At the fall semester winds down, those of you dealing with students whining about their grades and workload may enjoy this instructor’s Top Ten No Sympathy Lines. Gems include:
Leprechauns, unicorns, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, hobbits, orcs – and students who know the material but don’t do well on exams. Mythical creatures.
Compare to the academic librarian’s plight of, “no, you need to do the research, although I can show you how.”
Horror stories from the other side of the campus
This was my husband’s first semester teaching full time as a professor. This is finals week and he had a student email him to say that he (the student) wrote down the wrong date for the final and missed it, and could he please make it up? Hubby said no, the final date and time was broadcast to you via the syllabus and mentioned every day the last two weeks of class, plus the schedule is posted all over campus. So today the student’s MOTHER emailed my husband to ask for her baby to be allowed to make up the final. Students today are unbelievable! I can’t imagine telling my mom in the first place that I was dumb enough to miss the final, and I really can’t imagine my mom contacting my professor to try to get an exception made for me. She would probably write my professor to ask if there was a grade lower than F that I could get.
Oh, and this student was a SENIOR, by the way. The little bit of crap we get from students at the reference desk and in instruction sessions is mild compared to what their professors get.