Where Angels Know Better Than To Go

College professor resigns after video shows him screaming angrily into student's face https://t.co/xvaumIRUBZ

— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 1, 2022

So the story here is (supposedly) this:

“I deeply regret what happened in class. I lost my temper and did something I should never have done,” Pickard said in a statement.

“I have been under pressure lately, and I have been frustrated with students who pay attention to their cellphones and laptops, then wonder why they get low grades," his statement continued. "But that does not excuse my behavior. I apologized to the students and offered my resignation. I am now retired, as I had planned anyway. Please respect my privacy, it is over now."

I say "supposedly" because nothing is ever quite that simple: 

This professor is at Tennessee State University and apparently talks to students like this all the time. Something needs to be done. #Repost #tsu #racism #heneedstobefired pic.twitter.com/o7L27EMIdp

— KMD (@theylovekennedi) October 31, 2022

But even that allegation doesn't undo my take on this.

When I was a child (the Lovely Wife and I have had this discussion recently) in school, if I came home and told my parents the teacher told me I did something wrong today, my parents' response was:  "WHAT DID YOU DO?????!!!!!!"

Well, that's how I remember from my little child perspective.  I do remember that the teacher was my parent at school, and I was not allowed to blame the teacher for "what happened."  If something was wrong, it was my fault.  The one exception was the year I had hepatitis (at age 13), and a friend reported that my homeroom teacher opined to the class while I was out (for a month) that the only way she knew to get hepatits was through dirty needles.  My father muttered under his breath at that story.  Parents today would have that teacher in front of the school board so fast her head would spin (as we used to say).

So not all changes are bad.  But I ran into this teaching college, too.  If something went wrong with a student's grades, it was my fault.  The institutional expression of this idea is "outcome evaluations."

The idea is that if a school doesn't graduate enough students (a college, I mean), then the college is not doing its job.  Are the students motivated, interested, trying to learn?  That's the teacher's problem.  Are they actually learning?  Again, the teacher's problem.  I had students literally ask me why they had to take English to get an Associates Degree; because they really didn't want to bother.  If that student didn't graduate, or failed my class, that could be up to me to explain.

If I had a failing grade in school, that was my problem.  Today, the failing grade is the teacher's problem.  We're trying to find the middle here, I understand that.  But we're not hitting the mark.

I'll give you a quick example.  Back when I was taking papers on paper (I switched finally to "virtual" papers when the technology was there, partly because of this episode.  It gave me a copy of every paper submitted or not submitted.), I returned a hand-graded paper to a student.  Who then submitted the same paper to the Department Chair, complaining that I had been unfair and they deserved a better grade (it never occurred to me in 26 years of going to school to gather degrees like so much wallpaper, to ever do this).  The Chair was on sabbatical, so it went up to the Dean, a very kind woman who asked me politetly to reconsider my grade.

For reasons I still don't recall, I had made a Xerox of that paper before returning it (this is why I switched to electronic submissions when I could).  I compared my copy to the one sent to me by the Dean, and found two pages (the last two) had been rewritten and submitted without my comments (the last page, with my handwritten grade on it, was preserved.).  That grade appeal ended rather abruptly.

Now, I have no problem with student accountability.  But I faced rising hordes of students (as my years ticked on) playing on computers or cell phones rather than listening to my lectures.  The college supported classroom policies banning cell phones and computers, but I didn't want to spend my time enforcing those like a schoolmarm in a classroom full of 7 year olds.  I told my students to pay attention or suffer the consequences.  I also never took roll, although the school wanted me to.  Then again, I was an adjunct who could just not be rehired any semester. I didn't care what my statistics looked like (the school made noises about holding us all to account for our "outcomes").  In the end, the school couldn't afford to care; it needed the teachers in the classrooms the students were paying for.

But I think that's the "pressure" (some of it) Professor Pickard was facing, and he decided it was no longer worth it.  I sympathize.  I'd meant to be teaching still, and go on for three more years from now.  For reasons other than the classroom it stopped being worth it, but the classroom wasn't the congenial place it had been when I started it. I'll accept I became more curmodgeonly as I got older; but I never yelled at students, either.  I did, in the course of 20 years, tell two different students to be quiet or leave.  The last one left.  No one missed him, and I know the school would have backed me up.  So I didn't teach in a dystopian hellscape, and I agree the job of teachers is to teach, not just to present information and expect you to "get it" (I went through that in law school; it's just an excuse not to teach or be responsible as a teacher).

So I sympathize with what I think Pickard was going through.  That said, there's really no excuse to yell at a student.  I didn't even feel good about telling those two students to shut up (not what I said, but what I meant at the times).