To My College Professors,
Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Half the time, I email you with these words as an earnest way to be proper and professional in an email. I proceed to ask you questions, because I sure as hell don’t know what I’m doing right or wrong. You see, we college students already have enough weight on our shoulders, and you just like to push us further. Yes, we are in college, and we should be capable of being pushed to make sure that we succeed in our majors. I don’t mind a little bit of a challenge, because I know it makes me a better student.
You’re forgetting that we too have lives outside of school. We too get stressed out to the point that some of us have mental breakdowns from the overload of work in our minds. Some of us take four other courses or more. We may be college students, earning a degree in whatever field we choose, but we are also human beings. We have faults and struggles in our lives that may just be as important as school. I have a family and my own problems that I deal with every day. I can’t add more hours in the day, which is the sole reason why I lose sleep. I stay up studying and getting my work done like most college students.
My “favorite” thing about what you college professors do is that you either don’t answer our emails, you take too long to grade our work or you don’t show up on time. We spend a lot of money, or we take out loans, to gain an education that will (maybe) benefit us when we graduate. How are we supposed to do well if half the time we don’t know what we're doing? I’m not talking about laziness, but I have seen the lack of student-teacher communication, when a student needs it most.
Most of us end up with college debt after we graduate, and we don’t always get a job immediately after. So why are we spending the amount of money that leaves us in debt if we never learned anything in a course that we took all semester? I have seen college professors take months to grade one assignment. How do we know what we can improve on if we don’t even get feedback?
I’m not saying all of this to completely put down teachers, but I have seen my friends go through the same problem. Good professors are the ones who will take more time trying to get each student to reach the goal. I’m an education major, so I know the time I need to put in to make sure that my students learn a concept in class. It’s hard, but I know that I want to help them in any way I can.
There’s a difference between the teacher that gives a load of homework and a teacher that will take more time on one concept to get the students to better understand. Like I said, I’m not complaining about the amount of work necessarily, but rather the high expectations that professors have for their students, when they don’t seem to help at all. It’s important to challenge us, but how can we meet those goals when we have yet to understand the material you have given us?
I ask that you think of us as human beings and students trying to do our best. Some of us are trying to get a good education. We want to succeed and gain knowledge related to our field. In order for us to change the world one small step at a time, we need to excel at what we do.
Thank you,
Your Hard-working, Stressed Student
