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[ptarmigan]

I always tell my students that they need to watch me like a hawk. When they point out my errors, I just fix them, laugh at myself a little (if the error is amusing), and move on. Yesterday I got to the end of a problem and had a different result from what I'd remembered, and just said, "Wait, did I mess up somewhere?" and they told me where. The number of arithmetic errors I make in class is crazy.

[conjugate]

ABD_JHS, it sounds like you're handling it about right.  My students will point out when I miss a minus sign or when I forget a multiple of ½; they no longer even joke about whether I will count off if they make the same mistake.  They know I will, but not too harshly.

[nucleo]

My students will point out when I miss a minus sign or when I forget a multiple of ½; they no longer even joke about whether I will count off if they make the same mistake. 

I say in class quite frequently, "I have never claimed that I'd get 100% on my own quizzes."

[itried]

Yes, this is so normal! It's such a delicate balance between admitting our errors and laughing at ourselves -- which our students need to see so they themselves can build character -- and gaining and retaining students' trust, which they need in order to learn from us. That balance can be very nuanced, and it takes years of practice to strike.

I find that doing math or chemistry problems on the white board is really difficult, because I'm standing too close to the equations. There's something about only being able to see one or two factors at a time that disrupts my information processing; it helps when I stand back from the board while I'm writing equations. This can happen even when I'm just constructing sentences on the white board; I often skip a word or letter, and this rarely if ever happens when I'm typing or writing by hand.

[polly_mer]

I find that doing math or chemistry problems on the white board is really difficult, because I'm standing too close to the equations. There's something about only being able to see one or two factors at a time that disrupts my information processing; it helps when I stand back from the board while I'm writing equations. This can happen even when I'm just constructing sentences on the white board; I often skip a word or letter, and this rarely if ever happens when I'm typing or writing by hand.

This.  To see me lecture sometimes, you'd wonder how I manage to put my own shoes on.  But, it's having far too much to keep in my head and the fact that the board spatial arrangement doesn't let me see as much as when I wrote my notes on gridded paper.  Consequently, I skip lines and sometimes I manage to transpose numbers or just plain put the wrong ones on the wrong lines.

[prof_cj]

Last semester was the first time I had a real full course load of 5 classes. I screwed up A LOT. Dates, lesson plans, turning papers in to the right class...it's human nature.

I've got the same workload this semester too, and even though I still do better, I make slip-ups. My students don't care as long as I can laugh at it too.

[dr_mk]

When I make a mistake on the white board in front of a class, I've been known to pull out a red marker and circle my own mistakes and take off points on my own work.

[dr_know]

Once I was so ill when grading papers that I graded them according to the wrong prompt.  No one received above a C.  I gave them back, mentioning how disappointed I was that everyone neglected to do XYZ.  Then one student said that was last week's prompt, not this week's.  I apologized profusely and took the papers back.  Grading them according to the prompt yielded an A and a few Bs, plus the other grades.  Now that's embarrassing.  All you can do is honestly face your mistakes and do your best to correct them.  Most students will be understanding.  Only the true jerks will hold it against you.  Keep your head up and remember the semester will end soon enough.

[gbrown]

It probably won't make you feel better, but today my cell phone rang *while I was in class*. I not only frowned, but picked up my attache, dumped it outside the classroom door, closed the door and said, "How rude. Everyone here gets a 100% on their quiz today. Sorry about that." Everyone laughed and we moved on. Luckily this is only 1 of 3 or 4 times it's happened in the 12 years I've been teaching college... still, it was embarrassing. Students were thrilled, though, to get a 100% that day. I also believe that granting them this very small thing (it impacts maybe 1/2 of a percent of their final grade in the course) also serves as a stick/punishment/memory device which will help remind me to turn the thing off while I'm in class. You know I don't want to be handing out 100% on quizzes every day!

Heh heh.

Oh, and once I graded 40 exercises thinking that there were 20 questions on the sheet. There were 15. So although I'd counted up all the incorrect answers properly, I had to go back (in another pen color) and correct my own math later. It was embarrassing... but I tell myself that my students really pay so little attention to what I say and do that it won't make any sort of lasting impression.

Once when a student remarked that I had a wrong date on a syllabus (that's a syllabus with a 16-week in-depth course calendar and policies totaling over 3,000 words), I just said, "Oh, thanks Josh. Everyone, on the 2nd page, change that to April 26th" and moved on. If anyone had made a negative comment, I may have said something about how many times they've typed a 3,000 word document with just one typo... oh, I wouldn't have, but I would have been thinking it in my head!

p.s. dr_mk, That's priceless!

[bms2000]

On the first day of class I always tell my students something to the effect of, "I make stupid mistakes. All the time. At 8 am I will forget how to subtract, say one thing when I mean another, and spell various common words ten different ways. Part of being a professor is learning how to live with making a fool of yourself in front of a large audience on a regular basis. I will always own up to my mistakes and fix them. If you are patient with my mistakes, I'll be patient with yours."

That, together with my habit of rolling my eyes at my own stupidity when the inevitable mistakes happen, goes a long way toward building a tolerant student body. I still kick myself sometimes when I really screw up, but I do my best, that's all I can do.

[infopri]

I messed up big time today, but I suspect my students will forgive me:

I'm teaching a course that I last taught some 15+ years ago.  Today I uploaded an assignment to our CMS.  (It's a face-to-face class, but we rely heavily on the technology.)  The assignment contains lots of hypothetical situations, complete with dates.  When I looked at the assignment (via the CMS) a few hours later, I discovered that, first of all, I neglected to update about half of the dates, so my hypotheticals say things like, "X will happen on April 14, 2014.  Therefore, you must be sure to do Y by the end of January, 1995."  But, worse, the assignment contains all the answers!

I know that I removed the answers before re-saving and uploading the document.  I cannot for the life of me figure out how they ended up on the CMS.  But I think my students will forgive me for the error.

[fullofscience]

I routinely make fun of my own (terrible) handwriting and artistic skills. It's now a running joke in one of my labs that I'm going to be a physician because of my chickenscratch.