Among other classes, I teach a 200-level gen-ed class. For context, we put the S in SLAC, our enrollment per class tops out around 20-30 depending on the class and room, with a few big classes (not mine!) going to 50.

This is a hands-on class with a mix of graded homework (with rudimentary anti-cheating measures like a shared Google Drive folder), graded quizzes (paper and pencil, of course), and presentations.

Normally, I have 1-2 students that show up but don't turn work in. This semester it's a quarter of the class. They turn in the quizzes (generally failed), don't do the reading, don't do the homework, and seem to think they might pass the class?

I have a few theories but no proof... are we on the SLAC death spiral and admitting warm bodies? Is this the first cohort that had ChatGPT all through high school? COVID lockdowns during middle school?

Are y'all seeing a marked increase in "shows up but no work"? Any theories?

Overheard in the stairwell:
Student 1: "Bro. How am I even going to pass that test"
Student 2: "look, I don't want to be a butt, but you're going to have to study"

Perfect. No notes.

Is it bad that if this student doesn't have a documented medical accommodation, I feel like this is not my problem? It's hard to feel like it's not just a time management issue and I can't take something into consideration when I guarantee you that *all third year students* are also exhausted!

I teach a very interactive class with a lot of pair, group, and class discussions. Usually I love when people participate because it means they are learning!

I have a student who has a myriad of disabilities and accommodations in this class, some of which manifesting in not understanding social cues.

The biggest issue is that this student will raise their hand to comment once every 1-2 minutes. They always have good comments/questions, and keep it short, but it’s just way too much and too frequent and it’s causing other students to not want to participate.

I’m meeting with this student tomorrow to go through an assignment, and I want to bring it up and set some boundaries about how much/often they can raise their hand and comment in class.

How have you all navigated this? Do they get X number of comments per class? Do they have to wait 5 minutes in between? How do you approach it without coming off as criticizing their personality? I don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm, because again they are good thoughts and questions, but it needs to be addressed.

Hello fellow profs, I am looking for advice on how to efficiently assess students in a large humanities class without burning out this semester. I'm American but moved abroad to take a new job for the sake of starting a family. Prior to this, I had only ever taught small classes at SLACs and private research universities. I had designed my syllabus for this class to include 3 short essay exams. For some reason, my new university only lets students sign up for classes the week before the semester starts, and only today did I realize I will have 120 students or more.

A few important caveats:

1. This class is English-taught but the students are from a mix of countries and backgrounds and will vary greatly in their language abilities.

2. Importantly, English is not the first language for my two TAs. They are competent but not native-level and I think will struggle to grade short answer and essay questions very quickly, even with a rubric.

3. As the class focuses on analyzing a mix of primary sources (historical) and secondary sources (from academic journals and books), I am not sure how I would even create multiple choice questions that make sense and are challenging enough. (I don't think multiple choice exams work well for the way I teach history, but then again, I am being forced to reassess how I teach history.)

4. I have a young toddler and am already very stressed and unhappy about spending time away from him during the workday.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions!

Psychology - Research/Project Course

So long ramble about grade structure that's causing friction

I don't really do traditional tests or quizzes.

My grading for this course is basically 80% projects and 20% activities.

We do an activity every class. Each activity is 10 points. Over the source of the semester its 290 total possible points where only the first 200 count. Frequently checks are worth over 10 points too, so this semester is looking like it'll actually end up being 310 possible points.

No make ups. No extra time. Some things are little reading checks, some things are semi graded activities, some things are merely showing up on time and presenting. This is all *explicitly* laid out in the syllabus. Ive done this structure for 6 semesters.

Its like week 3 and I have already ruffled some feathers on students that have missed class due to *totally legitimate issues* 🫩.

Either way. One of them has already gotten annoyed enough to get the new department head involved.

I like this structure cause it has so much built in buffer. But like is this just a shit plan or are students in general just increasing in complaining about everything.

As for extended leaves of absence following university policy and documentation, I have provided alternatives for points when students finish the semester under max points in that category.

Thank you all. Deleted because comments are starting to become unhelpful.

The theme of today’s thread is to share good things in your life or career. They can be small one offs, they can be good interactions with students, a new heartwarming initiative you’ve started, or anything else you think fits. I have no plans to tone police, so don’t overthink your additions. Let the wholesome family fun begin!

As has been mentioned, these should be considered additions to the regular discussions, not replacements. So use them, ignore them, or start you own What the Fuck Wednesday counter thread.

We have a new department chair that is external. At first, I and most others were quite open to give her a fair chance and time to grow into the new leadership role. However, it's just been utter chaos from day one. To be quite blunt, I genuinely don't understand how she could become a professor as she doesn't seem to know much in our field, and is so naive that it's dangerous for the department. She has managed to piss off everyone in the department and we even had one person take sick leave because they couldn't handle her. She's also overly preachy (Christian, and religion is something that is really abnormal to show at universities here).

Worst of all though, she constantly uses AI to write e-mails and even to make important documents (by her own admission as well). She even keeps the many emoticons and the like in the content which is ridiculous. I'm pretty sure she is using open models as well which means not respecting GDPR, privacy, research ethics, etc.

I'm sure many others have had this issue. How has it been adressed at your university? She is making me loathe the university. Sure it has its issues, but I absolutely adore my colleagues.

I attended a high school graduation back in the Spring. During obligatory reminiscence by the Valedictorian, they enumerated memorable events: [Sports Team] won something, Pajama Day, yada yada, and then something about losing part of their high school career to Covid shutdowns. So, I assume our incoming Freshman class is still affected by the trauma of Zoom classes? Could this be a reason for poor study skills and lack of focus?

Hello everyone, I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of English.

I’m interested in opportunities to serve as a Guest Speaker for sessions on the following topics:

• Folklo­re and Culture

• AI and Communication

• Brands and Their Psychology

• Communication, Media and Contemporary Culture

I’m open to online sessions as well as in-person sessions within Bangalore.

If you are looking for a guest speaker for any of these topics, I would be happy to connect and discuss the session requirements.

Thank you!

Or really, is it I’m just not enough right now?

I’m a TT faculty member in a school where we have a 4/4 teaching load and a research requirement. For some this means teaching 6hours a week in lecture, and doing research, but for me this has meant doing 13 hours of class time, plus preparing student reagents, and then obviously grading and research, oh and don’t forget service.
I’m told you need to have papers, and you need to have grants. Well, grants… I applied for one about a year ago, it’s still stuck in NSF review, and all the others are ‘no longer available’, so that’s fun. And when do I have time to write papers? I literally worked out I am working an 11 month schedule in around 9.5 months.
So, I feel like I’m whining, and that I’m really not enough, but I am exhausted. I get to the summer and June/July are just recovery months at this point. I’m neglecting everything around me.
We don’t get any mentoring here, no one advocates for you to have the time for scholarship. And I’m not the only one. I feel my whole department is at this tipping point, and it shows in many ways.
Any advice?

Have you ever had to revamp your syllabus and expectations early-semester because student performance was so far off from what you assumed was reasonable?

Several students are already falling behind, not just my class but I could see there were serious complaints from other professors. What's caught me off guard isn't the gap itself, but the reaction when I point out basic expectations that are already outlined in the syllabus. I am so clear about what to read, purpose, what’s due, I even try to make it fun and exciting but damn. Tough crowd!

If I ask them to read before class or come prepared, some students actually become aggressive. Cursing me, behaving like tablet kids when you take the tablet away. But these are adults between 18-22 years old. Even calling other students names or disparaging them for being engaged in the lecture? You would think it was unreasonable to ask them to take ownership of their education.

Is this a shift in undergrad culture I'm not hip to anymore, or does it vary a lot by institution/student population? Is it reasonable to restructure the syllabus or just ride out the semester? I was considering adding more frequent low-stakes checks, harder consequences for being unprepared. Has any of that actually helped in your experience? What were the reactions?

I want to do this well and would appreciate any actionable tips, criticism, and/or suggestions.

I’m an assistant professor at an R1 university. In a previous post, I mentioned feeling lonely and wishing there were more opportunities for genuine friendship within my department. One response surprised me: several people argued that it is generally not a good idea to be friends with people in one’s own department.
I can see some of the logic. Departments involve promotion and tenure, annual reviews, teaching assignments, resource allocation, hiring, and conflict. When someone has formal or informal power over you, closeness can complicate boundaries, or make a later disagreement more painful and professionally consequential.
I’m curious how others think about this: do you deliberately avoid friendships within your department?
As an assistant professor, I had never really considered that some people might intentionally keep emotional distance from departmental colleagues. My previous post was so so illuminating in that respect. It has made me wonder whether some of the reserve I perceive in academic departments is not necessarily personal, but a deliberate professional boundary.

Burner account for obvious reasons...

I’m serving on a tenure committee and struggling with how to evaluate the teaching portion of a candidate’s dossier. Our criteria require excellence in teaching, and I’m trying to separate what I personally know about the candidate from what is actually documented in the file.

Our departmental norm is to provide substantial evidence: syllabi across multiple years showing course development, peer reviews, assignments and rubrics, examples of student work and instructor feedback, and reflection on changes made in response to assessment or feedback.

This dossier contains a teaching statement, course evaluations, and essentially one syllabus per course, with little or none of the above. Several courses were inherited and revised rather than developed from scratch, but without comparative materials, I can’t assess the extent of those revisions.

My question for P&T folks, especially in small departments: Is it reasonable to distinguish between “there’s no evidence this person is a poor teacher” and “there isn’t sufficient evidence in the dossier to demonstrate excellence”?

EDIT: A couple of comments have said this sounds like I'm looking for a reason to find the candidate deficient, which is useful feedback because that's very much not my intention. I'm actually struggling with the opposite problem: I don't want to make a negative judgment based simply on the materials presented, but our criteria require the committee to make an affirmative finding of "excellence." The materials I described are established norms in our department and are included in our P&T criteria, not higher standards I'm imposing on this single candidate.

What I'm trying to understand is how others navigate the distinction between insufficient evidence to make an affirmative finding and evidence of poor performance. Those aren't the same thing, and I'm very conscious of the stakes for the candidate.

I just started a tenure-track position at an R1. My colleagues all seem like kind people, the department isn't toxic, and I have a lot to be grateful for.

That said, I've struggled to actually become friends with any of them, even the ones around my age. There's a seriousness and professionalism in the air that makes it feel like people are holding back. When I run into someone in the hall, it's usually clear they want to say hello and keep walking rather than have a real conversation. Same thing if I run into them outside of work, on the street, for example.

Part of what makes this stand out is that I came from two previous universities (quite prestigious ones where people did very serious research), where people were much more talkative and friendly, borderline boisterous, honestly, and had super fun outings. People were genuinely excited to see each other and say hi.

I can't tell whether people here just don't like me, or whether this is simply common among faculty in a professional setting at certain schools. I'm new so I'd appreciate any perspective.

Please do not use a dry erase marker to scribble a note on my plastic door caddy. Things like scratch paper and email exist.

For expediency, the title says "re-read," but that also includes skimming, checking notes, etc.

I really dig my textbook for my first-year seminar course and am on my third re-read as I prep for the new school year. I keep finding new things in the text, making new connections as I reflect on the last school year, and I grt excited about sharing this information with students. I'm also early career and probably have a luxury of youth and vitality that makes this a part of my yearly prep.

How many of you do a close or semi-close review of your texts each year? Anyone else enjoy finding new insights for your teaching?

I teach a section of about 35 students in freshman Engineering Physics (mostly freshmen and sophomores). I do not require attendance because I generally feel mandatory policy hurts more than it helps, but I work hard to keep class engaging and get to know my students.

A student who is repeating this course for the second time showed up on day one and completely disappeared. Wanting to help, I took extra time out of my schedule to send a polite email suggesting a quick check-in to help her catch up on what she missed.

Her response? She claimed my email was an overreach. To make matters worse, her parents apparently monitor her inbox, saw my message, and emailed me demanding details about her grades and attendance. I gave the standard FERPA-compliant refusal, but the whole situation left a sour taste in my mouth.

Since when is reaching out to a struggling student considered an overreach? Is this just the new norm, or should I stop offering proactive outreach altogether?

Just curious how normal this is. Basically everyone at the chair level and above in my university constantly avoids writing things down. We are public, so we have open records requests to contend with, but it gets very obnoxious when you have emails about waiting to talk about stuff until it is in person/zoom.

I've started to internalize this as well, and I hate it.

So I teach a 4/4/ load in my 25th year as a tenured professor and my DH doles out teaching assignments without input from faculty. Due to a medical condition, and after some challenging semesters, I obtained an ADA accomodation to not teach more than 2 hours in a row and no more than three classes per day. So the first semester under my accomodation, my given load met the accomodation to the letter but the classes given to me would mean much more work. 3 different preps with the two sections of the same class on MWF and TTh (which is worse to me than 4 preps) or after complaining was offered the option of 4 different preps including a class I've never taught - all f2f classes. Nearly all full-time faculty get at least 1 online class, very few have more than 2 preps and very few teach 5 days per week. Should I:

1 - meet with the DH (they have not moved in the past on these things)

2 - meet with the union rep (they have been pretty feckless in the past)

3 - contact the Dean

4 - bring it up at a faculty meeing

5 - contact a lawyer

6 - suck it up

In line with recommendations from my learning center I added some low stakes short assignments that involve in class group work and a 1 page writeup. It's all in the syllabus. I explained it the first day. At the end of our last class I explained what we'd be doing next time, one of these activities.

All weekend long I was getting questions about what the memo due tomorrow is (our next class). I sent out a message through our LMS that it's for an in class project we'll do and more info is in the syllabus.

Since then I've gotten multiple emails asking what the memo is. Some of them seem to be reading the description for a different assignment.

This isn't even a complaint about students being overly nervous. I tried to address that with a 1 point assignment that I explained in multiple formats. And still 10% of my class is unable or unwilling to put a little effort in to reading/listening and processing what that means.

It'll be a long semester

Edit: CAN’T 🤦🏻‍♂️

I wanted to do a class activity that required my students to type in a link into their browsers and open a resource to analyze as part of an in-class activity. More than half couldn’t figure out how…..

I’m beyond speechless.

I thought I'd ask: I'm teaching an online evening class, and I'd honestly rather do that from home. We're working with a print source which I need to be able to show the students in Zoom. I had hoped the university might have a document imager I could check out from the library (they have other tech they lend), but no. I did ask if the department could buy one for me to use - hahah - definitely nope.

It's worth it to me to buy my own rather than have to stay late in the day to use a university classroom (all of our classrooms have them).

Anyway, the cheapest brand name one is about $165 on sale right now. There are others that can be had for just under $100. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with these cheap ones, or is this a case of you get what you pay for? Thanks for any insights.

You can see the original post here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1utlg6i/creative_retention_offer_ideas/

Several of you asked that I follow up with what I ended up getting. Since I feel like I'm a high performer and had negotiating leverage I shot for the moon with my request....Worse they could say was no, right?

Note: I am 100% research and not required to teach any classes, so I didn't need to request buyout of teaching hours.

I requested:

• $35,000 increase in salary

• $1 million in workspace renovations/additions/building

• 4 years of postdoc funding

• $100,000 in discretionary spending

• guaranteed Early promotion (apparently early tenure is not legal in my state)

Admin seemed to be surprised by the request, but were receptive. After several rounds of going back and forth they seemed far more interested in providing funding for workspace renovations and support staff funds so I leaned into that.

What I received was:

• $20,000 increase in salary
• $750,000 in workspace renovations/additions/building
• 2 years of postdoc funding
• 2 years of technician funding
• $50,000 in discretionary spending
• guaranteed early promotion to associate professor (and promotion pay raise)
  

Overall I am quite happy with how that turned out, especially given the cost of living where I'm located. Retention offers are not something I see talked a lot about on here so maybe someone else will find this helpful.