To professors everywhere,
Don't forget your students are young, dumb, and broke.
I think that many of your hearts become hardened while being a professor. Students with excuses, coworkers, and bosses who take advantage of you or just plain ignore you. All while trying to figure out how to grade over 100 papers, tell a TA what to do, and try and have your own life in the process. (I'm exhausted just typing about it).
But, as students, our lives are hard too. We have three or more classes in a week that each demand the same workload or each more than the last. Reading chapters of textbooks, worrying about exams, trying to find the motivation to show up to class when you make us feel stupid for not having the understanding in one quarter that you have after obtaining a Ph.D. Add our class loads to the jobs we have to maintain in order to survive and feed ourselves. Please do not forget, we make sacrifices for your classes.
For those of us who had to move away from home, we miss so much to be able to attend your classes as many days as we can. For everyone else, they might even show up to class sick because you won't accept an email that says, "I'm sick and I can't make it to class today," and penalize them for having to miss.
Lighten up.
When Arbitrarily, with all of this, social life, family, school, work, and we need to take a day off for a three day weekend, or we need to take a day to calm down from the hustle of college life, please understand. Mental illness is prominent in college students, if you are so tough on a student for taking a day off that they continue to overload their brain, their work slips.
We completely lose our motivation, you were in our shoes once, so why is it so hard for you to cut us a little bit of slack?
I am having at least three anxiety attacks in a single week, my class workload is ridiculous and I'm only taking three classes, but two of them have so much reading. I don't have enough time to work, finish my homework on time, and do all the reading you require... With the reasoning I've heard too many times to count, "Well this is just as much reading if not less than your other classes. This shouldn't be too difficult."
False. That makes it harder. I am not the only one.
Life is hard no matter how old you are. Please do not forget that your students are trying. They're trying to pass your class and get on with their lives as do you when the quarter/semester is up. Sometimes with our busy lives, we can't keep up, just put yourself in our shoes and ask yourself, "Am I contributing to the strife in this students life?" If you think you are or you're trying to rationalize why you're not, start thinking about ways to improve, for you and us.
