The Pissed Off Professor

I’ll be honest: sometimes, a student dropping a class is a blessing. Other times, it is an event that passes unnoticed.

Yesterday, a good student dropped one of my classes, and losing a good student is an almost irreplaceable loss: they add to discussions; they motivate other students; the make doing what I do worth it.

This is the third good student I’ve lost this semester. (The first two were casualties of too many classes and too little time, and one of the first two has already registered in my summer session course, so all is not lost.)

At this point in the semester, the dynamic of a class is basically set, and there is a balance that begins to build inside the classroom. Once built, the classroom dynamic is a living thing: losing a student who is part of this living thing is like lopping off a limb. This student’s leaving is going to diminish everything about the remaining weeks of this course.

This student is so special, she came to class to tell me she was leaving and to assure me that it was not about me or my teaching. She must have said “I really like you and the way you teach” a dozen times in the two minutes she spoke to me. (This was a plus: when a good student leaves, I generally do think it is my fault.) Once she said her goodbyes to the rest of the students, out the door she walked having unwittingly taken a bit of the classroom’s soul with her.

Later that night, as I was walking out, I saw the student in question walking out of an adjoining classroom. With her was another English teacher, and both of them wore looks of guilt as they saw me see them.

The other teacher scurried off, but my now-ex student stopped to talk to me once again. The conversation we had outlined her reasons for leaving my class and joining another. Basically, the other instructor “doesn’t care about grammar and punctuation and MLA like [I] do, and he takes late work.” I readily admitted to her how inviting a situation like that sounded, and I went on to point out that the other instructor’s ignoring the basics of writing and formatting and deadlines did not diminish their value.

She clearly understood, and again, she expressed to me (in all sincerity) how much she liked my class and my teaching, and “if [she] had the time to really focus on her classes she’d definitely take [my] course.” Unfortunately, “[she is] just too busy to do a bunch of reading a writing right now.”

I assure you, this is a good student—a student to whom I had no idea what to say. I am not angry with her (the other teacher is another matter), but I am angry and frustrated and at a loss—literally and figuratively.

Here is a good student making a terrible choice. Here is an example of how upside down our educational system is. Here is another reason I am Pissed Off.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Argument, College, Education, English, Students, Teaching, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.