Perplexed and confused as usual by my students

I'm still in dissertation purgatory, waiting for my Chair to respond with feedback to my concept paper. Even a response to my email asking for feedback would be a step in the right direction. What am I doing wrong (besides not asking my advisor for a new Chair)?

On the plus side, I have time to do stuff around the shack. Clean the cat box. Shake the litter out of the rugs. Organize my envelopes (I have so many sizes, yellowed with age—Who sends mail anymore?). Read some trash paranormal romances. Lay around and eat bonbons. Write in this blog. La la la.

Because of this lengthening delay in receiving feedback from my Chair, I'm in a constant state of panic. Mostly I keep it tamped down to a slow boil. Sometimes, though, it comes out sideways, in the form of nastiness toward others. I always feel really bad after I say something I shouldn't have. But it would be better if the nastiness had never happened. In my defense, it's not like I'm criticizing their choice of footwear, not that nasty. More like general snippyness, cattiness, and snottiness. (I think those are real words.) I have my reasons (malcontentedness combined with roiling panic), but I admit, it's no excuse for being snippy, catty, or snotty.

This constant low-grade panic is especially noticeable in my level of tolerance toward keyboarding, keyboarders, and my students in general. I'm to the point where teaching keyboarding is like scraping all ten fingernails on a dirty chalkboard. I have no patience with keyboarders who argue with me about where the fingers go. (I'll tell you where the fingers go! Finger this!) And I am seriously fed up with students who check their engrade score every five minutes. I love engrade, but it's the bane of my keyboarding existence sometimes.

In a discussion of the dual role of the student in the "business" of higher education, Meirovich and Romar (2006) used the terms customer and grade-seeker. The authors weren't using the terms in a negative sense, but more to simply describe the roles of the student in juxtaposition to the roles of instructors as service suppliers and retention-seekers. I use the term grade-seeker in a strictly negative sense to describe students who check their engrade scores multiple times a day, who ask questions like, "What do I have to do to get a C in your class?", who take all five absences as part of their attendance strategy, and who rarely if ever check the syllabus to find out what lesson they should be on this week.

Am I sounding snippy? What can I say. I'm trying not to panic.

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Source:

Meirovich, G., & Romar, E. J. (2006). The difficulty in implementing TQM in higher education instruction: The duality of instructor/student roles. Quality Assurance in Education, 14(4), 324-337. DOI: 10.1108/09684880610703938