How much can and should a teacher do for his/her students?

I would pull aside the one kid who had asked you for help and ask him what is going on. As for the others, I would just reiterate that you are available to meet with them and restate your office hours, but leave it up to them to initiate a meeting. It sounds like you have extended yourself a great deal already. However, if you feel you are talking above their heads or that they can’t understand the work, you could get in to a general discussion with the whole class about that.

How do they learn if you don’t let them fail? It sounds like you have gone above and beyond with your grading techniques (the liberal comments, the point-by-point showing their failure to follow instructions).

I would have a frank talk with the kid who asked you for help. Tell him that he is continuing to turn things in late and not doing the reading. Tell him you are willing to help him, but he has to help himself.

I believe (although I can offer no supporting evidence) that failing something like an assignment is a sure-fire way to get at least some of the students to actually get it.

The aphorism “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” (later reformulated as “you can lead a young man to college, but you can’t make him think” seems to hold true.

@marinelife is spot on – if they aren’t prepared to put the work in, you should show them that they WILL fail.

People remember the hard ass teachers; the soft ones are generally either not remembered, or are reserved for disparaging comments during reunions.

Sure they’ll remember me, but I don’t think it will be with much fondness. Lots of them are going to be pissed when they get this one back and I am not looking forward to their evaluations.

Many of them are lunatic overachievers and turned in assignments more than twice as long as they were supposed to be. Unsurprisingly, these are the kids who take me up on my offers for help, when all I want to say to them is, sheesh, get a freaking life already.

I agree with marinelife and 100thmonkey. You’ve done plenty already. At the postsecondary level, students ought to take responsibility for their own learning*.

I assume the “should” in your question refers to professional ethics and not professional advancement, but if you’ve got a tenure review in your future or are a grad student looking forward to your job search and are therefore concerned about your evaluations, then I would say just tactfully point out that you gave them those guidelines for a reason, and worked very hard on them, and that if they didn’t read them, that’s on them (but again, be tactful—make them feel guilty, not resentful). And if you are a grad student, I think those guidelines would look more impressive in the portfolio you bring to interviews (you are assembling one, right?) than would the somewhat higher evaluations you might get by handing out cheap As.

5 pages of guidelines is a bit much, though. Maybe you should allow more latitude in the assignment. On the other hand, I know that many students like everything spelled out for them, so I can see how frustrated you must be when you do exactly that in your gudelines and then they don’t bother to read them.

* I had a French professor who pointed out that in other European languages, one is not a student (étudiant) until one gets to university. Before that, one is a pupil (élève). The difference is that a student is supposed to actively study, while a pupil just passively accepts direction. This distinction is obscured in the US, where we talk about elementary school “students”.

I’d ask this one kid if something else is going on. There may not be, and then he should fail, but maybe he’s just had a death in the family, or is sick, or doesn’t realize he has a learning disability or a mental disorder. Yes, it’s college (right??), yes, he should be treated like an adult, but finding out that there’s one teacher that really cares and making that human connection can really change things for a student. And I know I hate not doing well (especially when it’s my own damn screw-up fault) for the one teacher I love and chat with all the time about non-class related things – I feel like I’m letting her down as well as myself.

If you wanted to, could you maybe give some extra credit? Extra credit has all the self-initiative and more of a normal assignment, and you could make it really hard, but then some of the students could choose to show you that they “got it” from failing the paper and make up for it.

You should help them learn. Giving them latitude does not help. If they can’t follow instructions, too bad.

In home schooling, there is no such thing as failing. Students learn that some things are easy to learn and other take a lot of work, but failure, or giving up, is not a choice.