Questions tagged [teaching]

This tag is related to the role and duties of a teacher, an academic instructor, tutor or a teaching assistant.

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How to deal with students who regularly ignores ban of laptop in classroom?

In my class (for undergraduate students) I do not allow students to use laptops so that you can focus more the lecture. (I do allow taking notes on tablets or using mobile phones.) Most students ...
0 votes
0 answers
41 views

Gradescope - posting grades

I have a class test graded, and want to publish\post the grades. However, some students are expected to makeup the test, and I don't want them to see the test yet. Will a student with This student ...
20 votes
17 answers
7k views

How to deal with students who are regularly late?

I teach a class that starts at 8:30 AM. Some students come late almost every day, usually 5 to 10 minutes late. In the past, I tried punishing late students by making them sing a song or blocking the ...
10 votes
8 answers
727 views

Should I let my students know I don't mind their (perceived) underperformance?

When working as a class tutor, I quite often receive apologies from students for not solving all of the assigned exercises, not knowing how to solve a problem, being absent from the class, etc. This ...
5 votes
4 answers
472 views

Undergrad: is it reasonable to have a syllabus policy about prolonged student absences from my course?

To establish course policy for prolonged student absences which lead to a poor grade half way into the course, do the following modifications to boundary conditions in the syllabus seem reasonable? ...
1 vote
1 answer
82 views

Books about teaching at university following quality standards? [closed]

What introductory books are there for a new university lecturer to know about teaching with quality assurance in mind?
-4 votes
2 answers
482 views

It is rude to offer a teacher the study guide you made for their class?

Is it rude to offer my professor a study guide I made for their class? I throughly enjoyed his class but the class he is teaching is extremely hard being it is a premed requirement. I made a study ...
6 votes
3 answers
3k views

Should I respond to students who plead for increasing grade [duplicate]

I use GradeScope for grading exams and quizzes in my courses and ask students to submit regrade requests only for objective mistakes, such as misreading numbers. Despite this, I receive many requests ...
12 votes
3 answers
5k views

Advice for a young lecturer

For a while my career was progressing in a "normal" way for a UK researcher. I completed my PhD and secured a 2-year postdoc working in collaboration with my PhD supervisor and one of his ...
25 votes
6 answers
9k views

My colleague took my teaching materials to use as their own. What should I do?

I am a postdoc and for the past several years I have been teaching a course for which I have designed all of the lectures, seminars, reading lists, etc. A new colleague joined our faculty last year as ...
3 votes
1 answer
279 views

How many hours of teaching do "12 taught US credits per academic year" correspond to?

It looks like that "12 taught US credits per academic year" is a common teaching load in research universities. However, I am not able to find the correspondence between "1 taught US ...
14 votes
8 answers
7k views

Is there any ethical problem with a tiered grading system?

I am currently teaching undergraduate level courses in mathematics and engineering in a university in the United States. My university requires us to go through some training on how to make our ...
0 votes
2 answers
258 views

Navigating Student Health Accommodations: A Delicate Balance

I occasionally encounter situations where students present medical notes from their doctors, citing conditions like headaches or general anxiety. These diagnoses often rely on the students' self-...
0 votes
0 answers
247 views

Career impact of bad performance at visiting instructor position?

This is probably the last question I'm going to ask for a while. This can also be considered a follow up to this post I made two months ago: Could my visiting instructor position be terminated due to ...
5 votes
0 answers
112 views

Free alternative to kahoot live quizzes?

Is there any free (ideally open-source) alternative to Kahoot for making live quizzes? I used to like Kahoot for live classroom quizzes, but recently they've changed their pricing model to only allow ...
14 votes
6 answers
4k views

Adjust grading policy mid-course to improve attendance?

I'm teaching a math course and have traditionally not enforced attendance, instead allocating 5% of the course grade to in-class participation (questions and answers), which maintained satisfactory ...
3 votes
3 answers
334 views

What's a good tool to help students perform peer review as a graded assignment?

I am teaching an academic writing course for grad students and part of the course content involves peer review activities on one another's writings. These peer reviews will receive a letter grade. Do ...
25 votes
3 answers
4k views

Will I be facing entitled students everywhere?

I work at a small regional university in the United States. Teaching takes up a significant portion of my time and energy, but I still enjoy it. I primarily teach undergraduate courses in math and ...
38 votes
13 answers
14k views

Appropriate/smart ways to decline students' requests of "begging for better grades" at the end of the semester without being too hurtful

Normally at the end of semester, there are always a couple of students begging for better grades. Let me just list a few sample cases: Case 1: I worked really hard during the semester. I attended all ...
12 votes
2 answers
2k views

I made an inappropriate joke in my class. Should I apologize or just let it be? [duplicate]

I am teaching introductory calculus, physics and programming to engineering students at a local college. Yesterday, at the end of a long day which involved a lot of programming, I ended up making a ...
28 votes
10 answers
10k views

Is it ethical for a professor to reuse exam questions annually without changes?

I'm facing a situation at my university that raises some ethical concerns and I'd like to get your perspective on it. One of our professors has a consistent practice of reusing the same exam questions ...
2 votes
1 answer
774 views

Can a professor use their student's work as their own work?

I'm studying in a college in India. I have a course with a professor who is insisting that we submit our presentations in ppt format so that he can use them as his own ppts for his later batches. Is ...
3 votes
2 answers
194 views

How can I teach a graduate seminar with two students (who are not from my department)?

I am teaching a PhD seminar (in social science) with only two students, both of whom are from other departments that are not very relevant to my field. I need to assume that they know nothing about ...
5 votes
1 answer
345 views

Should I take a Certificate for University Teaching while doing a postdoc?

I have just gotten a 2.5 year postdoctoral fellowship (philosophy) to do my own research project at a University (I am connected to a relevant research group and professor, but basically the project ...
1 vote
1 answer
183 views

How many new course preps before tenure (R1, US, Humanities)?

I'm a humanities researcher at an R1 university, just a few years into the tenure track. So far, the job's been pretty dominated by prep for my courses. I've been getting better at it, but there's no ...
11 votes
6 answers
4k views

Asking a professor for materials before the course

Next semester I will be at another university taking several subjects. I want to ask the professors there for the materials they use in class before my arrival, so that I can study them before the ...
103 votes
8 answers
15k views

Why are high pass rates for courses considered acceptable in the US?

(Sorry, I just couldn't resist the temptation to use this somewhat provoking title.) This recent question motivated me to finally ask the following, somewhat dual, question which I've been wondering ...
57 votes
12 answers
13k views

Student continuously makes insulting comments during my lecture - how do I handle him?

I teach in a small college and one student seems to have an obsessive need to make comments aloud during class. Sometimes those comments are funny (he is the class clown) but sometimes they feel ...
4 votes
7 answers
573 views

Group Versus Individual Assignments

Every spring (including the spring about to start), I teach an honors course that normally has an enrollment of about 25, with 15 to 20 of those coming from the top few percent of our students and the ...
23 votes
4 answers
2k views

Professor wants to expropriate submitted code for commercial use

I'm a Computer Science graduate student enrolled in a US University. In a class I'm currently taking, the professor has just given us a strange assignment. The professor works full-time in industry ...
17 votes
3 answers
3k views

Is it possible to survive in university academia without applying for grants?

I see that many professors spend all of their time applying for grants, minus a little bit of time to interact with the graduate students on their grants and a little bit of time to fulfill their ...
49 votes
16 answers
21k views

Is it unreasonable to expect students to read the lecture notes before attending the first class?

The new semester will be starting in a few weeks, and I will be teaching a course which starts on the first day of the semester. The goal of the course is to teach students how to use the R ...
42 votes
13 answers
4k views

What should you do when asked by the chair to raise course grade distribution when the students do not deserve it?

I am an adjunct in a reputable North American university. It is my first semester teaching an upper-year/beginning graduate-level course. A student raised a complaint against me to the chair of the ...
3 votes
1 answer
400 views

Teaching load and hired by the hour in the Swedish academic system

I've been offered a teaching position for the Spring semester at a Swedish University. The teaching load is 220 hours and they suggested that I should be hired by the hour. Does any of you know how ...
2 votes
0 answers
180 views

Regaining trust in the graduate school system? R2 Ph.D student with a history of getting burned by my Master's and PhD programs [closed]

I know I've posted a fair amount on this site but to briefly introduce myself, I'm a 4th year doctoral candidate in Experimental Psychology with an accepted Master's from a regional college in ...
11 votes
2 answers
804 views

Using another professor's slides for my course

I teach economics at an Indian University and recently came across some good publicly available lecture slides by another professor (US R1 University). I would like to share the slides with my ...
-2 votes
2 answers
429 views

How do professors and teachers develop critical thinking? [closed]

I'm in medical school and I am always puzzled by professors and teachers, specifically Sal from Khan Academy, due to how they can deeply understand the subjects and can understand anything. It's like ...
17 votes
8 answers
7k views

Made a joke in poor taste without thinking in front of students. Is there anything I can do to salvage myself?

I am currently a full-time instructor at a SLAC and am teaching a two intro sections and a sports-psychology section. In my sports-psychology class today, I noticed that one of the emergency windows ...
7 votes
2 answers
634 views

Technique for teaching "unlearning"?

How should one go about trying to teach students to "unlearn" a previous skill/principle they believe is correct but is actually wrong? Hypothetically speaking as a really basic situation, if your ...
13 votes
4 answers
2k views

Tips to organize LaTeX presentations for a semester

I am giving my first course this fall and, as a LaTeX enthusiast, plan to prepare my slides in LaTeX for all the usual reasons. For those of you who also do this, I wonder what resources you use to ...
37 votes
5 answers
15k views

How to reply to students' emails that show anger about their mark?

I always find myself in a difficult situation on the rage of students who are upset about their marks they just received. I feel it is kind of difficult to reply to students' emails that sound very ...
0 votes
1 answer
192 views

Interviewing Questions on Teaching

I've got an interview for tenure-track teaching jobs at an R1 and liberal arts college in the US. As part of the application, they've seen a cover letter, CV, teaching statement, 3 syllabi, and ...
2 votes
2 answers
449 views

What did teachers write on before the invention of the chalkboard?

I read that the chalkboard was invented in the 19th century in the UK. What did teachers write on before the invention of the chalkboard?
4 votes
0 answers
88 views

Department head has requested I lower student grades [duplicate]

I’ve been teaching a 4th year business elective for the past 8-years. Grades for my class generally range from about 57% - 94%, with the average at 86%. This current teaching year, the chair of my ...
2 votes
1 answer
387 views

Could my visiting instructor position be terminated due to low course reviews? Full time instructor position is not going well at all

I'm a fourth year doctoral student in Applied Experimental Psychology who earned a Master's prior to enrolling in my program (which my Ph.D program accepted on full). Long story short, my funding ran ...
2 votes
2 answers
362 views

How do I identify and deal with waste-of-time assignments?

I'm a college student with an interest in tutoring and eventually teaching. I spend a lot of time in class watching my classmates get confused and thinking of better ways to teach the material; I ...
0 votes
1 answer
168 views

How do I tell the SLAC where I am visiting that I would like to not teach next semester? [duplicate]

I'm a fourth year student in Experimental Psychology who is dealing with major, unresolved mental health issues and major problems fulfilling my basic responsibilities. I'm finding myself under-...
20 votes
4 answers
5k views

Tutoring Unfamiliar Material

Context: I've been tutoring in software development for the better part of this year. I've been a hobbyist and student software engineer for the last 3 years and I have decent experience in a few ...
10 votes
4 answers
8k views

Would it be frowned upon for a person to hold two full time online teaching positions?

I currently hold a full time teaching position, and recently accepted another full time teaching position at another university. Is there any reason I can't teach for both schools since the workload ...
19 votes
6 answers
8k views

How to not feel guilty when reporting possible misconduct during exam/coursework as a teacher?

I am teaching a small class in my university. This is my first time, and as I am still a PhD student and the university was missing a teacher, I ended being selected to present it. It is a programming ...

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