small vent

I am so )$#(*%$ sick and $_)(%$ tired of people thinking that they can do the crappy bare minimum of work and that should be enough to pass them and get them a decent job.

I require students in one of my classes to get scientific articles out of a journal, read them, summarize them, and critique certain points of them. I lay out pretty clearly what I want. I gave them several weeks to do it.

I had a few people come to me saying, "Can you help me search" and I did, of course, and most of them went away with an article they could use.

But this morning, I had one guy come up (they were due today) with a poorly-printed abstract and ask me "Where do I find [point A], [point B] and [point C] you asked us to write about?"

I took a deep breath and fought down the urge to say, "That was YOUR job. Not mine. You need to do it YOURSELF." I looked at the abstract- which is all it was - and said, "You can't find them because they're not in the abstract. You need to get the entire paper."

"But..." he said, "They asked for a login and password to see the paper in this journal."

(Note that this is all happening DURING class time. I do not know why but I have a couple people this semester with "boundary" issues in that, if they have a personal problem, they just walk up to the front of class as soon as they come in - even after I've already begun class - and demand my time)

"Then you need to find another article. There are a lot of articles you can get for free through the library databases on this topic. Take until Wednesday [yes, he won, if an extension was what he was looking for, but at this point he's failing, so it doesn't matter] and bring me another article."

"Well, if I can find a website that refers to this article and tells me points A, B, and C, can I just write them down from the website?"

"No." (because, I was thinking: he'll pull something out of his ass and claim it was off this mystery website) "I need to see a copy of the article. GO FIND ANOTHER ARTICLE."

So, I'm probably his bitch-of-the-week, but you know? I'm fed up with this. If I did work at the level people like this chap think they could get away with, I'd never have gotten tenure - hell, I'd never have gotten my contract renewed after the first year. And I continue to work over and above the call of duty. And, y'all? I'm TIRED. I could have been nicer to the guy but I'm just TIRED. Tired of being nice, tired of people assuming I will do things for them that they're supposed to do, tired of the attitude of "let's rush through this assignment so we can go out and fish."

Okay. And before anyone in some other profession says, "Then why don't you quit and do something else if you hate it so much?" I don't hate it. What I hate is the attitudes of a few, isolated individuals who seem to think that either the universe revolves around them, or that they have some special dispensation to slack off and still get grades equal to those of the majority of the students who do the work.

It's the bad apples that spoil the whole barrel, as the saying goes. It's the bad attitude people I tend to notice and need to complain about - because if I don't complain about it HERE, the bad feeling slops over into my other classes, and I don't want that to happen. So this is kind of a safety valve.

But I'm still ticked off at that guy. He had three friggin' weeks to find a suitable paper, and from what he had done, it looked like he probably tried to do it late last night.