Tuesday, August 16, 2011

How Do You Handle The Grade Emails? I'm Tingly in Anticipation.


My colleague teaches
summer school
in wool pants to
build stamina.

She hates them,
the summer retreads.
She tells me this
while standing by a fan.

"Their grades,"
she says,
"My God, their grades.
They must have them!"

We here electronically send
our grades at semester end,
shuffling through cyber-whirl
to a delicate fibrous transcript in the sky.

"Do you," she said,
turning her lovely bum toward the fan,
"Let them call you, email you,
hornswoggle you at the mall for their grades?"

"Ah," I say,
but don't answer.
(Our dynamic is such
that I merely listen.)

"I won't take their calls.
I set up vacation email," she says,
"although my actual vacation is only 17 days."
They can get their grades as Bill Gates intended."

"Is that bad?" she says.

Wool pants.
I sip from my coffee.

7 comments:

  1. Gotta have a blanket statement for all students, all classes.

    Mine is: "The grade fairy brings your grades. Don't bug me."

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  2. Dear Cherished Pupil,

    Given that you got a D+ on the first essay, a C- on the final essay, and a (gentleman's) C for participation, you should not be greatly surprised to have received a C- in the class. If you were concerned about your grades, the time to discuss this would have been eight weeks ago, when I wrote PLEASE SEE ME in giant red letters on your first "essay," and urged you to bring me a draft of the final before it was due. Unfortunately your final essay had all of the same problems as the first one, sans any optimism for future improvement.

    If you are hoping that I will reverse the rotation of the earth so that you can have an undeserved second chance, I shall refer you to this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCsHTNP2MaU . Unfortunately, it is explicitly forbidden for me to interfere with human history.

    Yours, alas,
    Prof. Lex

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  3. Richard's life is more interesting than mine.

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  4. I've managed to reduce the volume of final-grade inquiries considerably by announcing a date by which the grades will be available on their ether-transcripts, and after which they are free to check with me if they can't see a grade there (which, yes, implies that they shouldn't bother me before then -- a hint which most of them take). When students ignore this deadline, I ignore their inquires, at least until the deadline is past.

    The harder-to-deal-with genre of grade emails, at least for me, are the ones asking why they "lost" points on a particular assignment. At least during the semester, those really have to be answered. I'm trying to deal with the issue preemptively by writing (yet) clearer grading criteria for everything, even the stupid 3-point assignments, but the temptation to make even more of the smaller assignments essentially pass/fail (rather than excellent/satisfactory/incomplete/fail) is strong.

    Once the semester is over, I answer "why did I get this grade?" inquiries with factual grade-breakdown information, which usually does the trick. I also put up a vacation message for at least a week, answering only when I "return." After that, I answer follow-up emails, but at increasingly longer intervals, and often with the offer of an in-person conference "when we're both on campus" -- which tends to be a while in the future. I've had one or two such conferences which were actually productive (and one or two which consisted of my laying down the law about how close the student's inadequate citation came to downright plagiarism). In most cases, my experience matches Lex's: a lot of post-semester correspondence is with students who should have been in touch with me more regularly during the semester, and are having trouble letting go and moving on.

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  5. @Calico: mine, too. Or maybe the trick is in how he narrates it?

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  6. A shot of Jack Daniel's on ice with Coke works well for me. Just wait about 20 minutes for the alcohol to kick in.

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