For weeks now, I’ve been reading a lively discussion consisting of many posts from academic bloggers who are instructors and teaching assistants, and who have been wrestling with their diligently unprepared, undermotivated, stupid, misguided, misinformed, strenuously inattentive, plagiaristic, not-quite-getting-the-point students. Been there, done that. I still have, in a box somewhere, the Most Egregious Biology Final Exam Ever Composed — Ever, No Really. Some day when I feel nostalgic and have cleaned a path to the box, I will trot out the infamous MEBFEECENR, and no doubt will discover that the student in question now bespews the Congressional Record with his abhorrent and mind-warping utterances.

As I said, I’ve been reading a lot of these lately. I am not the first to ask, in passing, whether this inherent stupidity of students, over the many centuries it’s been a subject of conversation among pedagogues, might be taken to imply something other than Teaching is a Thankless Job, Pearls Before Swine, and that one about the sow’s ear. That whole Pig Cycle. Something, I dunno, maybe about doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting the results to turn out different eventually? What do they call that again? I forget.

At any rate, there is also a substantial crowd of academic bloggers who are students, who in turn complain about their classes. I now count myself among those. On the whole we tend to complain about foolish lectures, our instructors’ disregard of the basic principles of pedagogy, the occasional fundamental violations of students’ (or more often advisees’) rights, stuff like that there. Though because as a group we’re young and foolish and inexperienced, this tends to come across a lot like, “can you believe it?! Well, I never!!”

I flatter myself that I am very much not young, nor more foolish than should be expected. And I find this semester that just as there are a heart-rending class of “floundering” students who really, truly deserve instructors’ help and pity, and who provoke their own genre of troubled head-shaking and sighs among the blogging community of instructors, there is an equivalent class of floundering instructors.

Nobody seems to be talking about them.

What do you do when a professor has such a poor model of his students’ mental state that he imagines they enjoy the material as presented, understand the material, have mastered the material? When he asks, “You know X, right?” and the students’ answer means they have heard of it, and he assumes they mean they know it. What do you do when an instructor has so diligently built his entire class’s structure upon a body of patently false, wrong-headed received wisdom, that he ends up teaching things that are not only useless, but unintentionally misleading to the students? What do you when the position of trusted authority held by that professor — and the inevitable degree of ignorance among his students — ensures not only the students’ acceptance of this material as being correct, but makes them suspect the real stuff, out in the world, must be wrong? Or worse, leaves them utterly ignorant of anything beyond the sad, misshapen glimpse they have been provided?

What do you do when the professor’s student evaluations will surely fail to capture these facts, since the students as a rule know no better than what they’ve been told, and because the class itself is in a state of multi-year flux and who knows, maybe next year it will be different and better? What do you do when the professor is not yet tenured, with the vision that the might be? When the class might be seen by himself, his administrative superiors, and even the students as a resounding success?

What do you do when you have sat down with the instructor and expressed your concerns, explicitly, and he responds that you are probably right, but that his hands are tied, and he hasn’t the institutional support or time to run a lab (which might help), and that it’s just an introductory class and so how much damage can he really be doing? And that thus there is nothing to be done. (But, as an aside, that he doesn’t see how the material you have pointed out is wrong could possibly be wrong.)

And, worst, what do you do when the truth may be no floundering is going on at all? When the entire situation is no more than a reasonable reflection of the widely-held social norms and expected quality and depth of a modern, high-speed upper-tier university education?

Easy answer: You bitch about it in your blog.

Harder answer: You chalk it up to the status quo. You let him fall into the place that’s been so carefully prepared for him by generations of academic practitioners before. You watch him enter a position in which the only damage he can do is no worse than the damage his peers are doing already.

Scant solace lies down either path.