I’m sick to death of students calling me cold/rude/condescending because I give completely neutral, honest, observation-based feedback on their work. I give extremely detailed feedback on their papers and it takes FOREVER, and I don’t have time to “complement sandwich” every single comment. I DO give positive comments when I see positive things to complement about, but they never notice. I write things like “I can see that you are working hard to improve” or “I can tell you put a lot of effort into this assignment” but do they take that into account? No! I’m just a huge bitch because I pointed out where they needed to improve and suggested how they could do that.

They even LIE about things I said…one student tried to say that I said her work was “trash” when I would NEVER say that to a student (the work WAS trash but I know better than to say or write it).

I’m not your fucking therapist or your mom, and the expectation that I be responsible for your mental health is fucking sexist. This is graduate school and if you can’t emotionally handle being told how to fix your writing then you need to take that up with a mental health professional.

Anyway I’m half venting and half asking if anyone has encountered this and found a solution to it that doesn’t involve me performing emotional labor.