The Pissed Off Professor

The Pissed Off Professor will be participating in Blog Action Day, and if you have an ounce of intellect, you will too.

New books—new pens—new lunch packs—new folders: ah, the start of a new semester. (These are my new things: I wonder what new things my students will have?)

California has a budget—that makes things a bit easier, but the shuffle, bustle, and confusion of the first and second class meetings are always a challenge.

This semester, we’ve changed to a sixteen-week schedule—down from eighteen weeks in the past. In addition, most classes meet only twice each week. (Until this change, classes were traditionally M-W-F or Tu-Th.)

The sixteen weeks, two-days-per-week schedule is supposed to be a better fit all around: students prefer two-days-per-week classes (as do many instructors), and as impacted as the district is, more classes can now be crammed into the same amount of space.

Fridays are now free to hold one-day-per week classes, and like Saturday courses, these are very popular with working adults—not educationally beneficial in most cases, but popular.

The fewer weeks and days also means class meetings have been extended. Previously, M-W-F courses were 50 minutes in length, and Tu-Th classes were 75 minutes in length. Now, courses are 80 minutes long.

As a teacher, I love this: 50 minutes is far too short to do much good. By the time one takes roll, 5 minutes are gone; wrapping up is another 5 minutes, and that leaves only 40 minutes of class time. It’s tough to cover two things well in that amount of time: especially if one of the things is a reading discussion, but it’s a bit too long to use for just one thing. 75 minutes is better: once the 10 minutes of fluff are excised, it leaves just over an hour of class time.

80 minutes means I have those brains for an hour and ten minutes of scholarship: wow—now that is teaching time.

Of course, one of the things I’ve begun to notice when teaching the 75 minute classes is the issue of failing attention spans: students simply can’t sit still and/or focus for more than about 30 minutes of time. Now, I have to figure out a way to get them to stay with me for longer than ever.

I use all of the teaching tricks: breaking things into smaller units of activity, participation versus lecture, calling on people, etc. These are Band-Aids: the clock watching will inevitably begin after the first 20 minutes has passed, and in most modern classrooms (on my campus, anyway), the clocks almost always face the students not the teachers.

If only I were a hottie.

Like many Californians, I’ve been keeping my eye on the budget standoff—not because it’s a new phenomenon: it happens just about every year—but because of the impact it will have on my upcoming classes.

While sums of money too large to comprehend are spent on political campaigns and blowing people up, and those who refuse to solve the budget problem continue to get paid ridiculous salaries, students who have qualified for a variety of education-based assistance haven’t received their money.

This creates a significant problem for instructors: trying to teach classes with students who may or may not be able to afford their books and supplies. There’s no way to tell who’s telling the truth and who’s lying when it comes to situations like this—well, other than the fact that those who really haven’t yet received their money are far less likely to make this fact known than those who are simply using the unresolved budget as an excuse not to spend their money the way their parents intended and/or they way they should.

And let me tell you: having done this for a number of years, my classes will be filled with students who will claim not to be able to buy what they need because they haven’t received their checks.

The amount allotted to community college students is miniscule (approximately $1,500/year) compared to the amount allotted to students at other types of colleges ($6,000 and up/year), but the difference in these figures reflects the difference in cost to attend a community college versus that to attend other types of schools.

Here’s where it gets really neato: at the community college level, tuition for a year costs about $600, and that’s for a full-time student—a rarity in community college. That means of the $1,500 allotted for the year, only $600 of it is to cover tuition: the rest ($900) is for all that other stuff I mentioned above—you know, the stuff one needs to actually sit in a classroom and be productive.

Most schools have tuition waivers in place to solve part of the problem; however, these waivers do not extend to parking passes, textbook purchases, or minimal school supply fees. This seems foolish to me: if you waive tuition fees for someone but do nothing to deal with what is needed in the classroom, what’s the point?

Here’s my guess: waiving tuition guarantees the school gets its money from the government, but the school does not profit from the other stuff, so the other stuff gets no consideration. Lovely.

• I can’t put my class on hold until the budget gets resolved and checks are received.
• I can’t purchase books and supplies for my students.
• I have made an extra copy of each of my textbooks available for short-term use at the library, but this is something I’ve always done.

Maybe instead of essays, I ought to have my students write nasty-grams to their illustrious California politicians: “leaders” whose college-student children are not wanting for anything, I’m certain.

Until then, I’ll get to listen to all of the excuses—the few that are real and the many that are not—and I’ll have no choice but to go on with the show.

Somehow, the state’s inability to do its work will trickle down to me and my obligation to teach at the pace required to complete the semester, and because I have no control over the situation, I’ll be branded insensitive, and unreasonable, and a variety of other pleasant things by some of my students—and most likely Celia and her colleagues who never have issues because they are so darn perfect—and all alone in my evil, black hole, I’ll just remain Pissed Off.

Last month, Gregory tagged me, and I’ve spent much of the time between then and now debating how I might respond.

First, thanks Gregory: even if you admitted to struggling with the names of blogs to mention, I think it’s cool that of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, [you] walked into mine.

Second, here are the rules of tagging and being tagged:

• Post eight random facts/habits about yourself.
• Tag eight people who should then write their own blog entry about their eight things and post these rules.
• Leave a comment alerting the chosen bloggers they’ve been tagged.

Now, on with the show!

Here are eight (8) random facts about me:

1. While between careers, I seriously considered going to school to become a mortician.
2. As a pre-teen, I was a member of the Sacramento Unicycle Club, and I rode a 6-foot tall unicycle in parades—often I juggled as I rode.
3. I cry whenever I hear Peter, Paul, and Mary sing Puff the Magic Dragon.
4. When I was eighteen, I competed in the Ms. California Golden Bear contest at the California State Fair—it was a women’s body building contest, not a beauty pageant.
5. If I won the lottery, I’d quit teaching to write fulltime and play poker on the side.
6. When I was in my late twenties, I walked on coals.
7. My first grade teacher and I remain friends; in fact, we have the same birthday. For the past 15+ years, we’ve met up on our day and celebrated together. This year, I’ll turn 43, and she’ll turn 79.
8. I have said the perfect thing once in my life: about ten years ago, just before my first Cirque du Soleil experience (Mystère), I was wandering the floor of the Treasure Island Casino when I (literally) bumped into Alex Trebek. With no hesitation, I looked him in the eye and said, “What is, excuse me?” (Fortunately he laughed because his circle of body guards was not in the least amused by my having run into their charge.)

Here are eight (8) blogs I’m tagging; however, I’ve placed them into categories for reasons I think will be clear.

Blogs whose britches are too big to pay attention to a little gnat of a tagger like me:

Wil Wheaton: Yes, he played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the guy found his real calling when he became a writer.

dooce: Among the other really great (and often edgy) things you’ll find here, Heather Armstrong writes a monthly newsletter to her daughter—they are some of the most touching reads around.

Blogs for which the rules of tagging simply won’t fit:

Indexed: little cards—big thoughts, and when Jessica Hagy is on, she is really on.

TwitterLit: Twice each day, Debra posts the first sentence of a book. (Yes, she’s an Amazon affiliate, but how does that diminish such a cool idea?)

Blogs I love that have already been tagged:

red Ravine: This site reminds me of the sub-title of Anne Lamott’s wonderful book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Their tag post is here.

The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing: Sharon Lippincott shares tips, tricks, advice, and experience geared towards discovering who you are and how you got there via lifestory-telling.

Blogs I lurk at and thus cannot really announce “I’ve tagged you”:

Paperback Writer: Beyond having the best name on the Web, this site is filled with great reading—the blog kind and the book kind, and it’s just plain fun to hang around there.

I, Who Can’t, . .Teach: Another teacher telling it like it is, but this one deals with kids—makes it clear to me where some of mine come from.

And there you have it!

From this morning’s AP wire:

California’s budget is again overdue, and education is at the heart of the delay. While one side refuses to allow more cuts in the area of education, the other is demanding more cuts be made. The result: the members of the state legislature are embroiled in a tug-of-war that appeared to have no end nor hope of compromise in sight—until yesterday.

In what will undoubtedly be hailed as the state’s most important decision in education thus far, the California Education Consortium offered to act as non-partisan mediators to the state legislators. Having reviewed the issues presented by each side of the debate, the CEC has awarded control of California’s higher education to RateMyProfessors.com.

Beginning immediately, all aspects of course curriculum, instructional practices, and hiring/firing will be based on the evaluations left online. The CEC has determined the changes in educational quality will be profound and immediate, and it believes the first wave of change will be seen with the upcoming fall semester. Additionally, by relocating administration, peer evaluation, standards-maintenance, and course-overview to the virtual world, the anticipated monetary savings have been described as substantial.

When I read this, I found myself overcome with joy, and for the first time in my life, I had to review my status: after all, I was going to get the chance to go back to high school—where popularity (not substance) ruled!

Here’s a snap shot of what I found on the index page of the site:

I was pleasantly surprised to see that as I read from top to bottom and left to right, the first listings were the hottest professors—as we all know, it’s absolutely essential to education that a student be attracted to his or her instructor.  Fortunately, right next to the hotties were the instructors with the most smiley faces. (I wonder, are those smiles a result of the students being turned on?)

Sadly, I am neither hot by my students’ standards, nor am I overrun by smiley faces.

Here’s what I found about me:

It seems reports of my evil-doings are exaggerated by some readers of this blog. It also seems no one from my summer classes has rung in—sheesh! Last semester, it appears four students had something to say: two bad and two good.

Here are the rest of the pages:

So, of the twenty-two (22) entries, fourteen (14) are “Good Quality” ratings, four (4) are “Average Quality” ratings, and four (4) are “Poor Quality” ratings.

Let’s see if I can manage to do a bit of math: 64% of the reporting students think I’m good; 18% of the reporting students think I’m average; and 18% of the reporting students think I’m poor.

It’s too bad I don’t put any stock in this site given the majority of reports on me are above average—well, except no one reporting thinks I’m hot.