I have just finished manually transcribing some 180 POLI2P47 "Rights Across Borders" marks from the Google spreadsheets I prepare for myself and my TAs to the clunky database that the Brock University Registrar's Office uses. When I first came to Brock I could ask the Department secretary to do my photocopying, type my letters, and take my telephone messages. But now we have two administrative assistants and an administrative staff as undergraduate officer instead and we do those things ourselves. I don't mind. Time change. We don't have chalk to write with anymore either (asthma hazard, evidently). And we don't fill out marks sheets in pen and send to the Registrar to be input into a mainframe by their staff any longer. I do find the data entry part of my duties rather tedious, but I do it slowly and carefully, double checking and cross checking, to avoid giving a student the wrong grade. So it takes me a while to complete but this mindless task, but it does give me a chance to think.
Looking over the spreadsheets one can see that some students only rarely attend seminars and still manage to pass the Course. Similarly, when I deliver the POLI2P47 lectures, I can also see from the banks of empty seats in the lecture hall, that should be filled to capacity if they were all there, that some students rarely, if ever, attend the 2 hour starting at 8 a.m. lectures. The timing is not by my choice, we have a "Scheduling Office" for that, but as students have choice over what classes they enroll in, it does call the question why chose an 8 a.m. lecture if you are not a "morning person"? Many of those non-lecture attending students passed too. I suppose they have a Facebook group or Google the topics of my lectures given on the Course outline (available on-line, of course) to get by (??) Despite the use of plagiarism testing software, I can't help but suspect that some of the term papers submitted to me (electronically now, of course) were not written by the student who submitted them. As the term paper assignment accounts for 35% of the final grade, a strong paper would go a long way to a pass.
I suppose that it is the province of grizzled older professors to complain that "things aren't what they used to be." But 20 odd years ago when I started teaching at Brock, I would have a single class of about 15 with all of them in the same seminar discussion group led by me. They spent long hours researching in the University Library. They wrote their term papers themselves by hand. They would send me a note of explanation if they had to miss a class. They came to my office hours regularly for a cup of tea and a chat, often about personal matters or other topics unconnected to the course. After the exam I would buy them pitchers of beer in the student pub to celebrate. When it came time to write letters of reference for grad study or to help them land a job, I had lots of things to say about them. None of this is the case today.
I can't help but lament that the quality of education I can offer students now is much debased compared to what it was when I was a young professor just starting out.
