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Education in America

Considering Grad School? 8 Things to Think About

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Come on over to the Plain & Simple Press blog, where I just posted eight guidelines for people who are considering graduate school, especially a Ph.D. program. Or any degree that might lead to a job in higher ed.

Cruising Amazon for another purpose, I happened to run across a book on the same general subject as Slave Labor, apparently (judging from the comments) one whose author shares my jaundiced view of academe.

This led to a rumination: Do I regret having acquired a Ph.D.?

Well, yes and no.

If I had put the same amount of energy and time into climbing the corporate ladder as it took to jump through the Ph.D. hoops, by now I’d own Phoenix Magazine, my first employer in journalism. Or when my boss left Arizona Highways, I could easily have acceded to the throne…and believe me, I’d still be there today, had that been the case.

On the other hand, it did help me get into a few decent jobs, and at Highways it let me enter at the top of my pay grade. And ultimately, I did end up with a full-time, decently paying job in academe, even though it wasn’t on the tenure track. I got an offer for a tenure-track position…declined, because I didn’t want to move to South Carolina. Certainly not for $10,000 less than I was earning here!

If I had it to do over again, I would choose a different discipline: one that would open more doors to employment and that would pay better.

Such as…?

• For the mathematically challenged: a doctorate in educational administration will get you into an assistant or associate deanship or a vice-presidency at any number of colleges and universities. At the Great Desert University, these are decently paying, 12-month jobs, and some of them are even non-exempt. Obviously, such a degree would also buy entrée to a for-profit, proprietary school, if you don’t mind ripping off students even more extravagantly than GDU does.

• For those who can handle courses in statistics: the Ph.D. in economics renders you eligible for all sorts of national and international jobs in corporations, governments, and nonprofits. Think high-level banking jobs…

• A Ph.D. in psychology will let you hang out your shingle as a psychologist and also qualify you for other jobs outside of academia. These are rather more difficult to find than one would like. However…if you combine an M.A. in psych with an M.A. in nursing, presto-changeo! A psychiatric nurse-practitioner! Nurse-practitioners in general are highly sought after, and those with a specialty can easily earn six figures.

• For those whose eyes don’t glaze over easily: a Ph.D. in accountancy. At GDU, a brand-new, fresh-out-of-grad-school assistant professor can come on at six figures. Noooo problem.

• Microbiology could be promising: government jobs, and possibly some corporate jobs in agribusiness, environmental science, public health, or genetic engineering. Back in the day, I would cheerfully have majored in microbiology, except that women were not welcome in the sciences. Conspicously not welcome. Fortunately, that has changed.

It’s something to think about. Preferably before you start a program…

Would I Have Done This? Would You?

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Y’know, sometimes I look at what my students do, often out of simple self-defense in a world fraught with absurd bureaucratic demands, and wonder if I would have done the same thing as a freshman.

Would I refuse to buy the textbook for a college course I was paying to take? If I did buy it, would I refuse to read it? Would I turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or, in my day, from a magazine or book)? Would I beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because I had a full-time job and was taking 18 credits? Would I need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?

Well, off-hand the answers would be No, Probably not, No, Not a chance, and No.

BUT…on reflection…

The truth is, there’s really no comparison between today’s student’s experience and my college experience a half-century ago.

In the first place, I did not take English 101 and 102, the two-semester iteration of the high-school English that apparently does not “take” for most Arizona kids. I didn’t go to school in Arizona, thank all the Gods and Goddesses that be: California schools, even the lesser schools of southern California where my parents moved after three years in San Francisco, went so far as to teach basic literacy and basic expository writing. My SAT scores got me into a one-semester substitute for the advanced dumbbell English most students had to take, and that was a course in modern literature — it wasn’t a composition course at all. So it should be noted that there really was no comparison. With that in mind, let us consider:

Would I refuse to buy the textbook for a college course I was paying to take?

No, certainly not. In the first place textbook publishers did not gouge students upwards of $80 for what really are nothing more than $20 trade paperbacks. So buying a semester’s textbooks did not mean I’d have to skip paying the rent that month.

And in the second place, it never even occurred to me not to buy a required textbook — or even one of the optional texts. Of course you bought the text. What would be the point of taking the course at all if you didn’t buy the books?

I remember being absolutely shocked when a third-year student bragged, in the moments before a particularly boring history class convened, that he  hadn’t bought the course textbook and that in fact he had never purchased a textbook for any class in his major, and he had a B+/A– average.

Tellingly, he was an education major.

Speaking of that history course…

Would I refuse to read a textbook that I’d bought?

That history course was taught by a dry, monotone professor who required a heavy, thick, equally dry and monotone textbook. It’s hard to make history boring, but this guy did it. That book was the most tedious piece of published anything I’ve ever read this side of a journal article in higher mathematics.  It was almost unreadable.

I didn’t refuse to read it — I tried to read it. But if he’d sat me down and asked me what I’d read, he’d probably have concluded the answer was “nothing.”

These comp textbooks are similarly boring and tendentious. They’re excruciating to read, and I know the subject matter. No. I live the subject matter. And I find them perfectly awful.

I would not have read it because, at the age of 17, when I entered college, I knew all this stuff. I had been writing sourced (i.e., cited and documented) expository papers since the seventh grade. By the time I left high school, a textbook like the ones we require for today’s freshman comp courses would have nothing to offer me. I certainly could have passed a 2015 freshman comp course without ever looking at the text.

Being the little doobie that I was, I probably would have looked at assigned readings. But I wouldn’t have studied them carefully, because I would have considered it a waste of time.

However…it must be remembered that for today’s students, the material is not a waste of time. Many, many high-school graduates entering your comp courses will tell you that they have never written any researched paper in all the 13 years they spent in Arizona’s K-12 schools! Some will tell you they’ve never written a piece of exposition at all. Any piece of exposition, like “what I did on my summer vacation.” They do not know how to find research sources. They do not know how to distinguish, in terms of credibility, between something they read on Faux News and something on the same subject that emanated from the New England Journal of Medicine. They cannot recognize when they’re indulging in a fallacy. Some of them don’t know what the word “fallacy” means. As many as a quarter of them do not write in coherent paragraphs — they can’t organize their thinking in rational blocks of copy.  About a third to a half habitually write in fragments and fused sentences.

Although the average American high-school kid did not score in the 99th percentile on the SAT’s verbal section, nevertheless a good 80 percent of them were capable of writing a coherent paper without a lot of basic grammar and logical thinking errors.

So: not a fair comparison. Quite.

Would I turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or, in my day, from a magazine or book)?

No. I was too scared to pull a stunt like that. Nor did I need to: I knew how to find information and how to synthesize it from several sources into a single coherent argument. I left high school knowing how to do that — it was as natural as breathing.

Over the decades, a sea change in attitudes toward honesty has taken place. People in general — including young people — have discovered that it’s very easy to get away with things. Keep a straight face and no one is likely to question you, first because most people are too busy to be bothered and second because few instructors want to go through the hassle of flunking you out of their course for plagiarizing.

That’s a function, I think, of the number of bureaucratic rules that now afflict us all. We have restraints and demands coming at us from all directions. And one of the things people have figured out is that nothing much happens if you quietly neglect to obey. Or that the chances that you’ll be caught out and hassled are relatively low.

I knew a young woman who indulged in a fair amount of insurance fraud. She’d become expert in navigating insurance claims and would even offer to help her friends maximize collections. A couple of times, her scams were pretty damned transparent. But you know what happened? Nothing. She collected. She got not one but two houses completely rebuilt (questionable whether the fire that burned down the second house was actually a fraud or a genuine attempt on the part of her psychotic husband to murder her — probably the latter, IMHO, but that was never proven). Neither of these people — the crooked wife or the equally unethical demented husband — have ever had to account for their scams in any meaningful way.

Young people aren’t fools. Students can see this stuff going on. And when they attempt their own small frauds, they learn the same thing: getting caught is a very, very long shot.

If I’d been functioning in this environment, who knows what I would have done? It’s a different social ethic altogether.

Would I beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because I had a full-time job and was taking 18 credits?

Never would’ve entered my mind. You did not challenge your teachers. Or your parents. Or a cop. Or a principal. Or the IRS dude. Or anyone else.

The kid who asked to turn in a major paper three days late did so not once but twice — she actually came back after I said “no” and tried to change my mind.

But once again one has to ask: is there really a comparison here?

Except for reading texts to a blind student once or twice a week, I didn’t hold a job during the entire four years of my undergraduate training. People didn’t. No one expected kids to go to school full-time and also go to work. For a student, your job was to study. That’s what you did. You didn’t go out and sell furniture or wait tables. The very idea would have been frowned upon.

And sign up for 18 credits? Are you kidding? Sixteen units was considered a heavy load. I doubt if the university would have allowed me to take 18 credit hours in a single semester. I would have had to get some kind of special permission to pull it off, and you can bet that if an adviser had a clue that I was working on the side, no such permission would have been forthcoming.

Tuition at public universities was almost free. Families did not have to damn near bankrupt themselves to send a kid to college, and students were not saddled with a lifetime of debt to get a degree that is now considered indispensable for white-collar employment.

Blue-collar jobs that would support a family existed in those days, so a college degree wasn’t regarded as non-negotiable for entrée to the middle class. For that matter, the middle class still existed, too…

So again, there’s really no comparison. College kids were not subjected to unreasonable demands or exploited mercilessly. They didn’t have to work as wage slaves while they were trying to take classes, and so they didn’t have to beg dispensation to turn in assignments late. And instructors were full-time faculty on the tenure track, not wretched part-timers juggling two, three, or four mini-gigs to put food on the table. So they could afford to fit an occasional late paper into their workload.

Would I need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?

Sure. We used footnotes back in the Dark Ages.

But the principle driving the practice was the same. And I’d been using footnotes since the seventh grade. No one needed to take my little hand and sit me down and explain to me what sources to cite, when, where, or why. Today’s  poor little things haven’t a clue.

How’z about you? Would you refuse to buy the textbook for a college course you were paying to take? If you did buy it, would you refuse to read it? Would you turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or from a magazine or book)? Would you beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because you had a full-time job and were taking 18 credits? Would you need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?

They were the best of students, they were the worst of students…

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Ohhhhhh 🙁 moannnnnnn

The Eng. 102s’ final, endless research paper is in. We have four days in which to grade the monsters, and then I have to post grades on the district’s system. Meanwhile, another set of papers from the wannabe magazine writers is pending — a “brite,” the shortest of short-form journalism.

The magawriters’ efforts will be easy, and besides, there are only about 10 students remaining in that class.

But the 102s…hevvin help us, MOST of them have hung in there through the entire semester. That’s got to be some kind of a record, because by the end of a term a third to half of classmates have dropped a typical community-college course. So it’s GOOD, in one way: somehow we’ve managed to keep them on track.

But…what, really, is ON that track?

I made a little chart dividing up the classmates by the quality of their writing skills. The idea is to grade the weakest writers’ papers first, so as to get the truly, truly awful stuff out of the way while the brain is still relatively fresh. Then plow through the mediocrities, which can be as or more difficult than the bad stuff to grade. And finally have downhill skiing after you’ve reached the point where you can no longer bear to look at the things.

So. We have the “Best,” the “Worst,” and the “Others.”

Or we could say, the “Excellent,” the “Dreadful,” and the “Mediocre.” Or…the “Good,” the “Bad,” and the “Ugly”….

Under the “Best” rubric, we have six classmates, one of whom is really a very good writer. The “Worst” number five. And the “Others”: seven. Only two students have failed to turn in a paper, and one of those fell under the wagon wheels some time back. Neither of them were among the “Worst.” That means, yes: here at the end of the semester we still have to read, assess, try to comment intelligently upon, and apply a grade to five unintelligible pieces of illiterate drivel.

So far I’ve read a paper whose author attempted to organize the entire 2500 words into two paragraphs. I’ve read a 2500-word “research” paper without a shred of documentation. And just now I’m about to take up one in which I entered FIFTEEN corrections in THREE sentences before I gave up and went to bed last night.

What, seriously, am I supposed to do with a student who’s doing the best he or she can but still makes an error about every second word?

Yeah, I understand that some writers who do that have learning disabilities. And I do understand it’s not their fault, whether their brains are wired in some unique way or whether they’re simply victims of Arizona’s half-assed educational system. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re in my course, and I can’t very well flunk a quarter of the students in any given section — I wouldn’t keep my job long if I did that. And it doesn’t change the fact that these people — maybe as many as a quarter of our “graduates,” such as they are — are going to end up in some hapless employer’s business.

That’s right: 5 out of 18 is more than a quarter of the class: 28%.

And it’s pretty typical.

Postscript: As I was fiddling with this post, one student asked me to let him/her completely rewrite an abysmally failing paper (answer: No) and another asked me to accept NINE late papers because s/he’s had such a tough time this semester (answer: No).

Holy shit.

Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted: Back Office Staff Edition

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This morning I get on the phone to an assistant in the gynecologist’s office, to whom I’m trying to explain, for the THIRD time today (not to her, but to two other folks) that because it looks like I’m headed for a mastectomy, a medical oncologist advised me to consult with a plastic surgeon before that comes to pass,  and so I would like a referral to a plastic surgeon who knows what s/he’s doing.

She doesn’t quite follow. It’s a complex series of thoughts, after all. So I explain (again) that I need to talk to a plastic surgeon before I get scheduled for a probable mastectomy.

Says she:

“Is that in the pelvic area?”

{thought balloon: you ARE one of my students, aren’t you?}

“No, honey, mastectomy has to do with your breasts. They’re going to chop off one of my boobs.”

“Oh. How do you spell that?”

Ha haaaa! Is that hilarious or not?  And just think how hilarious it is that medical offices are populated with folks like this, ready to take care of your every health need…

Employer Beware: Here come our students!

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Holy mackerel.

I gave a student a gentleman’s B on an extended definition assignment — an 80 when in fact the paper was worth at best about 75 points and in fact was eligible to have 100 points deducted, leaving the poor lad with a goose-egg.

But because it’s an online course — they do have difficulty learning this stuff on their own, without someone to draw pictures on the whiteboard and explain it over and over in every iteration the instructor can think of — I’m giving this bunch the benefit of the doubt. This has been especially so for the extended definition, which is a difficult genre even for upper-division students to get their minds around, and for MLA style, to which many of them have never been exposed in their entire lives.

So a day or two after I ship this thing off to the little twit, feeling some misgivings about the generosity of the score, he e-mails me back to complain and ask what on EARTH he did wrong, since he carefully followed the MLA style guidelines shown at Purdue (no, he didn’t) and he didn’t think the paper was unfocused, as accused.

Argh.

I just finished explaining all this to the kid, in writing. To do so entails writing MORE copy than the student had to write for the assignment itself!

Original comment, tossed off quickly but IMHO right on target:

Okay, first off you’ll need to learn how to cite a source using MLA style. Please read the chapters assigned in the textbook on this subject. If you haven’t bought the textbook or it doesn’t help, then an excellent site to learn these techniques and to see examples is the Purdue OWL. It has an entire section explaining MLA style: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

Second, it is best to avoid the dictionary definition. With your essay, I can see why it would be useful to give comparative definitions, but it’s best to find a different way than relying on the dictionary.

And third, your body paragraphs do not tell a cohesive story. In some ways you showed what those for and against gay marriage believe. A more interesting and effective approach may have been to define gay marriage in terms of its legal, fiscal, and religious implications. It appears you have sources for this. This way your essay would be less of a “debatable” topic and more presenting some important facets of this definition.

New comments…

[Student opens essay with two insipid dictionary definitions, knocked off (one without quote marks) from Merriam-Webster Online. The subject matter is same-sex marriage, an insipid topic much favored by high-school teachers and English 101 instructors, and so the paper is probably recycled for this assignment.]

This is a direct, word-for-word quote. Even when you give the source, you STILL have to put quotation marks around strings of words that are directly quoted from the source: Marriage: “the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law.”   In writing an extended definition, it’s best to avoid using a dictionary definition, but if one feels one must, one at least ought not to start out with it.   

I’d make a new paragraph here, since you’re switching subjects a bit.

Also, it is best to avoid starting with the dictionary definition.

[Student comes to the end of the introductory paragraph with no sign of a thesis statement anywhere in sight.]

Okay. Now let’s think about where we are at the end of this opening paragraph. We’ve set up a kind of contrast between two dictionary definitions (one of heterosexual and one of same-sex marriage) and we’ve said that some people resent the idea of same-sex marriage as an affront to what they believe are the moral values of the United States. But – and here’s the big but – we haven’t established our own definition of anything.

As it stands, the thesis statement says that some people are offended at the idea of same-sex marriage, and that might work for  a report on the state of moralistic huffiness about this issue. However, the point of an extended definition is to present your own interpretation of what something means, an interpretation that goes beyond a mere dictionary definition. Thus, an extended definition’s thesis statement should put your definition (i.e., your interpretation, your personal spin, or your insight) in a nutshell.

One could have any number of definitions of marriage. For example, you could define it as solely a legal arrangement and argue that in a country of laws, that is all it is and the government has no business imposing religious definitions of marriage on those who do not subscribe to a specific religion – the U.S., after all, is not a theocracy. You could go the other way around and argue that marriage is more than a lowly human legal contract but instead has spiritual implications that go far beyond legalities, and so it should be a special case. 

In either event (or in any other event you can dream up), your interpretation needs to appear up-front, and it needs to drive the rest of the paper’s argument. In other words, your interpretation drives the point you want to make, and so it is the thesis statement, or at least a crucial part of the thesis.

[Student inserts an in-text citation: (Peter Sprigg, 2012).]

So what we want to do here is use only the author’s last name in the in-text citation; if there’s more than one author we’d use their last names up to a point…I think in MLA style it’s six, but look it up; after six, use the lead author’s last name followed by et al.: (Sprigg, 2012); (Sprigg and Twigg, 2012); (Sprigg, Twigg, and Busch, 2012; Sprigg et al., 2012).

[Student writes, “Mr. Sprigg claims that…”]

In academic writing, just use the person’s last name for this context; no Mr. is needed.

[Student regurgitates Sprigg’s reasons for opposing same-sex marriage, one of which is mildly specious and three of which are downright silly.]

Okay, it’s all very nice that Sprigg makes these claims, but how is it related to the definition of straight or gay marriage? And why should we buy these claims, which on their face are pretty silly? The Social Security issue could be a valid concern; the others, not so much, since people who are unhappy in marriages usually leave, whether or not they can settle down in wedded bliss with their same-sex partners; same-sex partners regularly adopt or obtain custody of children and raise them, and the fact that those partners’ relationship is legally recognized is unlikely to change that. So…what do Sprigg’s points have to do with anything? Especially with how marriage (straight or gay or both) is defined?

[Student rehashes the arguments of someone taking the pro-gay marriage stance; in doing so he mentions the claim that legalizing gay marriage is an attack on the institution of marriage itself.]

Ah hah! Here’s something we could use as a thesis for an extended definition. We could make the claim that the institution of marriage itself has a specific set of criteria that exclude same-sex unions. Note, though, that making that claim, while it would give us a definition to work with in this essay, would not of itself lead to the conclusion that legalizing same-sex unions and calling them “marriage” will result in the end of civilization as we know it. To do that, we would have to define marriage as the basis of and the bulwark of the entire moral and ethical construct of Western culture. That could be done…but to do so, we would have to say it in so many words.

[Student brings up recent cases in Arizona and New Mexico.]

Okay, we’ve got some good research here. But for the paper per se, we’re still in a kind of debate mode: yea or nay on gay marriage. We haven’t come up with an original point of view on marriage in general, on heterosexual unions, or on gay unions; we’ve only stated that people have differing opinions about the legitimacy of same-sex marriage. Note, here, that you only need the authors’ last names. BTW, I seem to have had my brain stuck in APA style here; MLA style spells out “and” while APA style uses the ampersand.

[In a muddled concluding paragraph, Student brings up the issue of religious beliefs, says Americans are not required to buy into but are supposed to respect others’ religious beliefs, and ends by deciding marriage is not just a word; it’s about love.]

Yes. This is an important point. But don’t lose sight of the fact that the US Constitution not only guarantees that Americans can worship God in any way we choose, but also that we are not forced to worship God at all. The government makes no establishment of religion. And there’s an incontrovertible fact that can bring us around to a way to use extended definition to argue one way or the other on this point. Here it is: we could build a definition of marriage as either a religious arrangement or as a legal arrangement – in this country, it happens to be both. Because Americans have conflated those two issues – i.e., a member of the clergy can legally marry a couple, and the couple does not have to go to a justice of the peace to make that church-based, church-sanctified union legal – we end up with a loud, contentious, and unpleasant argument over who can live together in a de facto state of marriage.

If we defined marriage as solely a religious arrangement, then we could argue that churches should have some say over what legal rights a couple may have. Using this to claim same-sex marriage should be disallowed would be difficult, because some established main-line churches are tolerant of gay marriage (just a few months ago, I was present at a marriage between two men performed by clergy of my church…one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the state). But it could be done.

If we defined it as solely a legal arrangement, then we could argue that clerics have no say about who may or may not be married in someone else’s church or down at the county courthouse – that they may say who may or may not be regarded as married in their church, but they may not dictate what people who are not members of their religion believe or practice.

You can make these arguments, obviously…but the idea with an extended definition essay is to make the arguments based on how a term is defined. What is marriage? Is it a legal arrangement? Is it a church institution? Is it merely a social recognition of a long-term (hopefully a life-long) commitment between a man and a woman, or between any two people? Is it the consecration of a sexual union intended to produce and protect children (and not primarily for pleasure or love)? Is it the consecration of two people’s love for each other? Is it the legal recognition and framework of a financial and parenting contract between two adults? Whatever definition you select and develop, that is what drives the essay…it’s what forms the argument (the point) you want to make. That’s not what’s happening in this essay.

 [In his Works Cited, Student lists two essays from Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints in Context, a library database designed to make it easy for students to find sources espousing different arguments about commonly assigned subjects. He gets the documentation style wrong.]

Italicize names of websites, book titles, movie titles, TV series, and other “long” things; put short things such as articles, poems, and short stories in quotation marks. Did you find these in an electronic source? If so:

Kellard, James. “Gay Marriage Should Be Legal.” Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context, 2012. Web. 1 April 2014.

 [Student cites a website sponsored by the Pew Research Organization. He gets that wrong, too.]

Use caps & lower-case for all titles. Note the format for dates used by MLA. Add whether this appeared in print or online; if it’s a Web source, add the date of access. Use hanging indent (in Word: Format > Paragraph > Special > hanging). Separate the names of two authors with “and.” Pew Research Center is the sponsor of the Fact Tank website, so that’s set up like this:

Lipka, Michael and David Masci. “Arizona Bill Sparks Debate about Religious Objections to Gay Marriage.” Fact Tank. Pew Research Center. 25 February 2014. Web. 1 April 2014.

 [Instructor reviews rubrics/score sheet, wondering if the paper was graded unfairly. She thinks not…]

I understand that these are headache-inducing, ditzy details – that’s why scholars hire people like me to edit their research for publication and to get the citation and documentation correct according to whatever style manual the publisher happens to use. The trick is, whichever style manual you end up using in your academic career or in the world of work (if you’re in business, the health sciences, the social sciences, or education, you’ll use APA style), pay excruciatingly close attention to these annoying details. What capitalization conventions does the manual use (APA uses sentence style for article titles and books but caps & lower-case for magazines and journals; MLA uses caps & lower-case for all titles)? Where do the standard elements like author, title of article, title of journal or website, date of publication, and date of access go? What parts of the thing are set in italic? Even though the details differ from style manual to style manual, the overall principles are the same.

The score on this paper actually is generous – I only marked down 5 points for incorrect use of MLA style, and because the paper is not really an extended definition, had I been feeling particularly dyspeptic I could have marked it down 100 points. (What a harpy!!!!)

Try to get that MLA style down. It’s a real PITA, but you can do it, given some patience and time.

Herein lies a problem: To explain this stuff face-to-face would have taken…what? 10 minutes? It probably wouldn’t have been necessary, because I would have gone over it all in the classroom, where I could draw pictures on the whiteboard, ask the students to figure out how sample citations should look, and give them an opportunity to bring up their own questions. This would have occupied an hour or two of class time.

It’s to my advantage not to have to diddle away my hours standing in front of a classroom, partly because the more hours I stand in front of a classroom, the lower my hourly wage works out to be. In fact, it can work out to less than minimum wage, depending on the amount of course prep and grading time I put in.

However, mounting an online course is time-intensive, and the time used to create it and put it online is unpaid, as a practical matter. It all has to be done before one goes on the payroll.

Thus, the more time I put in on grading, the lower my pay. That means I tend to compile succinct summary comments like the one shown at the top of this series of rants, especially for papers that are not failing. When a student with a “B” demands that I explain myself in detail, then my hourly rate goes down because I have to spend some unholy amount of time figuring out how to explain what the student should have learned on his own — assuming he is competent to learn on his own.

What we have here are students who probably are competent but — get this — have never been asked to write a research-based paper in their ENTIRE thirteen and a half years of education. The kid hasn’t a clue.

Most of them have never been asked to write an extended definition, either. It’s not a genre that’s commonly taught in high schools.

By and large, they do not understand why they should have to take freshman comp. They don’t understand why the skills that they should have learned over the prior thirteen-plus years have value in the real world, nor, for that matter, do they have any idea what skills they’re missing. Consequently, because they think their time is being wasted (and are oblivious to the amount of their instructor’s time they waste), they feel entitled to turn in papers that they’ve already submitted for other courses — often for high-school classes.

When an instructor decides, as I did this semester, not to force students to write on subjects of her or his choosing but to let them select their own essay topics, what they invariably will do is recycle old papers. Few to none will write a new, original paper that actually fits the assignment.

Yes, I could combat that by indeed deducting 100 points from a paper that does not fulfill the assignment — in this case, a paper that’s not really an extended definition but just a review of opposing viewpoints on a controversial subject. But…ever hear of Rate Your Professor?

I have a friend who was short-listed for a job at a much better university in a part of the country where she dearly wanted to live. After she didn’t get hired, she learned she was eliminated because a student had posted an anonymous and, IMHO, libelous review of her teaching practices at Rate Your Professor. Anyone who is not tenured — as adjuncts by definition are not — is crazy to fail a student for not turning in a paper that exactly matches the assignment.

People who are underpaid and whose job evaluation depends on anonymous popularity contests are put in a position of simply not being able to teach adequately. They are not able to deliver an honest assessment of a paper — or, if they do so, they do it at considerable risk.

I have given up the elaborate project of inventing original study topics and assigning specific paper themes that are difficult to self-plagiarize. It’s too much work; it takes way, way too many hours, leaving me earning less than minimum wage. Out of self-defense, our underpaid and overworked teachers, from K-12 all the way through the BA, are forced to let things go that should not get past them, to deliver substandard guidance, and to leave students pretty much in the dark.