Learned by Example: What I Would Do as a Professor or Instructor/Red Flags For Choosing Classes

“No one ever gets an A in this class.” You feel the chill down your spine as from your professor or instructor’s lips comes possibly the biggest red flag of any class you may have. Alternatively, you might have heard one of the most sought-after class introduction phrases ever: “All of the material for this class is free and will not cost you money, or be hard to find.” Indeed, some of the things you can hear from professors and instructors may restore your faith in the U.S. education system; that same faith that was once lost when your high school ignored bullying or pushed standardized tests instead of teaching you.  Meanwhile, others might say things that make you wonder if they know students aren’t made of money (nor does financial aid cover everything), or have any empathy or student experience at all. While it’s always good to get beforehand accounts of whatever class you are taking and the specific professor/instructor, before it’s too late to drop out, this article will also help you know what you can look out for in a great professor/instructor, in the form of how I would act and teach. 

Author’s Note: 

  For any professors or other instructors reading this: This list is made as accurately under how one can teach under the restrictions of colleges as possible; it is directly created from experiences I have had with previous professors and instructors through different colleges, the best of which were naturally able to do everything on this list. Also, a good goal for students and professors/instructors alike is to seek all of the entries on this list, not just as many as possible.   

 

YOU DO THE WORK, YOU GET THE A

Let’s be realistic: an A grade isn’t an A+, and it isn’t some elusive medal given to students once in a blue moon. Colleges have actual student achievement awards for that. An A grade simply means you worked hard and completed all the assignments, while exceeding expectations. An A+ means you exceeded them enough to warrant a perfect grade. As a professor/instructor, I would take this concept to heart. Not that any students who didn’t do work wouldn’t fail, nor would students who did lazy work get anything like an A, but, as discussed before, knowingly having a low A rate and a lot of B grades in a class (and working to keep it that way) is a red flag to prospective students and an unfair risk to students who strive to keep their grades high.

ALL MATERIALS OR ONLINE MATERIALS FOR THE CLASS ARE FREE/NO TEST-TRACKING
Who said a student’s financial aid is going to cover that random $200 textbook (especially when the book isn’t even a textbook), or that the government was merciful enough to give them proper and sufficient financial aid in the first place? And if you’re paying for online learning materials that cover the entire course, why are you paying for a professor/instructor? The world of extraneous paid learning materials is full of confusion and hypocrisy, starting with the college’s refusal to cover it with what you paid in tuition. As an educator, I would be just as capable of picking from the wide variety of free and open-source materials for teaching and learning as I am a student. A quick online search can lead you to just about any free resource students will need, as well as tutorials on how to use them. As for test-tracking, I’d like to turn attention to something else that test-monitoring software does besides monitor students while they take tests: hacking and endangering the student’s device. Seriously, how do you think the monitoring software is able to spy on students so successfully? Forcing someone to use a program that riskily hacks their machine so you can spy on them is a violation of privacy even if it’s to “stop cheating”, and it’s only a matter of time until more privacy lawsuits start to pop up. I’d want to be as far away from that legal battlefield as possible.

EXTREME CARE WITH ASSIGNING AND GRADING GROUP WORK

If you were working with other educators and they didn’t pull their weight, would you want them to drag you down when you got evaluated with them for tenure? Teaching singular students, especially online, is hard enough with the constraints colleges and other factors put on educating, let alone groups that have a random chance of doing good work together. If group assignments are absolutely necessary, they should be graded generously, and special care should be taken to make sure each individual group member gets graded properly, especially if one or more group members are called out for not pulling their weight. As for making the entire class a group or having group-evaluation/grading, that’s something that in itself is such a risk to fair grading that it acts as another red flag telling students to stay away from a class. As a professor/instructor, I would look at the long history of issues with group work, and think long and hard before doing anything with groups I wasn’t ready to do properly.    

FALSE/FIXABLE FAILING V.S. REGULAR FAILING 

Like it or not (and I certainly don’t like it), we remember the teachers, professors, and instructors, and their material, from classes we didn’t do too well in. So that should lead me and any other hypothetical or real educators to a solution that doesn’t involve failing them or lowering their grade, so that their experiences with you and the material stick. The best example I have seen is a grading system that displays temporary grades that look lower than the more complete grading; as well as a system that gives students a small window to correct their assignments, but displays them as a low grade in the meantime. While the micro heart-attacks lower grades like this might give students isn’t the best thing, this approach utilizes the low-grade memory concept without actually harming students’ grades in an unnecessarily harsh or unfair way.

ASSIGNMENTS THAT DON’T NUKE ONE’S SCHEDULE/RESPECTING BREAKS 

Breaks are breaks;  a time to relax and recover from academia, so that upon return you’ll be ready once again to complete your schoolwork. Breaks are not a time to assign work to make up for the days you won’t see the students. In addition, if an administration refuses to acknowledge longstanding break times (like Spring Break 2021), playing into that blatant misunderstanding of how breaks work, and what lack of rest really makes students mad enough to go party in Florida (Hint: I and all the other students I know travel the most when we don’t get breakdays), is dangerous. You are better off respecting the time students need to recover, and making class optional out of respect for this much-needed repose; something the best professors and instructors have no trouble doing, and something I would emulate. In terms of assignments, while it varies by assignment content, the assignment schedule that tends to instill the most knowledge (and not back up students with impossible loads of homework because only takes homework schedules are taken into account), is assigning on a one-week or two-week basis with fairly simple, but long, rich-with-content assignments that fully instill the knowledge of the course in students’ minds. 

Truthfully, all the items on this list help instill this knowledge, and following these concepts would be of paramount importance to me as a professor/instructor, if I truly wanted the best for my students.

Author’s Note: 

While I covered the validation for this article from a professor/instructor perspective, I would like to validate it from my end as a student by stating that professors who follow all these concepts, and my seeking them out, are the reason I have an associates degree out of high school and a wonderfully high GPA currently.

Also, I have indeed travelled the most and partied (safely and socially-distanced with a mask on) during the pandemic when I was not given break days. To this day, I am unsure of whatever reasoning that led people to think taking break days away was a good idea to keep students in place, as they usually rest on break days and travel on weekends.