Will I fail you?

Remember Pat? Since the Spanish book incident, s/he’s had the good common sense not to talk to me … well, until yesterday when s/he awoke from a stupor to ask, in the snottiest tone ever:

What are the chances that you are *really* going to fail someone in this class?

You’ve got to be kidding me. Three classes left until the exam and just *now* the student is thinking that s/he might actually flunk the class? It’s really too bad that Pat didn’t think about that after the midterm that s/he scraped through, or when s/he realized that it was impossible to finish the homework assignments, or when Lab Boy demonstrated that, yes, the math errors were being made by the student and not by the calculator. Or maybe this thought should have entered Pat’s head before s/he decided that Spanish homework was more important than actually listening to the lectures about the various t-tests. Obviously, as an untenured junior professor, I couldn’t just rail against Pat’s audacity.

I gave the boilerplate answer: “Well now, I really don’t know if anyone is going to fail the class until I grade all of the final exams.”

What I should have said: “The odds are pretty high.”

What I really wanted to say: “The only way you’re passing this class is if God comes down from heaven and guides your hand through the writing of the final exam. But, I think She probably has better things to do, seeing how we have famine and wars and other more important stuff going on right now.”

And now, in the spirit of final exam writing: What answer would you have given Pat if you did not have to fear being fired? Discuss.

For the record, I just want to note that not all of my methods students are like this. Sure, I have some whiners but they are just trying to lower my expectations so I’ll write an easier exam. That’s not going to happen because I want to see what they really learned this semester. Granted, I did break down and make it an open note exam, but unless the students sit down and organize their notes, they’ll never finish the exam.

Now, my Lab Guy thinks I’ve probably taught them too much math. It some ways, he’s probably right. But given the fact that SPSS crashes several of the lab computers when we use them, it’s a bit complicated to actually run labs. Plus, I still think they need to know the math behind the statistics, or else they will not understand what the heck SPSS is actually giving them.

I was pretty optimistic at the beginning of the semester because this group of students did fairly well in the research design part of the course. I didn’t realize that about a third of the students really could not do math. I’ve had to teach the order of operations, how to raise numbers to the zero power, and to add fractions, etc. — things that students should have learned in the University’s required math course. I certainly didn’t have to do this much remediation the last time I taught stats (at Big State University).

I am more sympathetic to my first class because they try the problems, ask questions, and do the math. They are actually learning something. The second class? With the exception of four or five students, the rest of them just sit there, don’t take notes, and (apparently) don’t listen. Yesterday, I wrote a table on the board showing how a 99 percent confidence level has an alpha of .01, etc. Five minutes later, one of the students raises his hand and says: Where did you get .01 for the problem? ARGH!!!