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 think a lot of people are missing the point. The entire reason I commented on this post was to say that people need to stop making sweeping generalizations about one group. The example I gave was to explain why I thought those generalizations do not apply. Sure some students don't work as hard as they should and some professors are terrible. But it always seems like its one side against the other. As I have said several times in my posts, this was one specific instructor.
Teaching in college uses flipped classroom. this means you have to read your material before you come to class. I use passport questions for a student to enter the classroom. The question is based on something they did not understand in their reading and we will go over these issues. Nursing is not STEM education where you learn and memorize long enough to take an exam and then forget it. What you learn in nursing you must remember and move it into your long term memory, this is not done by lecture alone. Not all teachers are meant to teach didactic, but are excellent clinical instructors. Brand new teachers need a few semesters to learn their role, just like any new employee. Scenarios that are realistic are a good way to learn and when you add chaos theory into the mix it provides real life experiences not theoretical issues, that the same treatment will get the sme results from each individual. Nursing is a lifelong learning career. It can not be all done in school. If you learn where to find your resources then you have learned a great deal.
OR...it doesn't matter about "fault"....what matters is you graduate nursing school and successfully pass the NCLEX. Right? Is that not the actual goal? Worrying about fault will slow you from completing the actual task at hand. It isn't the professors concern that you are working two jobs on the side and they do not base their teaching around your extra jobs. You have to navigate WHAT the instructor expects you to do. That is it. If you cannot complete the task while working two jobs then you either 1. QUIT one of the jobs.,2. QUT nursing school, or 3. Figure out a way to navigate the obstacle. Pretty simple. Whether you like it or not. When things don't go exactly the way you want it that does not mean the instructor is bad. Address your concerns, but also focus on what they expect you to do and DO IT.
Green, did you miss the part where the prof DIDN''rT lecture? told personal stories in class?[
No. I specifically noted that I was in complete agreement about lecturers who don't stick to the topic at hand, and that it was good that she was removed from this setting.
Many nurses accept positions for jobs that they are not qualified to effectively facilitate. There are a number of nurses who also lack the experience to achieve excellence. Some are even hired without a outstanding previous track record of assisting student at reaching academic goals.
There are two types of instructors that are hired to teach, highly qualified and minimumally qualified. One is a formal nurse educator with a masters or doctoral degree. This professional is highly qualified to create, organize, and share the theory or practice of nursing skills.
The other is a bacholar degree level instructor who is unofficially qualified. Their practice should be formally overseen by a masters level individual who specializes in the art of teaching theory and practice of nursing skills.
The selection of the actual instructors are based on the budget of the instution, acreditation of the program, and minimum state board of nursing standards. Ultimately teachers should be supervised and evaluated based on the goal to facilitae student acheivement.
Specializes in Psychiatry, Community, Nurse Manager, hospice.
That was really a bad lecturer.
But I don't think that's the norm.
I just finished my pre nursing classes, and I did find that there were a lot of students who blamed the instructors when they didn't do the work. It was better in the higher level courses that had prerequisites.
I think it is just human nature to blame others when we fail. I also have met and seen a lot of great people who I think would be great nurses who just can't hack the academics, and that makes me a little sad. When really smart people blame the instructor, I might get a little annoyed, because they could work harder, spend more time on the material and do better. But when someone of average or slightly below average intelligence blames the instructor, I just listen sympathetically.
I never fully appreciated how lucky I was to have the wits to do basically everything that I wanted to do in life, until I went back to school and met so many people in Community College who really didn't have the intelligence or academic ability to make their dreams come true.
Let me tell you about my journey and the school I attended, Ivy Tech in Richmond Indiana.
When I was trying to decide on a career path, I wasn't sure as to whether I could cope with the realities of nursing; basically the gory stuff. Even after I decided to apply to nursing school, I wasn't totally sure that I would not back out before it started, if I were accepted. Well, I got accepted and decided to stick it out.
My school divided the RN students into two groups where each group had different teachers.
*First semester, my group was lucky enough to have the only two teachers who actually taught the material; the other group wasn't so lucky.
*Second semester, my group got the other teachers. They only read power points, would not answer questions over material, did not teach at all. I had med-surg teacher who could not do a dosage calculation without making a phone call to another teacher; she didn't know how to manipulate the fraction to convert from pounds to kilograms. And she was a practicing NP.
Sadly, my pharmacology teacher told us that the school was setting us up for failure, and then she quit. By that time, I too, had put up with enough stupidity and decided to finish my nursing degree at another campus where teachers actually taught the material.
MY POINTS:
1. Please quit using the phrase "critically think" as if nobody but nurses has ever used critical thinking. Critical thinking is a part of everyday life and everybody does it. Nursing teachers like to throw that phrase around to make themselves feel superior.
2. When students attend nursing school, they deserve to be taught by experts with teaching ability, not just someone with a degree.
3. I expect students to study the material, ask questions, and come to class. They do not however need to waste time in a classroom where teachers only read powerpoints to them. And if they are going to ask questions, then the faculty better be willing and knowledgeable enough to answer them.
4. I expect the teachers to let the students know over which material they will be tested. I had teachers that would not give us a clue as to what we needed to know for a test. Then the test came and there would be questions pertaining to lengthy tables or information given under pictures.
5. Yes there is a weeding-out mentality in nursing school.
What other reason would there be for not informing the students of the material they need to master for a test. The entry requirements should suffice for weeding out unprepared students; if they have all the prerequisites, they should be good to go. If unprepared students are still getting accepted, then maybe the schools need to rethink their admission requirements.
6. Paths, other than traditional schools, should exist for students to earn the right to sit for the nclex to become RNs. Considering all of the negative comments on this site about poor nursing schools and poor teachers, there needs to be better alternatives to attaining RN status. The way it sits right now is you have to graduate from an accredited nursing school, no matter how bad the school is, to get your ATT. My first nursing school, Ivy Tech Richmond Indiana, was accredited and it was a joke.
The only thing that should matter is your mastery of the material and your clinical skills.
The internet has made it possible to bring together the best teachers on the entire planet; no longer do students need to put up with teachers who can't teach. It is no longer necessary to spend thousands of dollars to go to a brick-and-mortar school to get an education when you can sit at home and learn via youtube for free.
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've had a few of those kinds of teachers but not in my actual college classes. One was a 5 day class on audiometry taught in a town 3 hours from here and the teacher spent the first 3 days talking about herself. I was fortunate that a good friend lives in that town but other nurses had to get a hotel room. The last day she handed out what I thought was an evaluation but instead was a list of some of the concepts. This class cost $500. I wrote a letter complaining about the waste of time and money and I wrote to the state organization which had her name/class on their website and told them the instructor was not efficient. Last time I checked, her name/class was gone.
Another class was a 6 week EMT course I took as a new nurse. This was taught by a good friend but she simply read our assignment straight from the book. That was very boring. I loved it the two times we had a guest speaker!
I passed both classes because I took it upon myself to study the information. I agree that it is our responsibility to be pro-active here.
Still and all . . . . . it seems like common sense would tell you that your shouldn't stand in front of the class telling personal stories about your life the majority of the time or simply read from the book.
I think it's really interesting that some people comment on these topics saying buckle down and study and just get what needs to be done done. I've done all of that I even have a job but if your child went to a school that was subpar with a teacher that didn't do what she was getting paid to do, your responses wouldn't be the same. So let's just have that marinate for a bit.
The argument of I was never given x,y or z but I did what I had to do does not suffice. We are paying to be educated. There is a level of excellence that we expect from nursing whether it is a clinician or an instructor. These people who fail to do their jobs represent us as a profession. So yes again students need to take an active role in their education to ensure their success but I want my hard earned dollars to go to someone qualified and interested in teaching. It's as simple as that.
Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.
I think it's really interesting that some people comment on these topics saying buckle down and study and just get what needs to be done done. I've done all of that I even have a job but if your child went to a school that was subpar with a teacher that didn't do what she was getting paid to do, your responses wouldn't be the same. So let's just have that marinate for a bit.
There's a huge difference between childhood education and adult education. This site has a chart that shows some of the differences. Also take into account the fact that childhood education is mandatory whereas post-secondary is optional. Yes, there are bad instructors, but not everything can be blamed on that. Adult students need to take responsibility for their own learning.
In my experience it's rarely the instructor's fault.
I've taken many classes in my life but I've had fewer than a handful of subpar professors. On the other hand, I have met countless number of irresponsible or entitled students who just expect everything handed to them on a silver platter.
I think that both sides are correct here. There are students who complain too much because they want to be able to pass while doing a bare minimum of studying, and there are instructors who don't think that their students are capable of any critical thought and therefore will never give them the benefit of the doubt.
I have always been a good student. I was a second-degree nursing student and graduated Summa Cum Laude. My GPA was 3.97. I got an A- in one class, and I missed an A in that class by literally one question on one exam. And yes, I do blame the instructor for that course. Here are the reasons why:
1) No one got an A in the class. If no one got an A in your course, there is a problem.
2) On all exams, there were several questions where the answer directly contradicted what she had said in class AND ALSO contradicted what the textbook said. Keep in mind that this was a psych course, so many of the questions were very much dependent on nursing judgment. When students tried to question the answers chosen for these questions, she would not harbor any complaints and would blatantly deny having said something else previously and would say, 'The book is wrong.' This made it almost impossible to study for her course and was extremely frustrating. She also frequently insulted the mentally ill, which made me lose respect for her as a professor.
Did I complain? I did not, and I had several reasons for it. First of all, several other students (who I respected a lot) did complain without success. I did not anticipate more success. Further, I felt that it would be a good growing experience for me to let go of my focus on my GPA. I think plenty of us know that nurses can be perfectionists, and I fall into that category. I believe the issue was with her, but I also felt that it would be wise for me to learn to move on from my frustration and to accept that sometimes one cannot be perfect/some things are outside of my control. I am happy with this decision and I do think that it made me a wise person with more ability to let go of my anger towards perceiving unfairness, although I can't deny I sometimes regret not achieving the 4.0 that I set out to achieve.
In the end, I think this professor had issues that she needed to address. I am very passionate about mental health in this country and really wanted to master therapeutic communication in her course, but I think this was made more difficult to do due to the constant contradictions in her lectures.
As a student, I do have responsibilities: I should read before class. I should attend class, take notes, and pay attention. I should study for exams, and take an active interest in the material. I feel that I did all of these things in this professor's course. However, PROFESSORS ALSO HAVE RESPONSIBILITIES: they should work to ensure that they are presenting factual, unbiased, and relevant material to their students; they should provide up-to-date materials, and they should listen to questions asked by students with respect and attempt to answer them clearly. I do not feel that this professor did this, and I don't think she pretended to.
It is definitely not always the professors fault. I had a great med-surg teacher who people did not like largely (I think) because there was so much material in the class that it made things difficult. However, sometimes it really is the teacher's fault.
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futurecnm18
49 Posts
I think a lot of people are missing the point. The entire reason I commented on this post was to say that people need to stop making sweeping generalizations about one group. The example I gave was to explain why I thought those generalizations do not apply. Sure some students don't work as hard as they should and some professors are terrible. But it always seems like its one side against the other. As I have said several times in my posts, this was one specific instructor.
There is no need to be rude or condescending.