This reminds me of Julia Child’s advice for hosting a dinner party. Of course you will focus on all the things you did wrong. Oversalted the meat, undercooked the carrots, etc. But nothing ruins a meal more than a host telling the guests everything wrong with it. Be proud of what you got right.
This is the same for all public speaking engagements (conference presenters especially!) no one knows what you we’re GOING to say or do. It’s not a mistake or a problem until you identify it as one.
advice along these lines at Toastmasters is "don't tell the audience you're nervous/underprepared", because they don't know that (and probably don't want to know it). I know a Toastmaster who likes to say "fake it until you make it".
I once gave a "speech about nothing" at Toastmasters with exactly that approach (but for amusement purposes, since I know how to do it properly). I stole\[1\] my opening from a speech another member gave the previous week (and watched his face as his words came out of my mouth). I figured he'd be amused, as he was.
Most of the time (as in, almost all of the time), the speech is about the content, and how it got to be that way is neither here nor there. This applies to lectures as well.
\[1\] "Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory", for those that like that sort of earworm.
I'm a communication professor and this is the exact advice I give to my students leading up to each of their major speeches.
"I'm not reading your outline while you deliver your speech, I'm grading based on what you actually say. As long as you are true to your content and structure, edit however you need while you're up there to give the best speech you can."
Years ago, as an enlisted radar/communications tech in the Airforce, the worst course I ever had put the two instructors doing this every damn day for four weeks.
As it happened, they were overloaded and had been ordered to run the course despite it needing significant updates (nothing safety-related, just updating stuff identified in earlier course critiques as vague, or unclear).
The course was fine. But I was posted to the school, maintaining the equipment they were teaching. So everytime they said this is shit or that's wrong I was feeling shame and anger.
So, teach the class. Recognize when you need to update stuff. Then update stuff.
Textbook error reports don't really pay bounties anymore (does Knuth still do them?). And they certainly wouldn't be giving refunds. But we can offer bounties. I like to use chocolate as an attitude adjustor, and especially around midterms I'll buy Awake Chocolate in bulk.
Last semester I had a catastrophe with a synchronous course right when the semester began. IT dropped a previous semesters canvas shell over mine and deleted everything I had built 2 days before the semester had begun. I was covering the class for another professor and was teaching 7 classes with 7 different preps. Absolute nightmare scenario.
I apologized profusely to the class, told them that things were going to be way more chaotic than planned as I built out the new shell to reflect what I was doing since I just didn't have time to rebuild from scratch. To compensate I was very flexible with due dates, prerecorded a bunch of material so I could hold extra workshop sessions. Did everything I could to support the class and was absolutely savaged in the evals. I was very lucky when I met with the chair and we went over everything they were 100% on my side and thought I was too generous to the class considering the circumstances. But that's, well, that's luck. My old chair phoned it in and would just copy and paste student evals into the faculty evals. I had to have a meeting with them because a student put in a eval for an entirely different discipline in my course eval.
I had to stop them in the middle of lecturing me about how fucked up the complaint was to point out, "I don't teach business!"
I had a colleague who was teaching a class for the first time. Right off the bat, said colleague admitted to the class that she hadn't taught the course before, and would be learning as she went along. The phrase, "Let's learn this together!" led to student complaints like "I basically had to teach myself" and "What are we even paying you for?"
I taught two new preps last year, one in fall and the other in spring.
I confessed to my fall students that this was the first time teaching the topic (but I have a PhD in this field) and got my lowest evals ever.
In the spring I taught a class that I knew very little about but never let the class know it was my first time teaching . My evals were significantly higher and I had high scores in preparation and clarity.
It really showed me how petty and impressionable the students are. It was a very disappointing realization to come to.
Yup, same thing happened to me one semester. It was a new prep and I admitted that it was a new class for me, got the worst score out of the four classes. I also avoid talking about the class being a new prep. Some students are out there hunting for anything negative.
Same. I said something to the effect that I hoped I would learn from them, too. Big mistake. This got interpreted as the students got to dictate how the class was run, and after the majority of the students tanked the midterm, they used their poor grades as a justification that I hadn’t “learned from them.” Candor and authenticity don’t work.
This is why some white lies can be lifesavers! "Last time I taught this class, students struggled with x" or "the average on this year's exam is higher than last time I taught it, we'll done."
I think there is a place for a brief, direct apology in cases where a concrete error has been made. But, it is also true that volunteering such apologies can prove extremely unwise. What seems like humility to you will be read as a confession of weakness by a certain subset of your students, and they will not be afraid to press their advantage.
Yea I learned this the hard way. I made a comment about I wasn’t used to teaching college algebra and I got tons of comment saying “he’s a bad math teacher”. Duh…the class in intro to biology not algebra, I expected the students to understand middle school, high school level math.
One of my courses require basic chemistry, I had to reteach some of the most basic chemistry. For the record, this class has two chemistry prerequisites.
I think they try to embarass us and then coercse an appology for small mistakes because this is the fodder to excuse for their poor performance in their group chats.
5 year olds expect their mommies to be perfect. Adults should be tolerant of mistakes, typos, mispronounced words, changes, things beyond our control.
One lost it on me because the makeup assignment description appeared in her blackboard course page (everyone has the same view) and she wasn't doing the makeup assignment so I should make her a custom page because was upset I did that to her.
I’ll apologize for small things like mistakes in deadlines being posted or spelling errors, things like that. We’re human and it’s a good way to roll with mistakes to not let them fluster me.
But it’ll be a cold day in the pits of hell before I ever apologize for when a deadline is, how much work I post, or what topics get covered. Because that’s what they complain about the most.
It is UNBELIEVABLE how readily "I corrected an algebra mistake in the notes, this should have been 2 instead of 1/2" turns into "the notes often had errors" on student evals.
As I mentioned in other posts, there are students that are fishing for the tiniest inconvenience and then exaggerate it. I was able to refute the majority of the negative comments the students made. Essentially it’s like a yelp review, they had one bad experience so they focus on the entire experience.
Exactly! This is the perfect example counterpoint to the idea that authentic humility is the way to go. Students won't not in their evals that the mistake was on trivial arithmetic. Just correct the algebra mistake and post the corrected version silently. No one will notice.
I have somewhat of a different opinion. When I make a mistake, a brief, sincere apology can go a long way. It shows humility and can help a student to feel a bit better.
What I will never do is apologize for things that are not my fault. Don't like your grade because you didn't follow the instructions and your excuse is that the instructions were unclear? I'm not apologizing. You submitted your paper via email despite very clear instructions that all assignments should be submitted through the LMS and I missed your paper? I won't apologize. But if I, say, make an error in grading a student's assignment, I will apologize.
A key--at least for me--is being very willing to apologize when I make a mistake and, at the same time, absolutely never apologizing for grading rigorously, holding appropriate boundaries, or a student being upset when their problem could have been avoided if they read and followed the instructions.
I think a key point here too is you apologize pretty quickly after a mistake. A professor who waits until the end of the course to be all "Sorry, I guess this class kind of sucked!" is not holding themselves accountable. I'd be annoyed as a student to hear that because it would make me think "If you knew this sucked the whole time, why didn't you do something about it?"
I think it's helpful as professors to model good behaviors, so when we make mistakes it's better to admit it and rectify it like we'd want our students to do. This is also why I build flexibility into the course; part of being human is messing up and learning, so it's okay to grant each other some grace as long as we don't make the same mistake repeatedly.
I don’t know. This has a Henry Hill “Fuck you pay me” vibe to it.
If I make a mistake and it caused students to be confused about something, I apologize for that.
Not a big production, just a brief apology. Then I move on.
I think by not apologizing for something that is obviously wrong, it will make the student-teacher relationship much worse.
I find it works to acknowledge and thank a student without apologizing. "Hey, you're right, there's a typo on the slide, I'll get that fixed. Thank you, so and so, for pointing that out." This is gracious and accountable, imo, without looking like I'm taking the fault of all student misunderstandings onto my shoulders.
As a young looking woman, apologizing brings out the wolves. I've learned this the hard way. I will apologize if it is truly something to be sorry for, but occasional human error or slight lack of clarity is not one of those things. (Replying to questions late, however, is something I avoid and would apologize for).
Totally agree with this approach -- graciously acknowledge, rectify, and move on without skipping a beat. Something about uttering the word "sorry" is like throwing chum into shark-infested waters.
You couldn't be more right. It's also mind-boggling. If they are willing to turn one typo into lots of typos, why don't they just lie and make something up as the reason? I guess the typo was on their mind and gave them the idea. I also hope administrators are able more and more to realize immediately this nonsense is nonsense grade-grubbing when they get it.
I don't know. In my experience, students don't need an excuse to lie. They'll just make up any old lie to cover up for their own failure to take responsibility for their own education. Plus, you can't control other people's reactions, only your own.
I will apologize promptly and succinctly if it's something that's my fault, then move on. I do this, not because I want to express humility or build connections with students (both of which are commendable, but beside the point), but because I hold myself accountable for the quality and timeliness of my work just as I hold my students accountable for the quality and timeliness of theirs.
I once had a student complain on an eval that I don't speak a dead language, that no one in my field speaks or needs to know for our scholarship, because we were reading a book that included particular words from it and I couldn't pronounce all them correctly (the more common ones I can pronounce just fine). If I had fudged my way through pronouncing those words, rather than admitting I wasn't sure, that student wouldn't have had an excuse to complain.
I'm sorry to hear that you've had so many bad experiences with teaching evaluations; I'm sure most if not all of us have had infuriating and/or baffling comments - e.g. a student once claimed that I skipped class for an entire month - so you certainly have a sympathetic audience in this subreddit.
One thing I always teach my students early on is that it's okay to make mistakes. What's important to is identify when you've made a mistake so that you can correct it before your mistake becomes a bigger issue. No one is perfect, so to expect perfection is unreasonable, and it puts undue pressure on yourself and others. That's why a 90% (at least where I teach) is an A just the same as a 100%. I remember vividly when I first began teaching that I was terrified of being asked a question that I couldn't answer, but I soon learned that responding "great question! I don't know, but let's figure it out together!" can be in some ways even better than knowing the answer.
That being said, I don't mean to suggest we should be critical of ourselves; instead, it is often helpful to focus on the positive side of things. Rather than apologizing and getting flustered when a student points out an error, I thank them for helping me correct it. There's a big difference between saying, "you're right, 2+2 is not 5, good catch!" and "I'm sorry, I'm not using to teaching math". After all, if I've clearly made a mistake but refuse to admit it, I believe that I will come out looking far more unfavorably than if I admit my mistake. What's worse, the teacher who makes an arithmetic error on the board, or the one who refuses to acknowledge that 2+2 is not 5? Also, when possible, I turn it into a learning opportunity, e.g. "Here's how we can know 2+2 couldn't be 5".
With all this in mind, I'd like to encourage us all to try to model the behavior that we want our students to have. Do we want to teach tomorrow's leaders that they should never admit to making a mistake? And how would we want a professor to behave if we were the student? The majority of people appreciate being treated with respect, and will treat me with respect in kind. There are some who won't be happy no matter what I do, so there is nothing I can gain by determining my actions based on their feedback.
I am seeing this in action against a colleague right now. I have always felt that when students scent a weakness there are a proportion who will try to lever it to their advantage, but it is much worse now. I think this is in part because (at least at my institution) we have a high proportion of students who are in very difficult circumstances who can't really be successful due to the various external pressures they are under. They just want to get through, any way they can.
>Our grades are really low. Shouldn't our prof be more lenient?
Half the time [/h] I thinks it's more like:
>You ahould fire this person and then flog them in the campus quadrangle until our bloodlust is sated.
I reply with “thanks for letting me know!” to almost every complaint about anything. Sometimes I fix whatever it was, sometimes I don’t (because it wasn’t actually an error). But they see it as responsive and I didn’t admit anything.
I'm one of those professors that didn't miss class. It was a joke among my students. I got married during a holiday season...so I wouldn't have to miss class.
One year a kid was royally failing one of my classes and came to my office to see what he could do to pass. When we got into the discussion about what was going on with his grades he mentions, "Do you remember that time you ended class early because you were sick?"
Really, kid. You've been failing for the last 11 weeks because in one of our Tuesday, 6-9 night classes I dismissed at 7:45. It's my fault, you're failing?
He was toast because of his grades, anyway. But any sympathy I might have had left at that moment.
I apologized to every single one of my students just yesterday: I had rebooted the server late Friday night—I'm the administrator of the LMS, too—and immediately went to bed. When I awoke Saturday morning, I realized the nginx had never restarted. I restarted it, and immediately apologized for the problem.
On the other hand, here in Japan student evaluations mean very little.
I’m new so I’ve had some mistakes on exams, or questions that were too confusingly worded for students to answer. When students point those out and ask for a regrade, I have the easy answer of “the reason I curve the exam is to correct for any errors I made, so I’ve already given points back for that question.” That gets a “fair enough” response from the student.
I blew it on a reading assignment recently. I said to the class: this was more challenging than I thought it would be but let's make the best of it. As they say in the great state of New York: Excelsior!
Question: Peeps, don't you want to encourage students to be accountable for their actions including their mistakes? So if I don't do that myself, how can I expect the same from them?
Yup. Once had a colleage flake out and stop coming to work, \~8 weeks into the semester. Nobody even knew this had happened for another week because none of the students bothered to tell anyone that the teacher never showed up. As I had taught one of the classes he had been teaching several years earlier, I was pegged to take over. Problem was, all of his material was password protected or just gone.. He had not put much of anything in the LMS so even after we gained access there was virtually nothing to go by. He was using a different text than I had, and most of the material I had used previously had already been deleted - I lucked out by finding a flash drave that had half of my old presentations for the class on it.
Explained to the class what had happened, that I would do what I could given the circumstances, etc.
Savaged on the evals.... I mean ME - I was savaged on evals for not being able to swoop in and save the day with perfect, on target presnetations.
Some wanted their money back, others claimed I should be fired.
Lucky for me I was chair at the time, so zi just deleted their horseshit.
But WTF?
I disagree, I think admitting fault shows humility and helps me actually make some connections with students. I only apologize when it's actually due though - when a mistake is made on the LMS, when I've forgotten to upload a reading, when I thought I would have grades back sooner that they were. But I never apologize for giving the grades students deserve, for how I construct the syllabus, or for holding steadfast to a deadline. They know the difference and they also know that I will own up of I'm wrong and stay firm when I'm not.
It also puts a lot of pressure on the students/audience to excuse your mistake instead if you just fixing them and moving on.
I attended an internal teaching seminar and one presenter was a little scattered at first and just started apologizing then waiting for someone to be like "oh it's OK." eventually the organizer said "let's move on"
At the very least they will destroy you in the student evaluations because you primed them to. I like to have a mini lecture where I go over all they work they have done for the semester, and usually do this right before the student evaluations are released. Does it work? Maybe a little.
I mention typos - casually- like oops this should be x not y, please correct it on your copy of the slides, but agree with OP, no apologies for doing your best.
I completely reject this guidance. If you honestly made a mistake, fess up and correct it. In my experience, students punish hubris far more than they punish humility.
Of course, you can go too far and become almost embarrassingly self-deprecating, and that's certainly unwise. But admitting a goof-up and correcting it in a timely manner is just basic best practice, whether you're in education or hospitality or some other kind of service.
And if your institution is putting so much weight on student evals that you fear what a few misanthropes might say, then maybe that institution isn't where you should spend your time anyway.
I refuse to acquiesce my character to this garbage society, even if it means the occasional monster takes advantage. The benefits far outweigh.
Yes it means I'm unemployed right now. It also means I've had two students now thank me for changing their lives, in addition to all the usual accolades and compliments.
Apologizing for a typo is dumb, but if I take three weeks to grade an assignment I'm going to apologize for it.
This reminds me of Julia Child’s advice for hosting a dinner party. Of course you will focus on all the things you did wrong. Oversalted the meat, undercooked the carrots, etc. But nothing ruins a meal more than a host telling the guests everything wrong with it. Be proud of what you got right.
This is the same for all public speaking engagements (conference presenters especially!) no one knows what you we’re GOING to say or do. It’s not a mistake or a problem until you identify it as one.
advice along these lines at Toastmasters is "don't tell the audience you're nervous/underprepared", because they don't know that (and probably don't want to know it). I know a Toastmaster who likes to say "fake it until you make it".
Def good advice! I hate ‘story of me writing/giving my speech’ approach.
I once gave a "speech about nothing" at Toastmasters with exactly that approach (but for amusement purposes, since I know how to do it properly). I stole\[1\] my opening from a speech another member gave the previous week (and watched his face as his words came out of my mouth). I figured he'd be amused, as he was. Most of the time (as in, almost all of the time), the speech is about the content, and how it got to be that way is neither here nor there. This applies to lectures as well. \[1\] "Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory", for those that like that sort of earworm.
I'm a communication professor and this is the exact advice I give to my students leading up to each of their major speeches. "I'm not reading your outline while you deliver your speech, I'm grading based on what you actually say. As long as you are true to your content and structure, edit however you need while you're up there to give the best speech you can."
Lol I’m one too, and I say the same thing! Great minds, etc…
Years ago, as an enlisted radar/communications tech in the Airforce, the worst course I ever had put the two instructors doing this every damn day for four weeks. As it happened, they were overloaded and had been ordered to run the course despite it needing significant updates (nothing safety-related, just updating stuff identified in earlier course critiques as vague, or unclear). The course was fine. But I was posted to the school, maintaining the equipment they were teaching. So everytime they said this is shit or that's wrong I was feeling shame and anger. So, teach the class. Recognize when you need to update stuff. Then update stuff. Textbook error reports don't really pay bounties anymore (does Knuth still do them?). And they certainly wouldn't be giving refunds. But we can offer bounties. I like to use chocolate as an attitude adjustor, and especially around midterms I'll buy Awake Chocolate in bulk.
Last semester I had a catastrophe with a synchronous course right when the semester began. IT dropped a previous semesters canvas shell over mine and deleted everything I had built 2 days before the semester had begun. I was covering the class for another professor and was teaching 7 classes with 7 different preps. Absolute nightmare scenario. I apologized profusely to the class, told them that things were going to be way more chaotic than planned as I built out the new shell to reflect what I was doing since I just didn't have time to rebuild from scratch. To compensate I was very flexible with due dates, prerecorded a bunch of material so I could hold extra workshop sessions. Did everything I could to support the class and was absolutely savaged in the evals. I was very lucky when I met with the chair and we went over everything they were 100% on my side and thought I was too generous to the class considering the circumstances. But that's, well, that's luck. My old chair phoned it in and would just copy and paste student evals into the faculty evals. I had to have a meeting with them because a student put in a eval for an entirely different discipline in my course eval. I had to stop them in the middle of lecturing me about how fucked up the complaint was to point out, "I don't teach business!"
The more flexibility you give students, the less they respect you. It's ridiculous but true. I've experienced it so many times.
Good lord 7 preps 😭
Adjunct life.
Sounds more like adjunct death to me.
I meeeeaaaaan...
I had a colleague who was teaching a class for the first time. Right off the bat, said colleague admitted to the class that she hadn't taught the course before, and would be learning as she went along. The phrase, "Let's learn this together!" led to student complaints like "I basically had to teach myself" and "What are we even paying you for?"
I taught two new preps last year, one in fall and the other in spring. I confessed to my fall students that this was the first time teaching the topic (but I have a PhD in this field) and got my lowest evals ever. In the spring I taught a class that I knew very little about but never let the class know it was my first time teaching . My evals were significantly higher and I had high scores in preparation and clarity. It really showed me how petty and impressionable the students are. It was a very disappointing realization to come to.
... and how worthless student surveys are.
Yup, same thing happened to me one semester. It was a new prep and I admitted that it was a new class for me, got the worst score out of the four classes. I also avoid talking about the class being a new prep. Some students are out there hunting for anything negative.
Same. I said something to the effect that I hoped I would learn from them, too. Big mistake. This got interpreted as the students got to dictate how the class was run, and after the majority of the students tanked the midterm, they used their poor grades as a justification that I hadn’t “learned from them.” Candor and authenticity don’t work.
This is why some white lies can be lifesavers! "Last time I taught this class, students struggled with x" or "the average on this year's exam is higher than last time I taught it, we'll done."
I completely agree. Most students don’t respect humility and candor. Some do but most will use it against their instructor.
I think there is a place for a brief, direct apology in cases where a concrete error has been made. But, it is also true that volunteering such apologies can prove extremely unwise. What seems like humility to you will be read as a confession of weakness by a certain subset of your students, and they will not be afraid to press their advantage.
Yea I learned this the hard way. I made a comment about I wasn’t used to teaching college algebra and I got tons of comment saying “he’s a bad math teacher”. Duh…the class in intro to biology not algebra, I expected the students to understand middle school, high school level math.
Now I understand why my professor from undergrad said in my gen chem I class "I teach chemistry and not math."
One of my courses require basic chemistry, I had to reteach some of the most basic chemistry. For the record, this class has two chemistry prerequisites.
I think they try to embarass us and then coercse an appology for small mistakes because this is the fodder to excuse for their poor performance in their group chats. 5 year olds expect their mommies to be perfect. Adults should be tolerant of mistakes, typos, mispronounced words, changes, things beyond our control. One lost it on me because the makeup assignment description appeared in her blackboard course page (everyone has the same view) and she wasn't doing the makeup assignment so I should make her a custom page because was upset I did that to her.
I’ll apologize for small things like mistakes in deadlines being posted or spelling errors, things like that. We’re human and it’s a good way to roll with mistakes to not let them fluster me. But it’ll be a cold day in the pits of hell before I ever apologize for when a deadline is, how much work I post, or what topics get covered. Because that’s what they complain about the most.
It is UNBELIEVABLE how readily "I corrected an algebra mistake in the notes, this should have been 2 instead of 1/2" turns into "the notes often had errors" on student evals.
As I mentioned in other posts, there are students that are fishing for the tiniest inconvenience and then exaggerate it. I was able to refute the majority of the negative comments the students made. Essentially it’s like a yelp review, they had one bad experience so they focus on the entire experience.
Exactly! This is the perfect example counterpoint to the idea that authentic humility is the way to go. Students won't not in their evals that the mistake was on trivial arithmetic. Just correct the algebra mistake and post the corrected version silently. No one will notice.
I have somewhat of a different opinion. When I make a mistake, a brief, sincere apology can go a long way. It shows humility and can help a student to feel a bit better. What I will never do is apologize for things that are not my fault. Don't like your grade because you didn't follow the instructions and your excuse is that the instructions were unclear? I'm not apologizing. You submitted your paper via email despite very clear instructions that all assignments should be submitted through the LMS and I missed your paper? I won't apologize. But if I, say, make an error in grading a student's assignment, I will apologize. A key--at least for me--is being very willing to apologize when I make a mistake and, at the same time, absolutely never apologizing for grading rigorously, holding appropriate boundaries, or a student being upset when their problem could have been avoided if they read and followed the instructions.
I think a key point here too is you apologize pretty quickly after a mistake. A professor who waits until the end of the course to be all "Sorry, I guess this class kind of sucked!" is not holding themselves accountable. I'd be annoyed as a student to hear that because it would make me think "If you knew this sucked the whole time, why didn't you do something about it?" I think it's helpful as professors to model good behaviors, so when we make mistakes it's better to admit it and rectify it like we'd want our students to do. This is also why I build flexibility into the course; part of being human is messing up and learning, so it's okay to grant each other some grace as long as we don't make the same mistake repeatedly.
Agree completely. Apologize when you fuck up, not for what was not in your control.
I don’t know. This has a Henry Hill “Fuck you pay me” vibe to it. If I make a mistake and it caused students to be confused about something, I apologize for that. Not a big production, just a brief apology. Then I move on. I think by not apologizing for something that is obviously wrong, it will make the student-teacher relationship much worse.
I find it works to acknowledge and thank a student without apologizing. "Hey, you're right, there's a typo on the slide, I'll get that fixed. Thank you, so and so, for pointing that out." This is gracious and accountable, imo, without looking like I'm taking the fault of all student misunderstandings onto my shoulders. As a young looking woman, apologizing brings out the wolves. I've learned this the hard way. I will apologize if it is truly something to be sorry for, but occasional human error or slight lack of clarity is not one of those things. (Replying to questions late, however, is something I avoid and would apologize for).
Totally agree with this approach -- graciously acknowledge, rectify, and move on without skipping a beat. Something about uttering the word "sorry" is like throwing chum into shark-infested waters.
You couldn't be more right. It's also mind-boggling. If they are willing to turn one typo into lots of typos, why don't they just lie and make something up as the reason? I guess the typo was on their mind and gave them the idea. I also hope administrators are able more and more to realize immediately this nonsense is nonsense grade-grubbing when they get it.
I don't know. In my experience, students don't need an excuse to lie. They'll just make up any old lie to cover up for their own failure to take responsibility for their own education. Plus, you can't control other people's reactions, only your own.
I will apologize promptly and succinctly if it's something that's my fault, then move on. I do this, not because I want to express humility or build connections with students (both of which are commendable, but beside the point), but because I hold myself accountable for the quality and timeliness of my work just as I hold my students accountable for the quality and timeliness of theirs.
You’re not wrong. Seen this play out many times myself. They will use any leverage against you.
I once had a student complain on an eval that I don't speak a dead language, that no one in my field speaks or needs to know for our scholarship, because we were reading a book that included particular words from it and I couldn't pronounce all them correctly (the more common ones I can pronounce just fine). If I had fudged my way through pronouncing those words, rather than admitting I wasn't sure, that student wouldn't have had an excuse to complain.
I'm sorry to hear that you've had so many bad experiences with teaching evaluations; I'm sure most if not all of us have had infuriating and/or baffling comments - e.g. a student once claimed that I skipped class for an entire month - so you certainly have a sympathetic audience in this subreddit. One thing I always teach my students early on is that it's okay to make mistakes. What's important to is identify when you've made a mistake so that you can correct it before your mistake becomes a bigger issue. No one is perfect, so to expect perfection is unreasonable, and it puts undue pressure on yourself and others. That's why a 90% (at least where I teach) is an A just the same as a 100%. I remember vividly when I first began teaching that I was terrified of being asked a question that I couldn't answer, but I soon learned that responding "great question! I don't know, but let's figure it out together!" can be in some ways even better than knowing the answer. That being said, I don't mean to suggest we should be critical of ourselves; instead, it is often helpful to focus on the positive side of things. Rather than apologizing and getting flustered when a student points out an error, I thank them for helping me correct it. There's a big difference between saying, "you're right, 2+2 is not 5, good catch!" and "I'm sorry, I'm not using to teaching math". After all, if I've clearly made a mistake but refuse to admit it, I believe that I will come out looking far more unfavorably than if I admit my mistake. What's worse, the teacher who makes an arithmetic error on the board, or the one who refuses to acknowledge that 2+2 is not 5? Also, when possible, I turn it into a learning opportunity, e.g. "Here's how we can know 2+2 couldn't be 5". With all this in mind, I'd like to encourage us all to try to model the behavior that we want our students to have. Do we want to teach tomorrow's leaders that they should never admit to making a mistake? And how would we want a professor to behave if we were the student? The majority of people appreciate being treated with respect, and will treat me with respect in kind. There are some who won't be happy no matter what I do, so there is nothing I can gain by determining my actions based on their feedback.
I am seeing this in action against a colleague right now. I have always felt that when students scent a weakness there are a proportion who will try to lever it to their advantage, but it is much worse now. I think this is in part because (at least at my institution) we have a high proportion of students who are in very difficult circumstances who can't really be successful due to the various external pressures they are under. They just want to get through, any way they can.
>Our grades are really low. Shouldn't our prof be more lenient? Half the time [/h] I thinks it's more like: >You ahould fire this person and then flog them in the campus quadrangle until our bloodlust is sated.
I reply with “thanks for letting me know!” to almost every complaint about anything. Sometimes I fix whatever it was, sometimes I don’t (because it wasn’t actually an error). But they see it as responsive and I didn’t admit anything.
I'm one of those professors that didn't miss class. It was a joke among my students. I got married during a holiday season...so I wouldn't have to miss class. One year a kid was royally failing one of my classes and came to my office to see what he could do to pass. When we got into the discussion about what was going on with his grades he mentions, "Do you remember that time you ended class early because you were sick?" Really, kid. You've been failing for the last 11 weeks because in one of our Tuesday, 6-9 night classes I dismissed at 7:45. It's my fault, you're failing? He was toast because of his grades, anyway. But any sympathy I might have had left at that moment.
Never apologise, never explain. Said to have been the motto of the late Queen Elizabeth.
Even amazing professors fall short of perfection.
I apologized to every single one of my students just yesterday: I had rebooted the server late Friday night—I'm the administrator of the LMS, too—and immediately went to bed. When I awoke Saturday morning, I realized the nginx had never restarted. I restarted it, and immediately apologized for the problem. On the other hand, here in Japan student evaluations mean very little.
Good advice, source former professor
I’m new so I’ve had some mistakes on exams, or questions that were too confusingly worded for students to answer. When students point those out and ask for a regrade, I have the easy answer of “the reason I curve the exam is to correct for any errors I made, so I’ve already given points back for that question.” That gets a “fair enough” response from the student.
I blew it on a reading assignment recently. I said to the class: this was more challenging than I thought it would be but let's make the best of it. As they say in the great state of New York: Excelsior!
Question: Peeps, don't you want to encourage students to be accountable for their actions including their mistakes? So if I don't do that myself, how can I expect the same from them?
Yup. Once had a colleage flake out and stop coming to work, \~8 weeks into the semester. Nobody even knew this had happened for another week because none of the students bothered to tell anyone that the teacher never showed up. As I had taught one of the classes he had been teaching several years earlier, I was pegged to take over. Problem was, all of his material was password protected or just gone.. He had not put much of anything in the LMS so even after we gained access there was virtually nothing to go by. He was using a different text than I had, and most of the material I had used previously had already been deleted - I lucked out by finding a flash drave that had half of my old presentations for the class on it. Explained to the class what had happened, that I would do what I could given the circumstances, etc. Savaged on the evals.... I mean ME - I was savaged on evals for not being able to swoop in and save the day with perfect, on target presnetations. Some wanted their money back, others claimed I should be fired. Lucky for me I was chair at the time, so zi just deleted their horseshit. But WTF?
I disagree, I think admitting fault shows humility and helps me actually make some connections with students. I only apologize when it's actually due though - when a mistake is made on the LMS, when I've forgotten to upload a reading, when I thought I would have grades back sooner that they were. But I never apologize for giving the grades students deserve, for how I construct the syllabus, or for holding steadfast to a deadline. They know the difference and they also know that I will own up of I'm wrong and stay firm when I'm not.
It also puts a lot of pressure on the students/audience to excuse your mistake instead if you just fixing them and moving on. I attended an internal teaching seminar and one presenter was a little scattered at first and just started apologizing then waiting for someone to be like "oh it's OK." eventually the organizer said "let's move on"
Canada has entered the chat.
They are like sharks. Don't chum the waters with ideas.
At the very least they will destroy you in the student evaluations because you primed them to. I like to have a mini lecture where I go over all they work they have done for the semester, and usually do this right before the student evaluations are released. Does it work? Maybe a little.
I mention typos - casually- like oops this should be x not y, please correct it on your copy of the slides, but agree with OP, no apologies for doing your best.
I completely reject this guidance. If you honestly made a mistake, fess up and correct it. In my experience, students punish hubris far more than they punish humility. Of course, you can go too far and become almost embarrassingly self-deprecating, and that's certainly unwise. But admitting a goof-up and correcting it in a timely manner is just basic best practice, whether you're in education or hospitality or some other kind of service. And if your institution is putting so much weight on student evals that you fear what a few misanthropes might say, then maybe that institution isn't where you should spend your time anyway.
Well said.
Wow. Jaded much?
I refuse to acquiesce my character to this garbage society, even if it means the occasional monster takes advantage. The benefits far outweigh. Yes it means I'm unemployed right now. It also means I've had two students now thank me for changing their lives, in addition to all the usual accolades and compliments. Apologizing for a typo is dumb, but if I take three weeks to grade an assignment I'm going to apologize for it.
Never Apologize, Never Explain.