Nice One

The tests are graded, but I've barely noticed most of them, beyond recording their grades as the usual garbage.  That stupid wench has been consuming my attention in this class, and it is unacceptable.  I will put a stop to this.

She showed up to class dressed up like some ridiculous nightmarish clown.  Pinks and blacks and purples with rings and straps and dangling bits.  It was an outfit that should be restricted to dark nightclubs in out of the way places frequently raided by police.  Definitely not appropriate for the middle of the day, especially the day of an exam.  I can only assume she wore this because she would be going home to her family that day, the day before Thanksgiving, and wanted to shock them with her crazy ways.  Sure, because dressing in a way not unlike rebels from thirty or more years ago, only cuted up, is a way to be edgy.

I've been seeing students do their best to dress like idiots for years.  This shouldn't have bothered me.  But she came in to the room and smiled and waved at me, as though we were friends or something.  She probably is the type of person to tearfully hug all of her teachers at the end of the semester.  During the test, she made the most ridiculous faces, frowning, smiling, looking off thoughtfully, contorting them all in a cartoon-like fashion. It was distracting.  Thankfully she had her usual spot in the back of the room, so she didn't disturb too much of the class.

At one point she turned a page in the test, scribbled for a bit, then looked up at me.  She looked serious for just a brief moment, then smiled and nodded.  What sort of inside joke does she think she shares with me?  Does she think she's somehow bonded with me over the course of the semester?  She is nothing to me but an insect I can't wait to crush underfoot.

She did not finish first out of the class.  Instead, she seemed to wait until her friends were mostly done.  I watched them for any sign of cheating, but saw nothing.  They each had substantially different tests, so any copying would be painfully obvious.

When she finally handed in her test, she smiled and thanked me.  What is with this sudden friendliness?  I looked down at her exam.  Like her homework, the cover page was littered with pictures of butterflies and fairies.  I flipped through the test and saw unicorns and rainbows and other wastes of time.  She apparently felt she had plenty of time to not only complete the test, but doodle multiple pictures on every single page.

Her whole test was far and away more difficult than any other test in the pile, but there was one problem in the middle that was especially nasty.  It was an implicit differentiation problem involving finding tangent lines at a point of multiple self-intersections.  Beneath the problem, before her solution, she wrote, "Nice one."  What is this?  Does this think she can critique my work?  What arrogance.

This has to stop, now.  Rather than giving her her test back, I'm going to call her into my office to discuss it.  She will most likely expect me to chastise her about her doodles in the exam, but I will show her worse than that earlier student.  I will destroy her, and she will no longer be a thorn in my flesh.  I will be rid of her.

Thanksgiving

It is the day before Thanksgiving, so of course I am giving an exam today in calculus.  How could I pass up an opportunity like that?  One or two students approached me, asking if they could take the test early (or even better, late) because they "had" to schedule flights home that conflicted with class.  Naturally my response was to tell them that I suppose they "had" to drop the class, since they were missing a test with an inadequate excuse for doing so.

It gave me great joy that one of these students was in fact one of the five miscreants surrounding the imp, Lindsay Johnson.  This year I will be giving thanks that I will no longer have to suffer through Paul Moreno try unsuccessfully make a joke in the middle of class.  Not even his friends could bring themselves to laugh at them out of pity.  Pathetic.

With any luck, more of them will be culled after this test.  I have my guesses as to which ones, as I have been studying their homework as it passes through my hands after the grader has dealt with it.  I have constructed custom tests designed to hit their weaknesses, while looking like mild variants on the two versions the rest of the class will be getting.

The most likely to drop?  Nathan Thompson.  His homework appears to be fairly blatantly copied from Lindsay's.  It's not surprising.  He spends most of class making puppy dog faces at Lindsay.  I doubt she notices, or cares if she does indeed notice.  His pathetic performance on the first test shows that he doesn't make much of an attempt to absorb anything as he does copy.

Beyond that, the next most likely to drop will be Kim Sun.  I get the impression that she could potentially do well, if only she had unlimited time to do everything.  Her homework is meticulously written, a stark contrast to Lindsay's.  Unfortunately for her, when examining her tests, this meticulousness translates to incredibly slow performance.  I believe she left almost a third of the first test blank.  What was there was done well, but that's not nearly enough to succeed.

With any luck, not long after Thanksgiving both of these will be gone, and my life will be quieter and happier.

That brings us to the last two.  Scott Castilleja is difficult to judge.  Like the others, his homework all seems to be based off the same template, which I have come to suspect is Lindsay's.  However, he seems to have a brain on his head, evidenced by his decent performance on the first test and his ability to write his work relatively cleanly and correctly on his homework of his own volition.

Ordinarily, these things would make me suspect he was the main source of intelligence of the group, and all the information disseminated from there.  After all, Lindsay's homework is so sloppy, so messy.  Girls tend to have somewhat better handwriting and organization than boys, but not this one.  Her work will wander all over the page, interspersed with doodles of flowers and cats and nonsense of that sort.

And yet...and yet...her first exam was by far the best of the class, despite the sloppiness.  Worse than that, among this sloppiness, I have seen actual insight.  Some of the techniques and tricks she has used in solving problems have been interesting, more than I would like to admit.  These quirks I have seen pop up on the homework of everyone in the group, but only on her test.  If she weren't such an irritation presence, I would be tempted to put her on the path to greater things.

But I have a duty.  I have been charged with finding talent where I can, even if it is in such an unlikely place.  She will get a very special test.  One that should crush her spirit and her hopes.  If she can survive, she may earn my respect.  Though I think I will need to find a way to temper her indulgences.

Science = Men in white coats

Late last week, Albert Einstein was brought up in the course of class.  I guess it's not too surprising.  After all, he's arguably the most well known intelligent person of the modern age.  At least to people who have no connection whatsoever to intellectual pursuits, or thinking in general.  Unfortunately, he was brought up because a student tried to say he was a famous mathematician.

I corrected them, saying that he was not a mathematician, but a physicist.  The student responded by saying, "Aren't those the same thing?"

I should have let it go.  I should have told myself that surely they were making a simple mistake.  After all, especially historically, physics and mathematics have been very closely intertwined, and some of the best physicists have done great work in mathematics and vice versa.

But no, I wanted to try to educate this poor creature and said, "Those are not the same thing.  That would be like saying a biologist and a geologist were the same, even though one works with rocks, and the other with living things."

So this student.  This student responded, "Well, they do the same job, so they're the same thing."

I didn't have the will to keep the conversation going anymore.  When someone who is legally an adult, who has somehow graduated high school, seems to have as strong of an understanding of what "science" is about as a seven year old child, where do you even begin to try to unravel their ignorance?  I can only guess that this person assumes that any person in a white lab coat and glasses is perfectly interchangeable with any other, and there is no real difference between their jobs.

Wait, I take that back.  The average seven year old child would probably know the difference between biology and geology.  And if they didn't, they would probably be receptive and open to learning how they're different, and may be fascinated to do so.  I should not insult children by comparing them to this waste of brain matter.

Halloween

I do enjoy Halloween, but probably not for the reasons you suspect.

I certainly do not enjoy the proliferation of teeth-rotting candy among children and those with the minds of children.  The only joy that could come of this is watching the misery of children as their stomachs protest all the garbage they have funneled into their mouths.  But I am not foolish enough to be around children at this time of year, or any other for that matter, so it is not an issue.

I am also not amused by the concentration of "horror" themes.  Whether decorations, haunted houses, or whatever passes for scary movies these days, it is all silly nonsense.  True horror, what these people would think of as "supernatural" horror, would be wholly unfamiliar to these people.  Of course, these stories are never told because the people involved either are incapable of speaking, or are themselves involved in the perpetration.

No, the reason I enjoy Halloween is that it is a day that is celebrated by a large majority of college students, but it is not a national holiday.  They are in the mood to party,  act wild, and  cut class, but I am under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to cancel class on Halloween.  And so, on this day, I make sure to not only hold class, but to cover material that will most certainly be on the next test, and will not under any circumstances be repeated any other day.  Furthermore, I take a bit of pleasure in making class run longer than usual.  You can see them all watching the clocks and getting restless five minutes in, but the looks on their faces when the clock moves past the end of class and I haven't stopped is absolutely priceless.

Little wastes of time

Twice this week I have had students show me that they have enough energy to panic (mildly) over class, but not actually do anything about it, besides send a few emails.

First, there was this student who had barely ever shown up in class, and even gone so far as to miss our recent exam.  It was beautiful.  He had sent me an email the day of the test about how he couldn't be there because he had to cover a shift at his job all of a sudden.  The moment I got that email I knew exactly what grade he would get in the class, assuming he didn't take the hint and drop before the deadline.  I told him he could not make up the exam, and would have to take a zero on it.  He emailed me saying he wanted to "talk about his grade," and asked if he could come by my office and talk.  Great, another one of those annoying conversations.  I'm grateful he didn't schedule a special time to come by, because he never showed up, and never followed up on his email saying he wanted to talk.  I can only wonder if students like this don't drop the class because it takes a tiny bit more effort to fill out the drop form than it does to send of a terribly written two line email.

Along those lines, I never cease to be amazed at how many grammatical and spelling errors a student can manage to cram into such short messages.  It almost seems to border on intentional.  But that assumes they have enough presence of mind to do anything through more than pure instinct and muscle memory.

The other one is more...problematic.  I had another student miss the test, but claim they had a medical emergency.  Unfortunately, school policy forces me to accommodate students if they have (proven) medical excuses.  In a surprise turn of events, this student has been reasonably courteous via email, and the last time we spoke they agreed to take the test after class today.  They would of course take an unpleasant makeup exam, but they would still have a chance to survive the course (albeit a slim one).

But alas, they were not in class today.  Nor did they seem to be around immediately after class.  I am glad of that.  It would have been incredibly insulting had they skipped class, but shown up afterward to take the test.  And yet, later in the day, there is no communication, no information from this student.  I wonder if it penetrates their thick skull that they had an exam officially scheduled and they missed it.  With a paper trail established for the schedule, I have no fear of reprisal for giving them a zero on it.

One less brain dead waste of space in my classroom.  The semester gets better.

"Extra Credit"

I had hoped to avoid this situation.  In a class this low level and this large, and this full of pathetic idiots, I knew there was a risk.

Plenty of students did terribly on the first exam.  When I handed back the tests I assured them that there would be no miraculous extra credit, or - even worse - test corrections to save them from their own lack or preparation. A few complained, a few dropped the class, quite a number more said nothing, didn't react, and will most likely continue to quietly fail until the end of the semester.  Every now and then a student will see their terrible grade and react differently.

A few days after I handed back the tests I was in my office.  I was not thinking about calculus at the time.  No, I was doing something far more enjoyable - preparing a lecture on analytic spaces for my advanced class.  I heard a knock at my door.

A girl came in, looking like she had just stepped off a downtown street corner.  Her chest looked like it was about to fall out of the very low top of her shirt, and she seemed to have to have just enough skirt to avoid arrest for indecent exposure. I don't know if she had dressed up specifically for the occasion, or if that was how she normally dressed.  It's hard to tell these days where they draw the line between "casual" and "whorish."  I tried to tell myself that this is an overreaction to the relaxing of dress codes that children experience when moving from high school to college, but even by those standards it seemed extreme.

She closed the door behind her, and asked to talk about the test.  She grabbed a chair and pulled it around to the side of my desk, so there is nothing between the two of us.  I tell her, as discussed in class, there is nothing else to be done about her grade.  She had her test in her hand, and leaned over as though she wants to show it to me, but seemed to be using this motion as an excuse to expose her chest.  Then she said it.  She asked if there was anything we could work out, just the two of us, to help her get a good grade in the class.  Anything other than homework and tests.

I'm not an idiot.  I know there are plenty of professors who are willing to...indulge themselves this way.  As long as it doesn't become public knowledge, no one seems to care other than the occasional bit of righteous indignation.  But I have no interest.  Aside from the fact that I have no interest in tarnishing my integrity by selling out grades, if someone is so willing to offer up their body when they have trouble getting something they want, I shudder to think what sort of vast ecosystem of disease lurks in their flesh.

The trouble is, someone who starts down this road and makes this proposal is likely to be equally as troublesome if denied.  I had a colleague who had to step down from his position because of a sexual assault scandal.  He insists, and based on my knowledge of him I believe him, that all he did was reject the advances of a student looking to improve their grade by any means.  But he had made enemies in the wrong places, so the consensus was not on his side.

I have no interest in dealing with either of these outcomes, so thankfully I have a third option available to me. I looked the girl in the eye and told her, "Okay, let me show you something."  She smiled in what appeared to be an attempt at being alluring and stood up straighter, thrusting her chest out before her.  I mostly ignored it and pulled out a piece of paper and put it on the desk next to the two of us.  I scribbled a few things on it.

"I wasn't talking about math," she said with a frown.

"I know.  Let me show you this first."

"Okay.  Whatever you're into."  She leaned toward the paper, but also toward me, and gave me an odd look.  She seemed to be trying to act alluring again.  Pathetic.

I drew quickly on the paper.  She looked down and got that resistant, bored look that students get when they see a board full of graphs, symbols, and equations connecting them together.  All her conscious mind saw was mathematics too advanced for her to ever comprehend.  She almost said something, but her voice caught in her throat.  She stared at the paper.  While her conscious mind could make no sense of what she saw, her subconscious saw and comprehended just enough to feel compelled to look directly at it, and then it was trapped.  The lines on the page drew in her mind, and held it fast.  I drew a few more lines, and her eyes widened and her jaw fell slack.  I drew a few more, showing her more than a normal person should ever see, and you could almost hear her mind snap like a tendon stretched too far too fast.

I picked up the paper and held it in front of myself.  Her gaze followed it, but slowly, like she wasn't fully awake.  "You will leave here, and you will drop my class."  She nodded slowly.  "You will not bother any professor ever again for any reason."  She nodded again.  As I crumpled up the paper she blinked and shook her head.  She didn't quite have the light in her eyes that she did a few minutes ago.

I patted her on the knee.  "Thanks for coming in.  You have a good day now."

"Oh...okay..."  She stood up and walked out of my office.  Good riddance.  A troublesome mind has been made less so.

I unfolded the paper I had scribbled on and put it in my shredder.  It wouldn't do to have one of my grad students, or worse still, maintenance staff, see that and hurt themselves.

Shared Pain

If there are isomorphisms related to suffering and pain, then while I like to concentrate on the fact that the misery can take different forms in its target, unfortunately the analogy suggests that the suffering can be reversed.  This is especially true in times of exams.  I had a story I wanted to relate about my own exams, but an email from my colleague Dr. P. N. Philpott made me pause, and think on the pain that students can inflict back on their teachers through their persistent ignorance.  These are his thoughts as they came to him while grading exams, and I suspect everyone that has ever graded mathematics can relate to parts, if not all of it.

It begins:

My god.  Who taught you to write?  A demented chimpanzee with no fingers?

There are days when I wish, among many other things, that I could require students to pass a penmanship test before they dared to hand anything in for credit.  The rise of texting and the decline of instruction in cursive has not helped this matter in the slightest.

I must have not graded you hard enough in Calc I and II if you fail to
remember the fundamental trig identity \sin^2 x + \cos^2 x = 1, how to
expand squares of binomials, or how to integrate constant functions.
It's a mistake I won't make again.

Sometimes they teach us almost as much as we try to teach them.  Here, the lesson is the dangers of assuming these students can retain information seen innumerable times before.  Also:  you've seen these students before and yet they don't understand how tests are conducted in your class?  Sad.  At least if they were new they could argue they didn't know what to expect.

I need a stamp that says "WORD SALAD +0"

I would encourage you to instead take the path of another professor I once knew, who had a reputation for marking off for spelling and grammatical errors on his math tests.  Don't be so kind as to simply insult them, you must hit them where it hurts the most - their grades.

To the precious snowflake who wanted to use the nice big table (in the
room for the use of students who use wheelchairs) while everyone else
suffered with a postage-stamp size auditorium armrest (I said no) and
who just couldn't fit his work into the ample spaces provided, even
with stapled appendices, and needed to submit a homemade blue book
stapled to the exam, thanks so much for making me chew through pages
and pages of your ill-formatted equation casserole and thanks extra
for making absolutely 100% sure your work is nowhere near the problem!
Good thing I don't like to look at the problem while I'm grading it.
Right?

As above, I think you should penalize student further and further the more they inconvenience you.  Stress the importance of clarity of their mathematics and their presentation, and mark off accordingly.

What I love about this whole process is knowing that even though I've
inflated the scores for each problem so much that a dribble of ink or
a drool smear is worth 10 points, I'll spend Friday answering emails
about how I grade too hard and take off points for things that "don't
matter". If you already know "what matters" then by all means, sit
last year's final. We'll just let your course grade be your grade on
that exam.

 I learned long ago that kindness on your part is consistently met with abuse and exploitation on their part.  So you must preempt their whining needs with coldness and hardness, and give no expectation of any leniency.  Then if you ever choose to give them the slightest concession, it will feel as though they have received the greatest divine miracle in history.

I'm going to catch a lot of shit for "not explaining it well enough".
Maybe the quotation marks are inappropriate, since most of my
snowflakes' sense of tact, while vestigial, is developed enough to
avoid this blunder. Because guess what, guys? Education is a two-way
street. If you continue to sit there, blobbily wheezing through your
slightly open mouth, flecks of spittle forming in the corners of your
lips, when I say "Does anyone have any questions about this? Is there
anything I should talk about more, or try to come at from a different
perspective? This is quite an important concept, so we really
shouldn't go on until everyone is sure they understand", you've got
some crust coming at me with "I didn't understand when you explained
it in class". I don't even mention the book any more in this
situation, although it remains a mystery to me why any of these people
buy a $200+ book if they have no intention whatever of reading it.

Clearly your issue is that you still are trying to sympathize with your students, thinking of them as human beings almost on your level.  You should think of them as less than dogs.  For no decent person would abuse a dog, but these students need to be properly whipped into shape.

It's now been a few days, and by far the most frequent answer to my
standard post–exam failure question of "so, what happened?" has been
"Well, I know how to do all the math, but they" (I love that students
refer to the test maker as "they" when they are speaking to the test
maker) "use so many words! Where are all the numbers?" Sorry, sweetie.
Gone are the days when your mathematics examinations consisted of
one-step calculations, all laid out for you with an equals sign and a
blank for you to fill in. In the cold, hard world you've grown into,
you'll have to understand and interpret questions posed by one human
to another. Not your fault you believe that math wouldn't be this way,
exactly; but I'm here to disabuse you of your wrongheaded and mistaken
notions.

In the end, I'm a firm believer in the idea that, if these students refuse to learn any mathematics from me, I can at least teach them that it is in fact possible to fail.  I think many of these children go their whole lives coddled, with their self-esteem and ego stroked at each moment.  Enjoy teaching them that those days are over.

Test Faces

Proctoring exams is boring.  If you don't watch them, the students feel like they can push the boundaries.  In no time they'll sneak out pages of illicit notes, or act like you can't tell they're using their phones to search for answers or get help from someone else.  Yet it's not something I can entirely foist off on graduate students.  The lecture hall is too big, there are too many students, and the average graduate student is only slightly more aware of their surroundings than the infants they're supposed to be watching.

So, in the absence of anything better to do, you notice the different faces that students adopt while taking exams.  They range in an amusing spectrum centered around the one that most students have, that of the dutiful and busy face.  This is what you want, the student who knows they have no time to waste, this test is serious business, and so they had better get moving if they want to have a chance at finishing in time.

A little ways away from this norm is the angry face.  I doubt they do it consciously, but I have seen students who frown at their exams the whole way through.  It may be that this is simply what they look like when they're concentrating, but I suspect it's more that they see the test for what it is:  an adversary, and it is a battle they're not winning.  They look like they want to start arguing with the page in front of them, and it likely takes fair amount of restraint for them to not yell at the problems.  I'm sure these people are very pleasant to be around in day-to-day life.

On the other hand, you have the students, the all too common students, who might as well have been given a test written in Sanskrit.  They stare at the page, and you can see their brain has shut down.  These types come in two flavors, both characterized by their vacant stares, hoping that divine inspiration will hit them, or that the answers will magically materialize in front of them.  One stares at the test in front of them, not fully giving up, but their pencil sits limp in their hand.  The other stares off at the wall.  I think the latter is further gone, and probably is more likely to look at their peers' papers given the opportunity.

Then you have my personal favorite.  Take the angry student and the student of the vacant stare, mix them together and push them a little bit harder, and you have the imminent crier.  No student has full-out burst into tears during an exam in my experience, but I have seen plenty who are clearly using all of their mental and physical ability to hold in their tears until they leave the class.  They certainly aren't using any of their power to complete the exam.  These students tend to turn in their tests and almost run out of the room.  It is hard not to smile at them as they hand in their pathetic papers.

Then there is the one which is an endangered animal in my classroom, yet one I saw on this first calculus test.  I hope I misread it, but I believe I saw the endlessly irritating Miss Johnson give this face.  The face of someone who goes into a test expecting a challenge, as they should.  They look dutiful and serious at first, like the bulk of the students.  But then something will happen.  They'll flip through the test, look at the backs of the pages to see if they're missing anything, maybe even look around the class to see if anyone else is in on it, then scribble furiously, a smile creeping over them.  This is the look of someone who knows, or thinks they know, the material far better than they, or I for that matter, expected.

She indeed finished faster than anyone else in the class.  And there are only two kinds of people that finish tests early:  those that destroyed the test, and those that were destroyed by the test.

If she is the former rather than the latter, I am convinced she must have cheated.  If I can't prove it, or find how she did it, rest assured the very least that will happen in the future is a custom exam, just for her.

Safety Nets

The first exam is coming soon.  I look forward to watching their pain, seeing their feeble attempts to get those wheels spinning fast enough to exhibit some pretense of intellect.

It amuses me to see them squirm. They try everything they can to avoid actually thinking.  They are desperate to use calculators, to let a machine do the thinking for them.  They love to just mash the numbers and operands they encounter into their calculators in the hopes of getting something close to correct.

If I allow them to bring notes into the test they will copy every tiny bit of information they've encountered into their notes, until they reach a point where it would require a magnifying glass to make it all out properly.

And yet, no matter how many security blankets or safety nets you give them, if you ask them to do even the slightest amount of thinking for themselves they will panic.  I once heard of a student who was working with the basic equations of parabolic motion.  This student could plug numbers into the given formula, and get out an answer.  However, the moment they were required to solve for one of the coefficients in terms of everything else, they would shut down.  I'm not even talking about trigonometry.  This just required a basic algebraic manipulation of a quadratic equation to solve for one of the coefficients.

I sometimes wonder how these people manage to eat without stabbing themselves in the neck with their forks.  This may explain the popularity of finger food.

One way or the other, in a few days, I will see how long they can last with no safety net at all.  No notes, no calculators, and most of all no friends to do their work for them.  And I will be there standing over them when they fall spectacularly.

The List

I returned the first homework a couple of days ago.  All was relatively silent, at first.  Most of them just took their papers and put them away, probably never intending to give it another thought.  But then, someone looked and realized that only ten of the forty or so problems had been graded.  You could almost see the dawning realization ripple out from that first person like a wave in the auditorium.  I will never get tired of seeing the look of impotent rage on students' faces as they run up against a perceived injustice that they are powerless to fight.

These reactions, though enjoyable, are fully expected.  What I didn't expect was this little pocket of unflappable bodies in the back corner of the room, centered around that blue-haired cheerleader imp.  That  group didn't seem bothered in the least.  Normally this would be because these children are too distracted, too vacant, too busy talking and texting, to notice if the world is ending around them, much less if they're failing a class.  But I handed back their homework, so I know that this whole group scored very well on the assignment.  Among the highest in the class, no less.

Had they cheated?  Did they get the answers from the internet or some contraband instructor's copy of the book? Or did they have one of their number, or some sucker elsewhere in the class, who carried the burden for all of them?  This self-centered cheerleader already acted like the whole world was owed to her, and it looked like someone was willing to do whatever she wanted after a flutter of eyelids.

No.  I will not allow this to continue.  Now that I've handed back the homework, I have their names.  Paul Moreno.  Nathan Thompson.  Kim Sun.  Scott Castilleja.  And the cheerleader, Lindsay Johnson.  The name even sounds like a cheerleader.  I will find out which of them, if any, is carrying the rest.  I will separate them, turning the weaker against the stronger.  And if the strongest survives, then maybe I will take them in and put them on the proper path.  And if none of them has any ability, if they are all getting their answers from an outside source, then they will be purified, in the same way that an incinerator cleans everything away, leaving nothing behind but ashes.

Our Little Snowflakes

Talk about homework, and the creative ways that students blunder into it like someone putting their head down and running into a brick wall, are all too common among teachers.  I suspect this is because there are altogether too many people in these classes that only made it out of high school by some small miracle, or some large grade inflation.

For instance, after posting about my first homework earlier this week, I received an email from my colleague, Dr. P. N. Philpott.  He had received an email from one of his students:

"I just entered the data into webwork, and the online thing, and it gave me 167 for the variance and 12 something for the standard deviation.

How am I suppose to calculate those then?"

Intro stat, first time I've ever taught a sub-precalc level class.  It's fucking nuts.  I can't believe I ever thought badly of my calc students' maturity or sense of initiative.

The "online thing"?  THE ONLINE THING?  Damn, son.

In such a brief message, there seem to be an impressive number of things going wrong.  First of all, I shed a tear that my colleague has been forced to commit what I consider charity work (or possibly something akin to community service punishment) by teaching not just a sub-precalc level class, but statistics.  There's a reason many schools separate the statistics department from the mathematics department.  If it were calculus-based statistics, or an amusing subject like conformal invariants of random processes, then it would be more tolerable.  But this...doesn't sound much better than babysitting preschoolers.

This class is presumably taken by people for whom this will be their sole math class.  People who have spent their whole life trying to dodge thinking.  This email bears this idea out.  Dr. Philpott understandably has been reduced to an apoplectic rage at the ignorance.  No matter how much you lower your standards, there will always be those ready to disappoint you.

I do find it somewhat sad that these online services and programs have been cropping up in recent years in the futile effort to make it easier or...I shudder to say...fun to learn math.  I expect more often than not, the students try to use them as an excuse to be more lazy, and think even less.  The slightest problem that comes up, they come running to their professor.  It's a wonder they can operate a computer well enough to send an email.

The obvious answer to the question, "How am I suppose to calculate those then?" (while trying as hard as possible to ignore the grammatical error - we can leave that to the English professors to pick it to pieces) is, "You calculate it the way that we discussed in class, which is also the way it is done in the book.  If you have trouble using a tool designed to make your life easier and more convenient, I suggest you build character by calculating every variance and standard deviation for the remainder of the semester using nothing more advanced than a slide rule.  And no, I will not teach you how to use a slide rule."  If they try to ask a follow-up question, refuse to answer until they show you their calculations.

My Other Class

Ah, yes.  I am in fact teaching two classes this semester.  In addition to teaching first semester calculus, I was given a small concession in being allowed to teach a graduate topics class.  That means I can talk about whatever I want.  The students who show will either do their best to not get lost, or possibly try to impress me if they want the chance to work with me in the future.  Not that there's much chance of that.

So for the past couple of weeks I've been going through the four different proofs of the Weierstrass preparation theorem found in Raghavan Narasimhan's Introduction to the Theory of Analytic Spaces.  The theorem itself is beautiful and powerful.  It gives the ability to (up to multiplication by a unit in the proper sense) write an analytic function of several complex variables as a monic polynomial in only one of the variables whose coefficients are analytic functions in the remaining variables.

The four proofs cover a total of twenty pages in the book.  But above and beyond that endurance test for the students, they also have to contend with the fact that (while recently reprinted and cheaper to buy than it generally was ten years ago) it is typed lecture notes from over fifty years ago, printed with none of the modern smoothness that even your average undergraduate can produce after half an hour of learning LaTeX.  Even if the text was crystal clear, they typeface is a bit difficult to work through.

That, and it's always fun to see who is and who isn't capable of dealing with the concepts of germs of analytic functions.  Their beginning classes in complex analysis must be getting better, because not all of them were mystified by the idea.  Maybe it won't be a total loss.  If they can get through this beginning section, maybe I'll need to reward them with something a little lighter.

Or maybe I'll see what other suffering they can endure.

Homework

Ordinarily, I wouldn't assign homework.  They have a book, they have lectures.  If they wanted practice for the exams, they are welcome to do as many or as few problems as they want.  But the department requested that I assign homework, to help keep the different sections of calculus somewhat in line with each other.  I didn't fight it too much, as I saw the potential for fun to be had.

I know that more and more these days teachers are moving to online assignments because the grading is all done automatically.  But I prefer using a real grader, and not just because I am an old man who resists change and technology.  I love the fact that the grader's allotted time on the clock each week is limited, so for a class of this size, he only has the time to grade about ten problems from each assignment.  This gives me the delight of giving them large assignments, but only a handful of the problems are graded, and they never know which ones.  The problem that took them hours to work on could be skipped entirely, or the simple problem at the end they skipped could be graded in detail.  There are so many ways this can frustrate the students.

I also enjoy denying the students the ability to waste my time.  I suspect they come into this class from a high school experience where everyone held their hand and made sure they turned in everything and any little tiny hitch in their schedule was met with exceptions and special treatment.  Last week, when the first assignment was due, I must have had half a dozen students come to me wanting an extension on their homework because their financial aid hadn't come through yet, and so they weren't able to get their book.  I told them that not only was the book on reserve in the library, but they were sitting in a room of a hundred people who had their own books, and surely some of them would have been willing to share.

The look of dejection as reality sunk into their thick skulls was delicious.

Limits

Ah, limits.  The conceptual hub about which the entirety of calculus, and a great deal of analysis, revolves.  Any reasonable person would agree that something this important, this fundamental, should be given a thorough, honest treatment.

The students did not seem to agree.  As soon as I wrote down the epsilons and deltas in the definition, there were murmurs of protest.  As I used the definition to find a limit on a simple polynomial, the protests hit critical mass.  Lecture came to a grinding halt as the confused students became angry when someone said this seemed a bit advanced for a freshman class.

Really?  Who are they to judge what is appropriate?  Are they hoping this will be like a Saturday morning book reading in the local children's library, all simple words, colorful pictures, and happy endings?  It's not as though I have even deviated from the material in the book.  This stuff is all in their text, so as far as I'm concerned it is all information they are responsible to know for the test.  Nothing says I have to spend time in class on concepts proportional to space spent in the book, I can emphasize what I like.

Students only like things that are easy, or things they already know.  The more they protest, the more they are showing me they have room to learn.  Perhaps after the first test they will learn their will be a direct correlation between how much they protest in class, and how much this type of problem appears on the test. I look forward to the pleasant surprise of the first test.

Cell Phones

I knew it would happen soon enough.  Children these days cannot go five minutes without checking their phones.  I am willing to turn a blind eye to it, because the frequent users are often so amusingly perplexed when they see their terrible grades.

But when someone not only allows their phone to make noise in class, but answers it?  Intolerable.  This happened today, and the student seemed to think that because he was at the back of the room, he could carry on a conversation.

I stopped talking, took my attendance book in hand, and walked up to the back of the room and stood over him.  Being the type of self-centered maggot that he is, he didn't stop talking immediately.  When he finally hung up the phone, he looked up at me and said, "Sorry.  I had to take that call."

"Really?  Deciding on your lunch plans was more important than this class?  I hope it's a good lunch, because you have just failed.  Tell me your name so I can put it on the record."

He flinched at first, but then seemed to regain his arrogance.  "How can you fail me?  You don't even know who I am?"

I sighed, though inwardly I smiled.  I had hoped he would say that.  "Very well then."  I looked at the attendance sheet in front of me, and picked a male-sounding name at random.  Well, maybe not entirely random.  The boy in front of me was Caucasian, so I intentionally chose a name that wasn't.  "Eduardo Valverde.  You now fail this class."

A Hispanic boy across the room immediately jumped up from his chair and said, "You can't do that!  That's not fair!"  The whole class seemed shocked, but the rude boy in front of me seemed almost as shocked as Eduardo.

"I will not tolerate rude behavior in my classroom, and someone must be punished for it.  Since I do not know this person's name, then it falls to you.  You can either fail the class, or find out this gentleman's name."

"You can't do this," said Eduardo.  He took a few steps toward me and the rude boy.  I did not pay him much mind, but the boy seemed to be getting nervous.  While Eduardo wasn't huge, he did seem to be more muscular than the scrawny white boy now sinking into his desk.

"I can and I will.  You are of course welcome to drop the class, there is still time before the deadline."

"But I need this class," said Eduardo, more to the rude boy than to me.

"So do I," the boy said, though with a small voice.

"Look, you were the asshole talking on your phone during class.  You should drop and take it again next semester."

"But I'm in mechanical engineering.  It will throw off my whole schedule!"

Eduardo leaned over the desk.  "If your schedule is that important, maybe you should have been more focused in class."

The boy shrank further.  I saw his eyes shimmer, and I knew it was a good day.  "My name is Dave Hewitt."

"Dave Hewitt," I repeated out loud, as much to confirm it on my role as to see if he had by some chance try to be clever and give someone else's name.  "You may have failed this class, and most likely your life in general, but you have enriched everyone else's education as a result.  Thank you, and goodbye."

He sniffled as he gathered his books as quickly as he could, and ran out the classroom.  I may have heard his cell phone ring again.  I didn't bother to look at Eduardo as he went to sit back down.  I walked straight to the front of the room and finished my lecture on limits and continuity.

The First Day of Classes

Ah, the first day of classes.  Let's run through the standard litany of student garbage.  I pass out syllabi with all the relevant information they could need about class policy, and of course they pointless questions begin.

Someone asked about tests, and whether or not there will be review sessions for them.  I respond of course there is review for the tests.  Every day in lecture is a review for the test.  Every homework problem is review for the test.  Would they like me to assign more review work?

Someone else asked about how the homework is graded.  Thoroughly.

Someone said one of their other teachers actually gave out their cell phone number so students could call or text whenever they had problems.  I just laughed.

Someone complained about the price of textbooks.  I simply nodded, and remembered the fun I had over the summer trying to find the most expensive books.   The shrink-wrapped extras were a delightful bonus that would keep them from ever being able to sell it back.  You've got to enjoy the little things.

During this whole discussion, a group of about half a dozen students at the back of the lecture hall chattered away.  I couldn't entirely blame them.  The questions were the height of pointlessness.  But among them, I think I recognized that girl who was in my office last week, asking for special permission.  Of course.  She needs special help getting into the class, then can't be bothered with the common courtesy of keeping quiet while the professor is talking.  It took me a bit to recognize her, because her normal hair had been dyed a bright shade of blue.  Yes, I know this type.  Desperate to stand out, to be her own person apart from her parents, but will endlessly lean on her friends and teachers to go above and beyond to bail her out of every little bit of trouble.  I anticipate her getting sick...or maybe having a grandparent die, right around the time of the first test.

I hope so.  She will get her own very special exam.  And an education in how fair the real world can be.  Fair, because she won't be getting everything handed to her anymore.

But that will come in its own time.  Now, on to functions and a review of basic algebra every child should know.

An Early Start

Today, a girl came into my office.  She wanted me to sign a prerequisite waiver form to get into calculus.  With no prompting whatsoever, she launched into some long, drawn-out story about some problems with her placement score.  The network having issues, the school losing it, or not needing it because of her SAT scores.  I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention to her blathering.  I've heard it all so many times.  Nothing she said could ever matter.

I was about to tell her that she was in the wrong office.  Her placement issues are not my problem.  She should go to the registrar and leave me alone.  I could then drink up her defeat, and if lucky I could relish a tear or two.  But no, I had to remind myself, I'm taking a different path this semester.  Enjoying the long pain.  Students who require special permission early on are much more likely to crash and burn dramatically.  And this one had great potential to fail colossally.

So, I smiled and told her I would be happy to let her in my class.  Perhaps I smiled a little too much.  She seemed to back away slightly before forcing herself to reach over and take the signed form from me.  Ah, trying to put on a brave face.  I look forward to watching her cry later in the semester.  She would learn her place in the world, and it was far from intellectual pursuits.

They Will Get What They Deserve

Despite my best efforts, here we are barely a week before the semester starts, and I'm going to be teaching first semester calculus.  First semester calculus!  Babysitting a room full of idiots who are practically surgically connected to their phones.  Those sad, vacant stares alternating between confusion and fear.

It was Sherman who threw me under the bus.  All of us in the department who know The Path shared in the responsibility, but they let the blame fall on my shoulders.  He told me we all would have to participate in active recruitment at the lowest levels to make up for the losses this last year.  The others took things like discrete structures, linear algebra. All classes that, while beneath us, at least would have a decent number of math majors, increasing the chances of having a student with an affinity for The Path.  He said someone had to cover one of the calculus sections, "to cast a wide net."  Hah!  You don't cast a wider net in a sewer hoping to catch a dolphin.

No, I know it will be a lecture hall full of people who struggle to tie their shoelaces in the morning.  And I railed against Sherman all summer trying to convince him that he was wasting my time with this.  He finally told me to drop it or he'd find a way to make my other class remedial algebra.  I shudder to think what that would be like.

But then I came around.  Maybe I was approaching this the wrong way.  Why should I be frustrated that I couldn't teach snakes to tap dance?  If I was going to have to face a room full of soulless, dead-eyed husks, perhaps I could coax a bit of life out of them.  Not by teaching them.  Ha!  No, that's not possible.  The best way to get them to perk up, pay attention, and have some light in their eyes is to give them the spark of fear.  Fear that their college careers will be over before its barely begin.  Fear that if they wanted to survive this class, they'd have to dedicate their lives to it, and even then they may not succeed.

And when they saw that all the other sections of this class were quite full, and there was no hope at all, I would be there when their dreams were crushed.

And what if I'm wrong?  What if there is someone in there that is worthy of learning The Path?  I will know.  I will see their shining beacon stand up tall as the others fall.  And when he stands over the bodies of his fallen classmates, I will show him the doorway to the answers to mysteries he never could have imagined.

Maybe it will be a good semester after all.