2 posts tagged “fail”

Subject: [girl] gets smoked by professor
From:    [redacted]
Date:    Mon, March 3, 2008 10:22 pm
To:      [redacted]
Cc:      [redacted]

[girl]'s been disrupting her Psych class with [professor]. She and
[professor] have been having it out over email and [her] stupid ass has
replied all to the entire class and so this is getting sent out to pretty
much every frat.

On Feb 21, 2008, at 11:22 PM, [girl] wrote:

Hi [professor] - Thank you for this email because I was overly
discouraged/ frustrated after lab today. I have been working hard all
semester to participate as best I can and fully engage myself. I am
extremely interested in psychology, and do my best to stay on topic
butsometimes it is HARD over such a long class period. It is really
hard as astudent to try to add meaningful commentary and hear the response
"that is completely irrelevant" from a professor. I thought that in psych,
nothing is irrelevant, there are always confounds to experiments that
should be discussed.

I am a curious learner, I like asking questions and
bringing in new ideas - I understand that you are interested in your own agenda
as a teacher, that's your duty, but isn't it also your duty to give the
students who desire it active time to participate and feel
appreciated?

After today, I have no desire to participate in class anymore
because of how you made me feel. However, thank you for your apology, its greatly
appreciated.

[girl]

PS I truly was not talking at the end of class - a lot of the rest
of the class was and that sound builded up. I know when to be quiet, pay
attention, and listen.

And the response:

Hi, [girl],

        your email deserves another response from me. You're right in
general that the instructor should give students who desire it active
time to participate and feel appreciated, but apparently it's time
for at least one instructor to be a little more brutally honest with
you since you can't seem to take a hint. It's also the instructor's
obligation to keep the class on track and keep any one student from
dominating the conversation/discussion, ESPECIALLY when that student
continues to disrupt discussion by being off-topic and not
understanding the point of the discussion.

(1) You (and your group) were definitely a continuing distraction and
annoyance througout most of the class yesterday and it was really
ticking me off. It made it difficult at times for the entire class to
hear and attend to the presentations of other groups. Perhaps at the
particular time I addressed your group, you weren't talking. I don't
know. But it is a fact that your group was disruptive during most of
the class's attempt to discuss other groups' projects, and then when
you were paying attention to others' presentations your contributions
were largely off-topic.

(2) you truly don't seem to understand the difference between simply
wanting to contribute noise/talk instead of contributing something
productive and on-task. It seems to me as an instructor and to the
rest of the class in general that despite your enthusiasm for
participating, your contributions are mostly off-topic and
distracting, as if you talk before thinking, or as if you're really
not understanding what's going on. Yesterday was an example of this.
I repeatedly tried to tell the class as a whole, and you in
particular, that your personal experience/intuition about the
possible results of a study and the underlying explanations for those
results was not the topic or point of the discussion. After several
weeks of trying to politely listen to your input then having to
return the conversation/discussion back to real point, I think it was
about time someone did indeed shut you down a bit.

If you really think that "in psychology, nothing is irrelevant," then
you need to do something else with your time. If you really think
that you "know when to be quiet, pay attention, and listen," you are
sadly mistaken and I can't imagine I'm the only instructor or fellow
class student that thinks this. There's a real and important
difference between constructive engagement and participation in class
and simply talking about what ever tangential information pops into
your head. Clearly I took the wrong tone in my previous email. I was
hoping that by taking an apologetic approach it would lead to a
productive conversation (with give and take) about your behavior in
class. Instead you seem to think that you're not at fault at all, and
I find that just another bizarre example of how clueless you can be.
I withdraw that previous apology -- it was not warranted nor deserved
-- and simply ask that if you continue to attend lab, do not continue
disrupt class and attempt to dominate the discussions.

[redacted]
Visiting Asst. Prof,
Dept of Psychology & Dept of Math & Computer Science
[redacted]
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