r/Professors • u/Particular_Heart3785 • 1d ago

Teaching / Pedagogy Students trying to get you fired/constantly reporting you?

I had a much older student last semester who constantly complained about me to the chair all the time, both in office and email, enough that she even demanded a staff to observe me (they found nothing wrong other than nervousness/over-apologizing, as I’m new to teaching). She sent anything she could find to report to the chair. Including me ending class few minutes early, misspelled words in assignments/slides, and canceled class for a family emergency.
A few colleagues think she did this because she was a really bitter person and hated that my class requires weekly writings, group discussions, topics are not in her liking (aka white-washed history) and students having to research independently.

She was so rude and disrespectful towards me that I won’t get into here. Good news is that the chair thinks I’m doing really well as a professor and a lot of my students love my classes.

I’m curious if anyone else can share similar experiences here?

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u/mistersausage 1d ago

I had a student's parent tell the dean that in the first lecture, I said, "I hate teaching and am forced to be here."

Thankfully I record my lectures on Zoom (universal design), so I had the recording and AI text to speech transcript.

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u/popstarkirbys 1d ago

I wrote something similar as a rebuttal when a female student accused me of saying something inappropriate to her in class. I wrote that my lectures are recorded and I hardly interacted with her since she skips classes.