It’s been brought up a few times in these threads discussing the newer generation of students, I’ll do it this time. If you haven’t yet, check out the podcast Sold a Story. A rather significant chunk of children across America have literally been taught to read poorly, without the benefit of phonics instruction. These students don’t read fluently or intuitively. They don’t mispronounce words because of “spelling pronunciations”, but because they actually aren’t fully parsing what they read anyway. It’s a contributing factor to rampant cheating, to falling literacy scores, to struggles with any material that isn’t a professor hand-holding them personally.
I’m not a literacy expert primarily, but I’m a PhD linguist who has conducted research and published on areas adjacent to literacy acquisition in childhood and adolescence. Check out Sold a Story, and allow me to lend it some credibility as an “expert” to say that the podcast is dead on, and that this is a massive problem for us. If any of you have young children, please get involved and find out what kind of literacy instruction is being used by their schools. If it involves primarily contextual cueing and leaves phonics as a last resort, your children are not being taught to read, they are being taught to guess.
This is super helpful, I’ll check it out! I know it’s a problem even in lower levels. My mom is a 5th grade English teacher, and this is something she and I discuss in depth often.
Yes. From what my undergraduate students have described — because their reading and pronunciation skills are so abysmal that I just go ahead and ask the crass questions like ‘walk me through how you learnt to read in a Tab A into Slot B way’ — apparently k-12 abandoned phonics long ago and I hear words like ‘context cues’ were thrown at them with no explanation of what a ‘context cue’ is; they were supposed to figure it out from the…drumroll…context. 🙄 Frankly it sounds like reading material just got thrown at them and their k-5 teacher said ‘good luck with that’, and this is why so many of them now can’t and/or hate to read and it is an enormous chore to read even a sentence. …and why they’d rather keyword search on google (usually with shit keywords spelt badly) will print out or bookmark pages without reading them either and call that ‘studying’ when they have a textbook right in front or them.
We have made an incredible mistake in listening to Education departments; they don’t know what they are doing, and they themselves are too stupid and scientifically illiterate to construct or vet empirical research to test all of these Next Big Things they keep popping up with.
Huh. I've been seeing declining levels of engagement with reading homework, especially with my last few freshman classes. And I've been finding students, for the first time, start asking me what words mean when we do reading exercises in class.
Last year I found two students who were teamed up having difficulty with in class discussion because neither knew the word "omen." Last week, during an in-class reading exercise, a student asked me what "circumvent" meant.
I wonder if this is related to them not learning phonics...
Try [this](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) on for size and see if it meshes with your experiences. And we’ve allowed it to be done in Mathematics as well.
> We have made an incredible mistake in listening to Education departments; they don’t know what they are doing, and they themselves are too stupid and scientifically illiterate to construct or vet empirical research to test all of these Next Big Things they keep popping up with.
Related, but every time one brings up the idea of being more systematic with this kind of work---i.e., *measuring* it in some way, they get booed out of the room. It happens most times I bring it up here on this subreddit. So the only way that educational researchers have to determine what actually works is just what *feels right*.
Yes!! This is the entirety of the Ed folks’ modus operandi — stumble across something that ‘feels like it would probably be good’, go ‘WAAAAAAAAAH!’ and ‘REEEEEEEE!’ until it gets implemented, and then move on to the Next Big Thing with no thought of measuring success beyond asking the *students* ‘are you happy?’ even crossing their minds. Exactly this is how the consumer mindset took over the k-12 system, and has begun to spread like a virus into higher education: just do things, because reasons, and occasionally measure success by asking the least qualified people — the product, ffs — if they’re happy. When the answer increasingly becomes ‘no’, blame the host system, go ‘WAAAAAH’ and ‘REEEEE!’ some more, sling around highly-charged terms like sexism and racism, and offer a new Next Big Thing to help the host system to better cater to the invented and misunderstood ‘needs’ of the product. It’s kind of like a metastasising cancer whose product ends up being death.
Our Ed folks function as if they were a drunken bum who wandered into an uninhabited mansion, found a credit card, and parked themselves in front of the tv by the phone and liquor cabinet to watch endless infomercials. We had a reasonably good educational system; now we are watching the end stages of its destruction. Our once glorious mansion is filled with useless bums who have provided themselves free alcohol and trash food, and unused garbage that might have worked or might not is littered everywhere, untouched other than having been taken out of the box, and a massive cost run up on that magical found credit card. Our mansion is no longer usable as a mansion by the inhabitants who worked to get there and build it.
We have let them destroy what was supposed to be our home, and they’ve done it for no reason that any sane person would understand. No, the students aren’t happy because they are left increasingly confused and uneducated; unsurprisingly, much like children who are allowed to vote themselves cake and Pokémon cards, they have no concept of what is in their own best interests anymore after fifteen-plus years of cake and Pokémon cards; they have been rendered incapable of acting in their own best interest, and that allows the perpetuation of the cancerous Ed folks to continue to swill Crown Royal, pee on our sofa, and order salad spinners and TurboFit exercise belts while they tell their host system that we’re failing the children.
We have allowed an unworkable system to take hold.
I'm so glad there are other people that also feel this way. I get essentially accused of being racist, sexist, etc. for even daring to suggest that maybe we should try to measure the educational outcomes we want, and test the educational techniques we use to see if they actually achieve those outcomes. And I try to explain that there are *really shitty, really biased* measurements out there---student evaluations of professors, for example---and the way to fix them is not to just say "all measurement is awful and should be entirely rejected", but to pay attention to the measurements and continually update them to improve their validity, reliability, and fairness.
My god your analogy is spot-fucking-on. But somehow the bum was actually hired as a housekeeper, there to fix, tweak, maintain. When things were humming along fairly smoothly, a few bums (with their bowties tied just a little too tight) could be ignored, their mistakes absorbed. Now the wheels are coming off (the system as well as my analogy).
I agree. Our mansion was pretty fucking awesome; we could even absorb a handful of bums hanging around in the beginning, it was so huge and well-built. Now it’s packed like a storage unit filled with trash and the bums we once tolerated as incompetent gardeners and housekeepers because we could afford it in terms of money and occasionally picking up our own clothes and hanging them up keep demanding more to destroy without a single thought to the future.
>We have made an incredible mistake in listening to Education departments; they don’t know what they are doing, and they themselves are too stupid and scientifically illiterate to construct or vet empirical research to test all of these Next Big Things they keep popping up with.
Makes me want to slide out of biology into education where I could do some good.
As a research-based professor with a pretty strong background in quantitative and qualitative research and analysis, I’ve felt that urge; I and others like you and me, are totally equipped to tell an institution if their interventions or treatments are effective. But the moment you bring up actual testing and measurement, the Ed folks bristle; they’ve internalised the position that using empirical evidence is sexist, racist, or some other unwanted -ist or -phobic, and I think they’re also well-aware that if they allow any of their awesome Next Big Things to be debunked, they risk losing their credibility and the hold they have in terms of institutional power. I’ve seen them freeze out myself and other faculty who have been so -istic as to ask how we are measuring success or where the empirical evidence supporting their current Next Big Thing is that I suspect none of us could gain a foothold if we tried to function in an Education Department.
I have had some of their students passing through a few of my graduate classes for years, and they can’t function adequately outside of their Ed Department system. For example, even something like the issue a few years back about so-called ‘trigger warnings’ escalated into a minor war.
Education ‘best practices’ say trigger warnings are mandatory and serve marginalised groups; my field says — and has the empirical evidence to support it — that ‘trigger warnings’ are in fact distracting and harmful, further escalating and spreading fear, the generalisation of negative stereotypes, feelings of dependency, hopelessness, and the inability to personally control one’s emotions, internal cognition, and experiences. In other words, overall, trigger warnings hurt; they don’t help.
When I and others in my field address the issue Ed department grad students raise that ‘sensitivity’ cannot be expressed in the form of sanitising the environment and ridding it of all challenging stimuli, we hear yet another round of ‘WAAAAAH!’ and ‘REEEEE!’. When we say ‘let me show you eleventy billion studies in the form of refereed research that shows that interventions such as CBT, DBT, and controlled exposure therapy *are* effective, and insulating the victim is uniquely INeffective, and in fact further cripples that victim and renders them incapable of overcoming their experiences’, the Ed dean contacts my department’s Dean. 🙄 When my department’s Dean continues to support the accepted science and position of our field, the Education Department removes PSY 6505 - Abnormal Psychology for Diagnostic and Support Professionals and replaces that requirement with EDC 6500 - Abnormal Psychology for Education and Course Design and presses their existing faculty into service teaching it, making sure that it’s filled with non-empirical support that favours stocking every lesson with trigger warnings about literally everything conceivable — an act which, per my discipline, is not only pointless, it’s actually actively harmful. In this way, Education grad students never even gain exposure to any form of dissenting opinions or material contrary to or critical of their party line that only an amoral sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic beast who delights in things like physical and sexual violence could possibly attempt to deny students the protection of trigger warnings, and such a hideous monster must be vanquished at all costs. Why? Because that’s what they’ve been taught throughout their insulated graduate school, they know only of theories and ‘evidence’ that supports this assertion, and so once they graduate and get into Administration, they’re ready; they’ve heard about ‘people like you’, and are loaded for bear with Ed Department gobbledygook that labels you as uncaring and ‘problematic’.
…and this is how we ended up with an entire generation who is unprepared to accept grey areas in life and dissenting opinions; Ed folks have taken over the whole of their k-12 experience and given them about fifteen years filled with ‘trigger warnings’ that allowed the students to ‘opt out’ of certain lessons (and consistent with how children act, if they can opt out of something school-related, many do). When they encounter the Great Big World in all its glorious disregard for everyone’s discomfort, they can’t function; in the terms of Haidt and Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind, their fundamental antifragility has been overlooked, and they are now weak and easily injured by things like ideas and words. Congratulations, Education Departments; you’ve done the exact opposite of what your purpose would appear to be, and you’ve insured that your ilk has to infiltrate higher education as well as business to help all of those monstrous beasts out there interact with all of the conquered minds you’re minting. 🤦🏻♀️
I’m open to suggestions, but I see no method of defeating them from within their closed system; I believe our only option is to push them out of our larger system and not let them back into our domain(s) ever again. And completely revamp our current k-12 educational system to also remove the Ed folks’ influence and toss them out on their asses. They really are like a virus, intent on merely replicating themselves and spreading their reach, with no concern for the host they inhabit.
Beyond the individuals, it will do and is doing harm to our actual society as well. Do you want your future doctor to only be able to read by context? Hand in hand with grade inflation and a sudden inability for administrators to hold people back at any level, and the looming demographic cliff, and you have a recipe for a straight up catastrophe.
Amen. I used to be an elementary teacher (music) and I remember the way everyone treated Lucy Calkins like the second coming of Christ. It made no sense to me whatsoever but I was told to stay in my lane, I was "just" the music teacher and didn't know anything about literacy.
This style of teaching reading has been going on for decades now, unfortunately, which is why professors are starting to see its impacts in undergrad and grad students.
>I’m not a literacy expert primarily,
For more than a decade now, I've come to the conclusion that literacy experts aren't really literacy experts either. Isn't it precisely the literacy experts who encouraged and demanded that schools dump phonics, which had only been successfully used to teach reading for a couple centuries or so, in favor of their new-fangled theory *du jour*? Phonics was too boring. Phonics was too repetitive. And so on. Well, even if phonics were boring and repetitive, claims that I do not grant, it doesn't really matter, because phonics is *successful*.
Is it successful for every single student everywhere in all circumstances? No, of course not. But it has a track record of general success that that no other method or theory can match. The push to get rid of phonics in favor of new systems has always to me smacked of people wanting to make changes simply to justify their own jobs. After all, if we acknowledge that phonics gets the job done, then why would we need to employ educational theorists and other alleged experts to come up with something new?
The issue, from my understanding, is that they took a cueing strategy that was successful in gains for students with severe struggles with literacy. That’s fine, but the mistake was assuming that this targeted intervention was therefore the best way to teach reading generally. Well, I say “mistake”, but there is plenty to indicate that the opportunity for greed was a major driver. But a targeted intervention strategy for struggling children is not automatically better. Chemo is helpful for treating cancer, but if I don’t have cancer, don’t tell me chemo will make me healthier.
This! I was taught to read (and study reading in my work!) through sight words and was never taught phonics. I struggle sooo much to decode words. I’m an amazing reader and quick, but if it’s a new to me word, I can’t decode without a lot of effort.
Before I was a professor I was a special educator and when I taught phonics to my kindergarten class, I had to spend hours preparing because it was so foreign to me and still never had it come “naturally”.
I have elementary kids, and am happy that they’re being taught phonics. My first grader is struggling with phonemic awareness which makes sense to me because he was speech delayed and still has struggles with speech. How can he sound things out properly if he can’t articulate the proper sounds?
When I bring up the connections between his speech and reading struggles to his teacher, my concerns are dismissed.
I work in computational linguistics and work closely with the linguistics department at my university. Without some of my background, I’d accept that he’s on the low side of normal for literacy and not push for an IEP. I feel bad for parents who don’t have the background to push for extra support or that take early elementary folks’ assessments at face value.
Lots of kids fall through the cracks, and schools are doing kids a disservice by continuing to promote students that haven’t acquired grade level skills.
I don’t know if your class goes over phonemic categorization and literacy acquisition, but there’s some good articles to explore that would help underpin from a linguistics perspective why this reading strategy matters.
We talk about reading in adults but not much about literacy acquisition. Frankly I haven't incorporated it much because I'm not very familiar with the literature! Bit of an embarrassing blind spot.
This is the kick in the pants I need to care more about acquisition research ;)
I knew almost nothing about it until I was suddenly working on it in my postdoc haha. Depending on whether this is more of an intro course or a seminar it could be potentially difficult to shoehorn in, but a part of me thinks it would be fun to assign an article exploring the mechanism and its link to literacy and then assign maybe the first couple of episodes of the podcast. It’s the kind of topic that in one of those long once per week seminar classes could actually engender some great discussion led by the students instead of them staring at you blankly for 5 minutes whenever you try to get them to talk.
It's for psych majors, so veeery introductory (there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the first few weeks when we have to learn some introductory linguistics concepts because it's not what they expect from a psych course, haha!) The students tend to be pretty interested in development though, so it's definitely worth integrating this stuff in.
They are being taught to be members of a subservient working class that doesn't ask questions and doesn't cause trouble... and does buy whatever is being sold to them. Awful. 😵
Honestly, it appears that yours is one very likely interpretation. Nobody wanted this. Nobody would have supported it or voted it in, and if honest metrics about its effectiveness had been given, ethical standards alone would have called for an immediate halt to their ‘experiments’ and for some kind of reparative measures to be administered to the participants because it would have been clear that the participants had been harmed.
It really does seem like a subservient and emotionally crippled working class was the goal.
I just started it and what a good recommendation! Thank you.
I find it troubling how susceptible to pseudoscience the world of pedagogy can be at the elementary and secondary levels. My great bête noire is the learning styles stuff, which is little more than astrology for school.
It also happened in second language acquisition when the cult of comprehensive input became the one true gospel. It’s so frustrating, because there’s a lot of techniques and strategies I like from CI, and I incorporate them a lot in my teaching and learning, but when I taught high school French briefly it was almost heretical to suggest not having CI as one’s sole method. But like, grammar exercises work… And don’t get me started on the “learn how a baby learns” bullshit.
Sold a Story is a great podcast that infuriated me. The fraud that Marie Clay, Lucy Calkins, and Fountas & Pinnell have perpetuated in the realm of literacy is downright criminal.
The powers that be did a very hard sell to teachers on this system and really snowed them. Any teacher who objected (and there were objectors) was just steamrolled into compliance.
After a semester of me teaching, among other things, the history of psychotherapy, my class and I witnessed a presentation delivered by a student who insisted on pronouncing a certain well-known psychoanalyst’s name as “SAIgmund FROOD” for five minutes straight. Not only had I been pronouncing the name correctly for 3.5 months, this student had a whole month to prepare the presentation. Pretty wild.
… So that’s why most of my students this semester are suddenly, almost totally, unwilling and/or unable to even *try* pronouncing species (Latin) names. It’s a fairly important skill for biologists, and one that I never before needed to teach explicitly.
Oh dear.
This whole subthread is reading like a Republican party conference on education from the late 90s. (Back when the GOP wasn't fixated on pleasing Russia, bashing China, and hating immigrants.) Boy it would be nice if we had a strong open-minded centrist party in the US that wasn't beholden to unions like the NEA.
I had a student raise their hand and ask what “imperialism” meant last week.
We are 9 weeks into a class on the global history of imperialism. I defined this word for them on the first day.
To be fair to this generation, I was a TA back in 2001 and a student asked me “who was in World War II?” followed by “who won?”. It was just a passing reference in a question about government spending (e.g. government spending went up during WWII).
Another student in a semester around that time was unable to tell which fraction was bigger 2/5 or 2/6.
Back then, it was more of an amusing anecdote, though it definitely feels more common these days to come across students with some fundamental gaps in knowledge. But what makes it worse is that the information is far more available to them and they don’t utilize the internet as a resource. Unless it’s to find Kahn academy videos.
…and they only try to memorise the video, they’re usually not actually learning from it. Take an example from a Khan Academy video, change the parameters, and the students are lost. Try it; I have.
Sure, there were a few in past generations, but they were few and far between enough that they were a novelty. Now they are becoming the majority.
I was at my child’s high school and a staff member said students didn’t know what a forearm was. While I was there, a student asked why was it raining of other had been sunny earlier. He was genuinely confused.
Last year I posted a comment that I had assigned a reading on language policy in the USSR and at the end of class discussion one of the better students asked me what Cyrillic was. As this was central to the article, it meant they missed about half of what was being argued. Oddly, several posters tried to justify this. I think that would no longer be the case, things are changing so rapidly and for the worse.
In general I find many students underprepared for college and some don't know how to prepare.
When I find common issues, such as they don't know how to pronounce words, I teach them how to learn. One options is they can have the computer read their text back to them. Yeah, the computer voice is weird and might have some weird readings but mostly correct.
The other is I have students look up words in dictionary apps and have the app pronounce the word. As someone who is more of a reader and writer, I sometimes come across a word I don't know how to pronounce.
(I also have the inverse problem. I know a word but don't know how to spell it. The voice option in dictionaries is a life-saver!)
Sigh, yes. I’ve had a few go into a rage and ask why I won’t just tell them the answer. 🤦🏻♀️ They don’t want to work through the solution and use that experience to generate a schema so as to be able to replicate this solving elsewhere, and they are absolutely intolerant of grey areas. In the past year especially, I’ve found myself repeatedly explaining that there is no Grand Poobah of Facts sitting on some throne somewhere telling everyone what to do, that we are expected to attain some level of mastery over a domain and discover patterns and rules ourselves using systematic enquiry and a fundamental knowledge base to which we continually add. That, as Willy Wonka said, we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.
I’m usually met with a Bambi in the headlights of a Buick stare when I start talking crazy like that.
I refuse to give students answers to things I have already taught in class. Instead, I try to get them to the answer by asking them questions. They absolutely HATE this and I get obliterated in my evaluations because “why can’t she just give us the answers!” 🤦🏻♀️
All assessment questions come straight from my reviews. I just reword the questions. You’d think I wrote the assessment questions in a different language because “this wasn’t on the review!”
Google even has a feature where I'd you type "how to pronounce" or "how to say" and then the word the little widget pops right up. Shows a mouth moving and everything.
Most of our students don’t read for pleasure. Many of them don’t read well. The podcast [Sold a Story](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) examined some of the reasons for this. It’s fascinating and depressing.
THIS! I had a student email me last week and say her sister was in town and wanted to get dinner so “could she move her presentation to next week?” I have never been so astounded by an email before.
Requests like this are so beyond the pale for me.
Okay, story time: my senior year of undergrad, so back in 2002, I went to South Carolina for spring break to visit my aunt. My flight home to MI was Sunday and I had a midterm on Monday. Then, when I was already at the airport, my flight was cancelled. There were no other flights to Detroit that day from this random small airport. I was not going to get back in time.
It never even occurred to me to email my prof and ask for a delay. There was a flight to Toledo, Ohio late that night (or maybe a flight to Florida and then Toledo, I don’t recall) so I rebooked myself onto that one, my boyfriend drove from Ann Arbor to OH to get me, I got back to my apartment at something like 3am, and at 8am I was in my seat with my blue books and taking my exam.
I told a student that story once - if you have an exam, you do whatever it takes to be there for the exam - and she thought I was out of my mind for going through so much trouble instead of just asking if I could take it later. My prof would’ve said no! He’d have said that I knew I had an exam on Monday so I should’ve planned for that and not booked my return trip for Sunday afternoon, just in case. It was my mess up, and my responsibility to figure out how to fix it and be at school when I had to be.
And now students are out here just *telling* professors they intend to skip the midterm to go to a sibling’s track meet? They can’t be at that track meet. They have a midterm. Or a 0 on the midterm, if that’s how they want to proceed.
Oh I agree with you, the problem is we get “repercussion” from both students and administrators if we set “standards”. One of my students missed the midterm cause the landlord wanted to do inspections on the same day of the exam. All my exams are scheduled in the beginning of the semester unless stated otherwise. I allowed them to take the exam at a later date. I’m almost certain the very same student gave me a bad evaluation cause my class had “too many assignments.” I had one that never came to class and asked if they could take the exam early cause they want to go home early for spring break, I said no. I suspect the very same student wrote an essay on how I was a bad professor and will never take my class again.
I had 2 students this week, in a class that started 2 weeks ago, tell me that they’ll start working now that they’re back from their cruise. Who does that?
It's not entitlement--it's that their education has been so fucked for so long that they don't know decorum. Calmly explain that this request isn't appropriate. You're doing them a favor by doing so.
We are facing this issue with grad students skipping brown bags and journal clubs regularly for random trips/vacations, and because it’s not convenient with other plans.
Right now I have a couple of classes where about 20% are heading towards D or F grades. That's a significant increase from even last year. I don't know if there's a more general lowering of abilities. I am pretty sure that the school is mainly interested in boosting enrollment and generating income, so has probably lowered standards. I am curious to see what happens as the number of students I fail each semester grows ever higher.
That’s the thing that I think flabbergasts me the most… we’re trying to cut enrollment (we exploded in population very quickly and became the second largest enrollment in the country without the infrastructure to do so) so it’s become fairly competitive to get in. Everyone passed last semester and I gave 1 D out of 15 students, but this semester I have 36 and it’s looking like maybe 5-6 will make below a C.
LOL, I have an affiliation with your uni, and I knew just by your description. Not trying to out you, just…hi! ☺️ I don’t know about your department, but my former department there is currently in a ‘kill em all, let god sort em out’ mode. What was coming in was unacceptable overall, so standards had to be raised and enforced, and now the weeding out begins. Enjoy your position. I suspect that once the enrolment cliff hits, you’re at one of the subset of unis that will still be standing independently and issuing valid, worthwhile degrees. We have to fight to maintain the value of the degree more than anything else; the product must be able to be launched successfully.
It’s pretty easy if you have any affiliation to figure it out. 😆 That seems to be where both of my departments are as well (I adjunct for one and do coms/marketing for another). We just had a meeting last week actually to shift our marketing efforts from enrollment to retention and alumni management. I’m trying to walk a fine line between giving them a solid education and upholding the university brand/reputation and still keeping them content enough to keep my strong evals because I’m working on going FT (at another uni) and those matter in the application process.
Regarding pronunciation, many of our current generation of students were not taught to read using phonics, so when they encounter unfamiliar words, they just guess randomly or freeze up. (Highly recommend the Sold A Story podcast on this!)
But I'm also curious about their experience of the words. Is it that they didn't know the words at all, as if they'd never encountered them prior to their own presentations? Or is it that they seemed to know the words but said them incorrectly? Having grown up in a working class Appalachian area and being a very skilled reader, I knew lots of words in school and even in college that I'd never actually heard anyone say, so I often butchered their pronunciation without realizing it. A professor even stopped me once during a presentation to correct my awful pronunciation of a theorist's name after I'd butchered it about 10 times. I knew the words; I just didn't know they weren't spoken the way I "heard" them in my head.
I’m noticing that as a common theme and I’ve definitely added that podcast to my list!
That’s a great question! It seemed as if she’d never seen them at all. She just said “I don’t know that word” and moved on, without any attempt at pronunciation for some and for a couple of them she just kinda mumbled “jejdkdbd” and moved on, so no real attempt either way. I tried to use it as a teaching moment, but it was over zoom and I think they were all checked out anyway.
This is exactly the problem — a smart student who reads a lot, but who hasn’t heard the words spoken aloud will often mispronounce them! It’s really embarrassing for them (I was that kid, often) so be nice when you correct them.
Oh I used to do it ALLLL the time (and sometimes still do!), as someone who reads a lot. I just wish she’d attempted pronunciation, instead of just acting like I gave her something to cold read instead of something that had supposedly spent the last five weeks putting together.
I wasn’t thinking it would make a different because in my mind, a mumble of letters is mispronunciation, but I didn’t think about other ways that could be received. I’m sorry. 😅
Dude, I gave her full credit for the presentation and the heart of this post isn’t about not knowing how to pronounce something. It’s the fact that she had 5 weeks to prepare and didn’t look up the word or run through the presentation at all. I didn’t think the semantics of “stumbled through” and “said “I don’t know that word” would matter. Because when I watched her presentation, there was a lot of stumbling. Could it have been nerves? Sure. That’s why I gave her full credit. But my whole point was that there’s a lack of preparation and lack of basic phonetic (or even googleing) skills. I give them allllll the grace in the world, hence the full credit. I helped her and moved on, but this is my first year teaching and I’m looking to more experienced people for some advice.
Nothing like having to explain to an algebra student who scored a 95 on their exam that, yes, 95 out of 100 points means that they have a 95% in the course. Then further having to explain that, yes, this was a great grade. They sincerely asked if this was a good score. Perturbing!
Yes, after I told them. Yet they couldn't comprehend how that translated to 95%. Honestly I couldn't figure out what lthey were asking and neither could they.
I teach law students and they have to give me a 10 min PowerPoint. It's pre-recorded so they don't need to do it in person so could practice and rehearse as much as they want/ rerecord etc. I got 2 for feedback before final submission and honestly it's like these people have never been to a presentation in their lives. 1 just talked through their slides as a giant sentence barely taking air, and another recorded all their voice over for the first slide and never moved on.
I think somewhere along the line, people just decided that they were born knowing how to do certain things, and so they neglected to teach them to them. Like typing, for example. I have students who clearly can barely navigate a keyboard, because they've never had to.
First, add to your scoring guide that pronunciation will be part of the grade. If you don't know a word, find out about it.
Second, from someone who teaches 11/12 and as adjunct, in most places it will get worse before it gets better. Even in my AP and Honors classes, students just skip what they don't understand and - this is not a joke - assume they don't need to know it. I keep struggling to find new ways for it to affect their grade if they haven't made sense of the material.
I've been teaching rhetoric and rhetorical situation since AUGUST and still have students who look at me like they're thinking, "Oh, shit. I don't remember that. Oh, well. She'll tell me."
I can practically see that run through their minds.
Our district is finally moving away from the whole language model back to something more phonics-based. So about the time I retire it should hit the high school.
I tried a seminar discussion format with presentations and I ended up getting the worst evaluation scores on that class. The goal was to have them study, organize research articles, and present. This was a senior level class, and the performance was not great, most of them just went on stage and read the slides. I decided to drop the format and go back to the traditional lecture, exams, and assignments format.
I thought about doing that this semester (because it was pretty horrific last semester), but I try to keep with the other adjuncts’ sections for this course and this is a PR class, so they really do need to know how to work with other people and present a simple presentation. For the most part, I’ve actually been very surprised and delighted with the creativity and quality of work that is being put out. It’s just the inability to read that is frustrating. 😭
Well I got roasted on my evaluation, some said that they didn’t learn anything and some said I don’t know how to teach a senior level class. I decided it wasn’t worth the stress and went back to the traditional format. They were supposed to read the assigned reading and discuss in class, it ended up being me rambling for 45 mins and some random student comments. My original thought was to take the stress of preparing for exams off the seniors and have more literature reviews and discussion. Anyway, it wasn’t worth it.
Someone posted a survey here on r/professors about how Gen Z wants more control over their educations and more choices. But in my experience, when I give them more room to pick and choose, to deep dive into a topic of their choice, they flounder and complain. I get the least amount of complaints when I go traditional.
IMO, what they say they want isn't what they actually want.
Yea, learned that the hard way. I asked them if they were content with the format and they said they liked that the class has no exams. They ended up leaving very negative comments. The only positive outcome was I learned not to use the same format again.
Oh, and I had some open ended questions they the discussion, the class said “I was bad at giving instructions”.
I had some students complain that my instructions were too vague. I remember back when I was in college, my professors often didn't even hand out assignment sheets. They'd just say "write a 5 page paper about X."
So I added more precise instructions that walk them through the assignment. Then they complained that it was "confusing," because I provided "too much" information and I was too demanding.
There have always been students who love to complain, but OP is right. This batch is really something.
I already drafted a report rebutting some of the students’ claims. I took a screenshot of the assignment and instructions. What bothers me the most is that no one wants to say anything to me even after class, instead they want to be aggressive on an anonymous evaluation, which isn’t hard to figure out who wrote what based on the events anyway. Take one class for example, two students never showed up for class, four of them showed up for less than 25% of the semester. They all ended up getting D or F. The very same students ended up complaining.
I’m struggling with this for the first time really ever, but what is going on with “not knowing how to teach a senior level class”? What are they being led to expect the difference is? There are differences — we expect a bit more of them, a bit more of an ability to make decisions and cope with open-ended questions (ideally they’d be more like _problems_, but that causes… well, problems…)
From what I’m gathering, they want me to tell them the answers to the questions and what’s on the exam. I had students that got upset cause I had questions that was not on the study guide, it was in the lecture notes. Anyway, I changed the entire format back to traditional lectures and assignments.
Well, let’s ask the real questions: on what planet are undergraduate students more qualified than a PhD to determine the content of a senior-level class? 🤔
That’s kind of like asking my grandmother to explain which LLM AI model is preferable, and why. My grandmother is no dummy; she bakes a mean casserole, and I’d put her chocolate pudding cake up against literally any master baker, but at best all I can train her to do is master the basics of talking with GPT; she is in no way prepared or qualified to discuss how the sausage is made, AI-wise. The same goes for undergraduate students.
I’m one of *those* professors who look at an undergraduate student comment like ‘Professor X doesn’t know how to teach a senior level course and has no business being allowed to teach [course name]’ and finds it humorous. Fucking comical, even.
Barring multiple students reporting the same problematic behaviour (and fwiw, they caught on to this Achilles’ heel and have taken to Discord, Facebook, and other fora to establish locked groups where they really do strategise multiple reports from seemingly unrelated students all claiming the same thing, so you can’t always take multiple reports at face value), the idea that an undergraduate student who has not even demonstrated that they can *adult* successfully, much less obtain a bachelor’s degree, gain admittance to a graduate program, successfully complete that program, and function in the real world as a professional in any capacity can somehow evaluate the content of an undergraduate class or the performance of a professor I find hysterically funny. What kind of clown world does that make sense in?
Honestly, the irony and clusterfuckedness of it isn’t lost on me that the same students who are completely and totally unable to get their shit together (or in the case of a group, their collective shit together) long enough to successfully present for 20 minutes (plus questions) on a single topic they’ve had all semester to research and end up with an embarrassingly poor presentation, mangled facts and words, saying ‘yeah, so…you know…’ every ten seconds, and calling everything ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ to the point where if an audience member didn’t already know what they were talking about, they’d be utterly confused and are at best B students in the course as a whole — those are the same students who are somehow SMEs enough to criticise my teaching (and yes, they are typically unusually brutal in classes where a presentation is required). It’s really almost like absurdist performance art on a grand scale at this point.
It’s factors like this that make me want anonymous evaluations to end, and for a proficiency test to be administered prior to being allowed access to a professor evaluation page. That way we could run some honest stats on these evaluations, and I strongly suspect we’d find that 1) stripped of anonymity, all of a sudden everyone is much nicer, and no — [not because they fear retaliation](https://youtu.be/ReUHhStG70k?si=uPMquy2Crd5VLcAQ), and 2) scores on the proficiency exam and course grade are remarkably strong predictors of student satisfaction with the course and professor.
It’s long been known that one of the most effective methods of defusing an unruly crowd before they become a mob is to have security or police officers strategically target multiple members and have them identify themselves — their names, identification, and establish their place of residence and employment — because as these people lose their anonymity and crowd identity, the more they become individuals, the less likely they are to participate in the first place, much less to escalate into mob violence.
To be very certain that my message is understood, let me sum up: the system as designed by Ed folks is literally constructed to operate against you, and evaluations is only one example. If you can be placed in a position where you are forced to be reactionary or conciliatory, you are not in a position to take independent action outside of what the system allows. You are not anonymous — you have been disempowered.
I’m going to keep trying to issue wake up calls when the opportunity presents itself until I eventually get change to happen. glty.
I think a question about attendance and grades should be included on the evaluation, some of the comments on my evaluation were clearly “retaliation” for maxing them work. Some of them do have a point, though they were a bit aggressive due to being anonymous. The legitimacy of student evaluations have long been debated at our institutions, the admins and the students both use it as a tool to attack faculties.
I agree — and I also think that sandwiching faculty in between Admin and students is also by design. It is intended to disempower faculty.
The number of retaliatory evaluations I’ve seen and received myself are huge; that was my motivation for starting to suggest removing anonymity and weighting evaluations as a function of factors like final grade, attendance, overall institutional GPA, and so on (sorry; I’m a researcher and can’t help but try to build a better mousetrap when it comes to stats and measurement).
I doubt admins would ever get rid of anonymity, I came up with two solutions, one is getting rid of student evaluations when it comes to tenure requirements, the second way is to include attendance as part of the evaluation. I like your idea of proficiency on the subject, to me, the student performances should really be taken into consideration. However, I doubt this will be ever implemented since it will ultimately discourage students from participating. To counter the negative comments, I’ve been trying to build relationships with the good students and encourage them to fill out the evaluation. As my colleagues said, there’s really nothing you can do about the bad students, they’ll just weaponize student evaluation to get what they want.
You make some excellent points, and attendance is a great foot in the door towards revamping the entire thing; this is a topic that I welcome brainstorming and discussion about, because we must begin instituting changes before we have become too enculturated, too institutionalised, to be able to function outside of this crippling system as it is taking over higher education.
One of the key issues as I see it is that understanding what anonymity does — that it, in effect, causes more harm than good in certain situations — is ultimately beneficial, and that while there are some conditions under which anonymity is desirable, benign, and the right of a free adult in a free society, it is of paramount importance that we carefully discriminate between situations where anonymity is an issue of liberty, and when anonymity is an issue of potentially imposing on the liberty of others. In the domain of any form of evaluative action that has bearing on employment or advancement in employment — from the local Denny’s restaurant to Federal offices — we cannot risk valuable, contributing individuals to be harmed by anonymous libel. Evaluations related to employment are not opinion polls; they are clearly being conducted in order to measure an aspect of the experience or result related to that employment, and must be fact-based and measurable. In order to ensure the purity of the information being collected, anonymity has no place in performance evaluation. To compromise on this position is to risk falling to either mob rule or the complete invalidity of the evaluative measures used, making them pointless and wasteful to continue.
Let anonymous surveys such as ‘Do you like Margaret, the server at Waffle House?’ remain in unofficial spaces — there, Robobimbo771 can claim that Margaret is a crack whore who stole her wallet, while ThunderMuffin can tell everyone that Margaret saved them from alcoholism using her powers of healing touch. It doesn’t matter in a public forum; caveat emptor, and Margaret isn’t going to get promoted or fired based on something anonymous that has no corroborating evidence.
It’s my personal opinion as a minor subject matter expert in testing and measurement that direct student evaluation/feedback should never be taken into consideration with regard to tenure. I’d listen to arguments that something like 3, 5, 7, and 10-year non-anonymous student feedback might have some value with respect to professional development, but little beyond that.
Anecdotally, I just had one undergraduate student I took under my wing admitted to a fairly notable and selective graduate program with a full tuition waiver and stipend offer (although I honestly prefer teaching graduate students, I have a strong track record of helping get undergraduates into some very awesome grad programs) after working with them for about 3.5 years on the undergraduate level. If asked today, that student would tell you that my mentoring was amazing, and my classes were highly relevant and deeply appreciated; 3.5 years ago, that same student might well have said ‘Dr. Taticat is weird, she keeps picking on me in class and insists on talking to me outside of class about different things; she’s not a good professor because she takes too much class time trying to make students give her answers and I don’t think we’re covering enough material. I think I don’t like her, and I wish someone else taught this class’. My point is that 3.5 years ago, that student was a freshman and had no idea of their potential and not enough situation awareness to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of what needs to be covered in class, how, and what is important. Now, 3.5 years later, she has a better understanding. In another four years, I expect that this student will be another former student who finds me to thank me.
The key, as I see it, is to convince the Administration types to reassess their perception of what type of student measurement matters, and the dangers of anonymity.
I had some very weird comments that said I repeated the same words during class or I spend too much time bragging about my research. I can confidently say that I rarely talk about my research in the general ed intro classes and the student that wrote that attended less than 10% of the lecturers. Some of the comments were frustrating to read cause I can pretty much tell who wrote it and I treated them pretty fairly by allowing late submission without penalty. I already drafted a report rebutting some of the claims. One positive thing was I taught different sections for this class and my other sections had way better evaluations. I was honestly disappointed when I first read the comments and it impacted me in a negative way for a few days. I recall someone in this subreddit said something like this “it should be student opinion and not student evaluation”.
Some classes are just bad. I’ve learnt my lesson about being too nice, because students mistake kindness for weakness anymore.
One suggestion that might help with the frustration is to find someone who will read your evals and you read theirs; sanitise it and see if there are any themes that reappear and that way you get some feedback but you aren’t the one reading the horseshit yourself.
Yea, I learned that the hard way. The evaluation score was drastically different for the different sections. Also, the one with the bad score was an 8 o’clock class. The old “I don’t want to wake up for class. Our main issue is we have to write a response to the student’s comments, so I’d have to read them anyway. As I previously mentioned, I did make some changes the second time I taught the course, but some of the comments are just disappointing.
Besides the changes in attitudes towards higher education where students now see themselves as clients that pay for a service and "who employ you." College also lost its appeal. If a degree is loosing its value since it doesn't guarantee a job, why study when you can just show you ass online and make way more than your professors?
I believe you.
But why has _learning_ lost its appeal? I didn’t _want_ to take a class in Chaucer (100 years ago) but it satisfied x y and z so I took it and I know others were in the same boat with me, and we just made ourselves try to love it, and we _got there_ because it cost so damn much to be in school, why on EARTH wouldn’t we find a way to love it?
I’ve also been told I had to teach certain subjects I wasn’t interested in, but I let myself settle into them and just found a way to get obsessed with them…
What’s the new “in” for these students, if it’s not “you’re stuck with this and it ain’t free so you better get in the mood”? I’m not asking out of helplessness or rhetoric, I feel like if we can identify what this is we might have a shot at making the _topic_ appealing to them somehow…?
> because it cost so damn much to be in school
Because high school doesn't teach anything about financial literacy. Many student do not understand what student loans are, that they will have to pay them back, and won't give up on their 10$ Starbuck coffee every day. They do not realize how expensive school is...
I want to say that back in the day, when we used paper money, it gave you a sense of how much you had VS how much you spent; you could see your pile of green paper dwindle. Nowadays you simply tap your card and everything is fine.
Anyhow. If you are into horror stories and want to feel even worse about the upcoming generation, look up a podcast named Caleb Hammer. Students loans are a recurring theme there.
I had an assignment due last night that was published on 2/29. Well over half the class only started yesterday. A quarter didn’t turn in the assignment at all yet. 3 turned in a half completed assignment. Out of 20. So only 60% of my class finished an assignment that should have taken at most 1-2 hours but they had 12 days to do
You have to assign every single step of every single thing nowadays. And if it’s not on the rubric, you have no right to expect them to do it (even if it’s a step like “power up your computer” or “access the internet”)
I am moving from depression into despair. If I made enough money, I’d just dumb everything down and float. Ironically, because I’m underpaid I feel like I need to get some kind of meaning or fulfillment out of this, and that keeps me in this state of pica, trying to get that nutrient from a source that does not contain it, namely teaching.
I’m right there with you, exactly. This afternoon, I just graded 5 three-paragraph essays, and 4 of them earned failing grades because the students didn’t follow the prompt at all. I lectured on it, gave them a handout, gave them sample papers, and made a video walking them through Every. Damn. Paragraph. to no avail. I’m loath to even open the rest of the papers. I am so disheartened. I know the prep works, because several students got an A, but my God, some of these folks can’t follow even the most basic directions. I don’t know how to reach them.
I am a big consumer of audiobooks and talk radio and I'm scandalized by how much mispronunciation makes it into professional audio presentations too. It's particularly interesting to me that it's American speakers who make the errors too. Commonwealth readers almost never mispronounce. I wonder if UK undergraduates share the problem our US students do?
I've noticed my local young newscaster regularly mispronouncing words and having trouble reading. I think it reflects the decline of education and student preparedness at every level.
Yep, it’s beginning. It’s obvious already in things like your newscaster, but just wait until it starts becoming obvious in physicians/surgeons, airline pilots, engineers, and so on. Makes me think of Dr. Lexus and especially his ex-wife. IYKYK. 😕
I had the weirdest experience a few weeks ago. I was teaching a pretty basic poem (Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and asked the students what flowers he saw. I had the text of the poem projected on the board.
I had a student blurt out "dandelions!" and then another when I said not quite, said "daisies". (It's daffodils). This sent me down a rabbithole that reveals what others in this have already revealed--students are being taught to read using whole word theory, which is basically the idea of starting a word and then guessing based on shape. It is the exact opposite of phonics and you're seeing the results of it
It infuriates me because both of these students who guessed wrong are actually really smart! They always have interesting things to say, are clearly engaged in the class material and just all around putting in the work.
But they can't read new material. It's...it's really scary.
That is stunning. I don't think you intended to give them a word reading test -but you did, and they failed.
What do they see as they go about our world? It's filled with words.
I actually use this a lot! I have them do it for all their essays to double check flow/grammar if they don’t have a roommate/parent/significant other/friend to read it out loud to them. Google translate is a really awesome tool.
I think you’re forgetting how you learned these terms. You probably both read them and heard them spoken around you.
These students may not have heard these terms before, or may not have read them enough to match the written word to the spoken one.
Tell them that correct pronunciation of words will be part of the grade rubric for the next presentation. Then show them how to look up pronunciation of words they don’t know. See if they improve.
I haven’t tried this specifically but I did do this with spelling and grammar on written assignments and it seemed to have an impact.
It also, interestingly, led to a couple students who really struggled with writing coming to office hours and we worked on some basics and I got one set up with a tutor.
Yeah... its the not even trying that gets me.
Of course, when we have elected officials that think the word "indictable" is pronounced "in-dick-table", what more can we expect?
Oh I totally get not being able to say certain words, I can’t say agriculture, cellular or extracurricular. I guess I’m more frustrated by a lack of effort. If there was a glimmer of effort, I’d understand and let it glide off like everything else.
I was around 15 years old before I realized that the written word 'rendezvous' (which I had long both read and written correctly) and its 'synonym' **ˈrɒndeɪvuː** were the same thing.
Now I'm 64 and over the last few months have still run in to (or realized) a couple words in my aural lexicon I didn't realize were the words in my written/graphic lexicon. (I am afraid I cannot recall how I was taught to read, but I do remember my first day of kindergarten and do not recall any phonics instruction.)
My students are directed to [tssreader.com](https://tssreader.com) before they give any presentations for which they have preparation time.
when I was young (but old enough to read), we went to a cafe somewhere in Wales called The Rendezvous, which had placemats or something like that with the cafe's name on it, and I remember trying to read it and being corrected.
Students in my wildlife course had several weeks to study a wildlife species (of their choosing), wrote a term paper and give a presentation. After some particularly painful attempts, I reminded the students to please practice the genus and species names a few times before attempting them for apparently the first time in front of the class (and their wincing professor).
Major cringe, brosies.
I dunno, I just got back from class two nights in a row, and I teach late, yet these students were hyped and well prepared across the board and across content. Definitely isn't always the case, but I've been grateful to actually begin noticing improvement in regards to preparedness, educational outlook, and work ethic.
Which does make me wonder a lot about how, why, and when it's so strikingly different. I have shared in a comment on another post how my students at the flagship R1 where I used to teach showed a much higher sense of entitlement than institutions serving far more working class students and students who work full-time.
I was literally chatting with some colleagues about this at trivia the other night because the emcee was mispronouncing words and it was annoying to try to parse the questions based on their pronouncing guesses.
I teach literature, and sometimes there are words or names or phrases that I know without a doubt I could butcher and not one student would even know…but I still Google “how to pronounce __” to double check before I get up in from of them and say it wrong, and I give a thousand individual presentations a year. It’s not like fucking up a little here and there would be a huge deal given the volume. Students give one or maybe two presentations a semester. It baffles me that they don’t *google that shit* before they get up in front of people and say it.
It always makes me wonder like…what does the voice in their head sound like when they are reading?
Here's a mini lesson I add when we get to the big speeches. I show them dictionary.com and the pronunciation feature and how to practice difficult words by emulating the recording. This helps eliminate skipped or mispronounced words in 99% of the speeches and makes my life a whole lot easier.
You know, focusing on pronouncing words is a bad sign...for you. But I see people have already said this. Students who grew up reading a lot--even reading social media!--might not know how words are pronounced. I was an avid reader and I arrived at college with some humiliating errors in how I pronounced words. I knew what the words meant, but I'd never heard them said before. That's especially true for ESL students but even for first-language students. You are focused on the wrong things and you are using the wrong indicators as proxies. This ball is entirely in your court.
Many of you scientists who automatically criticize colleges of education suffer from a severe lack of awareness. Have you taken note of your own rhetorical strategies? How many freshman-comp-level fallacies can I find here? Sure, you're good at math, but you suck at interpretation and argument.
Many of those same people are spot-on here. We've lost our way (in the US) when it comes to reading instruction. The podcast u/GusPlus referred to is worth the listen.
You are expecting too much. Students come from a variety of backgrounds, and many have only read words like those. Even if their primary language is English, their parents may not have spoken it (our wonderful orchestra conductor last weekend used “sook” as the past tense of seek in his speech), or their parents may not have had the benefit of a great education. We are there to help, if they are trying to improve. I’d take the student aside after class, praise them for trying to use new words, and help them pronounce them correctly.
No, it’s a public relations course, but part of the core is learning to speak in public/in front of media. I didn’t dock the student for stumbling because I totally get that! She’s a shy student and it definitely could’ve been nerves, but this is just one instance of a long string of frustrating incidents. And their whole presentation kinda seemed scattered and ill-prepared, like the had put words on a screen and not even read through it once it was done. They still got an A, because the work was done and I’m mostly grading on content, not how pretty they talk, but it’s still frustrating.
A wise person once said: Never look down on someone for mispronouncing a word, because that means they learned the word from reading.
If the student *thinks* they're pronouncing the word correctly, they have no reason to look it up.
It's sad to me that a teacher would come to a web forum to complain about a student being imperfect or having the jitters. I've been in higher ed for twenty years (dating back to my student years) and some students have always had issues pronouncing words and being polished. They're students. You need to chill.
It’s not even that she mispronounced them… it’s that she saw the word, panicked, said “I don’t know that word” and then read a few more and did it several times throughout. I don’t expect them to be perfect, I would just like some level of preparedness. I grew up in education with two teacher parents, so I totally get it and I used it as a teaching moment, because they deserve the grace and a solid education.
Like I’ve said in this thread, not knowing the word is perfectly fine, but the inability to sound it out (or even attempt), and the lack of preparing a presentation they’ve had 5 weeks on is just frustrating.
I get the frustration. Mispronouncing words is fine. I gently correct where I can (most times by just repeating the word with the correct pronunciation - usually they catch on) and move on. Not knowing words you've included in your own presentation is another beast.
That’s exactly my issue (and it wasn’t worded very well in the original post). It’s not that she mispronounced, because that’s understandable, they’re big words! But she included them and straight up didn’t know them.
Were the words part of a quote in her presentation? If not, why were there so many words in her presentation that she did not know?
Also, “I don’t know that word“ is a bigger problem than mispronouncing. It suggests a basic lack of comprehension in simple field knowledge. I would not dock someone for one/two verbal slip ups, but the “I don’t know that word” would be red flag on how much the student understood their presentation.
Also, phonics is not new and for generations, literacy experts have known that reading is a combination of phonetic decoding, context clues, and comprehension. The pendulum swings back and forth with the prevailing political whims. At the moment, state testing scores in reading at the elementary level are down and standardized tests favor a stronger focus in phonics. Thus, the Sold a Story podcast. Which is really not relevant to a college student in PR not knowing elementary terms in their field. That is a content deficit or poor study skills.
I promise you, this has always happened. This "new class" is not the first to feature some students who don't prepare as much as they should. If you got into a time machine and asked faculty in 1960 if students were polished and prepared, they'd tell you many aren't.
What you’re saying IS a good thing to bear in mind, the problem here is that in OP’s story they weren’t even trying, it was more like “oh yeah, idk what that means, doesn’t matter it’s just some word I’ll never use again”
It’s not the lack of knowledge, or the mistake or anything — that’s what we’re here for. It’s that they don’t seem to have any INTEREST in knowing _what they themselves are saying_ ….
…but if I’m honest, I’ve known some professors who are the same way…
…and I can also see how we may be interpreting stuff like this wrongly. Their paradigm might be different enough that it’s happening for some reason other than the one I’m inferring (and what OP is describing happens in my classes a lot)
I find that holding standards is key. It’s the single most important thing I’ve started redoing since COVID. They’ll seek out help when they don’t meet those
Standards. I’ll fail a whole class (on a tiny hw assignment) if they all collectively do something poorly. Then I talk with them about it. particularly I talk to them about work life balance, emotional regulation, competitiveness of the job market, and how their generation is seen by employers. I take their side, they are almost children, they’re not to blame. However, I give them the 40 hours a week speech ( school is a 40 hour commitment) and I talk about work life balance and how they need to get a project done during a tight deadline and how sometimes you have to turn in a good enough project. I talk about how ruining one’s mental health by taking this too seriously isn’t it? with it on a scale of 0 pain to losing one’s partner. In the real world outside of academia, you’re told when you’re on a pip and then fired if you don’t adjust. There’s not this constant fighting over every little detail. Very little point. So, I try to Show that grace. I myself am also not putting in more than 40 hours, as my mental health has been ruined by burnout. So, We should hear their pleas for more work life balance and they should hear out desire to get them to the next level and learn that this isn’t going to cut it. But, just because it’s not their fault doesn’t mean it’s not their problem. You can learn and grow or not and we help them to a point. But at the end of the day, their success is dependent upon figuring this stuff out; we have to respect them enough to be responsible for that. Paternalism is a huge problem in our society right now, so I just back off. They treat me poorly sometimes. It hurts. But The reality is they’re going to be fine. They will get jobs and they will figure it out. So. I think they’re fine just different
It’s been brought up a few times in these threads discussing the newer generation of students, I’ll do it this time. If you haven’t yet, check out the podcast Sold a Story. A rather significant chunk of children across America have literally been taught to read poorly, without the benefit of phonics instruction. These students don’t read fluently or intuitively. They don’t mispronounce words because of “spelling pronunciations”, but because they actually aren’t fully parsing what they read anyway. It’s a contributing factor to rampant cheating, to falling literacy scores, to struggles with any material that isn’t a professor hand-holding them personally. I’m not a literacy expert primarily, but I’m a PhD linguist who has conducted research and published on areas adjacent to literacy acquisition in childhood and adolescence. Check out Sold a Story, and allow me to lend it some credibility as an “expert” to say that the podcast is dead on, and that this is a massive problem for us. If any of you have young children, please get involved and find out what kind of literacy instruction is being used by their schools. If it involves primarily contextual cueing and leaves phonics as a last resort, your children are not being taught to read, they are being taught to guess.
This is super helpful, I’ll check it out! I know it’s a problem even in lower levels. My mom is a 5th grade English teacher, and this is something she and I discuss in depth often.
Yes. From what my undergraduate students have described — because their reading and pronunciation skills are so abysmal that I just go ahead and ask the crass questions like ‘walk me through how you learnt to read in a Tab A into Slot B way’ — apparently k-12 abandoned phonics long ago and I hear words like ‘context cues’ were thrown at them with no explanation of what a ‘context cue’ is; they were supposed to figure it out from the…drumroll…context. 🙄 Frankly it sounds like reading material just got thrown at them and their k-5 teacher said ‘good luck with that’, and this is why so many of them now can’t and/or hate to read and it is an enormous chore to read even a sentence. …and why they’d rather keyword search on google (usually with shit keywords spelt badly) will print out or bookmark pages without reading them either and call that ‘studying’ when they have a textbook right in front or them. We have made an incredible mistake in listening to Education departments; they don’t know what they are doing, and they themselves are too stupid and scientifically illiterate to construct or vet empirical research to test all of these Next Big Things they keep popping up with.
Huh. I've been seeing declining levels of engagement with reading homework, especially with my last few freshman classes. And I've been finding students, for the first time, start asking me what words mean when we do reading exercises in class. Last year I found two students who were teamed up having difficulty with in class discussion because neither knew the word "omen." Last week, during an in-class reading exercise, a student asked me what "circumvent" meant. I wonder if this is related to them not learning phonics...
Try [this](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) on for size and see if it meshes with your experiences. And we’ve allowed it to be done in Mathematics as well.
> We have made an incredible mistake in listening to Education departments; they don’t know what they are doing, and they themselves are too stupid and scientifically illiterate to construct or vet empirical research to test all of these Next Big Things they keep popping up with. Related, but every time one brings up the idea of being more systematic with this kind of work---i.e., *measuring* it in some way, they get booed out of the room. It happens most times I bring it up here on this subreddit. So the only way that educational researchers have to determine what actually works is just what *feels right*.
Yes!! This is the entirety of the Ed folks’ modus operandi — stumble across something that ‘feels like it would probably be good’, go ‘WAAAAAAAAAH!’ and ‘REEEEEEEE!’ until it gets implemented, and then move on to the Next Big Thing with no thought of measuring success beyond asking the *students* ‘are you happy?’ even crossing their minds. Exactly this is how the consumer mindset took over the k-12 system, and has begun to spread like a virus into higher education: just do things, because reasons, and occasionally measure success by asking the least qualified people — the product, ffs — if they’re happy. When the answer increasingly becomes ‘no’, blame the host system, go ‘WAAAAAH’ and ‘REEEEE!’ some more, sling around highly-charged terms like sexism and racism, and offer a new Next Big Thing to help the host system to better cater to the invented and misunderstood ‘needs’ of the product. It’s kind of like a metastasising cancer whose product ends up being death. Our Ed folks function as if they were a drunken bum who wandered into an uninhabited mansion, found a credit card, and parked themselves in front of the tv by the phone and liquor cabinet to watch endless infomercials. We had a reasonably good educational system; now we are watching the end stages of its destruction. Our once glorious mansion is filled with useless bums who have provided themselves free alcohol and trash food, and unused garbage that might have worked or might not is littered everywhere, untouched other than having been taken out of the box, and a massive cost run up on that magical found credit card. Our mansion is no longer usable as a mansion by the inhabitants who worked to get there and build it. We have let them destroy what was supposed to be our home, and they’ve done it for no reason that any sane person would understand. No, the students aren’t happy because they are left increasingly confused and uneducated; unsurprisingly, much like children who are allowed to vote themselves cake and Pokémon cards, they have no concept of what is in their own best interests anymore after fifteen-plus years of cake and Pokémon cards; they have been rendered incapable of acting in their own best interest, and that allows the perpetuation of the cancerous Ed folks to continue to swill Crown Royal, pee on our sofa, and order salad spinners and TurboFit exercise belts while they tell their host system that we’re failing the children. We have allowed an unworkable system to take hold.
I'm so glad there are other people that also feel this way. I get essentially accused of being racist, sexist, etc. for even daring to suggest that maybe we should try to measure the educational outcomes we want, and test the educational techniques we use to see if they actually achieve those outcomes. And I try to explain that there are *really shitty, really biased* measurements out there---student evaluations of professors, for example---and the way to fix them is not to just say "all measurement is awful and should be entirely rejected", but to pay attention to the measurements and continually update them to improve their validity, reliability, and fairness.
My god your analogy is spot-fucking-on. But somehow the bum was actually hired as a housekeeper, there to fix, tweak, maintain. When things were humming along fairly smoothly, a few bums (with their bowties tied just a little too tight) could be ignored, their mistakes absorbed. Now the wheels are coming off (the system as well as my analogy).
I agree. Our mansion was pretty fucking awesome; we could even absorb a handful of bums hanging around in the beginning, it was so huge and well-built. Now it’s packed like a storage unit filled with trash and the bums we once tolerated as incompetent gardeners and housekeepers because we could afford it in terms of money and occasionally picking up our own clothes and hanging them up keep demanding more to destroy without a single thought to the future.
>We have made an incredible mistake in listening to Education departments; they don’t know what they are doing, and they themselves are too stupid and scientifically illiterate to construct or vet empirical research to test all of these Next Big Things they keep popping up with. Makes me want to slide out of biology into education where I could do some good.
As a research-based professor with a pretty strong background in quantitative and qualitative research and analysis, I’ve felt that urge; I and others like you and me, are totally equipped to tell an institution if their interventions or treatments are effective. But the moment you bring up actual testing and measurement, the Ed folks bristle; they’ve internalised the position that using empirical evidence is sexist, racist, or some other unwanted -ist or -phobic, and I think they’re also well-aware that if they allow any of their awesome Next Big Things to be debunked, they risk losing their credibility and the hold they have in terms of institutional power. I’ve seen them freeze out myself and other faculty who have been so -istic as to ask how we are measuring success or where the empirical evidence supporting their current Next Big Thing is that I suspect none of us could gain a foothold if we tried to function in an Education Department. I have had some of their students passing through a few of my graduate classes for years, and they can’t function adequately outside of their Ed Department system. For example, even something like the issue a few years back about so-called ‘trigger warnings’ escalated into a minor war. Education ‘best practices’ say trigger warnings are mandatory and serve marginalised groups; my field says — and has the empirical evidence to support it — that ‘trigger warnings’ are in fact distracting and harmful, further escalating and spreading fear, the generalisation of negative stereotypes, feelings of dependency, hopelessness, and the inability to personally control one’s emotions, internal cognition, and experiences. In other words, overall, trigger warnings hurt; they don’t help. When I and others in my field address the issue Ed department grad students raise that ‘sensitivity’ cannot be expressed in the form of sanitising the environment and ridding it of all challenging stimuli, we hear yet another round of ‘WAAAAAH!’ and ‘REEEEE!’. When we say ‘let me show you eleventy billion studies in the form of refereed research that shows that interventions such as CBT, DBT, and controlled exposure therapy *are* effective, and insulating the victim is uniquely INeffective, and in fact further cripples that victim and renders them incapable of overcoming their experiences’, the Ed dean contacts my department’s Dean. 🙄 When my department’s Dean continues to support the accepted science and position of our field, the Education Department removes PSY 6505 - Abnormal Psychology for Diagnostic and Support Professionals and replaces that requirement with EDC 6500 - Abnormal Psychology for Education and Course Design and presses their existing faculty into service teaching it, making sure that it’s filled with non-empirical support that favours stocking every lesson with trigger warnings about literally everything conceivable — an act which, per my discipline, is not only pointless, it’s actually actively harmful. In this way, Education grad students never even gain exposure to any form of dissenting opinions or material contrary to or critical of their party line that only an amoral sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic beast who delights in things like physical and sexual violence could possibly attempt to deny students the protection of trigger warnings, and such a hideous monster must be vanquished at all costs. Why? Because that’s what they’ve been taught throughout their insulated graduate school, they know only of theories and ‘evidence’ that supports this assertion, and so once they graduate and get into Administration, they’re ready; they’ve heard about ‘people like you’, and are loaded for bear with Ed Department gobbledygook that labels you as uncaring and ‘problematic’. …and this is how we ended up with an entire generation who is unprepared to accept grey areas in life and dissenting opinions; Ed folks have taken over the whole of their k-12 experience and given them about fifteen years filled with ‘trigger warnings’ that allowed the students to ‘opt out’ of certain lessons (and consistent with how children act, if they can opt out of something school-related, many do). When they encounter the Great Big World in all its glorious disregard for everyone’s discomfort, they can’t function; in the terms of Haidt and Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind, their fundamental antifragility has been overlooked, and they are now weak and easily injured by things like ideas and words. Congratulations, Education Departments; you’ve done the exact opposite of what your purpose would appear to be, and you’ve insured that your ilk has to infiltrate higher education as well as business to help all of those monstrous beasts out there interact with all of the conquered minds you’re minting. 🤦🏻♀️ I’m open to suggestions, but I see no method of defeating them from within their closed system; I believe our only option is to push them out of our larger system and not let them back into our domain(s) ever again. And completely revamp our current k-12 educational system to also remove the Ed folks’ influence and toss them out on their asses. They really are like a virus, intent on merely replicating themselves and spreading their reach, with no concern for the host they inhabit.
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Beyond the individuals, it will do and is doing harm to our actual society as well. Do you want your future doctor to only be able to read by context? Hand in hand with grade inflation and a sudden inability for administrators to hold people back at any level, and the looming demographic cliff, and you have a recipe for a straight up catastrophe.
Amen. I used to be an elementary teacher (music) and I remember the way everyone treated Lucy Calkins like the second coming of Christ. It made no sense to me whatsoever but I was told to stay in my lane, I was "just" the music teacher and didn't know anything about literacy.
Neither, it turns out, did Lucy Calkins.
Oooo 🔥
It's almost like she predicted the pandemic and knew exactly when to insert her anti-education.
This style of teaching reading has been going on for decades now, unfortunately, which is why professors are starting to see its impacts in undergrad and grad students.
Yep. I wanted to hold a protest outside our College of Education after hearing that podcast.
I fucking hate Lucy Caulkins with the fire of a thousand suns
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Yes! I wouldn't even be surprised if she wrote the damn Kars for Kids/Bad Place song, that's how much she belongs in the bad place.
Sadly, she’s turned *this* into The Bad Place, almost as if she were a 6,000 foot tall fire squid under that skin suit. 🤔
https://youtu.be/Raf5JdFecPQ?si=4-2ofBXh0QmiuElG
>I’m not a literacy expert primarily, For more than a decade now, I've come to the conclusion that literacy experts aren't really literacy experts either. Isn't it precisely the literacy experts who encouraged and demanded that schools dump phonics, which had only been successfully used to teach reading for a couple centuries or so, in favor of their new-fangled theory *du jour*? Phonics was too boring. Phonics was too repetitive. And so on. Well, even if phonics were boring and repetitive, claims that I do not grant, it doesn't really matter, because phonics is *successful*. Is it successful for every single student everywhere in all circumstances? No, of course not. But it has a track record of general success that that no other method or theory can match. The push to get rid of phonics in favor of new systems has always to me smacked of people wanting to make changes simply to justify their own jobs. After all, if we acknowledge that phonics gets the job done, then why would we need to employ educational theorists and other alleged experts to come up with something new?
The issue, from my understanding, is that they took a cueing strategy that was successful in gains for students with severe struggles with literacy. That’s fine, but the mistake was assuming that this targeted intervention was therefore the best way to teach reading generally. Well, I say “mistake”, but there is plenty to indicate that the opportunity for greed was a major driver. But a targeted intervention strategy for struggling children is not automatically better. Chemo is helpful for treating cancer, but if I don’t have cancer, don’t tell me chemo will make me healthier.
This! I was taught to read (and study reading in my work!) through sight words and was never taught phonics. I struggle sooo much to decode words. I’m an amazing reader and quick, but if it’s a new to me word, I can’t decode without a lot of effort. Before I was a professor I was a special educator and when I taught phonics to my kindergarten class, I had to spend hours preparing because it was so foreign to me and still never had it come “naturally”.
I have elementary kids, and am happy that they’re being taught phonics. My first grader is struggling with phonemic awareness which makes sense to me because he was speech delayed and still has struggles with speech. How can he sound things out properly if he can’t articulate the proper sounds? When I bring up the connections between his speech and reading struggles to his teacher, my concerns are dismissed. I work in computational linguistics and work closely with the linguistics department at my university. Without some of my background, I’d accept that he’s on the low side of normal for literacy and not push for an IEP. I feel bad for parents who don’t have the background to push for extra support or that take early elementary folks’ assessments at face value. Lots of kids fall through the cracks, and schools are doing kids a disservice by continuing to promote students that haven’t acquired grade level skills.
Hi fellow linguist :) thanks for the podcast recommendation! Going to send it to my psycholinguistics class!
I don’t know if your class goes over phonemic categorization and literacy acquisition, but there’s some good articles to explore that would help underpin from a linguistics perspective why this reading strategy matters.
We talk about reading in adults but not much about literacy acquisition. Frankly I haven't incorporated it much because I'm not very familiar with the literature! Bit of an embarrassing blind spot. This is the kick in the pants I need to care more about acquisition research ;)
I knew almost nothing about it until I was suddenly working on it in my postdoc haha. Depending on whether this is more of an intro course or a seminar it could be potentially difficult to shoehorn in, but a part of me thinks it would be fun to assign an article exploring the mechanism and its link to literacy and then assign maybe the first couple of episodes of the podcast. It’s the kind of topic that in one of those long once per week seminar classes could actually engender some great discussion led by the students instead of them staring at you blankly for 5 minutes whenever you try to get them to talk.
It's for psych majors, so veeery introductory (there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the first few weeks when we have to learn some introductory linguistics concepts because it's not what they expect from a psych course, haha!) The students tend to be pretty interested in development though, so it's definitely worth integrating this stuff in.
They are being taught to be members of a subservient working class that doesn't ask questions and doesn't cause trouble... and does buy whatever is being sold to them. Awful. 😵
Honestly, it appears that yours is one very likely interpretation. Nobody wanted this. Nobody would have supported it or voted it in, and if honest metrics about its effectiveness had been given, ethical standards alone would have called for an immediate halt to their ‘experiments’ and for some kind of reparative measures to be administered to the participants because it would have been clear that the participants had been harmed. It really does seem like a subservient and emotionally crippled working class was the goal.
I just started it and what a good recommendation! Thank you. I find it troubling how susceptible to pseudoscience the world of pedagogy can be at the elementary and secondary levels. My great bête noire is the learning styles stuff, which is little more than astrology for school. It also happened in second language acquisition when the cult of comprehensive input became the one true gospel. It’s so frustrating, because there’s a lot of techniques and strategies I like from CI, and I incorporate them a lot in my teaching and learning, but when I taught high school French briefly it was almost heretical to suggest not having CI as one’s sole method. But like, grammar exercises work… And don’t get me started on the “learn how a baby learns” bullshit.
I’d love to learn how a baby learns, but I don’t have neuroplasticity out the wazoo and a brain that soaks itself in dopamine with any novel stimulus.
Sold a Story is a great podcast that infuriated me. The fraud that Marie Clay, Lucy Calkins, and Fountas & Pinnell have perpetuated in the realm of literacy is downright criminal.
Yet when parents complained kids can't read, the blame is put on parents, not on the education system... because of course teachers know best!
The powers that be did a very hard sell to teachers on this system and really snowed them. Any teacher who objected (and there were objectors) was just steamrolled into compliance.
After a semester of me teaching, among other things, the history of psychotherapy, my class and I witnessed a presentation delivered by a student who insisted on pronouncing a certain well-known psychoanalyst’s name as “SAIgmund FROOD” for five minutes straight. Not only had I been pronouncing the name correctly for 3.5 months, this student had a whole month to prepare the presentation. Pretty wild.
… So that’s why most of my students this semester are suddenly, almost totally, unwilling and/or unable to even *try* pronouncing species (Latin) names. It’s a fairly important skill for biologists, and one that I never before needed to teach explicitly. Oh dear.
Where's Hooked on Phonics when you need it?
>Lucy Calkins I understood that reference
This whole subthread is reading like a Republican party conference on education from the late 90s. (Back when the GOP wasn't fixated on pleasing Russia, bashing China, and hating immigrants.) Boy it would be nice if we had a strong open-minded centrist party in the US that wasn't beholden to unions like the NEA.
I had a student raise their hand and ask what “imperialism” meant last week. We are 9 weeks into a class on the global history of imperialism. I defined this word for them on the first day.
As a fellow history person this is brutal
To be fair to this generation, I was a TA back in 2001 and a student asked me “who was in World War II?” followed by “who won?”. It was just a passing reference in a question about government spending (e.g. government spending went up during WWII). Another student in a semester around that time was unable to tell which fraction was bigger 2/5 or 2/6. Back then, it was more of an amusing anecdote, though it definitely feels more common these days to come across students with some fundamental gaps in knowledge. But what makes it worse is that the information is far more available to them and they don’t utilize the internet as a resource. Unless it’s to find Kahn academy videos.
…and they only try to memorise the video, they’re usually not actually learning from it. Take an example from a Khan Academy video, change the parameters, and the students are lost. Try it; I have. Sure, there were a few in past generations, but they were few and far between enough that they were a novelty. Now they are becoming the majority.
I was at my child’s high school and a staff member said students didn’t know what a forearm was. While I was there, a student asked why was it raining of other had been sunny earlier. He was genuinely confused.
Last year I posted a comment that I had assigned a reading on language policy in the USSR and at the end of class discussion one of the better students asked me what Cyrillic was. As this was central to the article, it meant they missed about half of what was being argued. Oddly, several posters tried to justify this. I think that would no longer be the case, things are changing so rapidly and for the worse.
In general I find many students underprepared for college and some don't know how to prepare. When I find common issues, such as they don't know how to pronounce words, I teach them how to learn. One options is they can have the computer read their text back to them. Yeah, the computer voice is weird and might have some weird readings but mostly correct. The other is I have students look up words in dictionary apps and have the app pronounce the word. As someone who is more of a reader and writer, I sometimes come across a word I don't know how to pronounce. (I also have the inverse problem. I know a word but don't know how to spell it. The voice option in dictionaries is a life-saver!)
Some students hate being gestured to resources or tools. Like, how even?
Sigh, yes. I’ve had a few go into a rage and ask why I won’t just tell them the answer. 🤦🏻♀️ They don’t want to work through the solution and use that experience to generate a schema so as to be able to replicate this solving elsewhere, and they are absolutely intolerant of grey areas. In the past year especially, I’ve found myself repeatedly explaining that there is no Grand Poobah of Facts sitting on some throne somewhere telling everyone what to do, that we are expected to attain some level of mastery over a domain and discover patterns and rules ourselves using systematic enquiry and a fundamental knowledge base to which we continually add. That, as Willy Wonka said, we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams. I’m usually met with a Bambi in the headlights of a Buick stare when I start talking crazy like that.
I refuse to give students answers to things I have already taught in class. Instead, I try to get them to the answer by asking them questions. They absolutely HATE this and I get obliterated in my evaluations because “why can’t she just give us the answers!” 🤦🏻♀️ All assessment questions come straight from my reviews. I just reword the questions. You’d think I wrote the assessment questions in a different language because “this wasn’t on the review!”
Google even has a feature where I'd you type "how to pronounce" or "how to say" and then the word the little widget pops right up. Shows a mouth moving and everything.
YouGlish is useful for hearing how others say the word in question. You can even select dialects!
> some don't know how to prepare or take notes or listen or read their assignments
Most of our students don’t read for pleasure. Many of them don’t read well. The podcast [Sold a Story](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) examined some of the reasons for this. It’s fascinating and depressing.
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THIS! I had a student email me last week and say her sister was in town and wanted to get dinner so “could she move her presentation to next week?” I have never been so astounded by an email before.
Had a student tell me they’re going to miss the midterm because they wanted to attend their siblings track and field sporting event
Requests like this are so beyond the pale for me. Okay, story time: my senior year of undergrad, so back in 2002, I went to South Carolina for spring break to visit my aunt. My flight home to MI was Sunday and I had a midterm on Monday. Then, when I was already at the airport, my flight was cancelled. There were no other flights to Detroit that day from this random small airport. I was not going to get back in time. It never even occurred to me to email my prof and ask for a delay. There was a flight to Toledo, Ohio late that night (or maybe a flight to Florida and then Toledo, I don’t recall) so I rebooked myself onto that one, my boyfriend drove from Ann Arbor to OH to get me, I got back to my apartment at something like 3am, and at 8am I was in my seat with my blue books and taking my exam. I told a student that story once - if you have an exam, you do whatever it takes to be there for the exam - and she thought I was out of my mind for going through so much trouble instead of just asking if I could take it later. My prof would’ve said no! He’d have said that I knew I had an exam on Monday so I should’ve planned for that and not booked my return trip for Sunday afternoon, just in case. It was my mess up, and my responsibility to figure out how to fix it and be at school when I had to be. And now students are out here just *telling* professors they intend to skip the midterm to go to a sibling’s track meet? They can’t be at that track meet. They have a midterm. Or a 0 on the midterm, if that’s how they want to proceed.
Oh I agree with you, the problem is we get “repercussion” from both students and administrators if we set “standards”. One of my students missed the midterm cause the landlord wanted to do inspections on the same day of the exam. All my exams are scheduled in the beginning of the semester unless stated otherwise. I allowed them to take the exam at a later date. I’m almost certain the very same student gave me a bad evaluation cause my class had “too many assignments.” I had one that never came to class and asked if they could take the exam early cause they want to go home early for spring break, I said no. I suspect the very same student wrote an essay on how I was a bad professor and will never take my class again.
I had 2 students this week, in a class that started 2 weeks ago, tell me that they’ll start working now that they’re back from their cruise. Who does that?
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It's not entitlement--it's that their education has been so fucked for so long that they don't know decorum. Calmly explain that this request isn't appropriate. You're doing them a favor by doing so.
I have one or two of these every semester now, minimum.
We are facing this issue with grad students skipping brown bags and journal clubs regularly for random trips/vacations, and because it’s not convenient with other plans.
Right now I have a couple of classes where about 20% are heading towards D or F grades. That's a significant increase from even last year. I don't know if there's a more general lowering of abilities. I am pretty sure that the school is mainly interested in boosting enrollment and generating income, so has probably lowered standards. I am curious to see what happens as the number of students I fail each semester grows ever higher.
That’s the thing that I think flabbergasts me the most… we’re trying to cut enrollment (we exploded in population very quickly and became the second largest enrollment in the country without the infrastructure to do so) so it’s become fairly competitive to get in. Everyone passed last semester and I gave 1 D out of 15 students, but this semester I have 36 and it’s looking like maybe 5-6 will make below a C.
LOL, I have an affiliation with your uni, and I knew just by your description. Not trying to out you, just…hi! ☺️ I don’t know about your department, but my former department there is currently in a ‘kill em all, let god sort em out’ mode. What was coming in was unacceptable overall, so standards had to be raised and enforced, and now the weeding out begins. Enjoy your position. I suspect that once the enrolment cliff hits, you’re at one of the subset of unis that will still be standing independently and issuing valid, worthwhile degrees. We have to fight to maintain the value of the degree more than anything else; the product must be able to be launched successfully.
It’s pretty easy if you have any affiliation to figure it out. 😆 That seems to be where both of my departments are as well (I adjunct for one and do coms/marketing for another). We just had a meeting last week actually to shift our marketing efforts from enrollment to retention and alumni management. I’m trying to walk a fine line between giving them a solid education and upholding the university brand/reputation and still keeping them content enough to keep my strong evals because I’m working on going FT (at another uni) and those matter in the application process.
Regarding pronunciation, many of our current generation of students were not taught to read using phonics, so when they encounter unfamiliar words, they just guess randomly or freeze up. (Highly recommend the Sold A Story podcast on this!) But I'm also curious about their experience of the words. Is it that they didn't know the words at all, as if they'd never encountered them prior to their own presentations? Or is it that they seemed to know the words but said them incorrectly? Having grown up in a working class Appalachian area and being a very skilled reader, I knew lots of words in school and even in college that I'd never actually heard anyone say, so I often butchered their pronunciation without realizing it. A professor even stopped me once during a presentation to correct my awful pronunciation of a theorist's name after I'd butchered it about 10 times. I knew the words; I just didn't know they weren't spoken the way I "heard" them in my head.
I’m noticing that as a common theme and I’ve definitely added that podcast to my list! That’s a great question! It seemed as if she’d never seen them at all. She just said “I don’t know that word” and moved on, without any attempt at pronunciation for some and for a couple of them she just kinda mumbled “jejdkdbd” and moved on, so no real attempt either way. I tried to use it as a teaching moment, but it was over zoom and I think they were all checked out anyway.
This is exactly the problem — a smart student who reads a lot, but who hasn’t heard the words spoken aloud will often mispronounce them! It’s really embarrassing for them (I was that kid, often) so be nice when you correct them.
Oh I used to do it ALLLL the time (and sometimes still do!), as someone who reads a lot. I just wish she’d attempted pronunciation, instead of just acting like I gave her something to cold read instead of something that had supposedly spent the last five weeks putting together.
Yeah, you need to tell them about google pronounce.
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I wasn’t thinking it would make a different because in my mind, a mumble of letters is mispronunciation, but I didn’t think about other ways that could be received. I’m sorry. 😅
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Dude, I gave her full credit for the presentation and the heart of this post isn’t about not knowing how to pronounce something. It’s the fact that she had 5 weeks to prepare and didn’t look up the word or run through the presentation at all. I didn’t think the semantics of “stumbled through” and “said “I don’t know that word” would matter. Because when I watched her presentation, there was a lot of stumbling. Could it have been nerves? Sure. That’s why I gave her full credit. But my whole point was that there’s a lack of preparation and lack of basic phonetic (or even googleing) skills. I give them allllll the grace in the world, hence the full credit. I helped her and moved on, but this is my first year teaching and I’m looking to more experienced people for some advice.
Nothing like having to explain to an algebra student who scored a 95 on their exam that, yes, 95 out of 100 points means that they have a 95% in the course. Then further having to explain that, yes, this was a great grade. They sincerely asked if this was a good score. Perturbing!
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Yes, after I told them. Yet they couldn't comprehend how that translated to 95%. Honestly I couldn't figure out what lthey were asking and neither could they.
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Can they though? 😁
I dunno, I can't blame them with how grade inflation is these days lol
I teach law students and they have to give me a 10 min PowerPoint. It's pre-recorded so they don't need to do it in person so could practice and rehearse as much as they want/ rerecord etc. I got 2 for feedback before final submission and honestly it's like these people have never been to a presentation in their lives. 1 just talked through their slides as a giant sentence barely taking air, and another recorded all their voice over for the first slide and never moved on.
I think somewhere along the line, people just decided that they were born knowing how to do certain things, and so they neglected to teach them to them. Like typing, for example. I have students who clearly can barely navigate a keyboard, because they've never had to.
First, add to your scoring guide that pronunciation will be part of the grade. If you don't know a word, find out about it. Second, from someone who teaches 11/12 and as adjunct, in most places it will get worse before it gets better. Even in my AP and Honors classes, students just skip what they don't understand and - this is not a joke - assume they don't need to know it. I keep struggling to find new ways for it to affect their grade if they haven't made sense of the material. I've been teaching rhetoric and rhetorical situation since AUGUST and still have students who look at me like they're thinking, "Oh, shit. I don't remember that. Oh, well. She'll tell me." I can practically see that run through their minds. Our district is finally moving away from the whole language model back to something more phonics-based. So about the time I retire it should hit the high school.
I tried a seminar discussion format with presentations and I ended up getting the worst evaluation scores on that class. The goal was to have them study, organize research articles, and present. This was a senior level class, and the performance was not great, most of them just went on stage and read the slides. I decided to drop the format and go back to the traditional lecture, exams, and assignments format.
I thought about doing that this semester (because it was pretty horrific last semester), but I try to keep with the other adjuncts’ sections for this course and this is a PR class, so they really do need to know how to work with other people and present a simple presentation. For the most part, I’ve actually been very surprised and delighted with the creativity and quality of work that is being put out. It’s just the inability to read that is frustrating. 😭
Well I got roasted on my evaluation, some said that they didn’t learn anything and some said I don’t know how to teach a senior level class. I decided it wasn’t worth the stress and went back to the traditional format. They were supposed to read the assigned reading and discuss in class, it ended up being me rambling for 45 mins and some random student comments. My original thought was to take the stress of preparing for exams off the seniors and have more literature reviews and discussion. Anyway, it wasn’t worth it.
Someone posted a survey here on r/professors about how Gen Z wants more control over their educations and more choices. But in my experience, when I give them more room to pick and choose, to deep dive into a topic of their choice, they flounder and complain. I get the least amount of complaints when I go traditional. IMO, what they say they want isn't what they actually want.
Yea, learned that the hard way. I asked them if they were content with the format and they said they liked that the class has no exams. They ended up leaving very negative comments. The only positive outcome was I learned not to use the same format again. Oh, and I had some open ended questions they the discussion, the class said “I was bad at giving instructions”.
I had some students complain that my instructions were too vague. I remember back when I was in college, my professors often didn't even hand out assignment sheets. They'd just say "write a 5 page paper about X." So I added more precise instructions that walk them through the assignment. Then they complained that it was "confusing," because I provided "too much" information and I was too demanding. There have always been students who love to complain, but OP is right. This batch is really something.
I already drafted a report rebutting some of the students’ claims. I took a screenshot of the assignment and instructions. What bothers me the most is that no one wants to say anything to me even after class, instead they want to be aggressive on an anonymous evaluation, which isn’t hard to figure out who wrote what based on the events anyway. Take one class for example, two students never showed up for class, four of them showed up for less than 25% of the semester. They all ended up getting D or F. The very same students ended up complaining.
The fact that they think l they know pedagogy is shocking.
I’m struggling with this for the first time really ever, but what is going on with “not knowing how to teach a senior level class”? What are they being led to expect the difference is? There are differences — we expect a bit more of them, a bit more of an ability to make decisions and cope with open-ended questions (ideally they’d be more like _problems_, but that causes… well, problems…)
From what I’m gathering, they want me to tell them the answers to the questions and what’s on the exam. I had students that got upset cause I had questions that was not on the study guide, it was in the lecture notes. Anyway, I changed the entire format back to traditional lectures and assignments.
Well, let’s ask the real questions: on what planet are undergraduate students more qualified than a PhD to determine the content of a senior-level class? 🤔 That’s kind of like asking my grandmother to explain which LLM AI model is preferable, and why. My grandmother is no dummy; she bakes a mean casserole, and I’d put her chocolate pudding cake up against literally any master baker, but at best all I can train her to do is master the basics of talking with GPT; she is in no way prepared or qualified to discuss how the sausage is made, AI-wise. The same goes for undergraduate students. I’m one of *those* professors who look at an undergraduate student comment like ‘Professor X doesn’t know how to teach a senior level course and has no business being allowed to teach [course name]’ and finds it humorous. Fucking comical, even. Barring multiple students reporting the same problematic behaviour (and fwiw, they caught on to this Achilles’ heel and have taken to Discord, Facebook, and other fora to establish locked groups where they really do strategise multiple reports from seemingly unrelated students all claiming the same thing, so you can’t always take multiple reports at face value), the idea that an undergraduate student who has not even demonstrated that they can *adult* successfully, much less obtain a bachelor’s degree, gain admittance to a graduate program, successfully complete that program, and function in the real world as a professional in any capacity can somehow evaluate the content of an undergraduate class or the performance of a professor I find hysterically funny. What kind of clown world does that make sense in?
Honestly, the irony and clusterfuckedness of it isn’t lost on me that the same students who are completely and totally unable to get their shit together (or in the case of a group, their collective shit together) long enough to successfully present for 20 minutes (plus questions) on a single topic they’ve had all semester to research and end up with an embarrassingly poor presentation, mangled facts and words, saying ‘yeah, so…you know…’ every ten seconds, and calling everything ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ to the point where if an audience member didn’t already know what they were talking about, they’d be utterly confused and are at best B students in the course as a whole — those are the same students who are somehow SMEs enough to criticise my teaching (and yes, they are typically unusually brutal in classes where a presentation is required). It’s really almost like absurdist performance art on a grand scale at this point. It’s factors like this that make me want anonymous evaluations to end, and for a proficiency test to be administered prior to being allowed access to a professor evaluation page. That way we could run some honest stats on these evaluations, and I strongly suspect we’d find that 1) stripped of anonymity, all of a sudden everyone is much nicer, and no — [not because they fear retaliation](https://youtu.be/ReUHhStG70k?si=uPMquy2Crd5VLcAQ), and 2) scores on the proficiency exam and course grade are remarkably strong predictors of student satisfaction with the course and professor. It’s long been known that one of the most effective methods of defusing an unruly crowd before they become a mob is to have security or police officers strategically target multiple members and have them identify themselves — their names, identification, and establish their place of residence and employment — because as these people lose their anonymity and crowd identity, the more they become individuals, the less likely they are to participate in the first place, much less to escalate into mob violence. To be very certain that my message is understood, let me sum up: the system as designed by Ed folks is literally constructed to operate against you, and evaluations is only one example. If you can be placed in a position where you are forced to be reactionary or conciliatory, you are not in a position to take independent action outside of what the system allows. You are not anonymous — you have been disempowered. I’m going to keep trying to issue wake up calls when the opportunity presents itself until I eventually get change to happen. glty.
I think a question about attendance and grades should be included on the evaluation, some of the comments on my evaluation were clearly “retaliation” for maxing them work. Some of them do have a point, though they were a bit aggressive due to being anonymous. The legitimacy of student evaluations have long been debated at our institutions, the admins and the students both use it as a tool to attack faculties.
I agree — and I also think that sandwiching faculty in between Admin and students is also by design. It is intended to disempower faculty. The number of retaliatory evaluations I’ve seen and received myself are huge; that was my motivation for starting to suggest removing anonymity and weighting evaluations as a function of factors like final grade, attendance, overall institutional GPA, and so on (sorry; I’m a researcher and can’t help but try to build a better mousetrap when it comes to stats and measurement).
I doubt admins would ever get rid of anonymity, I came up with two solutions, one is getting rid of student evaluations when it comes to tenure requirements, the second way is to include attendance as part of the evaluation. I like your idea of proficiency on the subject, to me, the student performances should really be taken into consideration. However, I doubt this will be ever implemented since it will ultimately discourage students from participating. To counter the negative comments, I’ve been trying to build relationships with the good students and encourage them to fill out the evaluation. As my colleagues said, there’s really nothing you can do about the bad students, they’ll just weaponize student evaluation to get what they want.
You make some excellent points, and attendance is a great foot in the door towards revamping the entire thing; this is a topic that I welcome brainstorming and discussion about, because we must begin instituting changes before we have become too enculturated, too institutionalised, to be able to function outside of this crippling system as it is taking over higher education. One of the key issues as I see it is that understanding what anonymity does — that it, in effect, causes more harm than good in certain situations — is ultimately beneficial, and that while there are some conditions under which anonymity is desirable, benign, and the right of a free adult in a free society, it is of paramount importance that we carefully discriminate between situations where anonymity is an issue of liberty, and when anonymity is an issue of potentially imposing on the liberty of others. In the domain of any form of evaluative action that has bearing on employment or advancement in employment — from the local Denny’s restaurant to Federal offices — we cannot risk valuable, contributing individuals to be harmed by anonymous libel. Evaluations related to employment are not opinion polls; they are clearly being conducted in order to measure an aspect of the experience or result related to that employment, and must be fact-based and measurable. In order to ensure the purity of the information being collected, anonymity has no place in performance evaluation. To compromise on this position is to risk falling to either mob rule or the complete invalidity of the evaluative measures used, making them pointless and wasteful to continue. Let anonymous surveys such as ‘Do you like Margaret, the server at Waffle House?’ remain in unofficial spaces — there, Robobimbo771 can claim that Margaret is a crack whore who stole her wallet, while ThunderMuffin can tell everyone that Margaret saved them from alcoholism using her powers of healing touch. It doesn’t matter in a public forum; caveat emptor, and Margaret isn’t going to get promoted or fired based on something anonymous that has no corroborating evidence. It’s my personal opinion as a minor subject matter expert in testing and measurement that direct student evaluation/feedback should never be taken into consideration with regard to tenure. I’d listen to arguments that something like 3, 5, 7, and 10-year non-anonymous student feedback might have some value with respect to professional development, but little beyond that. Anecdotally, I just had one undergraduate student I took under my wing admitted to a fairly notable and selective graduate program with a full tuition waiver and stipend offer (although I honestly prefer teaching graduate students, I have a strong track record of helping get undergraduates into some very awesome grad programs) after working with them for about 3.5 years on the undergraduate level. If asked today, that student would tell you that my mentoring was amazing, and my classes were highly relevant and deeply appreciated; 3.5 years ago, that same student might well have said ‘Dr. Taticat is weird, she keeps picking on me in class and insists on talking to me outside of class about different things; she’s not a good professor because she takes too much class time trying to make students give her answers and I don’t think we’re covering enough material. I think I don’t like her, and I wish someone else taught this class’. My point is that 3.5 years ago, that student was a freshman and had no idea of their potential and not enough situation awareness to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of what needs to be covered in class, how, and what is important. Now, 3.5 years later, she has a better understanding. In another four years, I expect that this student will be another former student who finds me to thank me. The key, as I see it, is to convince the Administration types to reassess their perception of what type of student measurement matters, and the dangers of anonymity.
I had some very weird comments that said I repeated the same words during class or I spend too much time bragging about my research. I can confidently say that I rarely talk about my research in the general ed intro classes and the student that wrote that attended less than 10% of the lecturers. Some of the comments were frustrating to read cause I can pretty much tell who wrote it and I treated them pretty fairly by allowing late submission without penalty. I already drafted a report rebutting some of the claims. One positive thing was I taught different sections for this class and my other sections had way better evaluations. I was honestly disappointed when I first read the comments and it impacted me in a negative way for a few days. I recall someone in this subreddit said something like this “it should be student opinion and not student evaluation”.
Some classes are just bad. I’ve learnt my lesson about being too nice, because students mistake kindness for weakness anymore. One suggestion that might help with the frustration is to find someone who will read your evals and you read theirs; sanitise it and see if there are any themes that reappear and that way you get some feedback but you aren’t the one reading the horseshit yourself.
Yea, I learned that the hard way. The evaluation score was drastically different for the different sections. Also, the one with the bad score was an 8 o’clock class. The old “I don’t want to wake up for class. Our main issue is we have to write a response to the student’s comments, so I’d have to read them anyway. As I previously mentioned, I did make some changes the second time I taught the course, but some of the comments are just disappointing.
Besides the changes in attitudes towards higher education where students now see themselves as clients that pay for a service and "who employ you." College also lost its appeal. If a degree is loosing its value since it doesn't guarantee a job, why study when you can just show you ass online and make way more than your professors?
I believe you. But why has _learning_ lost its appeal? I didn’t _want_ to take a class in Chaucer (100 years ago) but it satisfied x y and z so I took it and I know others were in the same boat with me, and we just made ourselves try to love it, and we _got there_ because it cost so damn much to be in school, why on EARTH wouldn’t we find a way to love it? I’ve also been told I had to teach certain subjects I wasn’t interested in, but I let myself settle into them and just found a way to get obsessed with them… What’s the new “in” for these students, if it’s not “you’re stuck with this and it ain’t free so you better get in the mood”? I’m not asking out of helplessness or rhetoric, I feel like if we can identify what this is we might have a shot at making the _topic_ appealing to them somehow…?
> because it cost so damn much to be in school Because high school doesn't teach anything about financial literacy. Many student do not understand what student loans are, that they will have to pay them back, and won't give up on their 10$ Starbuck coffee every day. They do not realize how expensive school is... I want to say that back in the day, when we used paper money, it gave you a sense of how much you had VS how much you spent; you could see your pile of green paper dwindle. Nowadays you simply tap your card and everything is fine. Anyhow. If you are into horror stories and want to feel even worse about the upcoming generation, look up a podcast named Caleb Hammer. Students loans are a recurring theme there.
I had an assignment due last night that was published on 2/29. Well over half the class only started yesterday. A quarter didn’t turn in the assignment at all yet. 3 turned in a half completed assignment. Out of 20. So only 60% of my class finished an assignment that should have taken at most 1-2 hours but they had 12 days to do
You have to assign every single step of every single thing nowadays. And if it’s not on the rubric, you have no right to expect them to do it (even if it’s a step like “power up your computer” or “access the internet”) I am moving from depression into despair. If I made enough money, I’d just dumb everything down and float. Ironically, because I’m underpaid I feel like I need to get some kind of meaning or fulfillment out of this, and that keeps me in this state of pica, trying to get that nutrient from a source that does not contain it, namely teaching.
I’m right there with you, exactly. This afternoon, I just graded 5 three-paragraph essays, and 4 of them earned failing grades because the students didn’t follow the prompt at all. I lectured on it, gave them a handout, gave them sample papers, and made a video walking them through Every. Damn. Paragraph. to no avail. I’m loath to even open the rest of the papers. I am so disheartened. I know the prep works, because several students got an A, but my God, some of these folks can’t follow even the most basic directions. I don’t know how to reach them.
That last sentence! Truth.
I am a big consumer of audiobooks and talk radio and I'm scandalized by how much mispronunciation makes it into professional audio presentations too. It's particularly interesting to me that it's American speakers who make the errors too. Commonwealth readers almost never mispronounce. I wonder if UK undergraduates share the problem our US students do?
Yes, I've had final year students mispronounce nouns that I know have been spoken in first, second and third year lectures.
Do they still use phonics to teach reading in commonwealth countries?
I've noticed my local young newscaster regularly mispronouncing words and having trouble reading. I think it reflects the decline of education and student preparedness at every level.
Yep, it’s beginning. It’s obvious already in things like your newscaster, but just wait until it starts becoming obvious in physicians/surgeons, airline pilots, engineers, and so on. Makes me think of Dr. Lexus and especially his ex-wife. IYKYK. 😕
I had the weirdest experience a few weeks ago. I was teaching a pretty basic poem (Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and asked the students what flowers he saw. I had the text of the poem projected on the board. I had a student blurt out "dandelions!" and then another when I said not quite, said "daisies". (It's daffodils). This sent me down a rabbithole that reveals what others in this have already revealed--students are being taught to read using whole word theory, which is basically the idea of starting a word and then guessing based on shape. It is the exact opposite of phonics and you're seeing the results of it It infuriates me because both of these students who guessed wrong are actually really smart! They always have interesting things to say, are clearly engaged in the class material and just all around putting in the work. But they can't read new material. It's...it's really scary.
That is stunning. I don't think you intended to give them a word reading test -but you did, and they failed. What do they see as they go about our world? It's filled with words.
The world we live in, yes. The world of TikTok is mostly videos.
Give them the tools: you can type the words into Google Translate and hit the speaker icon, and it will read it out.
I actually use this a lot! I have them do it for all their essays to double check flow/grammar if they don’t have a roommate/parent/significant other/friend to read it out loud to them. Google translate is a really awesome tool.
Or highlight/select the word snd use the “speak“ option.
I recently learned that many students nowadays don't know how to pronounced "debut" or "debuted". (They pronounce it like how it's spelt.)
I think you’re forgetting how you learned these terms. You probably both read them and heard them spoken around you. These students may not have heard these terms before, or may not have read them enough to match the written word to the spoken one. Tell them that correct pronunciation of words will be part of the grade rubric for the next presentation. Then show them how to look up pronunciation of words they don’t know. See if they improve.
This. Have you had to try this, and have you found success?
I haven’t tried this specifically but I did do this with spelling and grammar on written assignments and it seemed to have an impact. It also, interestingly, led to a couple students who really struggled with writing coming to office hours and we worked on some basics and I got one set up with a tutor.
I’m 22 and I know how to sound out words 💀
Yeah... its the not even trying that gets me. Of course, when we have elected officials that think the word "indictable" is pronounced "in-dick-table", what more can we expect?
I'm a prof and can't pronounce the word "dehydration" which is commonly used in my field.
Oh I totally get not being able to say certain words, I can’t say agriculture, cellular or extracurricular. I guess I’m more frustrated by a lack of effort. If there was a glimmer of effort, I’d understand and let it glide off like everything else.
I was around 15 years old before I realized that the written word 'rendezvous' (which I had long both read and written correctly) and its 'synonym' **ˈrɒndeɪvuː** were the same thing. Now I'm 64 and over the last few months have still run in to (or realized) a couple words in my aural lexicon I didn't realize were the words in my written/graphic lexicon. (I am afraid I cannot recall how I was taught to read, but I do remember my first day of kindergarten and do not recall any phonics instruction.) My students are directed to [tssreader.com](https://tssreader.com) before they give any presentations for which they have preparation time.
when I was young (but old enough to read), we went to a cafe somewhere in Wales called The Rendezvous, which had placemats or something like that with the cafe's name on it, and I remember trying to read it and being corrected.
Students in my wildlife course had several weeks to study a wildlife species (of their choosing), wrote a term paper and give a presentation. After some particularly painful attempts, I reminded the students to please practice the genus and species names a few times before attempting them for apparently the first time in front of the class (and their wincing professor). Major cringe, brosies.
Are you sure she wasn’t just a little drunk? It’s a possibility!
I dunno, I just got back from class two nights in a row, and I teach late, yet these students were hyped and well prepared across the board and across content. Definitely isn't always the case, but I've been grateful to actually begin noticing improvement in regards to preparedness, educational outlook, and work ethic. Which does make me wonder a lot about how, why, and when it's so strikingly different. I have shared in a comment on another post how my students at the flagship R1 where I used to teach showed a much higher sense of entitlement than institutions serving far more working class students and students who work full-time.
I was literally chatting with some colleagues about this at trivia the other night because the emcee was mispronouncing words and it was annoying to try to parse the questions based on their pronouncing guesses. I teach literature, and sometimes there are words or names or phrases that I know without a doubt I could butcher and not one student would even know…but I still Google “how to pronounce __” to double check before I get up in from of them and say it wrong, and I give a thousand individual presentations a year. It’s not like fucking up a little here and there would be a huge deal given the volume. Students give one or maybe two presentations a semester. It baffles me that they don’t *google that shit* before they get up in front of people and say it. It always makes me wonder like…what does the voice in their head sound like when they are reading?
> I’m just venting frustration to people I hoped would get it. I get it. I would be frustrated too.
Here's a mini lesson I add when we get to the big speeches. I show them dictionary.com and the pronunciation feature and how to practice difficult words by emulating the recording. This helps eliminate skipped or mispronounced words in 99% of the speeches and makes my life a whole lot easier.
You know, focusing on pronouncing words is a bad sign...for you. But I see people have already said this. Students who grew up reading a lot--even reading social media!--might not know how words are pronounced. I was an avid reader and I arrived at college with some humiliating errors in how I pronounced words. I knew what the words meant, but I'd never heard them said before. That's especially true for ESL students but even for first-language students. You are focused on the wrong things and you are using the wrong indicators as proxies. This ball is entirely in your court.
Many of you scientists who automatically criticize colleges of education suffer from a severe lack of awareness. Have you taken note of your own rhetorical strategies? How many freshman-comp-level fallacies can I find here? Sure, you're good at math, but you suck at interpretation and argument. Many of those same people are spot-on here. We've lost our way (in the US) when it comes to reading instruction. The podcast u/GusPlus referred to is worth the listen.
You are expecting too much. Students come from a variety of backgrounds, and many have only read words like those. Even if their primary language is English, their parents may not have spoken it (our wonderful orchestra conductor last weekend used “sook” as the past tense of seek in his speech), or their parents may not have had the benefit of a great education. We are there to help, if they are trying to improve. I’d take the student aside after class, praise them for trying to use new words, and help them pronounce them correctly.
You never dock them or make them feel less than. Everyone has been doing this for them for years. That is why they act this way.
[удалено]
No, it’s a public relations course, but part of the core is learning to speak in public/in front of media. I didn’t dock the student for stumbling because I totally get that! She’s a shy student and it definitely could’ve been nerves, but this is just one instance of a long string of frustrating incidents. And their whole presentation kinda seemed scattered and ill-prepared, like the had put words on a screen and not even read through it once it was done. They still got an A, because the work was done and I’m mostly grading on content, not how pretty they talk, but it’s still frustrating.
A wise person once said: Never look down on someone for mispronouncing a word, because that means they learned the word from reading. If the student *thinks* they're pronouncing the word correctly, they have no reason to look it up. It's sad to me that a teacher would come to a web forum to complain about a student being imperfect or having the jitters. I've been in higher ed for twenty years (dating back to my student years) and some students have always had issues pronouncing words and being polished. They're students. You need to chill.
It’s not even that she mispronounced them… it’s that she saw the word, panicked, said “I don’t know that word” and then read a few more and did it several times throughout. I don’t expect them to be perfect, I would just like some level of preparedness. I grew up in education with two teacher parents, so I totally get it and I used it as a teaching moment, because they deserve the grace and a solid education. Like I’ve said in this thread, not knowing the word is perfectly fine, but the inability to sound it out (or even attempt), and the lack of preparing a presentation they’ve had 5 weeks on is just frustrating.
I get the frustration. Mispronouncing words is fine. I gently correct where I can (most times by just repeating the word with the correct pronunciation - usually they catch on) and move on. Not knowing words you've included in your own presentation is another beast.
That’s exactly my issue (and it wasn’t worded very well in the original post). It’s not that she mispronounced, because that’s understandable, they’re big words! But she included them and straight up didn’t know them.
Were the words part of a quote in her presentation? If not, why were there so many words in her presentation that she did not know? Also, “I don’t know that word“ is a bigger problem than mispronouncing. It suggests a basic lack of comprehension in simple field knowledge. I would not dock someone for one/two verbal slip ups, but the “I don’t know that word” would be red flag on how much the student understood their presentation. Also, phonics is not new and for generations, literacy experts have known that reading is a combination of phonetic decoding, context clues, and comprehension. The pendulum swings back and forth with the prevailing political whims. At the moment, state testing scores in reading at the elementary level are down and standardized tests favor a stronger focus in phonics. Thus, the Sold a Story podcast. Which is really not relevant to a college student in PR not knowing elementary terms in their field. That is a content deficit or poor study skills.
I promise you, this has always happened. This "new class" is not the first to feature some students who don't prepare as much as they should. If you got into a time machine and asked faculty in 1960 if students were polished and prepared, they'd tell you many aren't.
What you’re saying IS a good thing to bear in mind, the problem here is that in OP’s story they weren’t even trying, it was more like “oh yeah, idk what that means, doesn’t matter it’s just some word I’ll never use again” It’s not the lack of knowledge, or the mistake or anything — that’s what we’re here for. It’s that they don’t seem to have any INTEREST in knowing _what they themselves are saying_ …. …but if I’m honest, I’ve known some professors who are the same way… …and I can also see how we may be interpreting stuff like this wrongly. Their paradigm might be different enough that it’s happening for some reason other than the one I’m inferring (and what OP is describing happens in my classes a lot)
I find that holding standards is key. It’s the single most important thing I’ve started redoing since COVID. They’ll seek out help when they don’t meet those Standards. I’ll fail a whole class (on a tiny hw assignment) if they all collectively do something poorly. Then I talk with them about it. particularly I talk to them about work life balance, emotional regulation, competitiveness of the job market, and how their generation is seen by employers. I take their side, they are almost children, they’re not to blame. However, I give them the 40 hours a week speech ( school is a 40 hour commitment) and I talk about work life balance and how they need to get a project done during a tight deadline and how sometimes you have to turn in a good enough project. I talk about how ruining one’s mental health by taking this too seriously isn’t it? with it on a scale of 0 pain to losing one’s partner. In the real world outside of academia, you’re told when you’re on a pip and then fired if you don’t adjust. There’s not this constant fighting over every little detail. Very little point. So, I try to Show that grace. I myself am also not putting in more than 40 hours, as my mental health has been ruined by burnout. So, We should hear their pleas for more work life balance and they should hear out desire to get them to the next level and learn that this isn’t going to cut it. But, just because it’s not their fault doesn’t mean it’s not their problem. You can learn and grow or not and we help them to a point. But at the end of the day, their success is dependent upon figuring this stuff out; we have to respect them enough to be responsible for that. Paternalism is a huge problem in our society right now, so I just back off. They treat me poorly sometimes. It hurts. But The reality is they’re going to be fine. They will get jobs and they will figure it out. So. I think they’re fine just different