, swearing too much, being a big too licentious with each other.But I cannot get my head around the continuous casual lying
they do.I have gotten to the point where I consider that nearly every statement they utter to me is probably a lie.
"Dr Lisa, my sister needs a ride to the airport, because she's going to Serbia
for a year long fellowship and I'm the only one who knows how to drive her car, which is a stick shift, which we have to put in storage."
"I was going to do the readings, but my dad just got back from a business trip to Denver and he had a wart on his thumb and my mom and I spent all night trying to get rid of it."
"I left my notebook with the exam time on a bus from when I spent the weekend with my girlfriend's family who are Quakers."
Every lie told to me is about avoiding work, or getting an extension. And nearly everybody tries it. Even sweet quiet students tell me whoppers.
Of course I turn all these fibbish requests down. I'm not a soft touch, but that doesn't seem to have slowed down the steady stream of lies.
I even have the "no excuses absence" rule as part of my syllabus, just to show them that it matters not if you're hungover or nursing the whooping cough. I just want them to be straight with me. I tell them that, actually. "I'm here to help you finish this course and this program. Just be straight with me."
And then, "Dr. Lisa, I'd like to come to the review session, but my girlfriend's dog needs a goiter lanced and the only place that can do it is in Baton Rouge, and I'm the only one she knows who can find his way around those streets at night."
"Dr. Lisa, I was going to have my project finished today, but the power in our whole neighborhood went out last night. An armadillo
dug up a transfomer near our house, and all of our neighbors spent the night on cots at a fire station nearby. The firefighters told jokes and one of them juggled, and I got to slide down the pole."
There's only like a quarter million of us in the entire world, but Quakers aren't made up, they're real, I promise.
ReplyDeleteAnd we breed electricity seeking armadillos.
I love student excuses...I love the sound of them as they blow past me.
ReplyDeleteLisa, for me, the sure sign of the lie is an extra detail. These students of yours all make the classic mistake of offering too much specificity. They are BAD liars, not bad people, just unskilled in fibbing...
ReplyDeleteBut I feel for you.
"The act of inventing a lie presupposes an effort which is distasteful to the mental inertia common to the majority of men. " -- Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, p. 99.
ReplyDeleteI've heard stories much like those, but I tend to assume that they're telling the truth. Why make up a parole hearing, or a suicidal roommate, or a dying pet, when they could just claim "the flu" or babysitting arrangements, or car trouble? The more elaborate lies risk sticking in the mind of the recipient, so the liar would have to remember them as well, and stick by them.
Dead grandmothers, on the other hand....
It doesn't matter if they're Quakers or New-Age Zoroastrians, goddammit!!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteNixon was a Quaker, you know.
I went to graduate school at a large, ethnically diverse university. My first teaching job was at a tiny super white CC. I had one Indian kid who figured he could pull the ethnic card and get away with whatever he felt like saying. So he missed a test for Diwali. Which I was pretty sure was not an "I need to skip a test." kind of holiday, but everyone got a drop, so what did I care? The next week he e-mailed me that he couldn't come to class because of Eid Al-Adha. That sounded more important, but he'd already used his free-bie. In reality, I don't know which is the heaviery holiday. But I do know that Hindus celebrate Diwali and Eid Al-Adha is Muslim. So he was fucked.
ReplyDeleteCould be a mixed Muslim-Hindu family (there are Muslims in India), but I've never heard of such mixed families existing in that country. Both holidays are big in both religions (Diwali is a festival of lights, Eid Al-Adha is the "Festival of Sacrifice" so it's something like Lent.)
ReplyDeleteActually, there are several mixed families, we just tend to skip those parts in our international brochures. It gives us great joy to be seen as a segregated nation, apparently. I've had senior faculty ask me if we celebrate Christmas. "Since the 4th century", I've told them, probably inaccurately (I don't know if Christmas was celebrated as it is now, but Christianity arrived on our shores about that time, give or take some).
ReplyDeleteThe catch is, Diwali -- yes, the festival of lights (celebrated at the onset of autumn) -- and either of the Eids are celebrated in the evening. A bit pointless to light candles and fireworks during the day, isn't it? And of course the fasts during Ramzan are broken at sundown, after the evening prayer. So this young man could have celebrated all suncontinental holidays to his heart's content, and still have come to class in the mornings.
The ethnic card, such a sad and utterly unimaginitive exercise. Especially in the age of Wikipedia. Good liars know better.
*subcontinental.
ReplyDelete@Froderick Frankenstien from Fresno
ReplyDeleteZoroastrians are a persecuted minority in Afghanistan and Iran because they will not convert to Islam (Zoroastrianism predates Islam, so that faith is seen as "outdated" by Muslims.) That written, the persecution of the Baha'is in Iran is far worse because they are a post-Mohammedian revelation, and Islam is supposed to be the last offshoot of Judaism.
The really annoying thing is that I think most of my students are telling the truth with their stupid, pitiful stories. They just have absolutely no sense of priority. ANYTHING that happens to them takes precedence over school. They seem utterly incapable of mustering the logistical effort needed to take care of things in order of priority. Yeah, I get that your sister stopped by last night to talk about something "really important." It didn't occur to you to simply tell her that you have an exam the next day and to reschedule your talk with her? No, that would be an unreasonable expectation. I, the mean professor, must accommodate every little SUPER-IMPORTANT thing that happens to you in your lazy, irresponsible life.
ReplyDeleteDo you know what happens to me if I am one *minute* late submitting my weekly class attendance? I get a flaming e-mail from the college telling me that if my job is so unimportant to me than maybe I should find something else to do for a living. No shit. I get my work done on time. I walk the walk, talk the talk, and I expect the little shits in my class to be in intensive care if they want any special consideration from me.
(Another Quaker here, ironically. Yes, Nixon was a Quaker, more's the pity, but so were a lot of abolitionists, prison reformers, early feminists, etc.)
ReplyDeleteThe things that bother me most about the lying are:
1. The insult to my intelligence. Do they really think I'm that stupid and/or gullible?
2. The fact that, when caught in the lie, students will calmly change the lie, contradicting themselves and revealing their lies, to my face, without any scruple.
3. And this one's the worst... The times when I catch a student in a lie, the student goes above my head to the chair, and the chair backs the student and gets angry with me for having been so cruel as to say to the student, "I don't believe you," or, "I'll need documentation for this."
@Strelnikov: I met some Zoroastrians. They weren't New Age. They seemed to be doing fine. Thank goodness for freedom of religion in the good old U. S. of A.
ReplyDelete@issyvoo: Didn't the Quakers officially disown him?
Also: your chair is a jagoff. You knew that, but I'm sure you still enjoy hearing someone else recognize it.
When students lie to me, I try not to let them seem me get mad. I just coolly request documentation. If it's for a funeral, I say, "I don't want to seem hard or mean, but I really do need written documentation so that I can prove why I'm giving one student an advantage that all the other students can't have." If they can't bring me that documentation, I dock them the points, quietly.
Yes, I hate the way that anything, no matter how trivial, takes precedence over school. Last semester I had a student try to get excused from missing lab by bringing me the receipt for having his car fixed. The date of the receipt was for the Saturday after the Tuesday night lab.
I also hate-hate-hate the insult to my intelligence. It never seems to occur to them that I was an undergraduate once, too.
But what makes me absolutely BATSHIT loco is then they lie, when it's not even necessary! If they can document an illness or a job interview I'll mark a blown deadline as "excused," but otherwise I won't accept late work. It never fails to amaze me how many students lie to me about why they missed the deadline, even though it NO LONGER MATTERS.
I, too, tend to think that the proliferation of detail is a sign that there's some truth lurking in there (as well as, yes, difficulty with setting priorities). Remember, most of them are not very good at summarizing the point of an article in a sentence, either. Hence the extraneous references to Serbia, Quakers, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe "lies" I encounter most often have to do with digital files. Now that I've made it clear on my syllabus that I expect students to back up important files regularly, which eliminates the stolen/crashed computer/drive excuses, I'm beginning to get uploads of the wrong file -- the shortcut file instead of the file itself, or a second copy of the proposal instead of a draft of the whole paper. I'm sure some of these incidents are honest mistakes, but some, I'm pretty sure, aren't.
Lies aside, the tendency to inflate those incidents of sh*t happens to crisis levels drives me round the bend. I have a cache of stories from my teaching past of students commencing chemo the same day as their final exam -- and not requesting (or even accepting) a deferral -- which I offer whenever a student tries to turn a paper cut (or the LSAT) into a reason for an extension.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, I teach in an area where a lot of students celebrate Christmas according to the Julian calendar (wait, checking self -- G comes before J, Gregorian before Julian), requiring them to take a number of days off from lectures and assignments, even though they are three or four generations from the homeland. When I'm feeling especially snarky, I wonder what they would do if I set an assignment due for 25 December.
I had students on the first day asking me what kind of excuses I would accept for missing exams. I told them they should consider dropping out of school.
ReplyDelete@Rimi
ReplyDeleteI was thinking that mixed families were an unofficial taboo due to the aftermath of the Partitioning of India in 1947 and the formation of Pakistan.....and I was dead wrong. I would guess that the government does not want to talk about it to avoid giving the Hindu nationalists an issue.
Frodo: Disowning isn't really a Quakerly thing to do. He was born in a Quaker family, but never claimed to be a "practicing" Quaker. But we have no creed or really any kind of rules. There are certain... I don't write about this kind of stuff so I'm not going to use the best words and hopefully Issy can do a better job explaining it... let's say "values" that are common to most of us. But no one idea is critical to being a Friend.
ReplyDeleteRunning a war is obviously in conflict with being a pacifist. So, Nixon was not the best Quaker. But he wouldn't be "disowned".
Hoover was also raised by Quakers. He might have been a little better at being a Friend.
I have considered being a Quaker, do I get part marks? (The lack of music did me in.)
ReplyDeleteI have a standard phrase for all of these excuses: "It sounds like you made a choice." They always look surprised.
That's outdated. At my Meeting, we have music before meeting once a month.
ReplyDeleteStrelnikov, oddly, you're right about the remnant bitterness about the Partition, on both sides of the border. But that doesn't stop mixed households simply because the numbers are too unwieldy. India has I think the third largest Muslim population in the world, so try as the Muslim clergy, the Hindu revivalists (their brand of Hiduism is a total blasphemy, but who's checking) and the government might to discourage it, there is lots of intermixing going on. The Indian Zoroastrians, on the other hand, are at the same time both large enough and small enough to be visible, and visibly enforce a a more community-purity dictum. And you're absolutely right -- there's nothing remotely New Agey about them :-)
ReplyDeleteI've no idea why I'm blathering on about this tangent. Probably professional conditioning: dispensing information at some length is pretty much what we do :-)
@Forderick - It never fails to amaze me how many students lie to me about why they missed the deadline, even though it NO LONGER MATTERS.
ReplyDeleteAhh, but those have a silver lining. They tell you that the student does not think of you simply as a grade-provider. They want you, the living, breathing person, to "know" that they are not just slackers. At the worst, they just don't want some faculty member with whom they might later have a course, to dislike them. At best they're ashamed of missing the class and would rather risk a trivial lie than leave you, the person, with an even worse impression of them - that they are drunk, lazy, stoned, etc.
I teach mostly online where seeing me as a machine is all the easier. They never have to make eye-contact. They can blow me off to the max - drop the class without consulting, lie without having to fake a facial expression, etc. And yet I still get those occasional e-mails, several weeks after grades are submitted, not requesting a grade change, but explaining "This is why I made such a bad impression in your class." The irony is that the ones who were really bad, who simply didn't do any work, probably made no impression at all. They were just that person that racked up one zero after another. All I know about them is their name, and that was serially forgotten after each assignment zero.
Perhaps some think that I will suddenly act: "Oh, this student was really special. I'll notify the registrar and request a grade change." But all except the most naive know that is not going to happen. I think they are truly regretful of the situation and, furthermore, I think they are almost always telling the truth. They really did go through a divorce, a military redeployment, an illness, etc. that prevented them from attending or doing the work, or if it didn't prevent them, it put up hurdles that were too high for them at this point in their lives. They had other priorities and, as adults, made their own decisions. And either to their credit or regretfully, they did not have the opportunity, or did not use it, to use that issue in their lives as an excuse while the class was in progress.
@Rimi
ReplyDeleteIt isn't blather, it's interesting.
@AdjunctSlave:
ReplyDeleteAs in the words of Abraham Lincoln:
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
If they want me to think highly of them, they should get their work to me on time!
@Froderick Frankenstien from Fresno:
ReplyDeletePretty sure that was Mark Twain who said that, not good ol' Abraham Lincoln. :)
What a great discussion! What I'll remember most are: Wisconsin Will ("I love student excuses...I love the sound of them as they blow past me") and Wombat (electricity-seeking armadillos).
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'll be stealing MA's "It sounds like you made a choice."
Finally, @Rimi: I agree with Strelnikov. Keep it coming.