Goodbye, Dr. No.

This is a brief note to express my gratitude to Dr. No. His blog, Acadamnit helped me to see the lighter side of being a college professor. I loved that he gave personalities to various fonts on Microsoft Word. And that many people could relate to his love/hate relationship with his job as a professor. He showed that being a professor is not only a job, but it is a way of life. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but it's always better with a smile.

Is all of Generation Y Lazy?

Today I'm going to gripe my ass off about my students. Maybe it's partly me, being tired of grading and tired in general and stuff. But, seriously?

I have required my students to write a 5 page essay about a popular trend, explaining the trend and 3 possible causes of it. Then they needed to choose the most likely cause and argue for it. So, this paper requires a bit of background and a bit of arguing.

I have read about 8 papers so far and not a single one has followed the directions. I gave these directions written, orally and in a model that we did together in class. Some classes even did a practice one themselves.

The papers I got are about 60% quotes and they read like articles on that trend. Then they interviewed their sisters about the trends so they could get up to their 4 required sources. 7 of them have no thesis. The one with a thesis does not state that they will discuss the causes of their trend.

Do I still have to grade 70 of these? OMG OMG OMG.

I should post the assignment sheet here so you can see that it's not unclear. Crap.