I've been scanning posts in the nursing student section for awhile to get a "pulse point" Check about what's on students' minds. I'm a longtime educator (11+) years at a major university and a longer time nurse (29 years). I'm also an acute care NP with a PhD. I understand that this site has forums for networking, venting, problem solving and support for students of various levels. I find it utterly fascinating and disturbing about how much of the frustration is displaced to instructors when students' achievements don't match their personal expectations.
Timefor a few realities about faculty:
1. It's hard to recruit and retain good clinicians to teach when the academic side pays much less than the corporate side.
2. We don't set out to trick or "weed" anyone out. We need to know that students have achieved a minimal mastery level of key concepts.
3. There is an expectation that students who want to be nurses will do the work in terms of preparation, reading, asking questions, and coming to class.
4. We expect you to be a thinker and apply the information to different contexts. It is not unreasonable to expect you to pull prior content from other courses through to the patient in front of you right now. Patients will die and/or have bad outcomes if you can't minimally apply key content to different situations and critically think.
i think I'm done lurking here. I wish all the students the best of luck going forward!
I wouldn't have been half as upset about the professor had she not mandated that we show up to every class and then refuse to teach the material. So valuable time that I could have spent learning the material on my own, which is what I did anyway, was spent listening to ridiculous anecdotal stories and being chastised anytime we had a question related to our nursing material.
I wouldn't have been half as upset about the professor had she not mandated that we show up to every class and then refuse to teach the material. So valuable time that I could have spent learning the material on my own, which is what I did anyway, was spent listening to ridiculous anecdotal stories and being chastised anytime we had a question related to our nursing material.
I had a few college instructors like that and I just used class time to study. It's not a personal attack from the instructor when she's bad at her job, or a reason to do poorly. It just means you have to work harder.
There is every reason to be upset when you get a bad instructor. But, most people who have gone to more than one college or have been students as long as I have don't let a poor instructor bother them. As long as the instructor isn't personally sabotaging you, you should be able to work around them.
One of my clinical instructors left for the summer to enjoy her vacation and told her students that they were on their own. For the life of me, I never figured that one out. She must have paid off each preceptor to take responsibility for her job. When she was around, she was a rotten peach, but at least a rotten peach is there​.
One of my clinical instructors left for the summer to enjoy her vacation and told her students that they were on their own. For the life of me, I never figured that one out. She must have paid off each preceptor to take responsibility for her job. When she was around, she was a rotten peach, but at least a rotten peach is there​.
I've been scanning posts in the nursing student section for awhile to get a "pulse point" Check about what's on students' minds. I'm a longtime educator (11+) years at a major university and a longer time nurse (29 years). I'm also an acute care NP with a PhD. I understand that this site has forums for networking, venting, problem solving and support for students of various levels. I find it utterly fascinating and disturbing about how much of the frustration is displaced to instructors when students' achievements don't match their personal expectations.
Timefor a few realities about faculty:
1. It's hard to recruit and retain good clinicians to teach when the academic side pays much less than the corporate side.
2. We don't set out to trick or "weed" anyone out. We need to know that students have achieved a minimal mastery level of key concepts.
3. There is an expectation that students who want to be nurses will do the work in terms of preparation, reading, asking questions, and coming to class.
4. We expect you to be a thinker and apply the information to different contexts. It is not unreasonable to expect you to pull prior content from other courses through to the patient in front of you right now. Patients will die and/or have bad outcomes if you can't minimally apply key content to different situations and critically think.
i think I'm done lurking here. I wish all the students the best of luck going forward!
I do believe that there are poor instructors, just as there are poor students. For the most part, though, I do believe that an inordinate amount of blame is placed on the instructor. My viewpoint is that the onus to succeed is placed on each STUDENT, and it is the student's responsibility to make that happen, whatever it takes. Are there instances where an instructor fails to meet the standard needed to teach? Sure. But I think that there are far more instances where a student fails to meet the standard to pass.
Frequently there are new grads who will post of their frustrations with a preceptor who isn't "doing enough", in the opinion of the new grad. The new grad feels that there SHOULD be more hand-holding, more instruction even, than is reasonably expected by anyone else at that point. It is then that we see the fruits of over-entitlement coming to bear. And they don't taste good
Students need to take the reins and do whatever is required to learn and master the material presented. New grads need to do the same, with whatever resources they are provided, and no one should be seeking to blame anyone any further than their own skins for the most part. Heck, I've even seen posts blaming the NCLEX for "being harder than it has to be" and preventing them from passing (and therefore becoming the awesome nurses they just know they are, deep down)!
I am amazed at the amount of hand holding students expect in nursing school.
OKAY!
Now there are times where you get a professor/instructor that probably should have steered far far away from the classroom but somehow they ended up teaching and they are not that great at it. It happens. When this happened to me I use to blame the instructor a lot and I never performed well in that particular class because it was always someone else fault.
Then I had an epiphany. I started to ask myself "but what can I do better" when I encountered such instructors and I managed to perform fairly decent in the class when I started being proactive and seeking the information/knowledge on my own.
Now currently back in school and a lot of people in one of my nursing classes are failing or on the brink of failing and all they do is complain. If there was an question on the test that the instructor didn't cover. It's the instructors fault (but yet all the material is in the book). If they didn't understand something during lecture and missed in in the test. It's the instructors fault. Everything is the instructors fault.
One day a few of us were sitting around and they were discussing the final exam and some were saying if they don't score at least a 90 on the test they will fail the class and they were all complaining about the instructor and the exams and blah blah blah..... so eventually I got tired of hearing it so I asked one basic question I said:
It sounds like you all are deflecting your poor performance in the class on the instructor but let me ask you "What could YOU have done better to receive a better outcome" ..... The entire table got quiet....
I used to think maybe that this was a typical immature mentality for the younger students - the instructor is the authority figure so by default they have to rail against them. But, whatever, a lot of the people that do this aren't that young and should know better. I don't know why it is verboten to suggest to a student that they learn something on their own. That's great that a lot of people have time to go to the office hours, print out the powerpoint slides, attend the pre-exam review, go to the post-exam review and all that. But, for those of us who don't have the time to do so, we gotta do it all by ourselves (god, how much more I would get done if I didn't have to spend the time driving to and from the lecture, let alone if attendance to the lectures wasn't mandatory -- the things I could do!). The instructor is never to blame if I don't do well -- I know it if I didn't study well enough. It has to be me, all by myself if it has to be.
I am a new grad and rarely ever comment on topics like this but I felt compelled to. Sometimes it is the instructors fault. I worked 2 jobs, one full time and one part time while I was in nursing school and I did well until I had a professor who refused to provide blue prints for exams, notes for her lectures, go over exams once they were administered or lecture for that matter. We spent the mandatory classroom hours listening to her anecdotes about her childhood and were forced to learn everything on our own at home. Half her class failed from the previous semester and the semester after ours she was forced to leave classroom lectures and was only retained as a clinical professor but our semester was not given the same opportunity.
I agree that sometimes students aren't willing to put in the work but for my class who was made up of adult students with families who were working full time, to spend our classroom hours listening to stories about the beach = a bad professor.
I had an instructor one semester who had a family emergency come up. They cancelled class more than we had it. We never got power points, test outlines, or anything else for that matter. When that instructor was there, they told a lot of stories as well.
You know what? We sucked it up and taught ourselves. If we had questions and couldn't get in touch with this person, we would go to our clinical instructors for clarification. Every person in our class passed that semester except one. We were all adult students with full time jobs and families. We out on our big girl and boy panties, sucked it up, and did what had to do instead of making excuse for our grades.
Did you get to collect the instructor's salary? that would have been the fair outcome.
I had an instructor one semester who had a family emergency come up. They cancelled class more than we had it. We never got power points, test outlines, or anything else for that matter. When that instructor was there, they told a lot of stories as well.
You know what? We sucked it up and taught ourselves. If we had questions and couldn't get in touch with this person, we would go to our clinical instructors for clarification. Every person in our class passed that semester except one. We were all adult students with full time jobs and families. We out on our big girl and boy panties, sucked it up, and did what had to do instead of making excuse for our grades.
I had a semester like that; with snow and ice canceling classes as well (ice and Southerners are not a good combination). I referred to that semester as the "Winter of my discontent made glorious spring by the sun of only 2 semesters left to go". Thank goodness that was over a year ago.
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futurecnm18
49 Posts
I wouldn't have been half as upset about the professor had she not mandated that we show up to every class and then refuse to teach the material. So valuable time that I could have spent learning the material on my own, which is what I did anyway, was spent listening to ridiculous anecdotal stories and being chastised anytime we had a question related to our nursing material.