College Life

Posts about college life, students, professors, and grades.

How to avoid flunking your online class

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hi everyone:

A student emailed me today, in a panic about failing the writing class I am teaching at a major online college. Here is what I told her about writing an assignment:

Please read all instructions carefully before you begin to write. Please write the document that the instructions call for. Look at each assignment as a separate and distinct document and do not mix them up.

Write one of them at a time, making sure that you have followed the instructions to the last degree before you submit them.  Ask questions as they come up, after you have read the instructions through numerous times.

Do not wait until the last minute to write an assignment because the panic mode clicks in and you cannot think clearly.

I hope this helps you as you navigate the courses you are taking.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Contacting your college professor made easy

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

If you are taking a college course and need to get in contact with your professor outside of class, there are a few tips that will be very helpful:

First, check the syllabus for the professor’s preferred contact method. Does she or he like to be emailed? If so, what email address does the prof want you to use? With the many platforms used by colleges throughout the world, sometimes a platform will allow direct contact with the professor but other times it won’t.

For example, one of my colleges uses Blackboard but the institution did not pay for direct email access. Students must type in my email address directly in order to reach me. Many times, they misspell my first or last name and I never get the email. Another of my colleges uses Desire to Learn, which mixes up the emails between my classes and I have no idea which class you are taking when I check my messages.

When emailing the professor, please tell us which class you are taking and which assignment you are asking about. It takes up precious time if you write something like “I don’t understand what you were talking about in class today.” I then have to email you back and ask which of the six classes I am teaching that you are asking about and what assignment is muddy or unclear. That might take up as much as 24 to 48 hours, depending on when you emailed me, for you to get the answer you need.

On the other hand, if you tell me “Dr. Parmelee, this is Joe Smith from your 10 am Monday/Wednesday COM 1010 class. I need more information on the Informative speech Works Cited formatting,” then I have a real good idea what you need to know.

I do not check my email at night. That is family time. The best time to email me is about noon, Monday through Saturday, because early afternoon is usually when I am online. Check with your individual professors to see when the best time to reach him or her is.

Hope this helps!

Dr. Sheri

What to do when you ask for a favor from the prof

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

With the end of the semester looming for some of my students, and mid-terms just over for others, it seemed appropriate to make some suggestions regarding asking for favors.

One thing: do not ask for repeated favors. Do not use the circular argument that “you did it last time, so you should do this for me this time.” You may have gotten grace from the instructor the first time you asked but that is no reason to expect it every week.

Do not try to strong arm the professor just because you are bigger than he or she is. The instructor is the boss and you aren’t, even if you work full time for boatloads of money and are used to being in charge. The classroom is one place where you are not running the show. A little humility is a great thing and you need to learn to be flexible.

I keep track of how many favors you ask for in a given semester. If there is a question about possibly curving your final grade, I will look in my grade book and see how many exceptions to rules you requested.

One semester, I had an online student who had excuses for every week of class. She was sick, her kids were ill, her Internet failed, her power went out. Every week, it was something new. When she finally showed up for class on week six of an eight week course, ready to excuse her way through that week, I called her to task. She couldn’t make up any work that was later than two weeks late, and everything she turned in late would be marked down 20%. She dropped the course.

Finally, when an instructor makes an exception for you, be sure to thank him or her. I can not count the number of times I curved a final grade upward for a student who was soooo close to the next higher grade and who had shown remarkable progress during the term, only to have the student walk out of the classroom without a word. I am human; I like to be thanked. It also demonstrates that your parents taught you to be well-mannered.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

 

Basic writing tips for college students

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

Today’s blog is on writing for college. Having taught college for 11 years, there are some tips I would like to share with you.

First, please use commas with introductory words and phrases. An example of an introductory word is seen in my previous sentence. If you are looking for an introductory phrase, I just gave you one in this sentence. These phrases can make your writing interesting but please do not use too many or it becomes tedious. Introductory phrases tell your reader to breathe as he or she reads your sentences and too many breaths lead to hyperventilation!

Next, use commas with the second-to-the-last item in a list of things. Here is an example: birds, planes, and automobiles. Let me give you an example of why this comma is so important. Let’s say that your parents have three million dollars and they want to leave one million to each of their three kids. If they write “we want to leave one million dollars to child A, child B, and child C,” then each child gets one million dollars. But if they say “we want to leave one million dollars to child A, child B and child C, then child A gets a million and B and C split a million. (I guess the dog gets the remaining million.)

Finally for today, please read your documents out loud before you submit them. It is amazing what you may catch. You may find that the sentences that you thought were so lovely do not make sense at all. You may locate sentence fragments, typos, and subject/verb disagreement. If you can catch them, the professor won’t find them for you, and this will result in a higher grade.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Showing up for class on time versus showing up late

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

Today’s blog discusses the early-bird approach to  class attendance versus the always-tardy look at school.

Why should you show up early? If this is one of your major classes, you have the ear of your professor before the other students arrive. Based on some classes I have taken, this means that you get to talk with him or her before the other 500 students get there. Even if you are attending a community college that only has 25 students per class, this still gives you the chance to get your questions answered personally.

You never know what nugget of information you will learn in these before-the-class chats. One of my friends is an actor who is currently attending college in New York. By showing up early for every class, he has had the opportunity to learn from his instructors who he needs to know to get that all-important first Broadway audition.

You also get to know the teacher better, and he or she gets the opportunity to learn who you are. This can be a very good thing, especially if you hope to get into graduate school someday, or if you need a letter of recommendation for a job.

Having students turn up before class begins is also an encouragement to the professor. It lets us know that you enjoy our class. It tells us that you are serious about your education and that you are willing to take responsibility for it. This can lead us to give you the benefit of the doubt if there is ever a problem.

What about always showing up late? Well, that tells us that you have poor time management skills, which means we probably won’t be giving you a letter of recommendation at any time in the future.

It also means that you don’t care enough about what we are saying to come to our lectures on time. I have had students who missed my lectures and then asked me what they missed. Don’t do that. I am not going to repeat my lecture for you privately.

People who turn up tardy irritate the professor, miss announcements, do not hear explanations and clarifications of assignments, and lose points off of their final GPA in all of my classes. I take attendance (or am marking you present on my roster) at the beginning of class; in my courses, two tardy appearances equal one absence and one absence removes 1 point from your final GPA. I have had students who earned an A but got a C because of their attendance behaviors.

People who show up late frequently do not have their work done. I love that old saying “failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

I hope you have found these tips handy. Best of luck as you navigate college!

Dr. Sheri

Interfacing with your college professor

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

This blog is about interacting with your online or face-to-face college professor in a way that will save you both a lot of time.

When you email the prof, make sure that you state clearly in which one of his or her classes you are enrolled. We waste valuable time either looking up your enrollment or asking you via return email which course you are taking.

Next, make sure you think about your email before you send it. I had a senior in college ask me recently what a Table of Contents was. The individual had to put it in the final project for the course and apparently never noticed that there was a Table of Contents in every college textbook she had used. (They also appear in magazines- had she really never read People?)

Understand that some professors do not reply to your reply emails. They think it saves them time, which it does, but what that means to you is that you should not ask any question you want answered in your reply to his or her reply. Start a new email chain or say in your first email that you will have additional questions, depending on the answer you receive from this email.

Make sure that you communicate with the professor in the manner which he or she requested. For example, at one of the colleges where I teach, I ask students to only email me via the college’s regular email system. We also have a means of communicating via the class interface, but the platform we are using is new to the college and there are some bugs that need to be worked out. Therefore, I only want to hear from students via regular email.

I have a rule that I will respond to students within 24 hours. If they do not hear from me, it is because I did not get the email. Not all professors are like that, but I believe in replying asap. Even if I do not know something, I will still reply and tell you that I am working on your request. Check the spelling of the professor’s name and make sure that you are using the correct email address before you get mad that you never got a reply.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

College idea of the day: Writing Centers

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

College writing centers can be a wonderful asset to the beginning college student. When I began college as a nontraditional (e.i. “older”) student, I had been out of the classroom for many, many years. I hadn’t written an essay since high school. Even though I was considered a pretty decent writer back then, I had forgotten many of the basics of essay writing.

One of my teaching assistants had the presence of mind to suggest I try the writing center (which is an asset that most colleges I have come across have available today) after giving me a D on the first paper I wrote for her. This formerly-A student in writing classes was totally shocked. After I picked my pride up off the floor, I hightailed it over for the first-available appointment. What a godsend that was!

Although writing centers will not write the paper for you, they will give you guidance as to where you are going wrong. You may need some remedial help in the form of a class or two, but they can work on your form and sentence structure that can help in class right now.

Do you struggle with subject/verb agreement, passive versus active voice, or semi-colon use? They can help. When do you hyphenate a word? Are you using a word that sounds like another word but is wrong (“are” for “our,” “there” for “their,” and the like). Go to the writing center. This is an asset worth talking about! Good luck!

Best,

Dr. Sheri

P.S. My grades went from a D to an A in a single semester- this strategy works!

 

More college ideas: taking online classes

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

Taking an online course can be daunting. Perhaps you are not great with computers. Maybe you have the great vanishing professor (who rarely shows up for class and takes forever to answer your frantic emails).

One thing is for sure: online classes take a great deal of personal discipline. Here are some tips for getting through them successfully.

First, set aside every day to check on your class. Yes, every day. This is because your instructor may publish an announcement that directly impacts the assignment you are doing. Perhaps the instructor has gotten a boatload of questions about something related to the assignment. Maybe the class has just been re-done and the Powers That Be are still working out the bugs. You need to be completely up-to-date with this.

Check the announcement page of your class page. Then check under “Ask the Professor” to see if someone else in the course has a question for which you might appreciate knowing the answer.

Next, look over the syllabus carefully and highlight on your calendar when all the Discussion Board postings are due (both the initial thread and the replies). How many classmates are you supposed to reply to? How long does your reply have to be? (Note: I have a student right now who has completely ignored the length requirements for discussion board postings and replies. As a result, she is failing that aspect of the course when she could be acing it.)

Special note: do not feel the need to reply to every classmate’s posting. That can drive your professor to distraction, since we get notified if there is a single posting…..now multiply that  by the number of students in the class. If there are 25 students (this is pretty normal) and they are each required to post an original thread and two replies per topic, that is 75 postings for the instructor to respond to. If each student replies to 5 other students, the number goes up very quickly. Please, be kind!

Make sure that you look through the Content section of your class page, the assignments section, the discussion board, and any other section that your school has. Note all assignments and look over the instructions carefully. With my online writing classes, one assignment builds on the one before it. If you skip even one assignment, your whole grade is in jeopardy.

Be kind to your classmates as you reply to their postings. Do not say “great post” to someone who has done less than the bare minimum but do not be rude either. Telling him or her “wow, you really messed up, dude” will not help. Make suggestions if you wish to guide the other student, but make sure that you are not trying to take the class away from the professor.

Finally, set aside time to do the assignments. I once had an entire class of folks who waited until the night before an assignment was due to begin it. They would send frantic emails and messages for clarification in the middle of the night as they scurried to get things done. Guess what? I was asleep.  By the time I saw their emails, the assignment was already late. I have been there, checking in every day, for the entire week, but not on Saturday night at 11 pm, Sunday at 1 am, or…..well, you get the idea.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

 

The care and treatment of college professors

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

While I am on a roll here (having spent the last two weeks talking about college), let’s talk about how to approach your professor to ask a question about your grades.

Let’s say that you got a grade that you didn’t like- it happens pretty often, though maybe not with you. The first thing you should not do is YELL at your professor. No, we are not here to flunk as many students as possible, we are here to help you learn the subject we are teaching.

intimidation is a bad thing and will not endear you to your instructor. Do not send a nasty email to your professor and do not find out his or her boss’ phone number and demand he or she be fired. If you request that the instructor call you, do not save the number to use in the future to call the instructor in the middle of the night to say that your WiFi is not working. We are not coming over to fix it.

How should you talk to the instructor? Respect is vital to a successful outcome. Ask your professor if you can schedule some time to discuss why you got the grade you did. Perhaps your teacher can talk to you right then, though you have to understand that teachers frequently instruct back-to-back classes and may not be available until later that day or week.  Unless this is the end of the term, you may have to wait a couple of days.

When you do get the opportunity to talk with the professor, ask for clarification on what the assignment’s shortcomings were that resulted in the grade. BE POLITE, though do not be Eddie Haskell polite (this is a cultural reference to Leave It To Beaver, a 1960s television show).

Explain your side of the story as calmly as possible, keeping in mind that your professor may have explained the assignment in full on the day that you skipped class or were tardy. If that is the case, it is not the teacher’s fault that you messed up.

I have been known to re-visit a grade or two in my time, but I never ever adjust a grade if someone is mean or nasty.  And, yes, I do keep a record in my files on how a student behaves in class. You do not want me to write “witch on a broom” next to your name or “liar, liar, pants on fire,” either. If I write either of those comments or anything else similar on my personal file on your class, you will not ever be able to get a letter of recommendation from me for that scholarship or job you want. Food for thought.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

How to be well organized in college

Posted on by Sheri Dean Parmelee

Hello everyone:

I speak to you today as someone who did two majors at the same time while also home schooling, being active in my church,  and running a small business. How did I keep things straight? By using a calendar the way in which I am about to share.

Purchase an academic calendar at an office supply company- get one that has an entire month at a glance. As soon as you get your syllabi from your various professors, enter all assignments (including reading and labs) in your calendar. Use a different color ink for each class. When you have a major assignment due, highlight it in yellow ink.

Next, enter all family and work obligations in the calendar in a different color ink. Your family needs to have some time set aside for them, so you do need to put them in your calendar, as well.

While some people insist that their cellphone will tell them when something is due, this method never crashes, is never out of cellphone range, and does not require electricity. Yes, it is old-fashioned, but, if you look at the calendar on a daily basis, you will never be caught off guard by an assignment. I would check each assignment off as I did it, being careful not to obscure the assignment itself, in case I needed to refer back to it.

This method got me through 5 years of undergraduate work, 1 1/2 years of master’s degree efforts, and five years for a Ph.D.  I only missed one assignment once- and that is because I left the assignment off of my calendar. I now teach for three colleges and guess how I keep track of which week each college is in and what is due from my students? Right, my friend, the calendar!

Best,

Dr. Sheri