Home > Insight

Teachers toe a subpar line
By Jennifer Lucas
jlucas6@mscd.edu

Part-time faculty at state colleges have the ability to confuse me. Some teachers really seem to care if their students learn. They’ll reply right away to e-mails asking for help and give all the help that they can in class.

Other teachers seem not to care at all if their students do well. They don’t answer e-mails in a timely matter and act like it’s a bother when a student approaches them with any sort of problem. This baffles me. Why do they bother to teach?

Everyone knows the pay given to part-time teachers is subpar. Is it a matter of prestige to say that they taught at a college? I don’t know how prestige could factor in if the students don’t learn anything or appreciate the class.

Although I am only a student, I have taught as a teacher’s assistant. Sometimes the teachers I worked with were overwhelmed with their many classes, and I ended up teaching labs. My favorite part about teaching was not the pay, but seeing in students’ faces that they had finally grasped the concept I was trying to explain. Sometimes it took more than one explanation, and sometimes they got it right away, but it was a gratifying feeling when they understood it.

I don’t see what these apathetic teachers get out of teaching. If a student is unhappy about the class and communicates this to the teacher, the teacher should work with the student to fix the problem. Unfortunately, some teachers don’t seem to understand this.

I have had classes with some of these apathetic teachers, and it makes me feel defeated when they won’t help with problems.

How can it be gratifying to let down students? Granted, some students stay quiet. The teacher may not know that students have a problem with the class. Perhaps some students are afraid of the repercussions for standing up to someone who may seem superior to them, especially when the teacher has full control of student grades and many peers in his or her department, who may remember which students were creating problems.

I will be forever grateful for the teachers who cared, part-time or full-time, who taught me not what to think but how to think, and those who taught me how to figure out the answers to problems.

And I will remain perplexed by the teachers who were physically there in the classroom but didn’t give a damn whether their students learned or not.