I don't want to mention much detail for the sake of anonymity (a Thing in the News), but a student at my uni has just been implicated in some truly heinous goings-on; this student was always a great, hardworking and conscientious person-- had gotten As in my classes-- and very polite and quiet and very smart. And I'm having a very hard time wrapping my head around this student being connected with said crimes-- really really doesn't make sense (exactly like when an interviewed neighbor on the news says, "Shucks, he was really nice, but a bit quiet. Kept to himself. We're shocked!" Well, we are! Head is spinning).
I know that at a lot of CCs the student body tends to be very diverse, at times encompassing people coming from extremely. . . complicated. . . backgrounds, but at the sort of four year school I work at, cops visiting a classroom to pick up a student, for example, is close to unheard of. It's just a bit gobsmacking.
Q: Anyway, has anyone else had a student who got involved in / committed something remarkably horrendous? Any amazing classroom drama of that sort? Share stories!
My partner had a roommate situation during my junior which just plain sucked. Two roommates who were absolutely terrible to live with and one who was actually rather pleasant (we wound up living with the pleasant one during my senior year, but somehow the pleasant one turned out to be worse than the other two combined once it was just the three of us).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, partner got out of that situation and into a different dorm apartment with a friend once fall semester ended.
The following semester, we learned that one of the crappy roommates had been arrested running coke up from Chicago to the Twin Cities. This roommate was a law enforcement student. This roommate also proceeded to use the free phone call to call the head of the law enforcement program (who was teaching roommate's relevant courses that semester) to explain why roommate was absent. The professor, as I understood it, took the call and then told the class later that day "I'm sure you've noticed that someone is missing. I won't say who, to protect their identity, but they were arrested running coke."
It really wasn't much of a surprise with this person.
Because I teach online I don't come across local news about students, and that's fine by me. With at least 25% of them, though, I wouldn't be surprised to find that they were a. criminals and b. stupid enough to get caught.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was an undergrad, a kid in my dorm was caught digging up corpses from a nearby cemetery and boiling skulls in his room.
In the DORM? Okay, I know that shouldn't be the most horrifying part of the story but somehow it is.
DeleteI once had a student call me to tell me their assignment was going to be late because they were in jail. I don't know if this was true, I told the student this was not a reason for extension as it is an avoidable situation.
ReplyDeleteOne day whilst reading the local paper I noticed a former student had been arrested. Her apartment was raided by police and they found lots and lots of drugs stashed in the freezer. She said they were her boyfriend's and she was unaware that he had drugs in the house. In addition, this apartment was across the street from the middle school, thus a drug free zone. She also had a baby in the apartment. That poor, poor baby.
ReplyDeleteI had a student whose sister was involved in a hit-and-run. The student convinced his sister to go talk to a lawyer. When they were told that the police had to be called, my student beat the crap out of the lawyer and both siblings ended up in jail. He missed one of my exams because of it.
ReplyDeleteA former colleague has a court date next month for a hit-and-run. He could have avoided being arrested. But, alas, proffies and adminflakes love to drink and drive.
DeleteI remember talking to a colleague in another department who summed up one of his classes this way: a third of the students had been in jail, another third are on their way to jail, and the rest ought to be in jail.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how much detail I should go into, but we at Euphoric State recently had a student who somehow got a high-ranking university administrator to help him burglarize university offices -- allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. (The trial's been set for a few months from now.)
ReplyDeleteSaid student was in one of my classes at the time -- to me, outwardly, he was always smart, enthusiastic, and engaging. (And I have it on good authority that he didn't hit my office -- should I feel flattered?)
I had another who had to get special permission to go on field trips, because as a condition of his parole he couldn't leave the county. But my read on him is that he was a delinquent who got to college, made it into the upper-division classes, and suddenly realized that what we study is actually really cool -- despite a surly punk-rock exterior, the kid's got a good brain, and I think he's finally found something useful to do with it.
Having been temporarily jailed a few times as a youth, I have a tremendous amount of empathy for students who get into mild jams.
ReplyDeleteTen years ago I was teaching a literature class at a prison outside of Cincinnati. The prisoners filed in and I started talking. In the back, one young man kept looking away whenever I viewed his part of the room.
About halfway through the first class I was wandering around and I saw his face. "Darren," I said.
It was a kid who had been a freshman at my small regional college a couple of years before. He was a good kid then and a pretty good student even in prison. He'd had problems; I don't deny that.
The worst thing that came out of that is he went by a different name in prison, and "Darren" became what he was called thereafter. The other "students" used to mock him a bit, as his other name was marginally tougher.
My wife had a guy who seemed really nice, engaged, studious. He didn't show up for class one day, and, as she read the paper later on, saw him plastered on the front page for murdering a baby.
ReplyDeleteI discovered (after the student had graduated) that (s)he had served prison time for poisoning some co-workers.
ReplyDeleteDon't know if I would have preferred to know that beforehand. The fact that I'm still here indicates (s)he learned to deal with their personal demons.
Closest I have come (to my knowledge) is when, in preparation for assigning students to groups for projects, I asked them to email me if there were legitimate reasons to not group them with specific others in the class.
ReplyDelete(I was thinking along the lines of, "We used to be romantic partners and had a bad break-up," or "I have been grouped with her for four other projects and would like someone else for a change.")
What I got from fully 1/3 of the class was, "DON'T group me with CHARLIE" and from one, "DON'T group me with CHARLIE, because he's a drug dealer and threatened me if I were to report him."
It took a bit of time to sort it all out.
A few years ago I took a summer language course for fun. One student was very odd, so odd that everyone took notice and avoided working with him whenever possible. He brought his brother along for the end-of-course beer night, and we all agreed that the brother seemed relatively normal.
ReplyDeleteEighteen months later, they were both convicted of creating and circulating child pornography using the Uni's computers.
For better or for worse, they've mostly surprised me by dying in unexpected ways: one suicide by a student who seemed entirely on top of things until the day he disappeared from my class (which was within a day or two of his death), one auto-erotic asphyxiation by a (recently) former student during his graduation week (almost certainly an accident, but the stress of not knowing quite what came next probably had something to do with the need for escape/distraction, and willingness to take risks in seeking it).
ReplyDeleteAnd there was also the student last semester who turned out to have been slowly losing touch with reality over the course of the term, and having some rather paranoid thoughts about the class talking about him behind his back in the process. Fortunately, other aspects of his psychological profile didn't prompt him to deal with these perceptions via firearm, but I'm still a bit shaken that I had no idea what was going through his head (though I don't think I was being oblivious; he really did seem like a pretty normal student who withdrew/disengaged by an amount that was well within the normal range -- i.e. easily attributable to busyness/sleep deprivation -- over the course of the semester). And no, if he'd showed up with a gun, I don't think the class would have been better off if I, or another student, had had one, too. A panic button might have come in handy, and I appreciated the quick response from the university's "student of concern" reporting service once I did learn (during office hours, some weeks later) what was running through his head, but, beyond that, I can't really think of a solution.
One of my students was arrested for solicitation and rape of a minor via Craigslist. Had been on the news the night after class one day. Fortunately not arrested at class time, but students were talking about it for awhile.
ReplyDeleteOur hamsterology labs were in adjoining teaching lab rooms, with wide open doors such that you could walk from room to room, and certainly hear what was going on in the neighboring room. It was an 8.30 in the morning lab, and the head TA was walking from room to room all pissed off going "where is so-and-so, it is 8.30, he's supposed to start his lab!" So-and-so was the TA of the lab group next to mine. Suddenly, another TA rushes in all wild-eyed and yells "So-and-so was just arrested for murder!" There's a period of stunned silence, and then general hubbub as everyone excitedly exclaims on this development, which included 2 other grad students in the same hamsterology department also being arrested, for killing 2 grad students at another university (some sort of unrequited love, and love triangle sort of stuff, really messy circumstances) and then finally the conversation turns to the hopeful inquiry "does this mean there's no lab today?"
ReplyDeleteTHAT is an especially good one.
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