Excuses

I turned in my grades at 3:45pm on Wednesday afternoon.  I had 45 minutes to spare.  Some years I have less than that.

The truth is I generally run out of motivation to grade prior to actually having to do the grading.  In some respects, the lack of interest some of my students display drains me of the motivation I think I should have.  As much as we would like to have students who think that they should give maximum effort in each of their classes, that’s very often not the case.

I gave three incompletes this past semester.  That’s three more than I usually do.  I will do just about anything to avoid giving an incomplete.  I think I’ve mentioned before my hatred of paperwork.

Originally posted as part of Teacher’s Lounge

One of my students was taking my Multimedia class as an independent study.  Given the disastrous nature of the past semester (five bomb scares, network crash, hackers, contentious labor negotiations, and jury duty for me), I didn’t hold up my end of trying to keep in contact.  Truth is, I feel that in that situation, it is the student’s responsibility for that, but I’m cutting her some slack.  She’ll have until February to complete a final project.  I’m hoping it is up to the standard set by the other students in the class.  They did excellent, professional looking work, for the most part…even the student who is graduating and only wanted to do “enough.”

Two students in my computer literacy class were taken ill.  The mother of one of them showed up in my class in early December telling me her child was in the hospital, having had a severe reaction to an allergy treatment.  The other one came with a note signed by a doctor which said she should not be allowed to return to class until next semester.  Not that she ever came much this semester.

A third student in comp lit (which to me has always rather meant “comparative literature”) was given the opportunity to turn in the stuff he showed up with after the deadline by linking to it from his website…since there was no reason for me to grade it if he didn’t have a website for his final project.  He was angry about that and he showed me!  No website.

Two students in Visual Basic and three in Java didn’t make it.  Nothing I could tell them about getting so far behind sank in.  It just is not possible to catch up an entire semester of a programming class in the last week or two.  And no excuse is going to substitute for actually learning how to program.  

They sometimes don’t like it that I take it to be my duty make sure that they have learned how to and can program.  They.  Not their relatives or their friends or fellow classmates or even the guy in the tutoring lab, but they.

No excuse is going to bridge that gap.  As empathetic as I can be to actual human suffering, they still have to learn the material.  I have a responsibility to teachers they will have in the future.

On of my colleagues had one student who had three grandmothers die this past semester.  As we all know, the major cause of death of the relatives of our students dying is examinations.  Once upon a time, one of my colleagues, upon hearing that a student would not be at the final because his mother had died, called up the student’s home to offer her deeply felt condolences…only to have Mom answer the phone.

Out of such occurrences grows a strong sense of cynicism.

I hate being lied to.  I don’t cause the deaths of your relatives, the computer is not part of a conspiracy to destroy your work (it did not, for example, cause you to click Yes when it asked you if you really wanted to delete all you files), and I am serious when I tell you how your final project will be graded (your project should be created accordingly).  

And now is funk time…the few days of collapse before trying to get “up” for the holidays.  I should probably go get a wreath today in order to feign my interest.

Bah humbug.

And Happy Holidays.