Dear Tech faculty,
While most of you professors are doing a great job, a few of your faculty colleagues could use some improvement in specific areas. Based upon complaints from our staff, we respectfully offer the following suggestions: Realize that students have other classes and jobs, do not wait until a week before to hand out study guides for tests and realize that not every student will learn the same way.
We are slowly coming out of a pandemic that caused a devastating loss of life and has devastated the nation’s economy. Many students lost their jobs or were laid off, and with Tech fees rising in prices, the cost of books and living expenses, more students are struggling to cover the cost of college.
There are 24 hours in a day. According to the CDC, adults need seven or more hours of sleep, which drops the number of hours down to 17 hours. If a student works part-time four hours (minimum) in a day, that number goes to 13 hours. If the student takes five classes in one day, each class is an hour-long, the number of hours in a day drops down to eight hours left in the day. If the student studies and does homework for an hour in each of those classes. That will leave a student with three hours left of their day. There are three hours left to eat, socialize, and be a person with a life outside of college and work.
However, there are a few professors who seem to wonder why students struggle with mental health, drop classes, or seem stressed all the time. Instead of realizing that students are overworked, they pile on the stress by waiting until the last minute to tell us about deadlines, or not giving us the rubric until after it is due, or giving us a study guide on Monday and having the test on Friday.
The most important topic our staff has an issue with is that some professors appear unaware that every student learns differently. We have faculty who are experts in their chosen field. But there are also some of those professors who seem to have challenges in effectively passing along that knowledge to students. We encourage those faculty to take advantage of professional development opportunities on campus to improve their classroom instruction.
If some improvements can be made in the areas noted by our staff, we believe class attendance would improve, along with overall retention and graduation rates.
Also, please keep in mind that we know teaching through the pandemic has created unusual challenges for you, as well. We appreciate your dedication and commitment to all of us. We really do. To those of you already doing a good job, thank you. To those of you to whom these suggestions are directed, we hope that you take our suggestions to heart when moving forward.
Respectfully,
The Arka Tech
