Coping with Whining Students (and Irritated Readers)

As I read the many recent academiblog posts about catching plagiarists, excuses for late papers, students missing finals, etc., it becomes clear that coping with the demands of whining students is most difficult at the end of the semester. 

How can we manage to maintain our grace and good humor in the face of the small but frustrating batch of students whose last-minute demands and lame excuses and have given us headaches? 

This is the topic of my article "Coping with Oy Vey Students," which appeared on Monday in Inside Higher Education. My premise is that we need to find respectful but effective ways of coping with the unreasonable few that cause so much of our frustration as teachers.

I also poke fun of the tactless requests and unbelievable excuses that students concoct. I provide a translation sheet of what a student says and what the professor actually hears.

Usually, students don’t seem to be aware of the off-putting impact of their approach.  Some are surprised when we don't believe that they "really didn't mean to plagiarize."  The students who make outrageous excuses are often immature and egocentric – but they are rarely hopeless - and I counsel patience, empathy and generosity with our verbalized responses.

Inwardly, of course, we can’t help but roll our eyes and sigh.   Oy Vey!

Coping with Oy Vey Students was intended as a light-hearted comment on common frustrations.  But my attempts at humor offended several readers.  I was labelled by a few as insensitive, unprofessional, anti-Semitic, pessimistic, depressing and a disgrace to my profession.  Wow. 

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, since trying to be humorous in a p.c. world is always dicey, shrinks are not supposed to be glib, and people with intense responses are the ones most likely to make comments.

Actually, I'd thought I'd been quite mild -- and I chuckle to imagine what the critical readers would think of some of the rants of Dr. Crazy, Professor Bastard, Seeking Solace, A Gentleman's C, Astroprof and many others ;)

On the other hand (and this is why I like the IHE interactive format so much) many commenters (including the highly critical) have great points.  Some profs share thoughtful ideas about the difficulties faced by both teachers and students.  Some told about elaborate fabrications students used to avoid work. Good management techniques were shared: I especially like the strategy of one professor who said he'd started giving oral make-up exams to students who missed the final and found that such absences dropped by 80%.  Excellent idea, at least for some disciplines, right?

Coping with Oy Vey Students was inspired by the many sad but hilarious stories my blogroll comrades have been posting about students' self-destructive gaffes.  I even linked to specific posts by Adjunct Kate, Dr. Crazy, Stewgad and New Kid. (Unfortunately, the links to Dr. C's rant on student emails, and New Kid's thoughtful post about class participation, appear to have been messed up by IHE.)

Since y'all have been my muses, I'm especially interested in your feedback and further anecdotes.  If you have time to check out the article, I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts and reactions: either here or or at the comments section of IHE.

(BTW New Kid, I thought that your thoughtful response to Mike Sacken was well-put.  And isn't Sherman Dorn's comment funny?)

Comments

[Jane]

I enjoy reading IHE, but rarely read the comments because, no matter how innoculous the article, the comments ALWAYS get very negative very quickly. I'm not sure what it is about IHE that brings these people out of the woodwork in droves.....

I did enjoy your article though, and the stories were priceless!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Yes, I did love Sherman Dorn's comment!

The negative comments frustrate me, because (in relation to this piece) they often seem to smack of a certain self-righteousness: "How COULD you treat/think of students that way! I would NEVER do such things!" What I regret is if students encounter this kind of piece and think it's directed at them, personally - but the students who are offended by this kind of thing (or who are even reading IHE!) are NOT the students that are being described. I know that while I had my issues as a college student (I allowed myself a certain number of cut classes a semester, I wasn't always completely prepared), in general I was one of the good, responsible ones (part of the reason I've ended up in this job), and some of the things that students do would just NEVER have occurred to me to do. It doesn't mean that no one was doing them when I was in college - it's just that it was outside my whole context. For students for whom it *is* outside of their context, these kinds of pieces probably *do* look a little unpleasant. But they just really have no idea what kinds of things students can do.

The other thing that gets me is that no one's making these things up - they happen; but describing specific individual students does NOT suggest the way that profs approach students as a whole.

(And yes, sometimes I'm sure I've dismissed a student as a bad student/slacker when they've been struggling with personal problems - but if I don't know what's going on with them, I don't know what to make of them. Maybe it's negative to assume the worst without other information, but it's hard to avoid entirely.)

Okay, I guess this struck a nerve with me, too... ;-)

[ianqui]

Notice that some of the negative comments were from students. Of course they're going to be defensive.

My general feeling about student behavior is that they need to take responsibility for it, and to the extent possible, they need to forewarn us of it. In the few years I've been teaching, I've come across a few situations where the student was speaking in earnest, and a few where they weren't. This year, since I've put my crisis policy in place, my students have been really proactive. Most of the time their warnings never ended up in a missed or late assignment, but I did appreciate the heads up. And had something come of it, I would've cut them some slack.

Don't worry, Mary. Your regular readers know that your advice is invaluable in our community.

[ianqui]

Sorry, wrong link. THIS is my crisis policy.

[camicao]

Mary- I think your column was great. Remember there's no such thing as bad publicity. Stand by what you wrote. Don't waver inside of yourself about what and how you wrote it. You have your finger on the pulse of what a wide range of faculty think and feel-- how many of your critics have counseled large numbers of faculty? How many of them keep up with the academic blogs, that are so brutally honest? You know what we feel and why. You wrote that column for us. Now these weirdos show up in the IHE thread to make you out to be a bad professor and mentor. They are sticks in the mud. No sense of humor. No sense of what is really going on with most faculty. What you write captures what my colleagues say every day about students, but in much harsher terms. So don't sweat it.

[academic coach]

Well, Camicao, I certainly appreciate your helpful words (and am always glad when you pop back in to our conversations). Of course, part of my post was a trawl for reassurance that Some people found it funny.

As Jane points out, IHE comments are always quite extreme. It is rare for someone to write "well done". Angry disagreement is the norm. I was prepared (intellectually) for the negativity.

However, as New Kid points out, I was sorry that some students took it personally. And I did agree with the student who took task with my quip "I hope the meds kick in quickly." When I started writing about Oy Vey tears I had in mind the kids who cry because they are caught lying or plagiarising. But I didn't make that at all clear.

Even though we do sigh a bit internally when students come to us with difficult emotional problems, because it requires tons of work to deal with such students no matter how empathetic we feel, this was not the issue my article attempts to address.

If the comments from IHE readers were a blind review situation, and I could revise and resubmit, I actually think that I would tweak a few things that would improve the piece and get my points accross more effectively. This is interesting to me, actually. There were only a few comments that seemed off the wall to me (anti-Semitic? for saying Oy Vey? Sheesh, I've lived in NYC where Yiddish is standard english (this gets me in trouble as a shrink down here in the south when my patients don't know from chutzpah, mensch, macher, mishegas, tsoris, kvetch, kvel, schtick, shpilkes, and other phrases extremely useful in the practice of psychotherapy.)

Actually, I've been thinking a lot about responses to criticism... and think I have another relevant IHE article in the works ;)

[Lisa]

Teaching in a professional program has its advantages, and one of those is that I can say to students outright: In the real world, whining does not pay on the workplace. It may pay to whine as a customer, but never, never whine to your boss unless you have just had your hand or leg severed by a piece of office equipment. In my studio class, my title is "Studio Director" and I tell students they are to view me as their boss. That means you can be fired from the studio or not showing up, doing lousy work, screwing around, or wasting my time. Tuition payments ensure you the right to sit your fanny in my class--everything else is different store. Whining about how your boss treats X and Y better than you will make you look like dickhead. Whining that you find the work boring will get you marginalized or fired. Whining that you have too much to do will also get you marginalized or fired. Whining that you feel discriminated against is a risky strategy unless you have a basis for it. Even if you are whining about something that has a good basis in fact, the truth is that work sucks. Being told what to do sucks, too. We are not put in this world for pleasure alone, unless we are Paris Hilton. That's why we get paid to work. Your college work is your training and education and both of those require work and accountability. Suck it up.

For the self-righteous profs who say they'd nevah say such a thing to the little blossoms in their tender care...they aren't doing anybody any favors. It is better to have me tell your work habits are sloppy and your grammar sucks than to have your first boss tell you as she is filling out your severance check. There comes a point when the desire to de-center yourself from the position as "authority" in the classroom, which I think in general is a good idea, becomes self-indulgent and responsibility-shedding. Sometimes you need a kick in the butt, and while I try to run my classes as collaboratively as I can, I remember distinctly that the people who have taught me the most about my profession and about research were not the ones that sugar-coated, avoided confrontation, or decided that expecting me to "participate" was "colonizing." They were the ones that said in some form or another: "I think you can do better than this shit. Don't give me any excuses."

[Analisa Guzman]

Lisa, your comments has given me so much to think about! And I am so happy I read it tonight as I was considering what to do with a "whiny" student who has used just about every single one of the whines on your list and wondering why I feel so bad about it if it is his fault. Thank you! I really needed to read that.

[russianviolets]

Mary, this is brilliant, and for the people who didn't catch the humor, well, there's very little to say. I'm particularly surprised and disappointed that some professor-types would so willfully misunderstand you. It makes me wonder if such naysayers have actually been in a classroom in the past ten years.

See, if we didn't give a shit, we wouldn't get mad; we would be like our colleagues (and we all have them) who leave for the weekend and leaver their "job" on campus. We wouldn't sponsor student clubs, plan outings, or participate on student service committees. We wouldn't answer a thousand stupid e-mails asking the same stupid questions that could be answered with one quick read through the syllabus. We wouldn't extend office hours or read half-baked paper drafts. We wouldn't allow students to revise their work, and we wouldn't expect them to participate or just show up. We would just check out, lecture, do our time, and go home.

But since we don't do this, we get to listen the whines, and we are entitled -- and even expected -- to lash out at the bullshit to which we are subjected by those 5%. Let's be clear; I love what I do, and I adore the 95% who are trying (whether successfully or not) to do the best they can. I will triple my office hours if it means that I can help my students succeed, and I have. But I will not check my standard or curb my expectations for those 5% who, not to put too fine a point on it, are spoiled assholes. Those 5% ruin it for everyone, and that is not something that we should just overlook.

And I firmly believe as well that it is NOT our business to make our students' lives our business, so those who think that we should chase missing students and hold their hands are misguided to say the least. I have a "no excuses" policy, and this eliminates all but the most die-hard excuse-makers. I tell my students that, as adults, I will not ask them to account for their presence or absence but to realize that these presences and absences have consequences, and my syllabus policies are NOT a jumping-off point for negotiation. Most often, it works. In the words of Mike Rose, "Students will float to the mark that you set." I think that students act the way they do because there have been no standards, expectations, or accountability. And if students expect me to stop treating them like adults, they can expect a very long wait. I will not do it.

School is a job like any other, whether they attend that job on a full-time or part-time basis, and I subscribe wholeheartedly to the notion that students are the makers of their own destiny. It is not up to me to do the work for them -- via extra credit, extensions, incompletes, makeup exams, etc. It is up to them. This is what we teach.

Our job is to help students learn both the subjects that we teach as well as how to be participants in the community called life, not to coddle them and encourage the same bullshit that they already know. They've had many years to perfect this, and I call down a hearty "shame on you" to the softy, disengaged professors among us who just shove troublesome students along, indulge and reward the bullshit excuses, and continue to wipe asses. It's not for me.

Much of the negativity indeed came from students, but most of it would have been eliminated had such students simply read your article critically. And therein lies the reason that we vent about students -- too often, they fail to do just that.

We are holding them accountable to standards that adults are expected to meet, and this, I believe, causes the most whining from all of the Peter Pans in the room.

RussianViolets

[ThankGodFinalsAreOver]

Thanks for a great article on "Oy Vey Students." I can't imagine why anybody would find that offensive. I loved it and I really needed it right now! It's nice to know I'm not the only one who is frustrated with students who don't take responsibility for their role in the own grades. I can't tell you how many times I've declared in exasperation this past week, "Oy vey!" Those exact words. I'm totally not kidding. Just a note, I typed in "whiny students" in Google and found more stuff than I could ever read about the topic. Here's a couple of good ones to add to your list: Student- "But I emailed you the assignment! Didn't you get it?" or "I know I failed the exam, but it clearly didn't reflect how well I know the material. Can I do extra credit?" or "I got A's on my other tests. It's not fair that I would get any less in the class just because I failed the final." Ummmm... yeah.... Thank goodness summer is here.