If you could have an open, honest conversation with your instructors - classroom or clinical - what would you tell them?
Here are some of my thoughts:
(1) Please make sure that everyone follows the rules & meets the requirements. Don't let some students make their own rules while others work hard to follow every rule! While there are always times exceptions must be made, the same students are often getting away with everything.
(2) When I'm in clinical, please just step back and allow me to do the task I have to do. Don't stand over me asking questions! Your running commentary makes me a nervous wreck. As long as I'm doing my task correctly, observe & keep quiet! If I do something wrong, please explain it to me and give my another opportunity to prove I can do it.
(3) Please ensure your expectations are clear and consistant. If you want our weekly patient write-ups a certain way, tell us. Don't change your expectations without letting us know!! The bottom line: most of us are working so hard to do our best! Tell us what you want from us and we'll always do what we can to get a good grade!
-- I told you, dear Director, that the instructors are not teaching well, the lectures are hours of trite reading of Powerpoint summaries of chapters, and that, repeatedly, the test questions have been inappropriate and/or poorly written for the content of the required reading and the lecture content. I hear that YOU personally disqualified 8 of the 50 questions on exam 7 as inappropriate. Maybe you should also go back and examine the TWO earlier exams that 75% to 80% of the class flunked. You may have made an example of me and drummed me out of your school, but I got the last laugh, because now you are finally seeing that what I said was absolutely true, and not just another whining student's tirades. ALWAYS believe the adults, Dear. We came to learn, not cheat. And to get a high quality education.
-- I don't recommend your RN program to anyone. And neither does anyone else in the class. They are only soldering on for Year 2 because your curriculum is completely upside-down and scrambled compared to any other nursing school in the region, and none of the Year 1 work done in your program is transferable to anyplace else. It's either try to pass your program, or go start over at the beginning, someplace else. Remember all that "customer satisfaction" that you harped about for patient care? Weel, you are in the business of selling education. And students are your customers. And you need to examine the product that you are selling to today's students, and whether or not it is a good fit for the type of student you have now. "I've taught it the same way since 1993" tells me that I have unwittingly bought an obsolete product from you. 1993 was before Internet, before computer-based training, before remote access via computer, before the scarcity of money for retraining, before high unemployment for students and parents, before so many mature adults lost their first careers and had to retrain, before you got so many single moms, before men got interested in nursing, before you had well-educated and very bright college grads applying to your program... Tailor your product to today's students, or else get out of the business.
-- Why don't all of you instructors get your heads together and tally up just how many hours of homework and reading assignments and computer work you are assigning to students, and by what deadline(s). I repeatedly told you that 18-20 hours of lecture per week and 16 hours of clinicals, plus all of that paperwork and computer sim work PLUS study for the exams just cannot be done legitimately, without cheating or shortcutting it someplace in order to carve out more time for study. 18-20 hours of lecture per week is useless to us. Just when do you expect us to study, if your lecture, clinical, computer, and paperwork time is EXACTLY what is preventing us from having time to actually STUDY??
-- STOP continually insulting your students! I got really sick and tired of hearing so many instructors blame everything on the "lazy" students "who don't take personal responsibility." I know those students. They are my classmates. They are working their tails off to try to meet the demands of your poorly designed curriculum that is sucking up all of their time with vast hours of useless talk and busywork.
-- You can't spoon feed critical thinking, but couldn't you at least spoon feed the patho and give the students the rules of thumb that every experienced doctor and nurse know exist. Adult students are smart enough to know that that there are no absolutes and that a rule will never apply 100% of the time.
.Yes, 90% of nurses are type A, 'in your face' personalities. But for those 10% that are more passive and easy going, please remember quiet doesnt = stupid. :) You'd be surprised how much the quiet ones know, because they listen more often than talk.
- you suck. your tests suck and everyone hates your class. either quit your 2nd job or stop teaching. you obviously can't do both. would it kill you to return things (quizzes, grades) on time...and will you please stop pulling test questions out of your a..s? oh -- and you aren't slick, lady. if we have a scheduled lecture for the day...? lecture. the very next time that i waste my gas driving over hill and dale to make it to class only to have your lazy behind split us up into groups for the purpose of teaching the class? i'm driving the (expletive) back home and i'll tell the director why i did it, too! if i'm going to teach myself, i prefer to do it at home....
-- I told you, dear Director, that the instructors are not teaching well, the lectures are hours of trite reading of Powerpoint summaries of chapters, and that, repeatedly, the test questions have been inappropriate and/or poorly written for the content of the required reading and the lecture content. I hear that YOU personally disqualified 8 of the 50 questions on exam 7 as inappropriate. Maybe you should also go back and examine the TWO earlier exams that 75% to 80% of the class flunked. You may have made an example of me and drummed me out of your school, but I got the last laugh, because now you are finally seeing that what I said was absolutely true, and not just another whining student's tirades. ALWAYS believe the adults, Dear. We came to learn, not cheat. And to get a high quality education.
-- I don't recommend your RN program to anyone. And neither does anyone else in the class. They are only soldering on for Year 2 because your curriculum is completely upside-down and scrambled compared to any other nursing school in the region, and none of the Year 1 work done in your program is transferable to anyplace else. It's either try to pass your program, or go start over at the beginning, someplace else. Remember all that "customer satisfaction" that you harped about for patient care? Weel, you are in the business of selling education. And students are your customers. And you need to examine the product that you are selling to today's students, and whether or not it is a good fit for the type of student you have now. "I've taught it the same way since 1993" tells me that I have unwittingly bought an obsolete product from you. 1993 was before Internet, before computer-based training, before remote access via computer, before the scarcity of money for retraining, before high unemployment for students and parents, before so many mature adults lost their first careers and had to retrain, before you got so many single moms, before men got interested in nursing, before you had well-educated and very bright college grads applying to your program... Tailor your product to today's students, or else get out of the business.
-- Why don't all of you instructors get your heads together and tally up just how many hours of homework and reading assignments and computer work you are assigning to students, and by what deadline(s). I repeatedly told you that 18-20 hours of lecture per week and 16 hours of clinicals, plus all of that paperwork and computer sim work PLUS study for the exams just cannot be done legitimately, without cheating or shortcutting it someplace in order to carve out more time for study. 18-20 hours of lecture per week is useless to us. Just when do you expect us to study, if your lecture, clinical, computer, and paperwork time is EXACTLY what is preventing us from having time to actually STUDY??
-- STOP continually insulting your students! I got really sick and tired of hearing so many instructors blame everything on the "lazy" students "who don't take personal responsibility." I know those students. They are my classmates. They are working their tails off to try to meet the demands of your poorly designed curriculum that is sucking up all of their time with vast hours of useless talk and busywork.
-- You can't spoon feed critical thinking, but couldn't you at least spoon feed the patho and give the students the rules of thumb that every experienced doctor and nurse know exist. Adult students are smart enough to know that that there are no absolutes and that a rule will never apply 100% of the time.
.Yes, 90% of nurses are type A, 'in your face' personalities. But for those 10% that are more passive and easy going, please remember quiet doesnt = stupid. :) You'd be surprised how much the quiet ones know, because they listen more often than talk.
2. How dare you give a student 100 % on participation when he showed up for 3 classes and myself 65% when I only missed 3 classes. Thanks for giving these same students 93 percent for spending 1 hour on their assignment the night before, and us 73 for spending a week on it. Learn to write a rubric, your marking is entirely subjective and unmeasurable. As well, I am sick of you playing favourites with your clinical students. I work my butt off for your class (shows on my 90% exam) and you keep lowballing me with these unfair marks.
3. Stop playing favourites with the boys.
4. Hand my project back that was given to you 2-3 months ago PLEASE
5. You really need to work on your lecture slides and organisational skills.
1. Making your tests so easy that people who didn't even read the material get the same grades as people who studied really hard is not going to make you a more popular teacher, it will just lose you respect.
2. Please prioritize our classes better. For instance, we should not have a major group assignment that is related to nursing history and takes months to complete when it is only worth 1 credit, while classes that are worth a few credits have much less work load. Especially when those classes are things like First Aid. Don't you think we should spend a little more time learning first aid than nursing history?
3. Please do not pass someone who stood back while her partner did everything because she didn't even know how to take blood pressure because she never shows up for class. You don't have to be the nice teacher.
4. If you were a nurse 30 years ago, please update your information.
5. Don't grade me down for an "important mistake" that isn't in our book or your lectures and that is old, outdated information.
6. Reading something in a book and doing it in real life are two very different things. Give us a break; we can't be perfect the very first time we do something.
7. Please don't tell us that something will not be on the test and then put it on the test.
8. Please remember that school books are expensive. Do you really need to use two different books with basically the same content in them? Do you really need to use a book that is no longer sold, of which there is only one copy in the library?
9. Please remember that, although we are motivated and want to learn the material, we also have many other classes going on at the same time, and each of them have thick books and other material to study. Telling us we have to know 300 pages out of a book, 60 pages of Powerpoint slide notes, and then added on top of that a few 40-page booklets, some whole websites and other fun stuff is a bit excessive. Your class is not the only one that is important to us, nor are you the only teacher assigning reading material for upcoming tests. There comes a point when there is not enough time to read everything and we have to focus on what is absolutely essential. It doesn't mean we're lazy.
10. You are not perfect either, so stop putting us down for not being perfect. Stop telling us how much more motivated your other classes are than us and how much better grades they get. Way to be a motivator.
11. Please do not go off on a tangent every 5 seconds with stories of how awesome of a nurse you used to be. We get it. You were way more amazing than we could ever be. Can we get to the actual class subject now?
12. When we do simulations, don't expect me to be a star actress. I'm nervous when I know I'm being watched by a video camera, and I have trouble talking to my classmate as if she is my patient. I am not an actress and the pressure of being watched, judged, and videotaped only makes things worse. Have realistic expectations and understand that the "simulation" is just that. It's not reality. My conversation with an inanimate doll does not reflect the conversation I would have in a real hospital. Nor does the conversation I have with my classmate about how his "mother" (another classmate/a doll) is sick. Come watch me when I'm with a real patient and then you can judge.
13. If you disagree with the way one of our other teachers does something, don't take it out on us when we don't do it your way. Your fighting is really immature and unprofessional and we can't be expected to remember three different teachers' different ways of doing things and do it that way when that particular teacher is watching.
14. Please learn to admit when you are wrong. Nobody is perfect, but owning up to your mistakes and trying to do better is the only way to become a better teacher.
15. Don't talk down to students when they ask you a valid question. Don't treat them like they are stupid because one teacher told them one thing and you are telling them another and they are confused. They are not questioning your almighty knowledge, they are trying to learn!
16. If we are practicing injections on each other, please take care of our safety. If we are re-using the kidney bowls that have had dirty needles in them before and my classmate rests the injection needle on the bowl completely unprotected before she is about to stick it into my skin, do not say that, "In a real situation you would have to change that needle." This is a real situation, because she is really going to inject me with that needle. I should not have to be the one to say, "Hey, seriously, though, I want you to change the needle now."
17. If you ask someone to write an essay about their personal opinion on a subject, you can't grade it as wrong because it doesn't match your opinion. It's an opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own, whether you like it or not.
18. When we panic about how much we need to know, you reassure us that these are things you pick up during years of nursing experience. That's nice. However you also expect us to know everything on the exam. Do you see a problem here?
19. Practicing something once on a doll does not mean we have learned it. It would be nice to practice a few things more than once before we are expected to be experts.
1. Making your tests so easy that people who didn't even read the material get the same grades as people who studied really hard is not going to make you a more popular teacher, it will just lose you respect.
2. Please prioritize our classes better. For instance, we should not have a major group assignment that is related to nursing history and takes months to complete when it is only worth 1 credit, while classes that are worth a few credits have much less work load. Especially when those classes are things like First Aid. Don't you think we should spend a little more time learning first aid than nursing history?
3. Please do not pass someone who stood back while her partner did everything because she didn't even know how to take blood pressure because she never shows up for class. You don't have to be the nice teacher.
4. If you were a nurse 30 years ago, please update your information.
5. Don't grade me down for an "important mistake" that isn't in our book or your lectures and that is old, outdated information.
6. Reading something in a book and doing it in real life are two very different things. Give us a break; we can't be perfect the very first time we do something.
7. Please don't tell us that something will not be on the test and then put it on the test.
8. Please remember that school books are expensive. Do you really need to use two different books with basically the same content in them? Do you really need to use a book that is no longer sold, of which there is only one copy in the library?
9. Please remember that, although we are motivated and want to learn the material, we also have many other classes going on at the same time, and each of them have thick books and other material to study. Telling us we have to know 300 pages out of a book, 60 pages of Powerpoint slide notes, and then added on top of that a few 40-page booklets, some whole websites and other fun stuff is a bit excessive. Your class is not the only one that is important to us, nor are you the only teacher assigning reading material for upcoming tests. There comes a point when there is not enough time to read everything and we have to focus on what is absolutely essential. It doesn't mean we're lazy.
10. You are not perfect either, so stop putting us down for not being perfect. Stop telling us how much more motivated your other classes are than us and how much better grades they get. Way to be a motivator.
11. Please do not go off on a tangent every 5 seconds with stories of how awesome of a nurse you used to be. We get it. You were way more amazing than we could ever be. Can we get to the actual class subject now?
12. When we do simulations, don't expect me to be a star actress. I'm nervous when I know I'm being watched by a video camera, and I have trouble talking to my classmate as if she is my patient. I am not an actress and the pressure of being watched, judged, and videotaped only makes things worse. Have realistic expectations and understand that the "simulation" is just that. It's not reality. My conversation with an inanimate doll does not reflect the conversation I would have in a real hospital. Nor does the conversation I have with my classmate about how his "mother" (another classmate/a doll) is sick. Come watch me when I'm with a real patient and then you can judge.
13. If you disagree with the way one of our other teachers does something, don't take it out on us when we don't do it your way. Your fighting is really immature and unprofessional and we can't be expected to remember three different teachers' different ways of doing things and do it that way when that particular teacher is watching.
14. Please learn to admit when you are wrong. Nobody is perfect, but owning up to your mistakes and trying to do better is the only way to become a better teacher.
15. Don't talk down to students when they ask you a valid question. Don't treat them like they are stupid because one teacher told them one thing and you are telling them another and they are confused. They are not questioning your almighty knowledge, they are trying to learn!
16. If we are practicing injections on each other, please take care of our safety. If we are re-using the kidney bowls that have had dirty needles in them before and my classmate rests the injection needle on the bowl completely unprotected before she is about to stick it into my skin, do not say that, "In a real situation you would have to change that needle." This is a real situation, because she is really going to inject me with that needle. I should not have to be the one to say, "Hey, seriously, though, I want you to change the needle now."
17. If you ask someone to write an essay about their personal opinion on a subject, you can't grade it as wrong because it doesn't match your opinion. It's an opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own, whether you like it or not.
18. When we panic about how much we need to know, you reassure us that these are things you pick up during years of nursing experience. That's nice. However you also expect us to know everything on the exam. Do you see a problem here?
19. Practicing something once on a doll does not mean we have learned it. It would be nice to practice a few things more than once before we are expected to be experts.
All of the bolded items above pertain to my program EXACTLY. Except for number 11. Our teacher's tangents are all about her father's medical issues and interestingly enough, the stories change every time she tells them... As far as number 8, we have been told numerous times to buy additional books that weren't on the official book list and then they are never cracked open.
Specializes in Critical Care, Emergency Medicine, Flight.
*stop being a biznatch...cool ur an apn, ur smart we get it. but were still learning dont cut us down bc we're not at your level yet.
**you were so tough, and made my life some what hellish, but i thank you so much. everything i learned from you, meds/patho wise will be so very useful this semester :)
**why cant u teach all my classes??!?! you were the best!!
oh & to the one who was in lab with us today
**excuse me but could you please not stand right over my shoulder huffing and puffing while u talk . you made me extremely nervous, in something i went in feeling really good about. thanks for breaking my concentration
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Streamline2010
535 Posts
-- I told you, dear Director, that the instructors are not teaching well, the lectures are hours of trite reading of Powerpoint summaries of chapters, and that, repeatedly, the test questions have been inappropriate and/or poorly written for the content of the required reading and the lecture content. I hear that YOU personally disqualified 8 of the 50 questions on exam 7 as inappropriate. Maybe you should also go back and examine the TWO earlier exams that 75% to 80% of the class flunked. You may have made an example of me and drummed me out of your school, but I got the last laugh, because now you are finally seeing that what I said was absolutely true, and not just another whining student's tirades. ALWAYS believe the adults, Dear. We came to learn, not cheat. And to get a high quality education.
-- I don't recommend your RN program to anyone. And neither does anyone else in the class. They are only soldering on for Year 2 because your curriculum is completely upside-down and scrambled compared to any other nursing school in the region, and none of the Year 1 work done in your program is transferable to anyplace else. It's either try to pass your program, or go start over at the beginning, someplace else. Remember all that "customer satisfaction" that you harped about for patient care? Weel, you are in the business of selling education. And students are your customers. And you need to examine the product that you are selling to today's students, and whether or not it is a good fit for the type of student you have now. "I've taught it the same way since 1993" tells me that I have unwittingly bought an obsolete product from you. 1993 was before Internet, before computer-based training, before remote access via computer, before the scarcity of money for retraining, before high unemployment for students and parents, before so many mature adults lost their first careers and had to retrain, before you got so many single moms, before men got interested in nursing, before you had well-educated and very bright college grads applying to your program... Tailor your product to today's students, or else get out of the business.
-- Why don't all of you instructors get your heads together and tally up just how many hours of homework and reading assignments and computer work you are assigning to students, and by what deadline(s). I repeatedly told you that 18-20 hours of lecture per week and 16 hours of clinicals, plus all of that paperwork and computer sim work PLUS study for the exams just cannot be done legitimately, without cheating or shortcutting it someplace in order to carve out more time for study. 18-20 hours of lecture per week is useless to us. Just when do you expect us to study, if your lecture, clinical, computer, and paperwork time is EXACTLY what is preventing us from having time to actually STUDY??
-- STOP continually insulting your students! I got really sick and tired of hearing so many instructors blame everything on the "lazy" students "who don't take personal responsibility." I know those students. They are my classmates. They are working their tails off to try to meet the demands of your poorly designed curriculum that is sucking up all of their time with vast hours of useless talk and busywork.
-- You can't spoon feed critical thinking, but couldn't you at least spoon feed the patho and give the students the rules of thumb that every experienced doctor and nurse know exist. Adult students are smart enough to know that that there are no absolutes and that a rule will never apply 100% of the time.