Friday, September 28, 2012

The Ballad of Pencil-Neck.

Dear Pencil-Neck Pete:

Thanks very much for showing up spectacularly late, sticking around to announce that I “screwed you again” by not making a three-point discussion board thread visible until three days before the post was due, and stating that you’ll be dropping Hamster Studies 3199 “just because of this” occurrence that you “can see happening all semester.”

Saying that you will attend every class meeting until the drop date also warms my heart. You clearly value education over grades, and I look forward to the next few weeks, when I can expect surly, passive-aggressive comments every time I ask the class a question.

I also appreciate hearing about your busy schedule and how the HMST 3199 schedule does not fit your needs. It’s a crying shame that your choice to enroll in a hybrid section does not mean you can work on a correspondence-school schedule and submit assignments at your convenience.

Furthermore, I’m sorry to hear that between your internship and other classes, you don’t have time to write an email that says “I’d like to turn in (assignment name) early, but the slot isn’t open yet on HamsterU LMS. Please accept the attached file” or even look at the course syllabus, where the assignment description has been posted since the semester’s beginning.

I earnestly look forward to having you in class another semester.

Go play in traffic,

Dr. Mindbender

6 comments:

  1. It's so tempting when their necks are pencil thin; easier to snap!

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    1. Or you can use them for psychoactive Kool-Aid enemas!

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    2. Perhaps your pencil neck and my no neck can get together, and, between them, somehow create a genuine student with a normal neck.

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    3. Or you could shove Pencil-Neck Pete's head up No-Neck Norbet's ass. The trouble with this is that Norbert might not notice.

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  2. Ugh. What is with this mindset? Why does it seem particularly egregious all of a sudden?

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    Replies
    1. It's the stress of increasing college costs in a down economy, I'm pretty sure, expressed in a way that is increasingly enabled by a nation that has decided that college proffies (along with K-12 teachers, who have had to deal with this for some time) are to blame for a host of ills mostly outside their/our control, or at least could solve some of them if we only chose to do so. That's a reason, however, not an excuse. And what in the world are they/we going to do when they/we run out of new scapegoats? We're getting perilously close to a circular firing squad, if we aren't there already.

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