*sighs*

For an ENTIRE week, I posted an OPEN BOOK quiz to be taken AT HOME by my students… because, I truly didn’t want to read weekly essays and took the same amount of points and applied it to four take-home tests.

Should’ve been cake, right?

Hardly.

The majority of my students STILL haven’t taken this quiz yet, and it closes at 11:59:59pm TONIGHT.

And, of those who have taken this quiz (which comes VERBATIM from the text), the class averages are 19/25 and 17/25… only ONE class has a satisfactory score: 22/25.

*sighs*

In my days in college, which weren’t THAT long ago, an open book was a miracle from God. A TAKE HOME open book was golden. If you failed it, you were truly an idiot and didn’t belong in college.

There, I said it. Although, we were sternly warned (with pointed finger and scowly faces) to not try to weed out those who do not belong in college… because hey, this is community college and EVERYONE belongs in college… here.

So, when do we use honesty and forth-rightness in telling some of these students that either they kick it into gear or they go to a technical school.  Let’s face it, we still need people to pump our gas in NJ (which makes us better than nearly every other state because our hands don’t smell like gasoline) and flip burgers (except for a fastfood place my husband and I went to en route to our cousin’s funeral.. robots would have done a better job).

It is NOT my job to tell some doe-eyed kid that they are not college material.  It IS my job to teach them and then assess whether or not they “got” it.  However, as I write their tests today for next week, I am wondering something…

If they can’t PASS a take-home open book quiz, how in the HELL are they going to pass a pen-and-paper test?

I’ve also noticed that thus far, this week, the same 5-6 students are having difficulties accessing or completing this quiz.

Um… ITS A TAKE HOME OPEN BOOK QUIZ.  Really?  Are you going to make this super dramatic?  It’s 17 questions DIRECTLY FROM THE BOOK… I could’ve given some of the people the PAGE numbers and they still would’ve failed.

It’s sad… ya know?

Yesterday, before and after class, the same student was bugging me about one of the questions that I had on the quiz.

He failed without that 1-point question, by the way.  And he is arguing semantics.  Patron and leader, in our perspective of a particular noble who supported navigation is the same thing.  This one individual OPENED the door for western exploration and enabled men such as Columbus, Vespucci, Magellan to show the Old World that there was more to this spinning globe than their egotistical selves and what they deemed “inferior”… Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

So, I told him, numerous times, that I stand by the answer: Prince Henry the Navigator.

I get home, a mere 30 minutes later, and there’s the SAME student writing the question for me in an email, in the event that I’m stupid and had forgotten that he already nagged me twice before without my relenting… to remind me, that if ANY OTHER STUDENT has this question wrong, that perhaps I should revisit it.

My response was:

If anyone’s gotten it wrong, it is because they didn’t read further in the text when it states that Prince Henry founded a Navigation school, gleaned navigational/maritime technology and enabled it to be improved upon… making him the patron and founder of…

Ok, you get the message.

Apparently, he did not.

So… I anticipate an email from an administrator asking me why an angry student is in their office bitching over a 1-point question on a quiz that they miserably failed.

This ridiculous sense of entitlement has been perpetuated.

I’m not saying that I do not make mistakes… however, after I checked the question when he FIRST brought it to my attention, I checked it and it was correct.  Ok, so there ya go… I looked at it and gave him his 30-seconds.  Let’s move on, shall we?

So, I’m DUMBING this test down more than LAST semester… and it pains me as I write this test to admit that if I do not dumb it down, that only a handful of students across the board will actually PASS.

Tho, I do have to say that they are fulfilling their part of the bargain we made… that I give them the notes and we have lengthy classroom discussions, they participate, and I give them an occasional activity in class to do.

Yesterday, by far, was my most productive and informal class since I’ve started at college.  I started to tell them the story of history, throwing processing questions out at them, “Why do you suppose…” and “In what way…” to see if they were getting it.

A small percentage of students began to raise their hands… and I didn’t pick on the hiders because I still don’t know their names… however, I will start calling from the roster next week… they need to earn the participation grade, it’s not a gimme.

———–

I have decided to invest in a netbook so that I can work on my lessons while I have downtime at school, as well as update grades, answer desperate emails, etc.

My school is odd… the adjuncts outnumber the full-time staff 10 to 1.  We have NO lounge.  We have NO desks of our own.  We have NO computer access that is out of the reach of the students (i.e. library).  And, dragging my shit from classroom to bathroom to car to tutoring to classroom to the cafeteria is getting exhausting.  One of the poli sci professors offered two drawers in her file cabinet for any adjuncts who need a place to put their stuff.

The full-timers have a room with cubicles for their offices.  The school must have sensed that the part-timers are getting pissy and put two SUPER SMALL cubicles together for us… with signs saying “Adjunct Computer desks.”  Guess what?  There are NO computers there.

Hmm…

Another adjunct and I have devised an evil plot… we’re going to print two pictures of a computer and TAPE it to the desk.  If nothing else, the other adjuncts will get the joke.  In other words, more likely than not, there never WILL be computers there… OR they will give us the left-over rejects that no one can use because its a POS.

I also noticed a small room used as a lounge.  I asked who it was for.  I was informed that the students are free to study there… but it cannot be used by adjuncts.  So stated the freeholders and board members who are in charge of our school

Are we a hated people?  Shall we wander the hallways for a thousand years like the Jews in the desert?  Or, will someone at some point realize that without us, that cheap school would have NO ONE to teach…

So, in rebellion, I went outside to my car (in a milled parking lot behind the modular classrooms) and had a cigarette… in the no smoking area.

Bite me, she said tongue in cheek.