Here is a situation that I dealt with while teaching a chemistry lab at UVic. I will outline the scenario without telling you how I dealt with it to hopefully generate some other ideas on how this situation could be resolved.
I was teaching a second year chemistry lab structured in such a way that I collected the lab reports from the previous week at the start of class, explained the next experiment to them and then let them all work. After collecting the lab reports and delivering the pre-lab talk, I began to circulate around the room to help the students. As I normally would do, I left the stack of lab reports (arranged alphabetically) at the front of the room on my desk. About 10 minutes later I wandered up to the front of the classroom and noticed that the lab report stack looked suspiciously smaller! It turned out that 5 lab reports (in a class of 15) were stolen from right under my nose!!! Needless to say I was quite angry and frustrated and felt that this was a serious sign of lack of respect.
Obviously the dynamics in a university lab class and high school are different, so lets imagine that this was a high school. Again, without me telling you my response to this (I will post it later), what would you have done?
3 comments:
It's definitely a tricky situation!...My first reaction would be wondering why they did that? The only explanation I can think of is that one student didn't want to hand out his report and he stole several to make it less conspicuous. So, first thing, I would take the names of the five reports that were stolen. Probably the guilty student is among them.
Second, I would address the class and explain:"Guys, we have a problem...There is supposed to be trust between us...If you are not ready to hand out your report, go and see me instead of making it worse by breaking other rules...bla bla bla". I would hand back the reports that I have without grading them and finally devise a system to make the next hand out more secure like taking them directly from the students and putting them immediately in my bag.
What a crazy situation! I think I would be a little flabbergasted!
Here's what I would do: I would take attendance so that I would know who was there, and I would also ask each student privately whether or not they had handed in a lab report that week. After determining who's reports had gone missing, I would advise those students (in private again), and see if they had an electronic copy of their lab report that they could resubmit. I would definitely report the issue to the senior lab instructor/coordinator, and also discuss with them what to do (especially if someone didn't have an electronic copy of their report to resubmit). Wow... can't believe you went through that!
I definitely agree with the idea that someone stole the reports because he (or she) didn't want to hand theirs in, or had already handed it in and wanted to fix some things and so stole a whole bunch. At first I was so shocked that someone would undermine me like that and then I got REALLY angry. I am not one to yell and will quite eagerly do whatever I can to avoid confrontation. But in this situation I did yell and it was loud. I told everyone to stop what they are doing and sit down. I then told them (very loudly) that someone had stolen some reports and that I was incredibly disappointed and shocked that someone disrespected me so much to do that. Since I was teaching only one section of about 5 of the same class I went to the senior instructor who also came in and yelled at them. In the end we never found out who did it, but I was very careful while marking the labs to look for duplicates or identical sentences etc. In a high school this would have to be dealt with differently of course since I don't want to go running to admin to deal with my problem. I would first of all not leave students work out on the desk and I would probably tell them that no one is getting a mark until the reports are returned. Likely, one of the other students would have seen what happened and would tell me. At that point the situation could be dealt with individually with the guilty student.
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