Some of you will recall my Christmas present from Cheating Charlene. Charlene has not gone quietly into that good night. She is stone cold busted, but she wants her day in "court." Fine. We'll do it. She's gonna go down, and although I can't frame it as a threat, not really, but since she wants to get all formal and everything, and get the Dean involved, I just might have to put some pressure on said Dean to put something into her academic record. This is almost unheard of, but the Dean does not like to do this kind of meeting, either!Anyway, Popular Pete is another professor. He's just so awfully popular. He fancies himself rather a babe (not really, but I see where he could delude himself) and he is in a band that plays at the college every so often. He's an RMP darling. Lots of high posts. Lots of little peppers! And he brags about it!
So, I happened upon Pete and Charlene duking it out in the hallway right after midterms. She was whining about her wanting to make up the midterm, and he was saying no. Then he and I got into a conversation about ole Charlene, and what an annoying little prat she is. He was telling me how sick he was of all the bullshit. "How strange, Pete, to hear this from YOU!-----I thought you loved the little snowflakes and they loved you!" I said. He admitted he felt like the glow of mutual love was dimming a bit. He said he was tired of cow-towing to get good reviews and be well liked. He said he was tired of bullshit from students like Charlene, who had not shown up for his midterm, and had not offered any excuse until two weeks later when she showed up and realized she missed it. His course only offers a mid term, a final and a research essay, so she was well and truly fucked, but he was going to stick to his syllabus, he said. And they could not retake it under circumstances like these.
He was convincing.
Charlene just forwarded her transcript to the Dean, and lo and behold, she received very high marks from all her other professors this semester-----and from Popular Pete?
An A.
What a fucking loser Pete is!
I really do hope it's like one of those movie scenes:
ReplyDeleteLoosens tie.
Takes a shot of whiskey.
Puts the grade "A".
Gets up.
Walks to safe in wall behind picture.
Opens safe.
Pulls out gun from on top of stack of money.
Loads it.
Fade to black.
Fin.
OK, good reason not to arm faculty. The cleanup would be a pain in the ass of the custodians.
DeleteCustodian would just call the meatwagon from the morgue....place would be swarming with cops and assholes taking pictures.
DeleteI wish I were popular!
ReplyDeletePopular Pete is equivalent to popular herpes.
ReplyDeleteGive him time. All he did was behave the way he always has. He is becoming aware of the difficulties that his reputation causes. You can continue to counsel him and he might turn away from the dark side.
ReplyDeleteAll of her other grades are irrelevant.
ReplyDelete"Charlene, here is your paper. Here is the paper from the web site. Exactly the same words. You are busted!"
Charlene: "But I'm the customer and the customer is always right."
"You are not a customer. You are a student, and a bad one at that. You fail."
While I was teaching, I frequently had students who whined that they were doing well in all their other courses until they took mine. Somehow, though, I didn't feel obligated to ensure that their grade in my course was comparably high.
DeleteOne took that logic even further. He whined that he could have been on the honour roll but his grade in my course kept him off it. He would have made it if he hadn't done poorly on the final exam. In his case, however, reading the instructions would have helped. There were 5 questions and each student was required to do only 4. Mr. I-should-be-on-the-honour-roll insisted on doing all 5, spending so much time on all of them that the best 4 weren't enough to give him a decent result.
Anytime a student tells you this, it is invariably a lie.
DeleteThat fucking sucks to know that he buys his popularity with grades. But he's not you. And I applaud you for standing up to tyrants who demand grades they didn't earn.
ReplyDeleteWe had a Popular Pete type in my department. He was oh-so-popular with the students because he was their "buddy", made few demands of them, and probably gave out high grades like free beer. He accomplished this by diluting course content and was the sort who could take a fairly complex subject like, say, thermodynamics and turn it into a warm-and-fuzzy session. Needless to say, he had consistently high evaluations from his students.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, one could take what he knew and write on the back of a postage stamp with room to spare. Then again, in our department, knowledge of subject matter was less important than making the students have a positive "learning experience".
Oh, Pete will never change. It's called integrity, and he doesn't have it. And you just don't grow it. He's already learned that the path of least resistance is the easiest way to get things done. He's not a teacher, but thanks to his popularity he'll always have a job somewhere.
ReplyDeleteOne great thing about being in the physics department is that none of us faculty are popular.
ReplyDeleteYou deal in rigorous reality, mathematically expressed. You can't lie in physics and expect to get a good grade, which is why they don't like you.
DeleteThe only way my students could get away by lying was to come to me after I went through the solution for an exam and claim that I "missed" a lot of their work. I knew the twerps were lying, they knew I knew they were lying, but I couldn't prove beyond all shadow of doubt that they were telling me a colossal whopper.
DeleteTest
ReplyDelete