Category Archives: students

Letters from Students Unhappy with Grades

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Dr. Linhart,

My world is going to end if you give me the grade I earned in your class. Because of this, can’t you just give me a C instead?

Sincerely,

Student

Dear Student,

I think there is a misunderstanding about grades. I do not give grades. I report what happened in my class with regards to student performance. As such, I cannot, and my integrity requires that I do not, report grades that are unmerited to the university.

I wish you fortitude in dealing with your situation. I realize this is not at all the situation you want to be in, but I know you will find the fortitude, dignity and integrity to get through it. Things are often incredibly painful when they are happening, and our challenge is to learn what we can learn from them, so that we don’t have to face the same problem again.

Best,

Dr. Linhart

Dr. Linhart,

Are you available in the morning tomorrow? I can bring all my assignments and exams, and surely there are points I can reclaim in order to get above the defined line.

Thank you!

Student

Dear Student,

Please tell me you are joking about this. I have been available all semester long to deal with point disputes. If there is something you feel very strongly about, I will, of course, be happy to hear you out, but this should have been taken care of when the papers were first returned to you.

I think you also misunderstand how many points it takes to raise a grade. Let’s say you had an 79.5% and the cutoff was 80% (I am sure we are talking a larger gap than this, but let’s use it for an example). That seems a small amount, but a handful of homework points or even a few points on the final or another exam will not bridge this gap.

I know you are disappointed with your grade, but I believe your time and energy would be better spent in determining what you need to do to avoid this situation in the future. The power to come for help or to put more effort into learning the material was available to you for the entire semester. If you had exerted this energy then, you would have earned the outcome you desire with no questions from anyone and with a great deal less frustration on both your part and on mine.

Sincerely,

Dr. Linhart

Did I just smile for 3 hours straight?

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I think I must have smiled for 3 hours straight. This was my first time at graduation on the stage as faculty. Giving the diploma to my student was awesome in and of itself. I think my smile almost broke my face.

I got to give my research student his diploma at graduation. Here we are, backstage, immediately afterwards!

I got to give my research student his diploma at graduation. Here we are, backstage, immediately afterwards!

If that was not enough, one of our associate deans was there, and he provided some mentoring. He told me I could move around on stage and go greet the students backstage if I knew them. Every time I recognized a name of a student that I knew, I jumped up, and went to give out congratulations and hugs. The other faculty probably thought I was nuts. I didn’t care. I think the students were glad to see me, glad I recognized them (although sometimes I did mis-identify which class they took from me), glad I was there with congratulations and hugs. I loved it. I just loved it.

Eventually I figured out who to talk into taking photos.

The only regret for the day is that I missed taking a photo with a friend graduating with a Ph.D. early in the ceremony. But I got to be there. I got to be a part of it. I got to see it. That made it a great day.

Semester Wrap-Up

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The semester comes to a close. My temper has been short lately. My patience has been short lately. It will be good to have a change and necessary to take a break.

What is it that makes this time of the semester so difficult for everyone? Part of it is, undoubtedly, sadness that we won’t much see this group of students again, since on the most part, we truly like them. Some of it is the high paperwork load that comes with wrapping up a semester. Some of it is the grade-grubbing and begging. I’d rather help students work hard and learn than give them grades that make them sad. But my job is to report what happened over the course of the semester, according to the rules laid out in the syllabus. There was the option of coming for help before the last week before the final exam.

I am also questioning myself. I made my final optional, but in order to insure that students came to class and learned the last material, I insisted on no unexcused absences for the last week and a 70% score or higher on the final homework. I think 3 failed to make the score on the final homework. One, in part, because he handed it in late. Another just did poorly. One of the two didn’t show up for the final. The second scored poorly pulling a borderline C down to a D in my class. A rule is a rule, and I know that it is part of my job to enforce rules. Though sometimes we make judgment calls on things. Let them walk away with a C and be done. The consequences of not knowing the material will catch up. Of course, sometimes that is the wrong thing, and it is better to accept responsibility for handing the consequences out rather than delaying it for some other instructor. Right. Wrong. Hard to tell. And maybe there is no right or wrong here, there just is what is.

Many students struggle with the concept that actions have consequences. Fair enough. But sometimes better to leave well enough alone. Also fair enough. Perhaps for next time, if where I am going to be teaching in the future allows optional finals, I will find a way to change how I notify or change the policy in a way that is gentler on everyone’s spirit.

Ordinary Kindness

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At lunch with a friend earlier in the week, my wallet/change purse dropped onto the sidewalk without me noticing. An hour later, before I even realized it was missing, two Aggies were knocking on the door to my office, returning it to me. I didn’t get their names; I was too surprised to discover my mistake. I know I said thank you, but it deserves being said again. Thank you. Ordinary kindness like this is one of the things I love best about College Station and my TAMU students in particular.

It was the end of class today. One of my students with a robust sense of humor let me know he hadn’t missed a single class. I blew him a kiss much to his and the rest of the class’s amusement. Ordinary kindness. Thank you, thank you for that moment.

Another had his wife and small child by class today, at least before the hour started. I think I got the blowing kisses idea from the little one, who blew a few at me. I returned the favor. Life’s happy little moments; I’m always glad to meet a student’s family, parents or children or spouses.

End of the semester wrap up — I had time and took a few minutes and shared some of the wisdom I have struggled with.

  1. Figure out what work activities you do that make you feel happy and alive. Do more of that.
  2. If you aren’t liking what you are doing, try other things until you find something that makes you happy.
  3. Some people are just mean. Avoid them.
  4. Find people who make you feel good and spend more time with them.
  5. Don’t waste your 20s. Don’t spend time in relationships with people you don’t really like and whom you aren’t treating well. Don’t spend time in relationships with people who aren’t treating you well
  6. Realize that we think that we are going to get through school and get a job or a family or whatever it is, and we will have arrived and things will be good. But we don’t always end up where we expect, and even when we do, there are always problems. Life is struggle. If there is one gift I could give you, it would be resilience.

We ended class a few minutes early, with hugs and handshakes and wishes for good final exams.

Lessons

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This semester I have two students who are honors course contracting my classes. This means that they want honors credit for the class, and we create a written agreement about what they have to do to get it. In practical reality, I write the contracts with some broad leeway so that we are doing extra work but the exact details are somewhat fluid, and easily customizable to my needs or the students’ needs. Sometimes I think I should be more formal about it, but so many classes like this I don’t teach very often, and so, no, I don’t have enough mastery of the material to really know ahead of time.

One of my honors students has not been showing up to class. I get that he’s generally smart enough to learn the material on his own. And I also get that the engineering school is being a gigantic problem for him with group projects and teammates who aren’t helping. And a grandparent recently died. I can cut him some slack once for missing my class, but I think he’s missed two or three in a row. And this isn’t the first absence.

I called him in to talk to him about it the other day. “Look, I know you are under a lot of stress, but make it to class. Think of it this way, would you want a letter (of recommendation) writer to say that you were reliable except when you are stressed and busy?” I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not going to put that in a letter, even though I’m annoyed. And even though I am annoyed, this is still a student that I just plain like. I should have poked more into how he was doing first. The poor kid was like a whipped dog for the rest of the day, either from me or from exhaustion.

I felt like such a heel. On the other hand, I really think he should be coming to class.

So lesson one, write it into the honors course contract. No absences except for excused absences or with prior consent of the instructor. I have to go to extra effort for you, you show up to class.

Lesson two, listen first. I already know this one. It is the execution that’s sometimes is lacking.

Lesson three, focus on the positive. I really wish I’d said instead, “I miss you when you don’t come to class.”

Lesson four is just a question for my readers. What should I do now? If I could write a Dear Student letter, what should it say? Oh, heck, here’s a first try. What do you think?

Dear Student,

I called you out for not coming to class the other day. I think I did a bad job of that. I wish I had asked you first what was going on in your life that caused you to miss class. I wish rather than getting on your case, I had told you that I missed you when you don’t come to class. I wish I had written it into the honors course contract so that we both would have agreed to that ahead of time. You looked bad the rest of that day, and I’ve been feeling bad since. I hope you will accept my apology for handling that badly. And I hope you will come to class. I miss you when you aren’t there.

Sincerely,

Dr. Jinx

Functions

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We are learning about linear transformations in linear algebra. These are just functions from one vector space to another that preserve the structure of the vector space. I had students do a team exercise to determine if a number of transformations, such as derivatives, integrals, translation of a vector by a constant vector, multiplication by a matrix are linear transformations.

I get that the linear algebra is new and confusing to students, but I was amazed (I probably shouldn’t have been) by how many found the function definitions to be difficult. After all, we learn about functions in high school. It’s just the linear algebra that’s new and confusing, right? Not quite, as it turns out.

I think this is a case where new knowledge confounds old knowledge. Because we are learning about something new, students lose their ability to keep their mathematical wits about them and apply their old knowledge to the situation. They start to believe that something funky must be going on, and then they try to use the new stuff all over the place. It doesn’t work.

Between my first section and the second, I reinforced the basic function concepts, and it might have helped a little bit. It didn’t help a lot. I know many students got it. I know some didn’t. My hope is that those who have been keeping up with the material might have had a learning curve, but then they learned from their teammates what was going on (or me, when I solved the exercise), and now they know what to do.

I hope I can reinforce the idea that you can go a long way in life if you can keep your mathematical wits about you. Uncommon sense. Apply your uncommon sense. Others call it common sense, but I don’t think it is!

From there to here

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I was asked what journey I took to go from writing software back into a tenure-track appointment.

A short answer would be that I have been very fortunate in my misfortunes; perhaps good at making lemonade out of lemons.

Here is a longer answer, still greatly abbreviated, omitting several years of unhappiness, discouragement and failures, and the unhappiness, discouragement and failures that were interleaved with the successes. I will mention in my first 4 years of teaching, during 3 of which I was not even full-time, I taught 10 different undergraduate courses from freshman to senior level. Starting over new every semester was hell, but it certainly established that you can throw me into a class almost at random, and I will make it a success.

As I found my stride with teaching, I was lucky that one of courses here rejected by the tenure track faculty was mathematical modeling, and inevitably, I got assigned to teach it along with two other new courses that year — as if the one difficult new course wasn’t enough on its own. I took a summer’s worth of anxiety medication trying to figure out what in the hell one would do with that course — projects, obviously, but what and how and … ???? It certainly didn’t help that everyone I talked to told me that this was one of the most difficult courses if not the most difficult course they had ever taught and that they were glad I was teaching it and not them. I figured if I wanted to teach a senior level course, I better be good at this, and I better like it. No pressure! I went to the Course Design Series offered by our Center for Teaching Effectiveness which reminded me to design around what I wanted students to learn. Apparently I had some good ideas.

I also think I just kept getting lucky. I acquired a talented undergraduate and independent thinker in the first iteration of that course, who became my undergraduate research student. He’s an electrical engineer in alternative energy (solar hot water heating), with a double major in mathematics. I was the one encouraging him to continue doing what he was doing, and lo, I became his research mentor. He wrote an undergraduate thesis, won some nice scholarships and awards — we had a great three years together. I will miss him to pieces when he graduates this year.

Through the modeling class, I mentored some smaller undergraduate research projects that could go to Student Research Week, or MathFest, in our undergraduate journal, or to a Writing Center competition. Simply encouraging students to submit their work when I see them doing something interesting makes such a huge difference.

I talked two young women who did interesting projects in my class into presenting at MathFest, and that meant I had to go myself. I talked about the writing I have students do in the modeling course. The session I was in led me to an opportunity write an article on that topic. This has been accepted to the journal PRIMUS. I have plenty more ideas that can go in PRIMUS. I just have to find time to work/write them up.

I never would have guessed how much fun it is to take students to conferences; seeing things through their eyes, taking them somewhere fun for lunch, going to talks with them. Up until that point, I had sometimes hated, sometimes tolerated, but I had never enjoyed a math conference. I overheard my two talking about not understanding a talk, and rather than being intimidated like I would have been, they were peeved that the presenter didn’t define his terms. Conclusion: it was a lousy talk. Go team! I helped teach them that as we learned how to put together presentations.

Ever since going to MathFest, I’ve gotten together with those two several times a semester for lunch. They are now finishing their master’s degrees, one in the Bush School, one in Wildlife in Fisheries.

The professor in Wildlife and Fisheries Science who advises my student had earlier worked with me to design a project for my class since he does a lot of mathematical modeling. This has grown, in turn. He puts me in his grant applications for attracting female mathematically talented students, and he and I are working on a project and getting some more ideas for publications together.

That puts together a track record of successful teaching, mentoring undergraduate research, and miracle of miracles, I was even on track to cobble together a scholarship program for me.

I was also lucky that I befriended the first woman tenured in the Math Department. We started talking because she’s been teaching writing in mathematics classes for years. We have lunch together once a week. Add to that some good/bad luck in that the department has been particularly dysfunctional in my direction this year when my credentials are strong.

She has been the best mentor ever, encouraging me, always happy to look over my materials and make comments and, most importantly, tell me when they were good and that she thought I would be successful. 5 tenure track campus interviews and two offers later, and we conclude she was right about that. I think I would have found the courage to apply on tenure track without her, but her encouragement and ready assistance made certain of it. I will never be able to pay her back, but I sincerely hope I have been paying and will continue to pay it forward to my own students in the future.

Mathematical Modeling

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Another instructor asked me tonight to talk to him sometime about what made my mathematical modeling class a success.

Where to begin? Love your students, and believe they are capable.

Foster a classroom environment in which everyone is respected, respectful, and everyone’s goals are aligned.

Let students make choices about what they do. Then they will own the work more than if you choose for them.

Don’t be afraid to screw up. Some things will work, and some won’t. Some of the biggest screw-ups will have the most profound learning opportunities. For you and for them. Some of the “failed projects” taught students more than success at some canned exercise would have.

Praise them. Then praise some more. But you can’t do generic praise. You have to look and see the specific things they are doing that are worthy of your words.

Make things meaningful and relevant to them and their lives. But don’t simplify the hard stuff. Let them see the messy. That is what mathematical modeling is all about, the messy interface of mathematics and reality.

Make sure they understand what mathematical modeling *is*, and keep bringing that theme back into their work. Because if they don’t walk out of your class understanding what it *is*, what in the hell have you actually taught them?

Start by figuring out what you think they ought to know and learn from your class. Then design everything you do around those objectives.

Make assignments that you will be eager to grade. That will make your life easier, and their work more interesting. If you find it interesting, they will too.

Don’t be afraid to do something silly or fun because it is silly and fun, the Zombie Apocalypse has been a great modeling project for that reason.

Since it is your job to criticize, make it their job to praise. Make sure they point out to each other the good things they are doing.

Look for success, for creativity, for talent, for competence. And where you find it, nurture it. It won’t always be in those put-together students who always do well at everything. You will find amazing things in your mid-range students and even in your screw ups. Don’t waste those gifts.

Tell them about your failures. Tell them where you struggled. Make yourself a human being to them — let them learn from your mistakes. You don’t have to be right all the time, and you don’t have to have been right all the time. Understand where they are coming from and forgive yourself for those times when you demonstrated their faults.

And did I mention love them? Love them. Love them. And love yourself too. If you bring grace, dignity, integrity, humility and love into your classroom, you will have it returned to you.

Queasy

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More interviews. An offer that I successfully negotiated to a point where I am comfortable/happy about taking it. A major teaching award.

I should be over the moon happy, but reality is that mostly, I’ve just been queasy and anxious. That seems ungrateful, even to me, but there it is.

The teaching award really put me in a funk for about a week. I think it brought home the idea that you really can be doing outstanding work, and, if you are not a tenure-track or tenured person in our department, you are still not really valued by the department.

Looking at it from another perspective, and this is the one I would like to get fixed firmly in my head, this award represents how much I’ve meant to my students. One in particular. The students wrote letters for me. They are telling me that I made a difference, sometimes a big difference, in their lives. I am honored and grateful for the opportunity to teach them and for the trust that they put in me. I am honored and grateful to be able to make that difference. I hope they know that they, too, have made a difference in my life.

On the job offer, I negotiated the salary to the point where I thought it was advantageous enough to me financially. The department chair himself told me to negotiate as hard as I could, and I did. It appears I pushed them as hard on salary as I could, hopefully while being polite, supportive, feminine — all the things women are required to be. Shouldn’t I be proud of that? So why do I feel kind of squicky about it now? Is it just that negotiating and asking for what you want is acting out of character for women? Is it the chilling news about the negotiation at Nazareth College that resulted in a rescinded job offer? I’m certainly familiar with the literature on women and negotiating, and that literature certainly makes it clear that often you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

That little voice in my head asks me if I have damaged relationships with colleagues by taking the chair at his word and asking for more than was offered. That little voice in my head says I was just doing what I am supposed to do. And it also says that life is not fair. My challenge is to find some peace and some path through all the things the little voice says.

Last the interviews. It was pretty obvious that the first school I interviewed at recently wasn’t as interesting as my current offer. The other one I liked a lot, but there are both perks and red flags with the position. First, the teaching load is lower. Second, they have a nice system of course buy-outs for pre-tenure faculty, even though they are a teaching school. Third, they are a department of 5 faculty nearing retirement, all of whom are greatly motivated to mentor me towards success. On the down side: the school has had financial problems in recent years. No raises. At one point, no contributions to the retirement fund for either a semester or year. There are reasons to believe it is on a healthier track. Things to seem to be getting better. On the other hand, there are also reasons to worry.

In any case, I find it unlikely they can get an offer together before I have to respond to the one I have.

It looks like a big decision is coming on Friday or later today to move to a new school and start a new position as a tenure-track assistant professor. I wish I felt less scared about it all, but big changes, even good changes, bring up a lot of anxiety. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to stay. The only way is forward. There will be many very difficult moments ahead, but that would be true no matter what. As Lois McMaster Bujold writes,

Tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

Onward.

Be Your Own Hero

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I returned exams on Tuesday. Wednesday brought a steady stream of discouraged visitors to discuss performance in the class and on the exam. “This class is abstract, and I’m not comfortable with abstraction.” “This class is difficult.” “I just can’t seem to get it, and I am working so hard.”

What do I say? Sometimes I want to ask, “Well, why haven’t I seen you in office hours before now? Now that you are here, how about you open your book and start working on some linear algebra?” In reality, I find myself saying, “Yes, the class is abstract, but one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox is the power of abstraction. You have to learn to think of matrices as mathematical objects, and vectors as mathematical objects that have rules for manipulation that we can follow, rather than visualizing a rectangle of numbers or a magnitude and direction in 3-space. If you aren’t getting this, something needs to change.” I can make a list for you (and sometimes I do), the top of it is put serious effort into doing and understanding the homework as it is assigned (which has been mentioned many times so far this semester), but you, Dear Student, have to be the one to carry out the actions and the plan.

I am both amazed and not amazed at how few have their books open before talking to me about their grade, and how many leave immediately after, never opening up that book to take advantage of the time and opportunity to work some of the linear algebra that is causing the difficulty.

Thursday I decided to bring the topic of discouragement up in class as an opening activity. What would you say to someone who is discouraged, specifically a classmate who feels that the material is abstract and hard and arbitrary and meaningless? Or someone who is just discouraged about something in general?

What did they come up with?

  1. Keep trying, don’t stop.
  2. Hope is needed for hard work.
  3. Forgive yourself and get to work.
  4. Pray.
  5. Take a step back. Take baby steps forward. Figure out what you know and go from there.
  6. There’s always a solution and always people willing to help you out.
  7. Spring break is coming!
  8. You are not alone, find support from others.

Two and three and five and six and eight, those are some good profound thoughts.

I admitted that this was on my mind for personal reasons as well. I am dealing with discouragement and frustration, though not with regards to our class or my teaching. I contributed some wisdom from what I’m currently reading, Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart. She advises us to

Lean in to your discomfort, and learn from it.

That is what I am trying to do with my situation. And it is hard. But with abstraction and confusion, that’s where you’ve got to go to make sense. Lean in to your discomfort.

What surprises me most about this discussion is the impact. I find it mentioned in notes written on the back of the quiz we took Thursday. In emails from students received over the weekend. One that included a link to this video, passed on to her by her father, full of wisdom and a change of perspective:

http://leanin.org/education/be-your-own-hero/

Does it make a difference to talk about it, to waste valuable class time on something other than math? I hope so. Especially since that quiz had some disappointing results, indicating we need to buckle down and figure this out. I know it’s tough to learn this stuff, to learn how to think differently. But that’s our job here, this semester.