#professor anifangor

[anifangor]

so obviously I don’t want my students cheating or plagiarizing because then they’re not actually learning

but for the love of god. if you’re going to cheat. DON’T MAKE IT OBVIOUS THAT YOU CHEATED????

i’ve only been out of school for a year, how are there this many students already who don’t seem to recognize that one key point of cheating is to NOT GET CAUGHT????

[anifangor]

lord help me

I’ve been grading essentially nearly nonstop for 14 hours and have barely made it halfway through the finals assignments and grades are due on monday at noon

[anifangor]

i hate finals week more as a professor than i did as a student

[anifangor]

why do students ask for what they can do to make up their grade or for extensions if they’re not even checking to see if i responded or doing the thing after i gave them permission

it would be one thing if they told me that the delays were bc of unforeseen circumstances or stuff outside of their control but when they don’t offer any reason and are just trying to boost their grade, and then they don’t do any of the work they asked for an opportunity to redo it’s ??? you asked for an extension, i said yes, and then the extension deadline passes and blackboard shows you didn’t even open it????

[anifangor]

just judging from the amount of posts i’ve made in the past like two days

anyone wanna take a guess at how many posts i’ll make in my job tag before the school year starts that is just me going Yikes TM at my coworkers’ behaviors/policies

this is post 10 and there’s two months before the fall semester starts

[anifangor]

i went without brain meds for a month and had to deal with a shit ton of emotionally and mentally draining bullshit while already mentally fatigued, and then a bunch of cold fronts came in right when i got meds so now i am cold and tired bc of the cold, and bc it came really fast i am having sickness issues w the cold, and i am just. so fucking tired. i need to catch up on all the work that i fell behind on bc of the lack of brain meds + mental fatigue, and even then, it’s barely a break bc i have to read the textbook for the class i’m teaching that i’ve never taken before and figure out what the fuck i’m doing for the spring

if i didn’t hate fall semesters before, i sure do now

[anifangor]

also it makes me sad that i have in my syllabus that if you are late, i just ask you come in quietly and make sure that i saw you to mark your attendance, and that i verbally said i will not hold it against my students if they are late ESP bc the classroom is literally on the farthest side of campus and isolated from most other buildings (and it is hot and humid as hell because we’re in the south and my classes start at 11 and 12:30, which is absolutely miserable when the campus is basically nothing but hills)

and i still had students on the second day apologizing and seeming stressed out about being late

like my dudes. y’all are human. this classroom is a huge ass inconvenience to everyone involved here, and i don’t expect you to run and risk passing out from the heat. the classroom doesn’t even show up on campus maps, i had to provide a google maps link to help them find the classroom

and i know a huge part of what happened is that they had educators or admin with policies that were ridiculously strict about attendance and took no excuses and gave them absolutely no grace

[anifangor]

survived the first week of school as a first time professor

some of my students aren’t very good at hiding the fact that they aren’t paying attention when i answer questions or reading the syllabus bc i’ve gotten the same question multiple times despite answering it in class twice and it being in the syllabus

but also a vast majority of my students are first time college students who probably spent the majority of the past 2-3 years in classes taught by stressed out teachers trying to adapt to terrible decisions made by admin, including the possibility of “just pass them no matter what” (which was already a thing pre-pandemic, where k-12 teachers in my area were bribed into passing students by admin policy) so w/e, they’ll figure it out eventually

and surprisingly the coworker i want to slap the most first is not one of the ones i predicted i’d want to slap first

the creators are Testing My Will because of all of the shit they threw my way since the start of the month, but i’m fueled by spite

in positive news, i got the faculty evaluation rubrics for service and teaching during the fall kick-off meeting. the rating scale is a little weird bc 3 is excellent and 5 is extraordinary, and i totally read the thing with a different scale in my head (1 being worst, 3 being average, 5 being excellent) and stressed myself out because it looked like it would be basically impossible for me to reach 4-5 rating

...

nancy pointed out that i had verbally read out “3, excellent” multiple times and then i was no longer stressed and reread the rubrics

before the semester had even started, i was on a p solid track to get a 3 or 3.5 for my first eval in ~feb-march next semester

[anifangor]

I love how the first person to disrespect me because I’m a young professor isn’t even one of my students, but my coworker, who not even a year ago, said she would fight to help me go from part time to full time faculty.

She keeps saying she doesn’t think people on the Speech and Debate team would respect me or Lacey bc we’re in our 20s but the worst disrespect has regularly come from the coworker who won’t even give us the opportunity to earn the respect of the team

[anifangor]

Also I have two weeks before the semester starts and I’m not ready

I spent the past week taking it easy bc I had Covid and next week I have three days of meetings, so I only really have this week to prepare, fml

[anifangor]

Why does the default template for instructor bio in blackboard include Twitter handle

Are there profs really giving their students their twitters on purpose

[anifangor]

why are About Me’s so hard lmao they have no right being this difficult

[anifangor]

i submitted my letter of accepting the job offer may 5

i got the notification that HR started processing my paperwork yesterday july 12

thank god that’s started but man the anxiety of wondering for two months if i actually did get the job or not because i had nothing from HR and my sam account still shows me as 1) a student account, not instructor account 2) unemployed since my GA position ended

another related gripe

the first day of the semester is august 22. my employment date starts september 1st. so not only have i been sitting around for two months anxious about if my stuff actually went through and if i actually have a job, i don’t get paid for the first WEEK of classes (not including all the class prep i’ve been doing on what should’ve been summer vacation for me)

like c’mon payroll. you telling me that i’ll have been officially working for three weeks into the semester before i get my first paycheck, and it won’t even cover the full three weeks??

[anifangor]

love the part about being a new instructor where i have to read an entire textbook in order to create the course

[anifangor]

ughh i really don’t want to have to deal w my students butchering my name every time they try to address/call me because it’s just so disheartening to hear it butchered regularly and even more frustrating to know that my first name is pronounced v similarly to a v common white name (Eliza but short a sound at the start) yet that is rarely how they try to say it when they read it (not to mention the people who seem to purposefully not try to learn the pronunciation)

i also really don’t want to do the “call me Prof [initial]” thing or tell them to shorten my first name to Ally (which isn’t even how you’d pronounce that part of my first name) bc both options remind me of the years i spent hating my name and my ethnicity bc i thought i couldn’t be worth anything if i was not white

i can’t even pick my second first name, the easiest of my names to pronounce, bc according to my mom who had tried to go by that same name for decades, people will still fuck it up

[anifangor]

i know not everyone is tech savvy but it bothers me so much when document formatting isn’t consistent

some of the formatting from other people isn’t even difficult to keep consistent? like, this one document has a numbered list where the name of the item is bolded, followed by a plain text format description of the item. yet not every item is bolded, some of them have different indentations at the start of the paragraph, one has the item name in a completely different font and size! 

i’m appalled because these documents are coming from professors who have fairly strict policies regarding student work/formatting, like c’mon. how are they going to take your policy seriously when your syllabus doesn’t set the example