My instructor is a rude...

[YellowRubberDuckie]

bitch. Why would you tell someone to call you back in a half hour, that you're in the middle of something, and then when that person calls back, you have conveniently absconded. I hate it when people are rude. And I think that is one of the rudest things you can do to people. If she didn't really care to talk to me, she should have said, can I just email you or something? I'm so tired of professors, instructors and other staff acting as if they are paying us, instead of the other way around. I pay them out the ass for rude treatment. And there's no reason for such behavior. UGH! Thanks for letting me vent.
Duckie

[PinkTiger]

1. You don't have to take it.

I'm an instructor in a small, midwestern university. If I did that my students would turn me in; they would rat to my boss.
So go ahead; you have my permission. Talk to your instructor's department head. You may be surprised how fast they get in touch with you.

[Nlighten1]

12. I can attest to this working.

When I was in college I had a problem occasionally with an instructor and it never fails to go over their head to complain.

[HereSince1628]

2. So, how many times do you pee a day there YRD???

Professors generally don't have receptionists to handle meetings, rather they do it on a first come first served basis, often foregoing anything resembling break periods, lunch or overtime.

Generally speaking, in the US faculty student ratios average 21-23 FTE students per faculty member which is somewhere between 60 and 100 students per semester. I have no idea what it is for your specific instructor but consider the possibilites...your instructor is deliberately screwing with you or you are misinterpreting the situation which involves an instructor trying to deal with semester closing details for classes, departmental demands, and existential needs like taking a crap or going to get a bite to eat.

[XanaDUer]

3. Not to mention many of the online classes some professors

are now being asked to handle to squeeze every last penny from the students they cannot fit into the classroom.

God help teachers and educators in general. Like social workers, nurses, and librarians, they are expected to do a lot not for a lot.

[PinkTiger]

5. Regardless, YRD has a point.

I teach 5 classes, but I always have time for my students. I make time for them. Some of my colleagues are pretty well unreachable. They leave earlier than it says on their door and they are rude to students. It is a challenging profession, but students are our customers. We shouldn't tell one we will be available and then take off. My boss does this to us all the time, and it is difficult to get an audience with his holiness because he is off to play raquetball, etc.

[HereSince1628]

6. And you assume that I do not have intimate knowledge of

academic life.

Blow yer horn. You are wonderful. The greatest maybe. Really.

But, it's my experience that at the end of semesters things get VERY nuts. Students who have not completed assignments--urgently must be dealt with. Excuse me but with a decade and a half of university teaching behind me, I am not naive to the possibilities.

So, why would an instructor call a student to the office at the end of the term???? Generally speaking students don't get asked to show up.

Usually it is because some assignment remains missing (BTW YRD didn't share the reason with us), or there if the instructor is also an advisor, there is something missing to enable registration or graduation. Why are such things missing???? Frequently because the student hasn't bothered to attend to details or to come in voluntarily for 15-18 weeks.

Am I by default sympathetic? NO. By default I ask the student to consider the circumstances faculty work on a first come first served basis and do get called out of the office by students, colleagues and their managers. And yet, from out of left field people harken "Fire the bloody faculty person." Put pressure on the blood faculty person.

Well, f---ing rude faculty members are democrats and members of DU, and f---ing rude students are too.

[XanaDUer]

10. S/he may be assuming I don't, either.

(I do).

And I shrink from the students-are-our-customers crappola.

Now even education is a business. Oy, vey.

[PinkTiger]

14. Ok, OK....

I'm home now, and got back to this thread, and see a couple of you are taking issue with my comments. Fine. But what YRD said was, she asked him to check back in a half hour, and when he did, she was gone. This IS rude, in my humble opinion. And it is commonplace among academics. You can shrink from the "students-are-our-customers" if you want to. That is your privilege. But when enrollment in your courses go down and your evaluations go sour, you will have no one but yourself to blame.
Or, maybe you are one of those who have tenure and believe that teaching is NOT what you are here for; you are an ivory-tower adornment to be cherished; they are lucky to have you and your wonderful brains. Good for you.

By the way, I 'm not assuming anything. I can imagine that some of my esteemed colleagues would feel the same way you do. I'm amazed at how little they work and how much they expect. I'm also amazed at how little they give a damn.
And, for your information, I'm a woman.

[Piltdown13]

15. I agree, what the instructor in this case did was rude

Barring some unforeseen emergency that she had to deal with, of course.

However, I have to say that the whole encounter might have been preventable with a little more vigilance on the student's part. IOW, I'd tend to have somewhat more sympathy if his request had been for something more urgent (like an unreturned graded assignment, or a family emergency requiring a reschedule of the final, or something like that). Even if I accept for argument's sake that students are primarily my customers (which I don't), I'd still have to expect a minimal amount of effort to keep current with how you're doing in the class, so that the end of the semester doesn't get cluttered with frantic "how am I doing" phone calls. Granted, the instructor shouldn't have essentially blown him off, but I have some sympathy for her position as well. I've never done such a thing, but I have myself had the impulse to send, um, testy e-mails to students who demand (and I do mean *demand*) to know two days before the final what their current grade is (and often, exactly how well they would have to do on the final to get whatever grade they need), given that my in-box is usually also filled with urgent requests to reschedule the final and such. But then, I always make it very clear what student responsibilites are at the very beginning of the semester, and I've never had a problem like this one crop up.

I guess all this just raises the issue of that fine line we walk between being helpful and accessible to students and bending over backward so often that we get treated essentially as menial servants by them ("I just e-mailed you 20 minutes ago, why haven't you answered yet???"). And I have to admit, the whole "students-as-customers" thing really bothers me. On the one hand, I understand where it comes from, but I also really believe that over-reliance on that model invariably means that our role as teachers will suffer. At least in the minds of some students and parents, this attitude has led to a "customer is always right" mentality -- and, unfortunately, in an academic environment, this just isn't the case, and we do our students no favors by pretending that it is. IOW, it wouldn't matter if we were, say, selling them shoes or a car, but I think we have a higher responsibility than that. Should we be rude to "teach them a lesson," even subconsciously? No, of course not. But I would argue that some (not the case in this thread, but some) of what students perceive as an instructor being rude, or nasty, or an asshole, or a bitch, is in fact the student being held to higher standards of accountability than he/she is accustomed to, especially when the instructor is blunt about it.

In terms of expecting a lot but not working much, obviously I've had experience with that, especially where the prof pushes most of the work off on his/her grad assistants. Please realize, though, that not every instructor who expects a lot is lazy and unsympathetic to students. My own position is that, because I typically spend at least 25 hours per week on a class when I'm teaching (these are undergrad courses, enrollment 80, taught by grad students with no help at all), my students can respect my investment of time and passion by keeping up to date with their progress (conveniently posted on the web), as well as handing in assignments on time and all that stuff.

OK, end lengthy musings. :-)

[PinkTiger]

18. You make some valid points.

Without stating everything in writing in the syllabus, and without giving grade reports on a regular basis, this would be a problem. I don't actually buy the "customer" thing all the way, either; the students have responsibilities, too. But it is a two-way street.
A little civility goes a long way. Students deserve a little respect.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

4. I've called three times since...it's not a case of simple bathroom breaks.

[ArkDem]

7. Well, that will never happen when

you get out into the real world.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

8. She finally emailed me my grade...

And what she said was this...

I am emailing you the grade that you reguested. Your average in the class is 80%. In the future it is your responsibility to keep up with your grade. Finals week is extremely busy and I don't have time to answer emails or return calls regarding reguest for grades. I suggest that unless you are making an A in the course that you take the final.

I'm sure her hostility is from the fact that her boss got my email about her rudeness and she's taking out her frustrations on me. Oh well. I got what I needed. And maybe she will stop being rude in the future.
Duckie

[Piltdown13]

13. Not to be confrontational, but....

As a past and future college instructor myself, I have to say that it's pretty common practice to place last-minute requests for grades/progress reports as a pretty low priority. Especially when you're a grad student dealing with end-of-semester responsibilites in your own classes, and working 50-plus hours per week while getting paid for about 20. If (and admittedly this is a big "if" with some instructors) your instructor has handed back graded work and made clear the class grading policies, you should be able to figure out where you stand pretty well. I have to admit, my own policy with such requests was to just e-mail students a link to our school's online gradebook site, where I kept their records up to date. Now, of course, if your instructor doesn't hand back assignments and/or doesn't tell you clearly what the grading policies are, that's a much bigger issue that should ideally be raised as soon as it appears.

In the spirit of friendly-but-unsolicited advice, I would advise that if you should need to make late-semester grade requests in the future, be really really careful not to insinuate anything along the lines of the idea that you're trying to decide whether or not to take the final or trying to figure out how little studying for the final you can get away with. Like it or not, most of us instructors feel pretty offended by that attitude, and the less-enilghtened among us will react with hostility and rudeness; after all, to us it suggests that our class is your lowest priority. :-)

[YellowRubberDuckie]

16. I tried to post this but.....

...She told us on Tuesday that she would e-mail us or grades, if we would put our e-mail addresses on the bottom of our last assignment.

My brackets must have canceled this out when I tried to post it earlier.

[Piltdown13]

17. Aha, I see

Hmm...well, depending on when you handed in that last assignment and when the final is scheduled, I might suggest that a little patience might have been in order. I can tell you from experience that it takes a *long* time to grade a section's worth of written assignments, and longer than you might think to calculate students' current semester averages, especially if there are a lot of students in the class. Other classes also play a part, as do the classes the instructor is taking him/herself (if a grad student). If, however, y'all handed in the last assignment last Tuesday and the final is coming up this Wednesday (for instance) I can understand calling her up to find out what's going on.

On edit -- Maybe there's an element of misunderstanding here too. I suspect that the instructor may have meant that she'd e-mail you your assignment grades, not necessarily your current semester grades. Still, you'd need that last assignment grade to get a complete picture of where you stood.

[SOteric]

9. How is it you're so certain she wasn't having a personal emergency?

Would it change your perspective any to learn that she'd had to rush to the hospital for a parent or one of her children?

Instructors are people too.

[Elidor]

11. Obviously, she's taking a cue from Catch-22's Major Major Major Major

In case you haven't read it (what?! you haven't read Catch-22?!), he instructed his orderly that he was only to let people in to see him when he wasn't in. When he was in, they were to be sent away and told to return later when he was gone.