Thread by @studentactivism

I've been thinking about this a lot since yesterday, and this is what really galls me—rooting for your students to fail, and creating conditions to maximize the chances that they'll fail.

https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1472734602993283077

(Context: Professor went viral for leaving students directions to hidden $50 in his syllabus. None of them found it, but it turned out the phrasing and location of the "directions" made it near impossible for even a conscientious student to collect.)

https://twitter.com/TheTattooedProf/status/1472603185122627584

Every professor has a choice to make all the time: You're a mentor and colleague to your students, working for their success, or you're their adversary, trying to trip them up, block their way, slow them down.

Sometimes (maybe, arguably) a professor has to have an adversarial relationship with your students, but in my view "mentor and colleague" should always be your default mode. Always.

If you leave directions to $50 in your syllabus, you should be rooting for someone to find it, checking every before every class to see if someone did, announcing to the whole class with glee and gusto if they do.

If they find that $50, they did what you wanted them to do! And without expectation of reward! And you rewarded them unexpectedly, for conscientiousness and gumption! That's a huge win!

And if nobody finds it, you tell the story later as an object lesson, right? And the lesson is "I'm on your side, hoping for you to succeed," not "I walk into this classroom thinking you're a jerk and I walk out mocking you."

It's absolutely not anything I'd ever do, for a bunch of reasons. But I can see it being an essentially benign Weird Old Professor thing.

But that's not what this prof did. He stuck the "directions" in a boilerplate section of the syllabus THAT HE DIDN'T ACTUALLY CARE WHETHER THE STUDENTS READ, and then phrased them in the weirdest, looks-like-a-mistakest way possible. And then crowed when they failed.

He just screwed with them, for his amusement and the amusement of others not in the classroom.

And that's really gross.

And this is such an excellent point: If you see an out of place reference to a locker and a combination-lock number in a syllabus, and it looks like it's there by mistake, why would you go open that locker? Even if you were curious about it?

https://twitter.com/MaryMarionberry/status/1472970071639150592