By: Katelyn Shaw

At WVWC, students strive for success but, sometimes, end up with a lousy grade. You have to blame someone, and who wants to take accountability, so who else can you blame but your professor? 

For instance, your professor has the power to give you a good grade or a bad grade, and of course, this professor in particular “hates you,” so that’s the reason you got a bad grade (hypothetically). Some students have this mentality, and in some cases, this may be true, but in most cases, your professors want you to succeed in their class.  

Dr. Huggins has been teaching for 24 years, and his favorite part about teaching is being able to work with students. Dr. Huggins said, “You wouldn’t do it if you didn’t want to work with students and talk with students.”

Your professors don’t want to “give out” bad grades. They want you to flourish in their classroom. Giving you a bad grade feels just as bad as receiving a bad grade. Dr. Huggins said, “It sucks. If you care about what you’re doing, you want your students to succeed, and when you give out a bad grade, they didn’t succeed.”

When you blame yourself for getting a bad grade, you are not alone, your professors are blaming themselves too. Whether that be because they didn’t get the material to you the right way or the professor didn’t engage you enough, there are a multitude of things that could’ve gone wrong that your professor was thinking about when they wrote that grade. Dr. Huggins said, “We all accept that we’re going to have students that don’t do well, and we’re going to have students that do really well. The students that do really well are probably not my fault. They’re succeeding in spite of everything I do wrong.”

Your professors want you to do well. Dr. Huggins said, “You spend a lot of time working and redesigning and trying to figure out how to help that group that is struggling to do better. I don’t need every student to be an A student, but I don’t wanna see students failing, and I don’t wanna see students struggling. I want you guys to achieve your goals.”

Being a professor doesn’t mean you are good at explaining. Dr. Huggins said, “More of my job is counseling, advising, and trying to figure out what you guys need and what I can do better.”

At the end of the day, if you have an A or C in a class, it doesn’t mean that you will be the worst or even the best at your job. For instance, you wouldn’t want a doctor who made all Ds in school to be your doctor because they didn’t grasp the content that they were learning. On the other hand, you might get a doctor that had all As and knows everything there is to know, but if that doctor is not empathetic or can’t explain to me what is wrong on a level that I understand, I don’t want that doctor anywhere near me. I want someone who knows what is going on can help me understand what is going on and cares about me and their job whether that person was an A student or a C student.

Photo by Katelyn Shaw