students on purpose.) Anyway, I can confirm not caring much about the student satisfaction scores can actually increase your scores. They've gone up since I've gotten tenure and relaxed. I think I do better when not nervous. I can also confirm that typically the higher the average grade in the course, the higher the average student satisfaction score. Honestly that's the best predictor.

Just doing my part to add some positivity to the world and this sub...(Next I'm yelling at the sky about ChatGPT forcing me to change how I teach, but you don't have to listen to that...)

This past academic year was my 15th year of college teaching (21st if I count being a GTA). Despite years of excellent evaluations and even a teaching award, I’ve never felt so defeated with teaching after this past semester. A significant portion of students seem annoyed to be there. They frequently skip class, the ones who attended often didn’t take notes during lecture or participate in class discussions, they were “whatever” about exams and projects, and somehow it was all my fault when they earned low grades. (OK, not really my fault, but that’s what the vibe felt like).

I honestly don’t know what to do going forward. Continuing teaching the way I am now isn’t going to serve the students or me well. Going draconian on attendance and late work policies seems likely to produce more whining and resentment. And I can’t dumb my class content down anymore than I have already. It’s a a catch-22.

Does anyone have any words of wisdom on how I get through this? I’m in my mid 40s and at least 15 years from retirement I’m also in a blue state with a growing population, so changing universities (which is hard to begin with in my field) could easily be out of the pot and into the frying pan.

Have any other female professors experienced an increase in bullying from male students? It’s happening with more frequency every semester. It’s insulting and I wish admin would address it. Has anyone’s admin addressed the problem? I suspect that the online manosphere culture is the culprit. I’m getting to the point where if it happens again, I am going to regret my actions. I fill out incident reports on every instance, but it doesn’t seem to be taken as seriously as it should.

Burner for obvious reasons. Evaluating applications for faculty positions. Come on folks, at least just read the application and make sure that your materials are to the right department. Or for the right position. On one hand, it makes my job easier to eliminate your application, but damn- seems like the bare minimum.

"Hi Class, This is my last announcement for the semester and it was very nice working with you! All assignments have been graded and recorded on Canvas and final grades are now being processed.

I wish you an awesome summer and be safe!"

Translation; it was nice working with most of you, not all and I am sooo done, my eyes will pop out soon and I need tylenol and please leave me alone!😂😂

Hi, just curious others’ opinions on this.

When I schedule a meeting via Zoom etc, I typically overbook the meeting. If I think it’ll be a half hour, I block off a whole hour. Is this rude?

I personally have not found a more consistent high in the professional world than having a meeting be significantly shorter than I anticipated and having an unexpected 30-40 minute window of time.

I realized recently this might not be a universal sentiment and maybe I should try harder to schedule short meetings from the beginning lol. I’m sure I’ve had colleagues think “what are we possibly going to talk about for an hour?”

Edit: clarifying language

Welcome to a new week of weekly discussion! Continuing this week, we're going to have Wholesome Wednesdays, Fuck this Fridays, and (small) Success Sundays.

As has been mentioned, these should be considered additions to the regular discussions, not replacements. So use them, ignore them, or start you own Fantastic Friday counter thread.

This thread is to share your frustrations, small or large, that make you want to say, well, “Fuck This”. But on Friday. There will be no tone policing, at least by me, so if you think it belongs here and want to post, have at it!

Hi all,

I’m a relatively new adjunct prof (teaching ENG 201) at a SLAC. I’ve heard lots of rumblings about pushing more group work based learning over exhaustive lectures.

Which approach do you fine is most effective? I already include small break out discussions where I have them grapple with questions, and present their findings/examples to the class, but I don’t know how to include more active learning, without cutting into my lecture time. I’m trying to hold the line, as I believe taking notes and synthesizing the material is a skill they have to learn as well.

I’m open to any advice - I’m willing to change my approach if it will help students, but I’m not sure pushing more active learning is the way to help these kiddos. Thanks.

R01 resubmission is two weeks out, the science was done, the aims were done, and the weekend still got eaten by editing line items and rewording the same equipment description four times because NIH wants one framing and my pre-award office wants another... plus a solid hour figuring out where a $4k software license should be filed

A colleague last cycle got returned without review because his budget listed effort in calendar months in one place and percent in another, so six months of work came back over formatting, not rejected but returned which is somehow worse.

The maddening part is that NSF doesn't want what NIH wants, Horizon Europe is a different beast, and DOE has its own thing, so every one of them could be a template with checkboxes and instead it's a folk tradition passed PI to PI..

Two questions:

How many hours per submission are you spending on budget justification?

Second, do you have a system you'd share, like a template, a trained grad student, or a friend in pre-award you bribe with coffee??

Drop in comments or DM me, i'm happy to trade what i have for yours

And if you've ever been returned over a budget formatting issue please tell me which agency and what went wrong, because i want to know if this is an NIH problem, everyone problem, or me problem

As a student, I always preferred lecture-based courses. As a professor, I tend to default to a dynamic lecturing style that incorporates elements of active learning (namely clicker questions, involving the class in derivations, and giving them practice problems after showing them an example). However, my current department heavily emphasizes groupwork and student-led discovery with minimal direct instruction. I suspect my approach isn't quite up to their standard.

I'm aware that research suggests active classrooms lead to better learning outcomes, so I'm willing to adjust my teaching style if it would benefit my students. That said, I do have a few concerns. I'll number them for convenience (a tl;dr version follows):

1. Most of my students are only taking my class because it's a graduation requirement. In other words, they do not have the intrinsic motivation to engage in discovery-based learning (unlike students in upper-division courses, who self-select into the field). It seems to me that many active learning exercises are designed with the assumption that each student cares about learning, and that's simply not the reality.
2. There's a set amount of material my course needs to cover, and I only have so many hours with my students. Activities take longer than lecture. How do you get through everything you need to cover in the allotted time?
3. Many aspects of active learning rely on group discussions or peer instruction — which strikes me as the blind leading the blind, especially if low-performing or low-motivation students end up in a group together. What if this results in key concepts being learned incorrectly? How far down the wrong path are you willing to let students go before you step in and redirect them?
4. Speaking from my own experience as an autistic person, active/collaborative learning poses special challenges for students who are introverted, neurodivergent, or both. For some of these students, navigating the social dynamics of groupwork can be cognitively taxing to the point where they can't fully process what they're supposed to be doing, let alone gain any valuable insights.

tl;dr:

1. The active learning paradigm assumes students are invested in learning. Many aren't.
2. Activities take up more time than lecture, and class time is limited.
3. Novices trying to learn from each other might lead to misconceptions becoming engrained.
4. Groupwork (the cornerstone of many active-learning frameworks) can be counterproductive and exclusionary to neurodivergent students or those who work best on their own.

If anything I've written seems confrontational, please know it's not meant that way. I genuinely want to provide my students with the best possible learning experience, and I'm open to the possibility that the way I've been teaching isn't that. I look forward to reading your comments.

Like many of you, I suspect, I spend a lot of my time reading, annotating, and commenting on documents. I'm increasingly tired of sitting in front of a computer or laptop, and my Surface Pro is just a little heavy for spending an hour or more annotating document files with a stylus. There are lightweight e-readers out with scribing functionality, but I don't know if any of them work well for academic use cases. I don't care about using it as a Kindle or drawing landscapes...I just want to annotate and mark up manuscripts and assignments so that I can turn those back over to a colleague or my students with the annotations intact.

Do any of you use a device like that that you're happy with? TIA.

I just wanted to share the news that as of today, I have tenure!

Not a lot of people in my life really get it, and it feels like a great accomplishment after years of work--despite my state working as hard as they can to make tenure meaningless. I'm ecstatic, and feel great going into my first summer not teaching in years, and I'm excited to come back in the fall and continue doing great things with my students, who are wonderful. Hopefully this provides a break from ridiculous student AI stories.

faced with an assignment that is clearly not a student's own work. the research citations are real, but the connecting prose reads exactly like a machine trying to hit a word

quota. our university provided tool just outputs a broad percentage score, which is completelyuseless and borderline irresponsible to use as definitive proof in a disciplinary hearing. how areyour departments updating their academic integrity frameworks to handle heavily edited or mixed synthetic submissions?

I had several students this semester that were failing miserably. After the second midterm, I sent an email saying, “tomorrow is the deadline to withdraw with a ‘W’.” Not one of them withdrew and not one came to class again.

WTF?!?🤬

Lately the graduate students coming into the department are drastically lower in quality than even five years ago. I realize this is a symptom of the larger issues we’ve seen in undergraduate classes (COVID, AI, US education system). However these graduate students coming into our department interview well, come with good letters of recommendation, and fantastic CVs. However, when they start it quickly becomes apparent their qualifications are exaggerated or straight up lies. They struggle with very basic tasks and in many cases take any criticism as a personal attack. The causes of these things aside I am struggling to come up with a reliable method to tease out quality students from those that can lie well or use AI help during the application phase. I have thought about extended interview periods, having them zoom in to lab meeting, contributing to paper discussions, inviting them for additional visits outside department recruitment events to observe them in lab/field. However, this feels excessive (maybe I’m wrong) and potentially unfair to the prospectives. So I am turning to you for advice. How have you all adjusted your recruitment techniques? Thanks