Monday, April 20, 2015

This Semester's Excuses. The Beginning of a List From Academaniac.

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1. My dog dropped my hard drive in a bucket of water. (This was a real excuse. I couldn't make this stuff up.)

2. My brain hurts.



42 comments:

  1. I couldn't write my report because my phone wasn't charged.

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    1. Do you have any handwritten draft?

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    2. No, but we do have Bud, Bud Light, Coors, and Sam Adams.

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    3. Pat:

      I homebrew mine. I just bottled a batch of draft this past weekend and got 5-1/2 cases out of it.

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    4. I'm not talking about beer. I meant that if you cannot type the report, you can write it by hand instead of typing it. If your report must be typed, you will do that later.

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    5. Monica, you're right. I totally apologize. I mean, just because your reply triggered a memory of my undergrad days when I worked in a restaurant and I responded to that trigger by attempting a joke doesn't mean that I needed to act upon said trigger. I was totally out of line.

      (And if the sarcasm above wasn't evident, let me make it clear here. I'm not sorry. I would think that I shouldn't be required to make this sarcasm statement, but it appears that my joke was taken too literally by everyone's favorite contrarian.)

      And QWV, I homebrewed for a while, but I don't have the time right now. Maybe in a four or five years when I'm able to do less overload to make ends meet. You know, when the kids have left the house.

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    6. Pat:

      I've been homebrewing for more than 20 years. I found that taking time to make a new batch and, later, bottle it as welcome breaks from working on my Ph. D. thesis.

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    7. Thank you all for explaining the double-entendre; I haven't been getting any lately.

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    8. Much appreciated. I mean, humour based on alternative interpretations is totally lost on me these days. So if your joke uses a hidden meaning, it's best not to let me guess; just give it to me.

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    9. @OPH: That's not what my condolences were about, but I guess they should be.

      My condolences were a double entendre. I was sending condolences because you said "I haven't been getting any."

      So I'm just giving it to you. ;-)

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  2. My brother was going to pick up my cat from the shelter but he had an emergency guitar lesson so I have to do it will I miss anything important? (Probably treading on thin ice here FERPA-wise, but the heck with it. It's a Platonic Ideal of student excuses, meant to be shared with the world.)

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    1. We are having a quiz. It was supposed to be a surprise but since you wouldn't want to miss that, I might as well tell you. Forget about the cat. It will still be at the shelter tomorrow. You should better study for the quiz!

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    2. Emergency guitar lesson! This is my favorite.

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  3. The best students could come up while I was teaching, aside from the perpetual die-off of various relatives, was something along the lines of: "I can't have the assignment done for today as I have to play soccer."

    I did, however, accept reasons/excuses such as hard drive failure. Floppy disks were also prone to either failure or data corruption.

    Back then, HDs didn't last as long as they do now and I've had some that started making rude noises after about a year. Nowadays, that's not an issue, particularly with all sorts of storage devices available and at considerably lower cost than they were back then.

    I used to teach CAD and I warned students to make frequent backups of their drawing files. Did everyone listen and follow my advice? What do you think?

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    Replies
    1. Ah, those were the days, right?

      Despite having a plethora of cheap data storage options, too many students choose only one, the flash drive, which is the least reliable.

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    2. I list having a backup system in the "required materials" part of my syllabus, and urge them to have both local and cloud (preferably automatic) backup storage. I also tell them I'll be more sympathetic if they lose a few hours' work than if they lose a week's or a month's work. That gets some shocked looks, but also some nods of recognition. But I'm not sure whether it precipitates any action on their part (and I still get the occasional "my drive died" excuse).

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  4. "I know the midterm is in a few days, but I also know you're a big music aficionado and I'm taking the week off to go to Coachella.... so....."

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  5. I couldn't do the assignment because I didn't know how to calculate one-half of one-third, because (1) I didn't have a calculator, and (2) I would have understood this confusing question if the amounts had been worded as proportions instead.

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  6. I can't because my sister is getting married.

    You said your sister got married the first week of the semester.

    This is a different sister.

    Older or younger?

    What?

    Is this sister older or younger?

    Then what?

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  7. I'm partial to the classic "My dog did a shit on it."

    I don't see that one as often now that they use their electronic gizmos to do their homework, but that will make it all the sweeter when it finally does happen to one of them.

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    1. It's even more fun when the instructor's aging cat uses a student paper for that purpose. (I had aging cats in the waning days -- at least for me -- of requiring paper copies of papers. Fortunately, photocopy machines were also common, so there was a solution to the problem, at least once things dried out a bit.)

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    2. I have had one of my pets chew on a student paper. I did as you did, photocopied it, which did a pretty good job at hiding the damage.

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    3. I have had one of my pets chew on a student paper. I did as you did, photocopied it, which did a pretty good job at hiding the damage.

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    4. Earlier this year a student sent me a phone picture through our LMS of the animal-destroyed notebook and tatter-strewn floor. It was beyond repair, clearly. I had to give credit for using contemporary technology to document...

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  8. I've probably told this story before, but the most memorable student excuse I've ever gotten was "hair emergency." (Older woman, whose children apparently insisted that she go immediately to the salon that day...)

    "Parole hearing" raises more questions than you're supposed to ask...

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    1. "I have to be in court" is equally enigmatic (and pretty common in my experience).

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    2. I once had a student come to me with "I have to be in court" to explain why he would be absent from my lecture that day.

      I told him, "Well, these things happen, you know," but he quickly responded with a big smile and said: "Oh, no--today I become Canadian!"

      It was with the greatest of pleasure that I told him to go stand before the magistrate, as I vaguely remembered my own day in citizenship court. That was one occasion when I joyously accepted a student's reason for being absent.

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    3. I had, " I will miss class because I have to go to jail." I looked puzzled and the students says for my criminal justice class. Not too long afterwards their instructor sent out an email about his students VISITING jail!

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    4. Frenna:

      A variation of that came courtesy of one department in our building. Every year, it went to a nearby women's prison and taught courses to some of the inmates there. Needless to say, that led to a few jokes about how the instructors from that department were going to jail.

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    5. Have to be in court is not a valid excuse. The pick-up basketball game can wait.

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  9. "Sorry for the short notice, but I can't make it today. Can we reschedule? This week is very busy for me, so next week would be best."

    Excuse-less email from student who decided to ignore that facts that (1) I'd announced in class that there's no time to reschedule conferences, so the best alternative is to come and bring whatever you have, however incomplete; (2) that the conference schedule posted online clearly shows no open slots; (3) that said conference schedule shows no slots beyond the end of this week; and (4) that the final version of the paper is due next week.

    Sometimes I appreciate an excuse, even a lame or ridiculous one, just as a sign of respect. Lacking same, I offered to reschedule the conference for very early in the morning on either of two days *this* week.

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  10. Not one weed joke on 4/20. I really did break the page. - Terry P.

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    Replies
    1. Is forgetting to post a marijuana joke on the right day an effective meta-joke?

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    2. Where is Cash when you need him?

      Seriously, where is Cash?

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  11. Just wanted to let you know I will not be attending class today. The reason is because I don't feel under the weather today I will get the notes from my classmates.

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  12. Comments interjected. Some details altered to protect the identity of the disappointing and disappointed.

    Hey Proctor Hep,

    It just dawned on me that the afternoon workshop is this Tuesday, not next Tuesday. [N.B. she sent this email at 9:30 AM on the Tuesday in question. I had emailed two reminders, the latest of which used the word "tomorrow", and which the receipt indicates was read about 18 hours prior to this response.] At this point in time I am in Northeast Salumeria to help my BFF get ready for motocross rehabilitation school in Nukutavake. We have been making trips to move her things between Salumeria and Quakerberg over the last 5 days with her mother's cousin's hybrid step-van. [The verisimilitude is always enhanced by some overly specific details.] Today I have to help her with vaccinations, scuba tank requalification, hang-glider airworthiness inspection, exiterra becuase she leaves tomorrow, witch means she can't drive me back to Qberg in her car and I can't drive the van either because it is still full of stuff. If you feel that I should attend this workshop, let me know so I can look into public transit options and procede from there.

    My response: I feel that the syllabus said that the workshop is mandatory. All requests for excused absences must be directed to the Office of Student Appeasement.

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  13. Exiterra. These excuses make me want to do just that.

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