Thursday, April 11, 2013

Trolling the Undergrads

 [This post is the result of a couple of conversations I had with my office mates. The funniest parts were, I'm sure, someone else's idea. Also, I don't plan on doing anything mean to my students. Don't take my funding away.]

What do grad students do for fun? Drink beer, mostly. But what do we do to pass the time when we should be reading papers, working on research and exercises  (the kind in math books), and figuring out what we are going to teach the next day? We plot our revenge.

Undergraduates are the enemy. That may seem harsh. After all, we were undergraduates once. And we were annoying as hell. Their very presence at the university forces us to devote 20 hours a week to calculus 2 classes. Yeah, yeah, I know, without them to teach I wouldn't have funding. That's true. Fine. But that ruins the joke.

If a graduate student has finished all of their work (or all the work they have the motivation to do) and have to stick around their office for office hours, no undergrad will show. But undergrads can sense when graduate students are busy. That is when they will show up early to office hours, and try to stay late. They will email their TA asking to schedule extra office hours because the regularly scheduled hours interfere with their intramural beer pong tournament, but only if the TA has a project deadline approaching. They will ask the same three questions in class three days in a row. Their TA will answer the question, three times, and do three different practice problems to illustrate the point. Undergraduates will then get the question identical to these examples completely wrong on their quiz. Undergraduates will tell you that f(x)=sin(x) is an 8th degree polynomial.

So what can be  done? How can we, in the graduate student community strike back? The professors all have different strategies. Nontenured professors will enthusiastically and cheerfully make the class as difficult as possible. They will be sure to say things like "this is an easy problem" as often as possible. An undergraduate who walks into their office will see his innocent question about Euler's Method evolve into a discussion of the Lax equivalence theorem. Intimidated students are much more likely to seek help from their TAs. Tenured professors don't care, and they make sure the undergraduates know it.

Graduate students don't quite have those options. We are beholden to our student reviews. But maybe we can get creative.

I am a Michigan native, with a pretty clear upper midwestern accent. I sound like I should be speaking at a board meeting or selling Chryslers. But I was born in Louisville, KY, and I do not pronounce it "Louis-ville". My point is, I can pull of a pretty good southern drawl if I want to. Or, even better, a hillbilly twang. For whatever reason, hillbillies are not seen as the most intelligent of folk. I'm not sure why, but I think most people would be surprised to encounter Appalachian hill-folk in the math department of a prestigious university. You see where I'm going with this. That first day of class, the undergraduates are going to be a little confused about why they are being taught calculus by Jed Clampett. I could even sport one those big biker moustaches. Or maybe just stop washing my beard.

That would confuse and surprise. But perhaps it would be better just to play on the fears the undergraduates already have. What does an undergrad imagine when they think of a graduate student in the math department? Well, they probably imagine someone born and raised in Korea. I can't pull that one off. But if they thought of a white person, they thought of some combination of the guy from The 40 Year Old Virgin, Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, and Rain Man. Why not give them exactly that? I could walk into class on the first day, recite a prepared lecture to the blackboard, making sure to scribble my notes. Mutter to myself when I mess something up. Ignore them as they try to get my attention and ask questions. Finally, at the end of the class, when all of the students completely confused and frustrated, I could turn around, surprised, and ask "how long have you all been here?" before hurrying out of the room. I bet half would drop right then.

Professors get to intimidate, and get away with it. It's not so easy for TAs. But perhaps there are ways. The best trick a TA could pull, I think, would require a supporting cast. The first day of calculus 2, none of the students know each other. It wouldn't be hard to bring along a couple of graduate students to be plants in the class. Furthermore, anything we teach in introductory calculus can be discussed with much more rigour and depth. The plan is to teach integration? Well, we'd better start with measure theory,  define topologies and sigma-algebras, and then prove the Riesz representation theorem. Here's where the partners in the class come in to play. Before any students get confused, or brave, enough to stop and ask what the hell is going on, have the grad students pretending to be freshman remark offhandedly to their neighbours things like "oh man, I learned this crap last year in high school", and "oh, professor [name a prof that didn't teach calc 1 last semester] went over this in calc 1". Have them ask a few questions about complex functions, and correct you when you "forget" to show that a function is measurable. Panicked freshman will be running around campus telling everyone that they had no idea what they were getting into when they came to college. Older students will look at them like they are crazy.

The undergrads will be around forever. They will always be frustrating to teach, and take up too much time. But perhaps there are some ways to get back at them. And if those don't work, there's always the old standby: schedule your office hours for Monday and Friday morning.