TO: Dr. Charles Smith, Dr. Raul Aparicio, Dr. Victoria Fowler, Dr. Bryce Rico & instructors from the Math Dept.

Date: November 11th, 2020.

We, the students of Fall 2020 MATH 2414 Section N01 do hereby support this petition. 

Complaints and discussions have been held throughout the semester regarding the experiences that we have had with professor Angela Lawrenz. 

We are dissatisfied with Dr. Lawrenz’s ineffective teaching, as well as her lack of ability and willingness to reach the students. We feel as if we weren’t given a proper chance to succeed in this class. There have been numerous problems regarding this professor and we feel like several aspects could’ve been easily improved over the course of this semester to enhance our learning experience but still, nothing has.

The First problem we experience is that she never sends our grades back in time. We are currently on Quiz 11 and only been given back Quiz 4 and 5 which was almost a month and a half ago. Same as for the discussions. The posting of the grades are erratic. She does things on her own time, which is fine if it was given back to us in an orderly manner. We have received several updates from her saying she is currently grading the assignments and is late. Which is a fine excuse because we were given a heads up but when it is two entire months late, it is hard to give a pass for that. She makes it excruciatingly difficult for us to review and reach out to her about the graded material. We should add that the feedback we do get is of minimal help. 

The Second problem involves the feedback and grading the quizzes. She went the extra mile to ensure we included all our steps, which isn't an issue to begin with. But she always scores the quizzes solely based on our steps, so even a small deviation cost us more than 50% of the points. She grades them very harshly and it doesn’t help when she just crosses out the incorrect sections without further explanations or telling us how to fix or to improve. Her grading of the quizzes shouldn’t be standard practice, it makes many of us lose confidence in our work and cause us to stagnate. 

The Third problem is the lectures we receive in class. She sometimes forgets to post them until the middle of the week. Sometimes she doesn’t and we, somehow, as a class gets to put up with that. When she does post them, none of them are hers, they seem to be just uploaded from Pearson and are either unrelated or not detailed to help us work through our homework questions. A lot of students in class are using YouTube/Khan Academy/Chegg and other outside sources to try to learn than the actual lectures themselves. Again, this should not be standard practice and we are extremely disheartened by her lack enthusiasm and interest to teach this class. 

The Fourth problem is communication. There have been many times where we have emailed her, and she does not respond to emails. We communicate as a class to see if she has responded and we often get nothing until it is too late, or we must respond multiple times throughout a day to hope we get anything back. It takes her 2 days minimum to get back to an email on a weekday and it’s always in the middle of the night. Which is unacceptable for an online based class. 

We would like to request the removal of Dr. Angela Lawrenz from Blinn’s Fall 2020 MATH 2414 Calc II course.

We would like her replaced with a more qualified, engaging and all round effective faculty member. With a new instructor, we think the majority of students taking Calculus II as of current and in the future, would be given the proper foundations for higher math or at least a better chance to succeed in this class. The signatures of students listed below represent those that are in agreement with this petition.