Grade Bailouts

Seems like an appropriate title. After all, adults who should have known better and done things differently are all lining up at Washington to ask for a financial bailout. It should be no surprise that the current college generation exhibits some similar traits when it comes to grades. Both are equally taxing. (Har.)

No, I will not go back and magically erase those absences you have. Yes, they could impact your grade, as per the syllabus. Failure to ignore reality is not going to earn you a bailout.

I think it's amusing that you just now noticed with your keen powers of observation that you're missing "a few" assignments, considering the ultimate semester deadline was a week ago, and those assignments were due in some cases two months ago. No, you cannot just "pop by the office and drop them off." They're not a box of doughnuts, they're grades. I'm sure everybody else in the class would've loved an extra two weeks to two freaking months to put their assignments together. They had a plan, you didn't. Pretending this is no big deal is not going to result in a bailout.

Lobbying me constantly via email and with cutsey comments is not going to make me improve your grade. I didn't fall off the turnip truck. Nor will showing up at my office at the crack of dawn improve your results--especially when you send me an email wondering why I'm not there at the crack of dawn (I was in a fucking meeting). There is a reason I said we would give them back at 1:30 in the afternoon. I don't like lobbyists. You don't get a bailout.

I'm not sure why your grade didn't "show up" via the online system that requires YOU to take the quizzes which then magically appear in the online grade book. I have nothing to do with it--it's all the wonders of the internet. If it didn't show up, that likely means YOU didn't do it. Why should you be bailed out for failure to do something?

Yes, it in fact does "suck" that you spent the whole semester putting things off until you forgot that things were actually due. We agree that you suck. But why, if there has been no change in your day to day operations, should I invest in you with a bailout? Won't you just have the same academic bankruptcy five months later?


-- DV

And in the middle of my tirade on the ones who suck this semester, in walked one of the good ones just now with a big fat Xmas present and a homemade card--candy/treats that are made in her home state and her undying gratitude for having somebody so far away from home (she lives on the West Coast). Aw.