Today, while demonstrating for lab 102 (plants and microbes), I lost my temper! I raised my voice slightly at the students, and pulled the demostrators aside to tell them off. The students in today's lab were told to do two graphs for their experiment, and write a proper caption for it. Most of these first year students do not know how to write a proper caption, thus all they wrote was "y vs x", which is completely unacceptable. We have been spending lots of time in other labs telling the students to think about writing good captions that describe the experiment, not just y vs x! However, when I asked a student why they think it is acceptable to write y vs x, their answer was "that demostrator told us it's ok"! After that, I noticed, students were avoiding me marking their captions and are asking other demostrators instead. I took a look, and students with lousy captions were given full marks without even knowing they shouldn't be doing that!
It is one thing that students do not know...it is another when we as seniors just accept it and say it's ok! I pulled the demostrators aside and sarcastically asked them -" is this what their postgraduate education has been teaching them? Is this how they write captions in their papers?" I was pissed! and I was even more frustrated when I found out the tutor did not even care about students not putting in effort to write proper captions!
I am not asking the students to write the perfect caption, but it is definitely worth the effort to start learning the right thing now. And even the demostrators and tutors needs to start working on not accepting mediocre work, and these students will live up to the high standards.
It was a disappointing day at work :(
Glad you are pushing them to live up to the standard! I was surprised that going into Masters level education, my classmates had not yet learned how to sample the intertidal!! I was soon very popular haha
ReplyDeleteThat really sucks! It's like that sometimes here. Good thing there are people like you to uphold quality standards.
ReplyDeleteMom wrote
ReplyDelete"the only way to get excellence is to expect it. Do not worry about hurt feelings....the best teachers,the best motivators are hard on their students. Why did Vince Lombardi win? What made Mrs Bunin (insert your toughest teacher) great? Tough expwctations You are not there to be their friends. You may be the first person to challege them in their academic career....You may be showing your age!!!!and your Asianess Keep it up genius Your loving Mom"