Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The senior and the freshman

My department is fairly good at upholding what remain of our university's standards. One big one is that nobody can enroll in our introductory chemistry class after the first week of classes.

No one.

No way.

No how.

(Unless there's a monumental screw up in the Registrar's Office.)

(Or the Dean needs us to do him a "favor.")

By coincidence, the Registrar did screw up and the Dean needed a favor, both in the same week. Two different students were allowed to enroll mid-way through our semester - a senior and a freshman.

Seniors taking a first-year course do pretty well. If they've made it that far, they know how to turn in homework online and can piece together enough nouns and verbs to create a lab report. They generally aren't a problem. Freshmen are, well, freshmen. They don't know their ass from a hole in the ground even when the sun is shining.

Both students were enrolled in my class. Oh, boy.

I met both separately. The freshman was entirely new to campus. I drew him a map to the bookstore. My years of experience told me that he was going to be a big headache.

The senior was gung ho for chemistry. He apologized repeatedly for his various mistakes that led him into the situation and the inconvenience he caused me. He was going to get caught up on all the work during spring break and ace the class. He knew what he wanted to do - graduate this semester - and had a plan to succeed. With this kind of attitude, he'd do well in the class. It was obvious to me, a professor with years of experience dealing with good and bad students. I'm no idiot about these matters, after all.

I'm an idiot. Well, not exactly but I sure as hell didn't foresee that the freshman would actually follow my map to the bookstore, buy the book, and start reading. I didn't realize that he would study hard and actually do well, at least for a guy who joined the class halfway through the semester. I was impressed.

Nor did I expect the senior to completely flake out. All his grandiose claims of superior time management and dedication to graduating this spring were empty, as empty as the zeros I recorded for his incomplete homework assignments. As empty as the exam page where he should have shown his calculations for a 20 point problem. As empty as my beer right now (though not quite that sad).

I don't know what's in store for the freshman. He's probably going to scrape by and maybe graduate some day. The senior will probably graduate too, but not this semester.


Beaker Ben

29 comments:

  1. Well, fuck. You should buy a lottery ticket. Pick your own numbers, then have the agent issue you a ticket for the opposite numbers.

    To me, the frosh is less surprising than the senior. Maybe that's because I am less surprised by people exceeding low expectations.

    Perhaps the senior had no plan beyond the semester. Perhaps what he'd learned in his 3+ years was mostly how to bullshit convincingly, but he also realized that he'd have to put his money where his mouth is, and that he'd still not learned how to do that.

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    1. "Opposite numbers."

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    2. Whatever numbers he picks, they will be wrong, so his odds improve if the numbers he plays are NOT the ones he picked.

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    3. What is the "opposite" of 3?

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    4. Not 3.

      Of course it's ludicrous. Let's not overthink this. Every so often, we encounter a "winning streak" wherein everything goes according to plan. On such occasions, someone will often jokingly suggest that we play the lottery, for we will surely win.

      Ben's situation was the opposite, wherein "if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right".

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    5. OPH. You da man.

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    6. Bullshitting convincingly will get him far in life, I'll grant him that.

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    7. Indeed. Half the time you lie, your victim wants to believe you.

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  2. hate to be that guy who's going to complain about what would happen here. I sincerely wish I wasn't! No way the senior doesn't graduate

    The senior appeals: his [insert family member] died, he battled [insert illness or condition], he argues that instructor was [insert any number of adjectives], etc. Sympathetic associate dean who works closely with VP for Retention changes grade from F to P (passes with credit)

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    1. Yeah, assuming the one placed in the class as a favor to the Dean is the senior, we should fully expect that the inmate already has the asylum's leadership in his back pocket and that he will enjoy their continued intervening to shuttle him through.

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    2. Yes, OPH is right on this. Ben could fight it until death, and I have as well, but it won't matter given the circumstances.

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    3. OPH and ELS are right: I can hear an associate dean here arguing, "being allowed to enroll in the class at mid-semester he was put at a huge disadvantage! It's really unfair to expect him to have completed all the work etc......"

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    4. Hmm. . .Somewhat different experience here (and no Dean's favors involved), but I pretty regularly fail supposedly-about-to-graduate seniors, and they stay failed. I also regularly encounter supposedly-about-to-graduate seniors others have failed (one of the "joys" of teaching summer term). So I'm pretty sure that the failing grades I and my colleagues award "stick."

      Of course, this comes from the perspective of teaching almost exclusively a required writing course that is supposed to be taken somewhere around the beginning of junior year, but which students often put off (or fail, most often by simply not doing the work -- the come-to-the-exam-and-pray-hard approach many of them use for other classes just doesn't work for an examless writing class, and my assignments are not easy to find responses for on the web, so various well-engrained "coping" strategies don't work very well), leading to them taking or retaking it during their planned "last" semester.

      It also comes from the perspective of a place where privilege and entitlement are relatively low, applications and enrollments are fairly high, and tuition dollars from repeated required courses taught by relatively-inexpensive faculty are welcome (perhaps a bit too welcome, but since the retention and graduation "metrics" are pretty good for our student population. . .)

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    5. All of which means that I'm not at all surprised by the behavior of Ben's senior (but understand why he was, if his experience with such students is usually different).

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    6. I take a zen-like view of grade changes. I would not change the student's grade and I would argue strongly against anybody changing it. However, I don't tell the dean what to do. If he wants to change the grade, he can. It's completely out of my hands at that point so I don't worry about it.

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    7. If the senior was put in the class by the dean, he probably knows the dean will take care of him so he won't care about the course. He probably just wants to graduate magna cum barely and his parents will take care of him.

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    8. > graduate magna cum barely

      Nice. I'm going to steal that.

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  3. Yo, Beaker! This one rocks: "As empty as my beer right now (though not quite that sad)."

    Hey, Perp. This one does, too: "He probably just wants to graduate magna cum barely...."

    I'm reading the blog in between conferences with remedial comp students on papers that often make a vacay in Gitmo seem desirable--as long as waterboarding is included.

    Stay strong, everyone.

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  4. I'll update you at the end of the semester.

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  5. Flash forward 15 years, and the freshman is now (still) a struggling adjunct while the senior is Dean of Student Mindfulness, Acceptance, & Delight.

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    1. Yes, but you left one detail out--Senior is leaving to be the provost here.....

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    2. That would make me count the days till retirement!!

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    3. Great. Now that you guys just fucked up my morning, I guess it's all uphill from here.

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    4. "It's all uphill from here"

      That's when I turn to my Yaro file, or one of the many somethings I bookmarked from CM.

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    5. I'm trying to lower my expectations for the coming day in order to blunt my impending disappointment.

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    6. As one of CM's wisest authors recently wrote:
      You know what a good mental health break is? The weekend.

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    7. I hope it was clear that I was not speaking negatively towards you, but was attempting (perhaps poorly) to be funny.

      I am pleased to say that almost everything went as well as possible, and the one thing that didn't went better than expected. So, by all accounts, a winning day. I should have played the lottery.

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    8. I caught it in the way you intended, OPH. You'd have your work cut out to upset me...I recently mentioned not only having the Yaro file in my office, but also bookmarking various posts; some of them are yours and others are ones where your comments are part of the reason for saving them.

      Pleased you got a good result.

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  6. I get big-talkers like your senior all the time. First, they try to convince me that they are good students. Then, "life" starts getting in the way of them doing basic assignments on time. And then, toward the end of the semester, they dramatically reveal some sort of chronic, but not-visibly apparent ailment that is the "true" reason for their poor performance. Or they explain to me that their family has abandoned them. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, there is some sort of extreme "family emergency" that must remain secret that also requires their complete involvement. Lately, I've been getting lots of confessions of being stricken with MS, others blame some mysterious gynecological condition that they are not sure of yet. In the end, if their grades are close enough and they've attended enough, I just pass them through. Yes, I know, standards matter, but the courses I teach are gen. ed. and most of them are graduating from this one-horse school with degrees in Criminal Justice or Psychology. We all know the job prospects in those fields, and most of my students will never qualify to go to graduate school. I just put down the C or D that they are closest to and rest assured that life will sort them out. Crooked? Maybe, but I've gotten tired of being a crusader.

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