I received the following e-mail yesterday:Dear Professor Bella: I am writing to let you know that I am registered for your online Hamster Literature and Composition course, starting Monday. I only just sent away for the book, and I am told it will take at least two weeks to get to me [Bella's addition: as I ordered it from a no name back woods kind of web site and not from the book store, where there are plenty of texts still available.] So, I just wanted to help you out by letting you know that I won't have my text book for at least the first two weeks of class, in case you end up wondering why I am not doing any of the assignments.
Sincerely, Helpful Hannah
Dear Helpful:
Actually, you are required to have the textbook from the first day of class. You will be given assignments, due at the end of that first week, which will require you to read and quote from the Hamster texts. You will also need the background material on Hamster history to do well on these assignments, which is found in your text book. Luckily for you, I have placed two copies of the textbook on reserve at the library. I hope you will have the time to do all your reading and assignments there, as you will not be able to take those copies home with you. If you live too far away to make this feasible, you should drop the class as missing two weeks of a five week class is a recipe for failure.
Sincerely, Professor Bella
Dear Professor Bella,
I did not know that I could read the text book at the library. [Bella's additions: I guess I must not have opened the first page of my syllabus where that is written in bold, block letters, or opened my first e-mails from you welcoming me to to class, where that information is also given. ] All you had to to was let me know. I will try to get there to do the reading. Thank you very much.
Helpful, and now Hurt, Hannah
One can see the F coming from a great distance.
ReplyDeleteArgh! I get those e-mails All. The. Time. What are they thinking? I love it when they get all offended when confronted with, you know, facts.
ReplyDeleteI like to respond to them in the same breezy tone they use. I love saying "Oh, that's no problem at all! Thanks for letting me know! You totally need to book to complete the assignments, and you can't have an extension on that work, because you're required to have the textbook. But thank SO much for letting me know that I don't have to worry about your zeros for the first three weeks of our eight week class! Buh bye!!"
I recently had a genius who tried to take an online test on his iPhone and then wrote to inform me that there was "something wrong with the course page". Thanks for letting me know! Oops, you opened the test on an invalid platform, but you did see the test questions, so BUMMER, you can't re-take it. You should TOTALLY read the syllabus! ttyl!
I would need to take a couple of hits with Compound Cal, before responding to these idiots.
ReplyDeleteMy first semester of college, the bookstore ran out of copies of the required Calculus text. I panicked.
If the same thing happened today, our flakes would celebrate. I would ask what happened to change things, but I have my own theories that include NCLB, bad parenting, and the difference between community college and university.
Risking a hailstorm of replies...
ReplyDeleteOn the first day of classes I inform my students that copyright enforcement is not part of my job description and that Xerox invented long time ago a means to reproduce printed text. And that I have left a copy of both the (obscenely expensive) manual and the (just re-edited with minimal changes to force students to buy the new edition) workbook in Library Reserve.
I could get fired for that, even with tenure. We all have to take classes in copyright enforcement. Some of my colleagues have gone so far in the past as not to require textbooks and make copies of all the chapters students needed every semester. That has now come to a halt since Big Brother introduced his Revolutionary New Copier System which tracks each of us.
DeleteI am right there with ya, Frenchie, but I could never put such a thing in writing. However, at our library the copy machine occupies a very prominent spot by the door. I have to hope that my students can use more IQ points when it is in their best interest....
DeleteOh hell. Maybe not.
The email might as well have said: "I'm going to be a pain in the ass for five weeks and then blame you for it when I fail the course."
ReplyDeleteIndeed. A most astute translation.
DeleteI got one email asking if the student really had to buy the book. The gist of my reply was "well, you're responsible for absorbing the content and applying it in the assignments."
ReplyDeleteI do get their objections to textbooks, and I don't always use them. But if I do assign one, I expect them to buy it.
A few semesters back, I got an email from some admin asking if I had a spare copy of the text that I could lend to a student enrolled in my course who had asked for "emergency funds", specifying that he couldn't afford to buy his textbooks.
ReplyDeleteI replied that, not only were there two copies on reserve, but the student was repeating the course, and the text had not changed...
But Faris, don't you know students are supposed to sell their textbooks back to the bookstore? There are posters and flyers and everything saying so, often weeks before the end of the semester.
DeleteTime to go all Yoda on this one's snowy little ass:
ReplyDelete"Do or do not. There is no try..."
Wow! you censor my response? Typical... academic freedom, and all that. rollseyes
ReplyDeletePosts older than 2 days usually get snagged by the Blogger spam filter. It's been our experience that advertising and phishing comments often appear on older posts as bots search terms and create comments with ads, etc.
DeleteYours was NOT 2 days old when you posted your comment, but as noted on this page before, the spam "blocker" is a little capricious in how it weeds comments out. Usually a moderator finds 3-5 every day that shouldn't have been blocked. As soon as we see them, like yours above, which Cal viewed at about 3:55 am Pacific time, we post them. Sorry if there was a delay.
We also don't know what response of yours we censored. Not the one above, right, from 11:27 pm? Did you post earlier under another name?
We did take down some comments that came in from one of the non-name accounts. Was that you? (It's against the rules of the blog to post anonymously or with any of the non-names people try out: "No one." "Unknown." "Anonymous guy." It's in our "Rules of Misery" from the sidebar, and it's been addressed on the page a few times, even quite recently.
As always, we like to remind readers, there's no conspiracy against anyone. Nobody, except that tool from Oregon, is on our permanent shit list. If a comment gets snagged by the spam blocker, it gets reviewed by a moderator. In 90% of those cases, it gets posted as soon as we see it.
[I also posted this on the current post about academic freedom and etc., but when I looked here and saw this exchange, I figured I'd copy that post here as it pertains...]
ReplyDeleteI think I remember that name as the person who called me a dipshit and a fucking something for not being sensitive enough to how expensive textbooks are. I was actually going to reply later (life does get in the way) that I thought I was, actually, sensitive to that fact as I put two copies on reserve at the library. Sorry I don't know how to link, but this was on my post about pre summer session e-mail.
If this is, in fact, that same person, I was going to also tell him/her that s(he) should hold off on the righteous anger long enough to try to understand the problem. S(he) represented him/herself as a person who got As all the time using the textbook on reserve at the library. Great. I don't suppose he/she got As by sending the prof an e-mail saying that he/she would not be completing assignments during the first 40% of the class as his/her textbook would not be arriving before that.
Sigh. But the person was on the attack, cursing and angry, so I was not really surpised that she/he got pulled. I was actually kind of touched that you guys cared.....