i see from the syllabus that we have a reading quiz tomorrow. I ordered my books from Amazon, and they are not in yet, so I need you to give me a copy of the book so that I may study. I will pick it up at your office at 10:13, as this is convenient for me.
Sammy Snow
Option 1:
Dear Sammy,
Let me do you one better. Please come to my office and I'll give you $3.99 so you can pay for expedited shipping and get your books in a timely manner. You'll also need to borrow my time machine and set it to the first day of class so you can order your books and get them.
Best,
Dr. Amelia
Option 2:
Dear Sammy,
Why don't you stop by my office, and I can use my time machine to send you back to the first of August, where I emailed you the syllabus and a helpful guide to which books that you can rent and which, as a basketweaving major, you will need throughout your academic and professional careers. Once you get there, go ahead and order the books, and you'll be all set.
Ciao baby,
Dr. Amelia
Option 3:
* * * Crickets * * *
Option 3: let me save you a trip to my office by simply telling you to find someone else in the class who has the book so you can borrow theirs. Mine is busy because I'm using it. Better yet: you're going to be a pain all semester: drop the class now.
ReplyDeleteOption 3.
ReplyDeleteAh, so you have a time machine too! A word of advice: don't let students use it, they never do anything useful such as causing themselves to disappear by preventing their parents from ever meeting. It's almost always doing something greedy and stupid, such as embarrassing themselves by becoming their own fathers or mothers, which screws up the gene pool right good, or gaming the stock market, and just look at what happened there.
ReplyDeleteTenure is great. I wish there were tenure-track jobs for all the contingent faculty who deserve them. Tenure lets you say things like:
"My telling you to use your common sense is really extraordinary good advice. You really should!"
I said that to a dangerously innumerate engineer wanna-be who'd just whined to me, who's repeating my physics class. (See, I told you I had a time machine.) If this flake complains to my chair, I can say, "It's funny, but your following me to my office just to complain was the most effort I've ever seen you put into the class. Imagine what you could do if you put that kind of effort into delivering substance!"
Although you can't be fired for that, since anonymous student evaluations don't really count anymore, it still isn't a good idea to use the power too often. I still post to CM since I often get Alice-from-Dilbert moments, where I gasp, "MUST ... CONTROL ... FIST ... OF ... DEATH!!!"
The key question is whether the complaining 'flake will notice that the chair to whom he is complaining is also the professor he is complaining about. One can hope, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that he will.
DeleteI have heard more colleagues tell me stories of students this semester-not just without textbooks- but with the expectation that the professor will scan and email them not one, not two, but three chapters from the book. I would invite them to the office and put them in the time machine and send them back to a time where "survival of the fittest" meant something.
ReplyDelete