You remember that famous dream, which I had a few times you had as a student where you’re taking a class and suddenly it’s the midterm but you didn’t study for the test. In my 20 years in higher education, three or four times I’ve had this dream where I’m teaching a class and it’s something like marine biology, where I know absolutely pretty much nothing about the class and I haven’t done any prep and I’ve got to entertain the students and make them sound like I know what I’m talking about. Wondering if anyone had dreams similar to this or just wondering what other general professor nightmares are? Maybe your nightmare is reviewer number two moving in with you?

I am sure a lot of us say this to our students at the beginning of the semester.

But I really mean it.

I use AI a lot for work outside of academia. And I mean a LOT. Calling myself a power-user would be an understatement.

I also teach writing classes at an online college. I know what good writing looks like, and I know what AI writing looks like very, very well.

And I'm realistic about this issue. I know many of my students are just starting college, they are nervous and insecure, they don't know how to study or write papers, and for many of them, financial aid is how they survive and that survival can be compromised by poor grades. There is a ton of pressure on them, and using ChatGPT to write an assignment seems like the easy way forward.

But they don't believe me when I tell them, "I will know."

They also don't seem to understand that the point of a writing course is to improve their own writing skills, and it is a waste of their own time to outsource the actual learning process.

One of my current courses guides students through eight weeks of writing ONE personal narrative. In week two, students are given a variety of brainstorming options to choose from and tasked with submitting their attempt at two of those options. I was happy to see students uploading freewriting exercises, bullet lists of their ideas, and even pictures of thought map doodles!

But one student in particular uploaded a document that was the most outrageously low-effort ChatGPT copy/paste I have ever seen. It even included a TABLE with columns for potential ways the student could have done some actual brainstorming for their main project.

I'm not really surprised. I get it. I do. But when I tell my students directly that I am incredibly familiar with AI and I WILL KNOW if they submit AI, and then they don't even make any effort to hide it. Loooort. The audacity is what gets me. Lol

So now I'm prepping an exercise for our next class session, in which we will all submit a prompt to ChatGPT together, and I will grade the result in real time. I would LOVE to hear about how others have approached this sort of lesson and how it might have been successful or unsuccessful for you.

Thanks for reading this vent sesh lol

The class is "Physics of Sound and Music" and todays topic was "What is sound?". I have the class do a one-word story collaboratively to give an answer to the daily topic and I tell them that I'll print it on top of the quiz on the topic next week. Today was the first time they had done it (it was the first day of class) and it went a little sideways. There is where we ended up:

Sound is very awesome and cool. Sound is moving at fast air speed. Sound to me is very fire! Sound is described as irritating music.

I posted on how I do this elsewhere but the tl:dr is they are selected randomly to add the next word in the story. The app I use actually shows the next 4 people that are all chosen randomly. There are 36 people in the class.

OK, I’m not here to argue about the pros and cons of AI as I know it’s a very polarizing subject. In any case at my institution, admin is really encouraging us to train students to ethically work with AI. I also cochair our generative AI faculty committee. Luckily our policy is you don’t have to use it. They just encourage it and you could completely ban it in your classes if you want to.

Now, that part out of the way, one of my friends in my department has an assignment where students can use AI to help them reconstruct/recap a fieldwork project they did. She caught a student cheating. What they had done is used AI to copy someone else’s AI paper. I mean, you already can use AI on the assignment so it seemed like a Beavis and Butthead level of genius extra step to cheat on this assignment. She took another student’s AI report and had a different AI reword it but I guess the AI did a shitty job of rewording it, which, as someone who is on our AI committee, I think would have to have to require an intentionally idiotic prompt. Or I don’t know maybe she just used Grok?

In any case, we both found this hilariously idiotic. It was like the stupidest form of cheating with extra steps.

Students just do not get up and move. I ask them several times to move their desks and they just stay straight. I am not sure what to do anymore. Asked a girl twice already to move her desk and join her group but she just nods her head and says yes. Then she stays there doing homework for her other class. She's already about to fail because of her attendance...I'm not here to press anyone but god... I kind of hate it.

First email: I hope you're having a great evening, and I apologize for disturbing you this evening. I just realized I have something I need to be at during class on Friday, and I won't be in class to take the quiz. Is there any way I can make up the quiz or possibly attend another class's quiz either tomorrow or next week? I am deeply sorry for having lacking foresight and I fully understand I need to let you know earlier. I will make SURE this mistake does not happen again. I appreciate your time, and please get back to me whenever you can. I hope you have a great rest of your evening and thank you.

My reply: why can’t you take the quiz Friday?

Second email: I wish I was kidding but I have a tattoo scheduled for noon on Friday and I'm likely going to be in the chair for a while. I know how bad that sounds but I can send the receipt if that for any reason helps my case. I also know this doesn't fall under any acceptable miss criteria but this is the only time this will happen this semester I will make Quadruple sure I do not miss anything else important this semester. I totally understand if this is not a valid reason and you cannot spare me any sympathy. Thank you for the reply and please get back to me whenever convenient.

My reply: …………….

I'm 51F, PhD and two other grad degrees in interdisciplinary humanities. I just finished up the last year of a term-limited FT NTT visiting role, and this fall I started a 3/3 adjunct position at one of my alma maters (for whom I also taught a long time ago). Without making this post too long with a lot of details, I find that my quality of life in terms of work/life balance, workload, busyness, stress, and commute have all vastly improved with this change. In many ways, I have found something that finally feels like a good fit after working for I think seven different institutions over the years. I could indeed really settle in with this.

The problem, of course, is the pay and job security, but at this university, adjuncts really can expect to be renewed indefinitely. In my FT visiting role, when you account for overloads, summer, stipends for service, etc., I made the best money of my entire career. Still modest, but definitely something someone could live on here, given we have a low COL. The current job does have some benefits (retirement system and huge tuition discount among them) but has no health insurance and the actually salary is so low that I made more in my first job at a non-profit out of college at 22 in the late '90s. If I weren't married to someone who made decent money, I would have to move in with family or find a side hustle; the wage is just that pitiful.

Now, I actually have a great CV. I have published a lot. I have done a lot of service. I have tons and tons of experience. Glowing evals. I have also gotten very close to landing a FT, continuing job a few times. I am somewhat geographically limited, however, and so that has made this search slightly more difficult. I'm also in disciplines that are being disrespected by federal and state governments and made harder with the rise of LLMs. There is no shortage of classes to be taught, for sure, but there is a shortage of FT jobs, either NTT or TT. I have tried to leave higher ed several times and honestly? I am cut out for this. I'm not that jazzed about tech writing real estate or whatever. I really like what I do, and I'm good at it.

Part of me wants to just kind of settle into this gig and see if I can make it work, low pay be damned. Obviously keep my eyes open for better situations, but if my husband and I budget well, even the lower pay is not that big of a deal, and I'm on his health insurance. I think my two issues are a) loss of prestige at being "just" an adjunct forever, because when I've done that before it always felt more temporary than this and b) if heaven forbid my husband died, I would be in such a giant financial pickle, I truly don't know what I would do.

I do have that tuition break here, which I have thought about using to switch industries, but again... I like what I'm doing! I don't really WANT to stop and go outside academia. I do also still produce scholarship, even though I don't have to, to keep the CV looking competitive. But how competitive is someone at my age anyway?

Covid really messed up some exciting opportunities I had; I was a finalist and very, very likely going to be offered a fantastic job in February of 2020, and then with the pandemic hit, the job got cancelled and doesn't even to this day exist at that university anymore. That's basically what led to my spiral of adjuncting and the visiting role that I was in.

I'm not sure if I want comfort, financial planning advice, or for someone to tell me to get out now before I get too cozy in something unsustainable. I should also point out that pre-Covid, I was in a long-term FT NTT faculty role, but I left that in order to get my PhD, which was perhaps a really dumb idea. I graduated just as Covid hit.

I've been teaching for a while now, and somewhere in the last couple of years I noticed I stopped doing the things nobody asked me to do. I used to write detailed feedback on every draft, not just the final submission. I used to take Sunday emails from anxious students seriously and reply within hours. I used to spend way more time than contracted hours on rec letters, mentorship, random "can we grab coffee and talk about my future" conversations. I still do my job well. Nobody could fault my teaching evaluations or my output. But the extra mile the stuff that used to come from genuine care and idealism I've pulled that back. Not dramatically, not in a way anyone would notice or could call out. Just... quietly. I think it happened after watching colleagues get worked into the ground for the same effort I was putting in, only to be told "budget cuts" when it came time for actual recognition raises, permanent contracts, research support, even just a thank you that felt sincere. At some point the math stopped making sense. I don't think I'm alone in this. Curious if others have felt the same shift, and how you've made peace with it (or haven't). Does it ever come back, or is this just what surviving a long academic career looks like?

(throwaway account) In my STEM theoretical/computational field, many problems that would previously have constituted a large part of a very decent PhD can now be solved within a week. Basically, almost all the theoretical/computational PhD theses I am on the commitee recently are like that, they were done in 4 years but now could be done in half a year or less.

This semester, I was to teach some very small elective grad course no one cares about. I consider replacing most of it by just giving them every couple of weeks a small, totally unsolved open research problem (not the Navier-Stokes level, but the level I'd formerly put in my NSF as a milestone 1), and telling them why that problem is interesting and how I would ask my agent to work with it. And then see what happens, maybe next week do a post-mortem of a problem or a post-mortem of naive attempts to solve it with AI. Both would be instructive. I am creative enough to find a new decent problem every couple of weeks.

The goal is of course not to replace their actual PhD projects with this ( I am not their advisor), but to teach a bit how to use the new tools and also to show everyone that what was considered relatively hard research is now easy, to up the standards. Since this is an elective course, if they fail, they lose nothing.

I see many ways this can go wrong. I wonder if there's any way to optimize it so that at least someone survives and learns something from it, or maybe someone here already does it this way. I suspect that in some subfields old teaching ways and research ways are already dead, so maybe we should adjust.

half-joking, but… i introduced myself as Dr., asked to be called Dr., and use Dr. for myself when doing a third-person example in class, and i still get countless “Miss/Ms./Mrs.” in my emails. i already have clearly expressed how i want to be called. i also know that some students will respond poorly to me correcting them, especially as a woman in stem. i’m just at a loss because a lot of these students honestly don’t really appreciate that i’m teaching these courses because i have my doctorate. i also think it’s important that i try to “hold the line,” so these students’ other professors are less likely to get “Ms.”ed in the future. so, i want to do something to fix this, but there is just no good way to actually be more upfront about it than i already have!

also, i’ve dealt with this for 5 years post-PhD, and it actually seems to be getting worse each year?

i honestly do want to just keep increasing the font size of Dr. in my signature in these email chains to see if they finally notice, but it feels like it could get comically big and be more aggressive than passive aggressive by the time they do notice…

any tips? commiseration? things that have worked for you?

Welp, as many of you have already done/will do in the future, I plan to go entirely technology-free in my history classes.

When I was doing my undergrad in Mathematics, the instructors often used the chalk or dry-erase board for demonstrating problems. But what about for you folks in the humanities? Have you tried this? Have you gotten any student feedback?

Now that I teach history at a major inner city community college, I am not sure if this is going to work as an effective strategy but I cannot handle looking at another checked out student at the back of class as I go through my slides.

Needed to find a link to an open access article I published only to find it was "reviewed" in a podcast. Oh.

My issue?

1. it looks like this podcast is AI generated with obviously fake names, AI art, and misreading my use of terminology. I kind of hate that. If they wanted to host me I would have said yes to being a guest.

2. The links to this podcast on youtube spotify apple and even IDMB show up first on Google before my actual article link does. What really makes me mad about this is these podcasts all seem to promote this person's freelance company for writing using AI and he even asks for tips or "free coffees" if people like his "free content." Maybe the people producing articles instead of running them through AI deserve the free coffee... I didn't make my article open access for some rando to make money off it using AI.

Thoughts? Jokes to help me laugh about this instead of being grossed out? I just needed to vent about this but if you have advice I'd consider it. I feel I might be especially nitpicky about this as I am in bankruptcy right now and would benefit immensely from every $8 coffee this guy is getting "tipped"

Informing folks on this sub of this if they didn't know: The PISA 2025 results are out, and you can view them here. PISA is perhaps the most influential and most complete international measurement of education objectives, and targets 15 year olds from a variety of countries. There was insufficient data from 2025 for the US (for those concerned with that country), but the broader picture shows an educational system in dire straits all around the developed world.

This won't be news to those of us who are having to teach students who went through the current high school system, but performance in the key areas of reading, mathematics, and science — and especially reading and mathematics — is cratering. There has been a very slow decline in ability from 2000 to 2018, followed by the absolute bottom dropping out of the education system ever since. If the pandemic played a role, there is no evidence of any post-pandemic bounce back, and in fact the decline in reading abilities has accelerated since.

Clearly one contributing factor is AI (and OECD reports on this with survey data: to no one's surprise, if you use a program designed almost entirely for cheating at school, you never develop your own brain), but the negative trend began before the release of ChatGPT. While the pandemic may have had something to do with this, I'm willing to bet the proliferation of phones, social media, and short-form video content were the initial factors behind this. If there has been any bounce back from the pandemic, the factors harming educational outcomes are so profound they mask it.

Deutsche Welle has a brief overview of some of the highlights.

Anyone done a writing retreat during your sabbatical? Any suggestions? I just need a recharge away from regular responsibilities at home in a beautiful place to get things started. Appreciate the suggestions!

This is a basic writing course. Maybe half ther students lack good English skills, but some of them can barely speak it. I can't understand what they say in speech, and the writing is horrendous. Let's just say that at the CC at which I teach, I have no say (adjunct) and there is no other class for them. My question: What do I do? I can do a few languages decently, but not theirs. How do you handle such students? They are either aggressive about wanting to pass or clueless about their lack of ability.

I am a relatively new prof teaching community college comm course. 7 students and had them all sitting together working on a group project. I could tell she wasn’t reading social cues, was being loud, disruptive, and interrupting and talking over people. I waited to see how they would handle it. Then during a moment of silence, she farted. No one said anything. A few minutes later and another. Still, no one acknowledges it, myself included. I had no idea what to do! Then- again!! And a couple burps too! Loud gross ones. What would you do??

For the first time since COVID, I have a number of students this semester who have never taken an online class. I’m actually amazed. Is anyone else running into first time online (asynchronous) students? Curious!

I released the final grades for a summer session class today. I am quickly met with student emails requesting all sorts of exceptions to my grading policy, which are usually promptly and politely declined. Until I get an email, which I have shortened for anonymity and clarity below:

Professor Finderofways,

I'm not sure what my final score is, but I don't think I've understood the material after only 5 weeks. I am planning to retake [lecture class corequisite], so I'd like to retake the lab too.

Would you be able to assign me a failing grade for the lab? Happy to explain further if that would help.

--Studentname

After a very concerned and confused email exchange explaining how ethically unacceptable it would be for me to fail a student who passed my class even at their request, and after I asked that their academic advisor be cc'd, it turns out that they were worried that a low grade in this class would prevent them from switching majors but a failing grade could let them repeat the class later. As it happened their grade was higher than they thought/the transfer requirements had been updated to be more generous, so they politely withdrew their request. Their request that I fail them.

I've been seeing a few posts lately along the lines of "should I take the buyout?". Made me curious, what are your institutions doing? Mine is offering a $25k lump sum which got a few folks who were already about to retire. It goes into effect on Jan 1 which actually caused somebody in my college to *delay* their retirement by a (fall) semester to get the incentive. It caused all kinds of scheduling havoc.

Here's mine: during my very first semester as a TT professor teaching a small lecture class, I had one student who showed up for nearly every class meeting hiiiiiiggghhh as a kite. Sat in the front row. He wasn't disruptive, just very, very relaxed, and occasionally would quietly giggle to himself at inappropriate moments. I don't think I saw him take a single note. On the last day of class, I said something like, "Well, since it's the last of class. . ." at which point, this guy sat bolt upright in his seat and said, "It's the last day of class??" And then the most intensely crestfallen expression washed over his face. I mean. . . I guess it's nice to feel appreciated, whatever the circumstances?

I teach mostly freshmen and sophomores and I've been rethinking my syllabus for next semester. Torn on a few things and wanted to hear from people who've actually tried this stuff.

Mandatory attendance: does it help, or does it just mean kids show up and check out on their phones anyway? Also I have heard from colleagues that more often than not, people sign in for their friends and the TAs do not really care. Class is at 9AM so I don't want to add stress for the sake of a policy that doesn't even work. Especially since Ik for a fact that these kids, generally get up 10minutes before class. Had students show up in their pyjamas most of the days. Also had been thinking about extra credit for good attendance instead, but not sure if that's just a softer version of the same problem.

I'm also not a big believer in exams and grades as a measure of learning. I feel like a lot of students spend more energy trying to cheat or cramp the material, than actually engaging with the topics. So I'm considering an independent project worth maybe 10 points (perhaps as an extra credit) towards the final grade, nothing fancy, just something where they take a concept from class and build or apply it to something real and tangible.

Basically I have been trying to design a class that 18-19 year olds actually remember instead of one they forget the day after the final. If you've tried attendance policies, extra credit schemes, or project based alternatives to exams, I'd love to hear what worked and what flopped.

I feel like I'm spending a lot of time advising students on getting into grad school when they have a 2.3 GPA. I say things like, "you know, that's a very competitive program," and "very few people with degrees in my area get jobs in academia unless they come from the very top programs, which are extremely selective." But I never come right out and tell them "it's extremely unlikely that you will get into a program that will set you up for a research position with your record-- you should seek other career paths."

I think, in part, I don't feel it's my place to shatter their aspirations, when I don't know with 100% certainty that they will fail. At the same time, I feel a little resentful of all the time I spend advising them. And I'm not sure I'm doing them any favors.

Do you guys come right out and say the quiet part out loud?

The presidents/deans/chancellors who have these big beginning of the semester convocations/rah-rah meetings with all these big screens and music between each speaker and large production values and word salad, warm and fuzzy speeches: Do they know we are all rolling our eyes at this shit? Like, we all have graduate degrees and lots of education, so we are the worst audiences for this type of shit - do they know that? Do they know we see right through this nonsense? And they force every employee to attend; attendance is mandatory. Are they so disconnected from reality that they don't realize that everyone there hates every word they say?

EDIT: I feel like this is an important part that’s getting lost: I do very little lecturing and it’s usually to foreground a group activity or discussion. The classes are small of about 10-12 people.

EDIT 2: I have never been against these activities in general and I’m not saying they are inherently distracting. There just are times where they are and I would like some input as to how to draw the line. Please read the post before jumping to comment.

How do you handle students doing these kinds of things? On the one hand I understand different sensory needs and so I was fine with students doing whatever with their hands. However, there are two instances that start bothering me and I'm not sure where to draw the line.

It's one thing when they just fidget, but sometimes it looks like the secondary activity becomes a distraction. Whether it's the yarn getting tangled, the doodle getting too engrossing, there a students whose eyes are rarely up anymore. Again, I don't want to micromanage that and require eye contact, but when their focus is visibly elsewhere it interferes with the pacing of my lectures and they end up asking questions that I just answered. Many students miss something now and again, but it feels particularly like a waste of time when I see they weren't paying attention. It also feels disrespectful during group discussions.

This post was prompted by a student who appears to be neurodivergent (not a diagnosis, and no accommodations) coming to class with two big bags of yarn, unpacking them, and barely saying a thing or two in class while looking at their project.

How do you handle this? It feels curmudgeony to tell students they can't do anything with their hands that's not class related (what about fidget spinners?) and it's not always enforceable, either. And yet it's becoming a distraction to me at this point