instructors who complain about students (a rant)
Just like other instructors, I have students who are flaking out right now, whining, complaining, plagiarizing, you name it. But they are a tiny minority. The vast majority of my students are doing their best work of the semester right now. They are coming to class prepared and ready to work. They are coming to my office hours with thoughtful questions. They are emailing me with drafts and asking me to challenge their logic and evidence.
My theory is that instructors-who-complain-about-students don’t actually like students in general. It wouldn’t matter how persistent and devoted a student was, the instructor-who-complains-about-students is going to complain because he/she simply doesn’t enjoy the company of students. Perhaps the instructor-who-complains-about-students would prefer to be working with graduate students rather than undergrads or honors students rather than “regular” students. Or perhaps the instructor-who-complains-about-students would rather be researching than teaching. Whatever the case may be, I doubt that the instructor-who-complains-about-students enjoys interacting with students.
By instructor-who-complains-about-students, I don’t mean the instructor who has an obnoxious case of plagiarism in a class and gripes about that case. I mean the instructor who has an obnoxious case of plagiarism in a class and generalizes his/her anger or frustration with that one case to all students. I gripe about students, but I gripe about particular students who have irritated me in particular ways. I try hard not to generalize from one irritating student incident about all my students.
I’ve noticed that instructors-who-complain-about-students seem to have more plagiarism, more “bad writing,” more slackers, and more complainers in their classes. Or at least that’s what instructors-who-complain-about-students seem to believe. Only those same troublesome students come into my classes and are generally hard-working and good-natured. Every semester, an instructor-who-complains-about-students visits my classroom and comments that a student in my class “is much worse” or “like a different person” in their class. Hmmm, I wonder why.
I find my students, in general, to be interesting, thoughtful, engaged, funny, and hard-working. I enjoy spending time with them, in the classroom and out. I look forward to seeing them, and I suspect that when I enter the classroom, students can tell that I’m happy to be there and I’m happy that they are there. I expect that this makes a difference in how students behave in my classes. I imagine that instructors-who-complain-about-students do not appear happy to be in the classroom, and that their unhappiness is evident to students, who consequently behave like unhappy students.
All of this is a long winded way of getting to the thought that got me started on this blog entry. I had coffee with a former student today and we had a great conversation for an hour, and when I mentioned that I’d had coffee with a former student to another faculty member, s/he said, “What on earth could you talk about for an hour with a 20-something kid?” (I’m not even going to get into how a 20-something person is not a kid.) Well, hmmmm, we talked about politics, the economy, where we grew up, families, the Man, and a whole lot more. And it was good conversation. And I wish I had more time to have conversations like the one I had today with current and former students.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I, too, enjoy my students in the classroom
and out of the classroom. Thanks for writing about this.
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