For many years, you sit behind the ropes and look at how things are done. You are a teacher's assistant for more years than you have been a student. Normal tertiary education in my country is three years. After three years, you can begin to work as a teacher's assistant depending on the lecturer's preference. I started in 2017/2018 and now in 2023, I am actually teaching the course to third-year students.
Having been behind the ropes for so many years does not prepare you for the onslaught of what I call the studentus ignoramus.
Before getting into the ranting part, it is crazy how philosophy lecturers survive. In less than three weeks, I marked 60 essays of 3500 words each. If you do the math, that is more than 200 000 words. That is about 2 and a third Ph.Ds. How is this sustainable? Or in other words, how can you give quality feedback on work when your brain is mush? I am probably just too new to the game.
In any case, the marking is done, but after releasing the marks, I was met with emails from the get-go:
And this is why I call them studentus ignoramus. They are wholly ignorant and instead of them impressing me, I somehow need to impress them. Impress meaning here not impress in the normal sense of the word. Impress here meaning literal impressing, making a mark. What I am getting at: Their providing me with an essay is good enough to secure good marks irrespective of what they wrote in the work.
This all the whilst they question me on how they got such a low mark, as if I am the one who did not understand their work or missing what they wrote. All the whilst they take the position of authority in this relationship.
It strikes me odd how entitled students have become tainted by this strange overconfidence and arrogance. Irrespective of the lecturer's position, they as students are in the right.
One can see this from a wholly different perspective as well though. There is this saying that the consumer or client is always in the right. The student is in fact to some degree buying something (so-called "education") so as the client they are always right. But this places the lecturer in a precarious position. If education can be bought, how is learning taking place? At the end of the three years, you want the degree but you also want the degree to be worth something. But if education is merely about the client buying something and always being right, what is left of quality education? Money talks, and unfortunately the student is a paying customer.
So in the end the question "Why is my mark so low?" cannot be a good question for any lecturer because of her precarious position in this shaky relationship. Because, on the one hand, the low mark is because the student, for example, did not attend class, did not understand the key concepts, and did not even answer the question asked. But on the other hand, she is a paying customer demanding a service (albeit a service not of quality but of semblance, illusion, sham, and so on).
In any case, this rant was merely about students not pulling their weight and then blaming you as the lecturer for giving them low marks. We live in strange times I tell you.
I hope you are well. This is my first post in the ranting community. If I did not follow a rule or anything please let me know! I was kindly shown to this community by a reader of one of my previous posts whilst marking the essays.
All of the musings are my own, albeit inspired by this odd situation I find myself in. The photographs are also my own, taken with my iPhone.