I'm pretty good at sending strong signals to students that there's no use in coming to my office to discuss (read: negotiate) final grades. Yet roughly one or two students each year prove foolish enough to try talk their way into a (slightly) higher grade. I never budge.
Today, some benighted student dropped by my office, without an appointment, to discuss his final grade. Within a few minutes, it became clear to him that he had no real basis for disputing the grade he earned on his term paper, so he then turned to purported reasons why his grade for the course should be increased. Of the many foolish suggestions he made, one that stuck out was this: He told me that he should get "a little extra credit" due to the fact that he came to class. I explained to him in palpably annoyed tones that one does not get credit for meeting one's most basic obligation.
The point was entirely foreign to this student. He couldn't see how it was the case that by registering for my course he incurred the prima facie obligation to attend class regularly, and how this meant that the idea of giving him extra credit for attending class regularly is incoherent.
That someone could get through 3 years of university education and not be aware of this basic point about obligation and moral credit is amazing. It's also an interesting indication of how universities are failing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
Being a chair, I get to hear more than just my own students' ridiculous bullshit. My favorite so far concerned a trio of young women who came to my office to complain about one of my adjuncts. Being imbeciles, it took a while for them to articulate what the fuck it was they were complaining about.
"So what you're saying," I said to them "is that you think it's unfair that the instructor has questions on the exams that cover material from the lectures, given that he doesn't explicitly require attendance?"
"Yes," they said "that's our complaint exactly". They were completely incapable of grasping the astonishing absurdity of this.
Here's how I finally got them to back down: I told them that they would need to submit their complaint to me in writing.
imipolex:
Nice! Back when I taught in the state you presently teach in, I once had a student complain after having missed an exam that he didn't *know* that the exam would be on the day he missed. I said, "the exam days are indicated on the syllabus." He replied: "you never told us that we had to read the syllabus."
So, I get an email from a student the night before an exam last week asking if I would allow a cheat-sheet.
My reply: No.
Yet, I was perplexed. We seem to reached a point where a student asks, without the slightest embarrassment or hesitation, if he can cheat on an exam. What was this about? Last night I told my sister about it. She is a middle school teacher. She informed me that one of the many "results" of the No Child Left Behind Act, is that teachers all over, in order to keep school funding, are allowing kids to have just these very "cheat sheets" for all their exams. "It's just normal to them, now."
729: 1
Educational Doom: 1,567,938.
729:
Wow. That's utterly fucked and a sure sign of DOOM. I always suspected that the "No Child Left Behind" stuff would fail at everything except for confirming the impression in students that schools are providers of consumer goods-- viz., that "no child left behind" would come to be understood to mean "the customer is always right," or at least that educating the student was *wholly* the responsibility of the school (and in no way a burden for the student).
I'm sure there's some Frankfurt School language about instrumentalization that's appropriate here, but I stopped paying attention to Frankfurt School stuff in 1989.
I can almost see the dark clouds of DOOM overhead!!!
Brooks:
Nothin' left to do but play the fiddle.
...and watch the world burn.
Brooks:
And laugh.
My favorite when I used to be a course assistant was Juniors and Seniors in College complaining when I used to deduct points off an essay or term paper for grammar and Spelling. Now I was not even being a bit prickish about improper use of a semi colon or some long physics terms, I was deducting for constructing a sentence with no verb in it, prepositional phrases used as sentences, confusing homonyms, and even mispelling a made up word such as "conversate".
When I talked to my neice who was approximately their age at teh time, I was told that it was due to "Whole Language" being taught where you marked correct on tests even if your spelling and grammar was not correct, as long as you could remotely communicate an idea. I asked her if pictographs were also marked "passing" and she said no. How can students survive in the real world if they cannot even communicate and reason effectively.
Another time I will give you the rant about how I kicked out an intern from the much vaunted NYU publishing program due to the fact she wanted to work on "real stuff" even though she was only available to show up for four hours on one day per week.
Santa:
One thing I'll say for teaching at an fancy university to stuck up boot lickers: I've yet to have to correct a conflation of "its" and "it's" in a student paper.
Post a Comment