Hold My Hand, So That I Don't Smack You

This is a small, tiny piece of misery that I need to relieve before I teach my 1230 class. It's especially important because my 1230 class recently received a veiled threat from me that went like this:

"You guys might notice as you come into this building that you cross a road. You might notice there are cars on that road. Your faculty might be in those cars. If your faculty are having a bad day, perhaps...well...it could end badly for you. LOOK BEFORE YOU CROSS THE GODDAMN STREET."

In short, this is a class that I have already threatened to hit with my car.

So! Here's my misery.

This semester I am teaching two sections of a big "Intro To Everything" class. One section has 160 students in it, one section has 40. Don't ask. I am also using a textbook, which is a bit unusual for me but with 160 students I went with it. It seems that my textbook, published by Kumquatson, has a supporting website at which the beautiful and unique snowflakes can take practice tests to "help them study" for exams. This website is kind of amazing. In fact, one almost wonders what my job is as a teacher, I mean, why not just assign them the damn book and the supplemental readings (also on the site) and then test them?

Anyway. In order to access this site, they need a code from Kumquatson. Each student gets a unique string of 16+ letters. I am not allowed to tell my students who is in my class. Consequently, I am not allowed to say...create an excel file of their names and use it to assign each one an individual access code and then email it to the class. Therefore, I sent the whole list to them and said "this will take you a few minutes, just try some codes until they work. There are 230 of them here, so you should be fine."

RIOT! You would think I asked them to...oh...put some sand under their eyelashes and hold still while I threw things at them. One student EXPLAINED TO ME how to make an Excel spreadsheet. I actually stood there with my mouth hanging open and then said "Uh, I'm sure that you didn't mean it the way it sounded, but it sure sounded like you just explained to me how to use an application that I use to track hundreds of pieces of data on a daily basis..."

Finally I totally caved and said "Let me think about this."

It turns out that through a series of very ugly manipulations I can list their student ID numbers and then match those to the Kumquatson access codes. I even, politely, put their ID numbers in ascending order. I bet that at least four of them had to look up the word "ascending."

This has not, of course, put an end to "But Prof Black, I don't understand what's going to be on the test" AND my all-time favorite so far..."I really need to pass this class so that I can graduate and I'm really nervous about the exam."

I don't mean to beat up my own discpline, but jeez people, it's a %$&*! intro-level social science, I've taught it for six years, and in that time I've failed...maybe 20 people. Out of hundreds. She did not seem reassured.