Myth 1: “I’m bothering the professor if I ask for help.”

A derivation of this myth is “Professors are too busy to help me.” Yes, we are busy people and, contrary to popular opinion, we do stuff outside the classroom, like research, meetings, service, meetings, advising, meetings and other meetings about meetings, we are never “bothered” by a real request for help.

The truth is, we see it as an investment for a couple reasons. First, we help you improve the specific assignment that troubles you. That makes life easier on us when we have to grade the assignment and we get to read a quality piece. Professors can fly through quality work, quickly sing your praise and then move on to the next thing, which is probably a meeting. Work that is lousy takes forever and a day to get through, as we correct every glitch along the way and ponder if we should chuck it all and become a long-haul truck driver.

Second, it’s an investment in future assignments. If we help you fix the mistakes now, chances are, you’ll avoid making those mistakes in the future. That means we won’t have to muddle through the grading process each time we read your work. It’s that “Teach a person to fish” approach to giving you an education.

Finally, it gives us a chance to make adjustments for the class. If you’re having a problem, you probably aren’t the only one having it. Thus, if you bring it to our attention, we’ll probably find a way to help you fix the problem and then share what we figured out together with the rest of the class. That improves everyone’s experience and makes life easier on us when we have to grade your papers as well.

In short, you’re not a bother if you have a real concern, so bring it to us and we’ll help you get through it.

Myth 2: “Professors like failing students.”

Versions of this include “This guy/gal gets off on being a harsh grader” or “Nobody gets an A in Professor Smith’s class.”

We don’t like failing students and we probably aren’t that thrilled when we have to give out even worse grades like a “D+.” (Why do we have a D+ as a grade option? Who thought it was a great idea to dress up a D? I can’t imagine going home with one of these to have my old man yell, “You got a D?!?!?” and having me respond, “No, Dad, it’s a D PLUS!”)

Contrary to popular opinion, professors don’t get cash bonuses or a set of steak knives if we meet some quota for failing students. In fact, it takes far more work to fail a student than it does to pass one. Think about that the next time you bomb out of a class.

Professors typically have two main gripes about student and grades:

1. Some students just want the A or the B or whatever but don’t care about the knowledge, information or learning to go along with it.
2. Some students figure A’s are like Halloween candy: As long as they show up and go through the motions, they should get it.

If you approach the professor for help by saying, “I need to get an A (or  a B or a C or whatever), so how can I do that?” what the professor hears is, “Look, I really don’t care about anything going on in this class other than what I need to get out of it grade-wise so that I can move on to something much more important than you and whatever crap is happening in your class.” However, if you ask for help with the idea of better understanding the material so that you avoid failure or a grade too low to keep your scholarship or whatever, we’re totally in your corner.

I believe that, for the most part, grades will result from the effort the students put in, so failure takes an awful lot in my class. In other courses, I’m sure the failure rate is higher because the stakes are higher. My wife, Amy, has taken nursing courses where people get smoked every semester with F after F after F, which always seems to me to be Draconian. That said, the stakes are much higher if you have a nurse who doesn’t know the material perfectly. The last thing I want to hear before being sedated in advance of a surgery is a nurse saying, “I think I gave him the right dosage, but I had a real easy grader in Med-Surgery…”

Myth 3: “Professors don’t care.”

This drives us nuts because so many of us do care. It also smacks of that whiny, self-indulgent, woe-is-me crap that everyone has said at a bar, three drinks after getting the break up call from our significant other. (Versions of that include, “Women are evil, man…” and “Men totally suck…”) Sweeping generalities mean to camouflage personal shortcomings don’t get the job done, and professors know that. We STILL say this stuff in other aspects of our lives. (“The reviewers who rejected my article don’t know squat about this field!” or “The sabbatical committee is playing favorites!” or “Chancellors are evil, man…”)

We all have our own version of this myth and it distracts us all from the ability to get stuff done. Early in my career, whenever I would get a rejection from a journal, I’d crumple up the letter up, throw it in a corner of my office, dump a bunch of stuff on top of it, curse and then start looking for jobs in the automotive mechanic sector. A day later, I’d pick it out of the stuff, look at it, crumple it back up and throw it in a different corner. By Day Four, I’d read through the comments, figure out which ones were legit, which ones were crap and get cracking on a revision. Eventually, I learned to trim that grieving process substantially…

There are always people who are a-holes for no good reason, who like pulling the wings off of flies and who just don’t care about you. In professor-speak, we call them “Reviewer 2.” However, the majority of your professors want you to be successful if for no other reason than they get to brag about you when you do well. (I’m still yakking about students who are at “major media outlets” that I taught introductory writing to, as if my “noun-verb” lesson was the only thing that helped them succeed in life.) They also want to see you have that moment where the light goes on for you and you “get it.”

That’s the ultimate payoff for most of us.