Escaped Thoughts

Recipe for Angry Students

That's right, you don't have to be a teacher at one of those high-brow institutions to cause stress and anguish! You too can anger your students with this simple, fool-proof recipe:

  1. Wait until the last week of classes, when stress is already at the highest level of the semester.
  2. Assign more work than is reasonable for a week: remember, it's ok, because your class is the only one they are taking (or at least, the only one that matters to you)!
  3. To add zest, make it due on a reading day, despite school policy, secure in the knowledge that no-one will complain lest you simply move the homework deadline up even more.

Now there's nothing left to do but sit back and enjoy the suffering. As an added bonus, tell your TA to grade all of them in 48 hours, and relish the horror of his realization that he could to give up sleep, research, and all of his classes, and he still probably wouldn't get it done, but that you'll blame him if the class wonders where their homeworks are while studying for the final (once they wake up from their stress-induced coma).

Other's Thoughts

From the mind of zeuropa

That is incredibly accurate! I'm actually wondering if we should go to a dean or the chair or something...but I don't really know if there's time or if its even worth bothering.

From the mind of Stuart

It's not so much the amount of work he gives us that bothers me... it's his attitude towards homework. He seems to just make up big lists, and then hand them out as if he thinks its as easy for us to do as for him to make the list of problems. Which is probably why it never occurs to him to give us some warning about homeworks, or to get them to us sooner, rather than later.