A teacher's frustration

I am imagine that all teachers have a day like this. I wake up and check my campus e-mail. I am flooded with my research students' next assignment. A research plan. I begin going through them, and none of them, I mean none of them, are complete. The students aren't following the instructions I gave them, they just seemed to turn something in so that they would get credit. So I start thinking "it must have been my explanation...maybe I didn't describe the process well enough." So I go through the day wondering how I could have improved. It is in my self-pitying moments that I open one last student's e-mail and see that that one student has followed the directions correctly. It is a well prepared assignment completely and wholely written. Maybe that one student was listening, or actually took time to read the instructions on the paper I gave all the students. Maybe I are not a failure after all. Ahh...the joys and frustrations of teaching.

But I am not done. I teach a developmental class where everyone has to get a 75% on all the tests. If they don't pass a test, they can retake it until they pass. My mon/wed/fri class has enough flexibility that I can include a few re-take days into my schedule, meaning I can take a class period and make it into a retake test day. Doing this on the first test was close to disatrous. Out of the 10 people who had to re-take the test, maybe 2 passed. None of them had studied before the retake. Seriously people, if you didn't pass it the first time, why don't you study to pass it the second time around? I don't get it. Why do people think that information will magically appear in their brains?

I thought maybe if I instill this principle into their brains, maybe some of them will be prepared by the time I give them the retake for the second test. And some of them did...some tried really hard to be ready. I can tell when they are studying. And even though they didn't necessarily pass even on the second time, at least they were improving and making a valid effort. However some of the other people just didn't even work at it, and those people really drive me nuts. They came into the test, sat down, realized that the information still wasn't there, and turned in almost blank tests.

Maybe it is because I was the kind of person who was not woefully smart. I had to study several hours, and do lots of problems just to do decently on a test. That had to be one of the funniest differences between Jimmy and I. When he told me that he studied the night before he took an exam, I thought "seriously, you haven't been studying for it all week?" He is good at taking tests, and he I am pretty sure he retains things after one run through. I however, required lots of scrap paper, and probably hundreds of problems before I really felt confident about material. That was how my undergraduate career went. I spent most of my college life studying. I admit now, that I may have been a excessive studier. But I won't take back the fact that it did almost always ensure good grades. I say almost because some of my physics tests would have been hard even with the solution set right in front of me. Although it may have cost me a significant social life, I went to a school were drinking was THE activity, and I wasn't interested in that.

Maybe people just don't know how to study. Maybe I am being too critical. Okay, I feel a little bit less angry and little more sympathetic for these people. I guess I just needed to write it down.

Note: I realize for all you exceptional writers out there, that my writing method may be sloppy and not entirely grammatically correct. I try to read through all my posts, but I am not characterized as a good writer. I even go back and read my posts and think "why--this girl can't put together a single correct sentence!" I will try my best to accomodate to your talents.