Krissy Kick and Scream – I don’t care that your mother is an instructor, I don’t care that she thinks you should have received full credit for that assignment. I do hope I don’t get any of her students if she does not make them apply the reading to their answers.
Late Leslie – No, taking your kids to soccer, skating, ski, or any other kind of practice is not a reason to miss your scheduled presentation. Hope your kid’s trophy looks good on your resume because your GPA will not.
Everyone Agrees with Me Everett –Really the WHOLE class agrees that you got graded unfairly on the last assignment? How nice of them to place such a vested effort in your academic well being. Maybe if you had put as much time and effort into the assignment as surveying the whole class we would not be having this discussion.
OMFG Everett!
ReplyDelete... and his twin brother Omniscient Otto, who knows everyone else in the class had "trouble" on the assignment he couldn't figure out.
Or their cousins Do It For Me Deb & Dan who repeatedly post pleas for help because they just don't "get" the assignment. Neither of them can formulate a substantive question about a specific aspect of the project, they just don't get "it."
OK, I admit, maybe you haven't written a paper for Advanced Navel Gazing but you must have written a paper about SOMEthing, at SOME time? Right?
Bueller? Bueller?
A snappy comeback to Everett might be:
ReplyDelete"I'll let you know when this becomes a democracy!"
I seem to have a variation on Everett, or maybe Otto, who noticed that most of the rest of his online group had posted a particular assignment in a particular place, but couldn't figure out how they knew to do so. So he emailed me an hour before the 11:59 p.m. deadline to ask me to call him or his also-puzzled pal and let them know what was going on. I did not receive the email until the following morning (I do warn them to read ahead in the calendar, since I'm often not awake and answering email at 11 p.m.), at which point I replied, pointing out as gently as I could that there are these extremely detailed lists of things to do and links to the places where they should be posted called "modules," which were presumably where their classmates got the information (I think my dynamic duo were just clicking on the "new" icons provided by our version of Blackboard on the courses list, which I really, really hate, since they defeat all my attempts to get students to consult the things I post to give them the big picture, such as a calendar and the modules, and take them straight to the uncontextualized details instead).
ReplyDeleteBut somehow the fact that two of them were puzzled made it okay to be puzzled, and to demand immediate help, despite the evidence that the other 3/4 of the group *wasn't* puzzled (and the fact that clicking around the site would have fairly quickly yielded the answer; it's pretty well organized, and not all that full yet).
@Froderick
ReplyDeleteI use this on my first day:
"My classroom is a benevolent dictatorship. When you try to get away with crap you know you shouldn't get away with, the benevolence goes away."