SVSU professors expect high achieving students but create classroom environments that produce last-minute work from students and create bad student-professor relationships.
When the semester starts, professors set expectations that students will complete the classwork on time and those students who “forget” when something is due will not be given a second chance.
They give strict rules for how to format emails, how to label assignments and generally give off a no-mercy attitude.
Most students are annoyed by these rules, but they do their best to follow them. These expectations are sometimes annoying or inconvenient, but someprofessors take them too far.
Professors expect us as students to be perfect, but don’t let students make mistakes and learn from them.
Trends I continue to see include professors posting the slides one minute before class starts so students can’t print them to take notes on as they lecture.
Professors who give you test scores two months after the test and won’t inform you on what you got right and wrong.
Professors who post lectures at 10 p.m. and tell students to watch them and be ready to discuss them at a 10 a.m. class the next morning.
Professors who disable the editing and deleting on discussion posts. So, if you catch a typo of your own, you can’t correct it.
In one of my classes last semester, we were working on an assignment. I asked the person next to me if I was understanding the problem correctly, as the professor was busy helping other students.
My professor told me I couldn’t ask for help from other classmates on what we work on in class.
All of these scenarios are ones that I or my fellow classmates have experienced during our time at SVSU.
Many times, professors have things on Canvas, but they lock them until they feel the students need them.
If they forget to unlock assignments, they don’t expect students to be upset at them for their lack of perfection, yet they want us to remember when to turn everything in without ever forgetting.
These scenarios that professors create foster laziness in students and last-minute work. If they had things on Canvas unlocked ahead of time students could tackle it when they know they are ready.
What I miss about high school is that, when you got to class, you already knew what the bookwork was for the weekend on Monday even if you hadn’t finished the lectures yet. You knew what to focus on, what things to be listening for.
If your Tuesday-Thursday was booked with extra curriculars, you could start the homework on Monday.
Now everything must wait until the week of, everything’s locked on Canvas, and you don’t have access to anything until the professor gives it to you.
Homework is due at midnight or on Saturday nights at 10 p.m. instead of right before class.
While these things may seem small when they happen in the classroom, it affects students on the daily.
Why should I, as a student, have to submit homework at midnight?
I have had some amazing professors at SVSU, and in those classrooms, the professors were understanding and didn’t lock assignments until the week they were due.
They were empathetic and human and, in their classrooms, students succeeded because they felt safe to do so.
Small changes to how a professors organize their classrooms will foster a better relationship between students and professors and encourage students to take the first step on their homework instead of being locked out of everything they need to do.
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