He'p me! He'p me!

(...trying to phonically capture a line out of the Little Richard Geico ad*)

Anyway. Teacher Lady (who has a very funny blog that you should probably read if you teach college) has written a number of times about the amazing helplessness of her students.

And you know, I see it too. And it drives me up the wall.

(Standard disclaimer: this is probably less than 10% of our student body, but as squeaky wheels get the grease and annoying personality traits get noticed and commented on, they seem like a much larger proportion of the population)

There are different categories.

First, there is simple sad-sackery. People who seem to have little rain clouds following them around whereever they go. They can't hold down a job. They can't find a babysitter for their kids who isn't flaky/a criminal/both. They have massive and mindbending family traumas. (Although the best of these didn't happen to me, it happened to my mom, also a professor: a student had to miss one of her exams because his grandma's boyfriend was having surgery and he had to go to the hospital with him. Why grandma couldn't go [if grandma is well enough to have a boyfriend, she should be well enough to accompany him to the hospital] was unclear). They have to appear in court for mysterious reasons. They have bizarre health issues (and insist on telling me all the bloody/gory/pus-y details. I'm a biologist, but I'm not a doctor. Please don't tell me about what came out of the thing your dermatologist lanced on your back.). I don't know what to do about these people. I've had trouble in my life, but I've (so far) always managed to stay more or less on top of it - are there just real-life Mournful Joneses out there who just keep having bad stuff happening to them? Like a curse, you know? Or is it that there are just people who are worse at dealing with it?

I have sympathy for those folks but it has a limit. Usually the third tragedy-that-takes-them-out-of-class-or-requires-them-to-hand-in-work-late in as many weeks is the limit. There's a point at which you just want to say, "Take a semester off, get your life in order, stop bailing your friends out of jail, don't let comparative strangers sleep on your couch because they have nowhere else to go, break up with that guy who's so bad for you - and come back later on."

Second are the mama's boys and mama's girls. These are the people who make me angry, because I look at them and think they could do so much better. These are the "kids" (and I think I'm justified in calling them that - they may get to be 40 someday but they will never really grow up) who are totally dependent on other people to manage life. They're the ones who hand me unstapled papers with the excuse of "I can't find a stapler." (I usually grit my teeth and say I have a stapler in my office. The department buys my staples or I'd not be so willing to staple for them). Or they're the ones who forget due dates. Or lose the syllabus - or never keep it to begin with. They're the ones who lean over and ask their deskmate for paper or a pen (And I always say - as long as it's still before the start of class and I'm not interrupting myself), "You can charge him/her whatever you want as a rental fee, you know." A lot of these people are male, and a lot of them seem to be the sort of male who figure they can get by on charm and good looks. And they usually do; there's no shortage of girls who have internalized the Female! Must! Serve! ideal who is HAPPY to give him a pen - not loan, give. Because that type always walks off with the pen, pencil, tape, book, whatever, that he borrowed. (The female of the type is the ditz-head "pretty" girl, who has occupied all of her brain capacity with makeup tips and methods for styling the hair, so there is apparently no room left for "bring paper to class with you." They usually get paper too, either from a guy who thinks it may be the Royal Road to Getting in Their Pants or from less-popular girls who think maybe she'll remember it come sorority rush time. (She won't.)

I have little sympathy for these people. I forged my way alone through college. I ALWAYS had paper. I ALWAYS had extra pens lest the pen I was writing with run out. I owned a little stapler to staple my papers with. And I was one of the people who was known to be a prepared person, and sometimes got asked to loan stuff. And you know, I did. I was a nice person. (I am, still, too, pretty much, under the veil of cynicism). But you know- a lot of times the borrowers have more disposable income than the folks they mooch off of? That doesn't seem fair, when you're ekeing your way through on scholarship, to have the BMOC who is a "legacy" and comes from a moneyed family, expecting that it doesn't hurt you to hand him fifteen sheets of notebook paper every week.

The third group are the people with poor time management. These are the folks who put things off 'til the last moment - either because they're working three jobs to make the payments on their Big Flashy Trucks or to be able to afford trips to the nail salon, or because they would rather party than do schoolwork. These are the people who come to me with a diskette in their hands on the day a paper is due, and say "My printer broke!" or "I ran out of ink!" or "there was a power surge just as I was typing my literature cited!" And invariably when I put the disk in the disk drive, it won't run or the paper isn't there, and the student gets all meltdowny and swears, swears that the paper is on there. And I sigh, because I don't like students bursting into tears in my office, and tell them "have it to me by 5 pm." And I think they know it. I think in more case than one lately it's been crocodile tears conjured up to buy a few more hours for the paper that's not really done - and perhaps in some cases, not even started.

(You know how I can tell a genuine "It's on my hard drive but I think this disk is fried" from a student who's trying to buy time? The quality of the writing and whether or not the thing's proofread. If it's chock full 'o' typos, I know it was a last-ditch effort. And I don't generally need to downgrade it; it does that itself.)

I had it happen to me today - students who had a computer-based assignment came to me and said "The computer lab is NEVER OPEN! We couldn't do the homework!" and I told them to get it to me by the end of the day. And I unlocked the computer lab for them even though I'm not supposed to when the monitor is not there - because two or three years ago, someone was caught downloading kiddie p*rn onto the campus computer. No fake. (If we hadn't caught and dealt with it fast, no doubt we would have been the Hot Topic of the evening news for weeks). Anyway - I went to the secretary to complain about the lazy computer lab monitors and she looked at me and said, "There's someone there from 10 am to 5 pm five days a week." So these guys were playing me. Or they tried to come in after 5 some day. Or something.

These are also often the people who give sob stories about "I didn't KNOW the exam was THIS WEEK!" which always gets me angry - it is IN THE SYLLABUS. I announce it three to five times in class in the two weeks leading up to the exam. I post it on the class website. I think you would have to be deliberately ignoring important stuff in order to not know when an exam in my class is. (Mercifully, I almost never hear that. But a lot of my colleagues - who aren't as anal as I am about announcing things multiple times - do.) Again, this is something I do not get - the first day of class, when I was a student, I'd come tripping home to my dorm room, syllabus in hand, and immediately WRITE all the exam dates and paper-due-dates on my calendar in my room, sometimes even using a different color ink for different classes. You know, so I knew in advance. So I could, like, study and stuff.

Okay - maybe some people manage without calendars although I can't quite see how they do. I have two in my office right now - and two at home. And one on my computer. But I also wear a watch and I see lots of people who don't.

But those three groups of people - the sad-sacks, the "my mama loved me so much she always took care of me, and you should, too," and the poor-time-management crew - are people who frustrate me more or less regularly. Because, I look at my other students - some single parents. Some working long hours. Some returning to college after a long hiatus. Some caring for disabled relatives. And they manage! They have more stuff going on in their lives - more serious stuff - than a lot of the "help me! help me!" people. And they never ask for slack, they never expect to be allowed to hand in stuff late. And they do well. They might not be A students - when you're having to tutor an autistic child at home or work the graveyard shift dispatching police cars it does cut into your productivity as a student - but they manage. And they never ask for a gold star or anything for what they do - they just do it, quietly, and accept their degrees at the end of four or five years (or however many, if they're going part time). Whereas the mama's boys and girls act almost like they expect you to stand up and applaud if they are on time for an 8 am class.

And it blows my mind. I know I was an atypical student - all professors were at one time atypical students - but I seriously cannot imagine going to college and not knowing when my exams were, or not even having a clue. Or not even seeming to care. And I cannot imagine expecting "bennies" (like extra credit) for attending class. (That's another thing that blows my mind - on days when attendance is low, some joker will invariably ask, "Do we get extra credit for showing up?" Now I just laugh. One day, once, I made the comment that I had lots of things I did that were expected of my and I never got paid extra for, and that really came back to bite me in the ass on my evaluations. So now I just laugh and shake my head even though I'm screaming inside. I fully expect in another generation or so we will have a country where 80% of the people won't do anything unless you offer them some kind of bribe.)

How did we get here, and how do we get back? Or is it again, just a matter of the 10% seeming like so many more than they actually are?


(*seriously, are those not some of the funniest/weirdest ads on television? I mean, I'd never use Geico, based on an experience a friend had, but I still love the ads. I love the Cockney gecko ads when he's talking to other lizards. I love the Cockney gecko on the chat-shows ads. I love the celebrities-telling-real-customers-stories ads. And the new caveman ad - with the preppy caveman in the airport - is surreal enough that I like it, too.

so much better than the "Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!" ads [and did you know they have a hemerhhoid product? Sadly, they did not do the obvious and go "Hem-rid! Apply directly to the ass!" Now that, I'd like to see...])