Horrible Habits of Professors

Simplistic · Mar 30, 2017

Theres nothing you can really do now except just to go with the flow and deal with it. In the future, use a teacher rating site to prevent this from happening again.

shan_elle · Mar 30, 2017

I've been blessed with some really good professors throughout my prerequisites, but this isn't the case with my nutrition professor. For starters, she has cancelled class 3 times already this semester, and we had a snow day once. This is made really bad since we only meet on Fridays anyways. Then, she hasn't graded hardly any of our work. We've had about 6 assignments so far, and only 2 of them have been graded. I'm still waiting on a grade for an assignment we did in February! We have a really thick textbook with a huge overload of information, too. I don't really mind this except for the fact that we are only tested on about 30% of the content. How do you guys deal with professors who run your blood pressure up?

I understand why you're frustrated with the situation, but ultimately it's your education and you need to take responsibility/control over it. If she cancels class, spend the hours you would've spent in class reading the textbook, watching related YouTube videos, or form a study group with classmates. Sure, next time you could use a teacher rating site to try and prevent this from happening again, but in the nursing program (at least in ours) you don't get to hand select your instructors. You will need to learn to be flexible and do some self-teaching.

In nursing school the textbooks are even thicker and the amount of information you need to know is even more. I would suggest figuring out how to navigate this while you're still completing pre-reqs, which aren't as demanding as nursing school. When I have a lot of content to cover and I'm not sure what I'll be tested on I start with gaining a solid knowledge of all the main topics/ideas. Once I feel I have a good handle on that I will dive deeper and deeper into the details of each topic, as time allows.

TofuSandwich, ASN, RN · Mar 30, 2017

I had a professor once that graded NOTHING until after class was over for the semester (it was a 5 week accelerated winter course). It was an online class and he also didn't answer any messages either until after the class ended, when the answers were no longer of any use of course. There was no communication or teaching in the class whatsoever, every single week we just read x number of chapters and wrote a few papers and took a test. He didn't even log into the class at all while it was in session, we got all the assignments at the beginning and just submitted them as they became due. I just gritted my teeth and dealt with it and left him a scathing review on ratemyprofessor once my grade posted. I got an A, and a lesson to never ever take him again.

**NICU Guy, BSN, RN** · Mar 31, 2017

The problem is that many of the online "professors" are adjunct faculty. They "teach" a few online classes for extra money while working on their Masters/PHD. They are too busy with their real job and classes that they are taking to deal with the classes that they are being paid to teach.

TofuSandwich, ASN, RN · Mar 31, 2017

The problem is that many of the online "professors" are adjunct faculty. They "teach" a few online classes for extra money while working on their Masters/PHD. They are too busy with their real job and classes that they are taking to deal with the classes that they are being paid to teach.

I wouldn't write off adjuncts so quickly. Every great online course I've had has been with an adjunct. All my mediocre ones were with full time professors, and my absolutely AWFUL experience (see above) was with a professor as well. I find that the professors seem to teach a bunch of in person courses, and then toss a few online classes on top of that and they quickly become an afterthought for them, possibly because the students aren't "in their face" twice a week asking for their grades. There's less accountability for them in the online courses, because they can just ignore an email a lot more easily than ignoring someone standing in front of them.

MiladyMalarkey, ASN, BSN · Apr 1, 2017

The situation stinks. I get it, you want to know how you're doing in class & actually have class when you show up for it. The only thing I can say is just consider your professors are people, life happens for them too, you don't know what's going on in your nutrition instructor's personal life. If she canceled classes it may be she was sick or had an emergency or what have you, it likely wasn't just to play hooky-still possible, but probably not likely. I'm sure she has a boss she has to answer to as well about her absences. In the meantime here's to hoping things improve.