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OK I'll tell you what I hate about online teaching: the grading. The having to make EVERYFUCKINGTHING gradeable and then having to grade it.
In face to face, I can see if you're there and tracking what's going on. I can see you participate in a variety of ways (speaking in class, but also taking notes, doing partner work, etc). I don't have to make you write a thing to track that.
In face to face, I compete with your attention in only two ways: you actually not showing up, and your phone. If you show up, even if you dick around on your phone, you likely get SOMETHING out of the class. Also I can bust you for being on your phone to make sure you get it.
In online, I'm competing against EVERYTHING. And because of advertising online classes as 'I'm going to school in my pajamas!' students think that this is not a thing to prioritize. I have so many students working full time jobs but taking a full courseload.
When the time crunch happens, they prioritize and for some reason, possibly bc Freshman Comp is boring, they don't prioritize my class, so work is half-assed and last minute.
If I assign something, I must 100% in an online class make an assessment about it, or students won't do it. But sometimes students don't see the immediate point of the content-assessment connection, so they don't do it. Case: teaching how to write a thesis statement-write one.
It looks obvious to you and me that if you have 4 things in the tasks that are about learning how to write a good thesis statement, that you ought to do those things before you write your thesis statement.
Nope. I had about half my students yesterday just LEEROY JENKINS it.
Nope. I had about half my students yesterday just LEEROY JENKINS it.
In online I can say thing X in six different places--the content, the announcement, the syllabus, the dropbox label, the downloadable assignment sheet....
And still have students tell me they didn't know thing X.
If that's true, they're not doing their part here.
And still have students tell me they didn't know thing X.
If that's true, they're not doing their part here.
My usual rage is that this digital native generation has been whining like fucking toddlers all month about how omg the CMS is so hard it's mean for me to expect them to know how to do shit like, you know, upload a document, or click on Content or scroll down.
(I honestly don't believe them when they whine about this. They have been trained by shitty high school teachers that they don't actually need to do any work and if they just plead helplessness they'll get by. I bet mommy cuts their meat for them, too)
So everything I assign has to have a gradeable component. Which means if I want them to learn something, I have to teach it, grade it, and then regrade it. Every. Thing. I. Teach. So imagine trying to teach basic parts of speech. Which I do in Linguistics.
I have to teach each part of speech separately, and reinforce each part of speech, and deal with the fact half will just jump to the assessment bc they think they know what they're doing and when they don't, insist 'Blackboard glitched' and could I reopen the quiz for them.
The students who do know the content get bored (and I don't blame them) because I'm trying to get everyone through.
And I write comments to improve, which go unread or unheeded. It is week fucking FIVE and I am still telling the same student "let's work on capitalizing proper nouns! Here's a link to a resource to help you out!" And....getting nothing. He's not reading them.
And the lowlevel emotional labor of having to deal with students who aren't reading your carefully worded to be cheerful and encouraging feedback about them fixing the SAME FUCKING MISTAKE THEY"VE MADE FOR FIVE WEEKS is what's going to kill me, I swear.
Like the first 2 weeks, sure, fine, everyone was figuring things out and some silly goofs happened. I'm not talking about that. But I literally just graded a person's post. I told them on MONDAY to please capitalize I. In her assignment posted last night.... nope. Still i.
Students: 'all my professors have different schedules and expectations' is not an excuse. That's called...COLLEGE. Even face to face you'd be dealing with that. We all run our courses differently. That's not an excuse after, say, week one.
It is also LITERALLY why the only stuff you had to do for week one in my class was take a multiple choice syllabus quiz. So you could learn how my classroom works.
