I immediately want to forward it to the chair, dean, president, student services, campus police and a non-existent mass-mailer for the entire College Misery population.
I'm hesitant to read anything I can't forward, so I'm going to just delete without reading. Thanks for offering to share some of your specialness with me, two semesters after you stopped being my problem, no less. Especially at 10 O'Clock on a Saturday night. There is nothing my life needs more than TMI from someone suffering from terminal uniqueness. It was thoughtful of you to try to lay something on me on my day off. But I'm all good on slippery situations for the semester. Thanks for clearly labeling it so I'd know what to do with it.
In other words, by precluding me from employing standard "cover your ass" methods, you leave me no choice but to ignore whatever drama your message contained.
(For what it's worth: I do read messages marked Confidential, but only if they come from student services.)
WELL? Inquiring minds want to know.
ReplyDeleteI had a student tell me I was a worthless piece of garbage. This was on account of the fact that I was failing him for plagiarism; I would not accept his excuse that he had copied the whole web article into one word document, and had written his own thoughts about the web article in another document, and then forgotten which one was which when he handed it in. Never mind that they were not supposed to be using any article, just their little brains and the Alice Walker story in question. Never mind that there was not mention of the article in his works cited page. But anyway, yes, he called me a worthless piece of garbage who had no business teaching people things when I had so much to learn myself. He followed that up with "Now, this e-mail is just between US, it is private and confidential, and I explicitly do not give you permission to share it with anyone."
ReplyDeleteWhen I replied to him, copying his original e-mail into the reply, I cc'd my chair, the dean of students, the dean of academics, and everyone in student services.
I tell people not to send me CONFIDENTIAL things b/c I can't be trusted to keep a secret.
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ReplyDelete@'Bat: Never read e-mail from students over the weekend, it's always trouble. Even if you wait until your office hours on Monday, you'd be right never to read e-mail from students marked CONFIDENTIAL: I've never received one that wasn't trouble. No one can prove that you didn't hit the "delete" key accidentally, or that your spam filter overzealously prevented you from receiving the message in the first place. Also, check you faculty handbook: if your university is like mine, you're not even required to read e-mail at all!
ReplyDelete@Bella: You don't have to take abuse like this, and you shouldn't. No employer in the real world would tolerate it. Feel free to forward it to any university administrator who may be able to help you get this student expelled, or at the very least, disenrolled from your class. If this student said this to the staff of any fine restaurant or hotel, they'd have every right to refuse him service, and if he refused to leave the premises, they'd have every right to call the police and have him removed. You should have the same rights. It doesn't matter if the message is supposed to be confidential: abuse is a far worse breach of netiquette than confidentiality. If, for example, one were to get a threatening message, one has every right to forward it to the campus police, and should do so.
Bella, I think your story is a triumphant tale of a little shit who thought he knew the law, was woefully mis-informed, and got burned for being a little shit.
ReplyDeleteIt made my day.
@FF: It's so true, and it's another reason why I hate my job (I really do; the better students just cannot make up for the awful, too numerous ones). You know what they did for that little shit? They let him drop the course without getting the "F" he so richly deserved. But at least he was out of my hair, and that got him out as quickly as possible with no further contact. And he did not get his money back!
ReplyDeleteLittle shit indeed.
Oh crap - why did I look?????
ReplyDeleteIt's a rat-mail exposing a cheating incident. It all adds up - it explains something I couldn't put my finger on over the summer.
It is also disgustingly racist.
I am torn between busting the little bitches who cheated, or just ignoring it so the racist who ratted them out goes nuts.
Which crime deserves to go unpunished?
Hi Wombat! You've probably already dealt with this, but I'd bust the cheaters, if it is not too late (I don't think I could do that after the fact at my college). You have almost no chance of changing the racist, but the cheaters need to know that sometimes academic dishonesty had ill effects.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I would write the rat a letter explaining that such rhetoric is offensive and wrong and not at all appropriate and that (s)he should be sure to avoid such language from any further communications.
have fun!
My syllabus just got longer.
ReplyDelete