Saturday, February 11, 2012

More Real Mail

In my email today:

he instrustions i read on the course outline were that "For this essay you
are to compare the websites of three hamster fur weavers" and i
didn't know they had to be local ones. I wrote the paper on the three weavers we did in class and proof read it and am ready to submit it. was i
mislead by the wording of the course outline?

(Student is in every class including the two I modeled the assignment.)

Followed by this one:

I wrote to you a week or so ago indicating that I was coming into your Hamster Fur Weaving class late in the semester. I was hoping that I could take the initiative to catch up on what I had missed on my own, but can see that without your directive I won't be able to fully understand what it is I need to be doing. I felt shy about writing to you to ask for help, but even though my message is coming late I still want to give myself the chance to do well in your class

(Student was enrolled in class from day 1, and at the end of week 5 has not come to a single class and missed two assignments.)

10 comments:

  1. The emailed questions I'm getting are sounding more and more like this: well-nigh incomprehensible, even to the person who wrote the assignment. I'd like to blame it on smart phones and their auto-complete functions, but I don't think that's the only problem, just part of the picture.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The emailed questions I'm getting are sounding more and more like this: well-nigh incomprehensible, even to the person who wrote the assignment. I'd like to blame it on smart phones and their auto-complete functions, but I don't think that's the only problem, just part of the picture.

    ReplyDelete
  3. 4 weeks of absence? I would already have filled out the paperwork or online forms to make this student the registrar's problem. Soyanara, with a "W".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We are no longer able to withdraw students because it might screw up their funding. I would also get in shit if I suggested the student withdraw.

      Delete
    2. Interesting; we're required to narc on students who don't show up for the first week precisely *because* of funding, so that we don't have a bunch of self-sabotaging morons or purposive creeps trading a string of Fs for infinite student loan laundering.

      Delete
  4. Right now I have an opposite case on my desk. Grad student. Her E-mails to me are clear, grammatical, cogent. Her papers are a mess of jargon, verbosity and abstraction that make no sense. Words misused, clear grammar errors, etc. I don't know what is going on. I think the student is simply a bit intimidated by having to write something that sounds "scientific," so she loses her bearings and tries overly hard to sound educated, complex, etc.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tell her to read some of Roald Hoffman's papers. No, really. The guy is a published poet and playwright, as well as a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist. He writes good.

      He also studiously avoids the passive voice.

      Delete
    2. Sorry, that should be "He also studiedly avoids the passive voice."

      Delete
    3. It should also be "He wries WELL." On the other note, my students like to send me emails from their phones, too. I'm tolerant of it, but yesterday I worked with a student who wrote his ENTIRE rough draft, single spaced, one page long, on his phone. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

      Delete
    4. Sorry, NC. Apparently the intended joke didn't come across very well.

      My sympathies. On a phone!?!?

      Delete

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