I don't see why not!

Madame, If my chem lab finishes early today can I come to your office? tks, Cecilia

Um, yeah, in theory you could definitely come to my office – anytime in fact, not just if your chem lab finished early – now if you want me to actually BE there, too, perhaps you should be more specific?

today's brain trust

Today in class...

So... on WebCT where it says "Current Average" - is that our grade so far this semester?

Um, yes. Again the need for a sniglet signifying those situations where you pretty much can't answer without sounding like you're pointing out how stupid the person question is because, well, the person question is so fucking stupid!

tech culture shock

This time it's about a student I know better, from a club responsibility - hence the fact that she has my cell number...

"How to handle a meeting" 
by 
Generic Student Who Thinks Texting Circumvents Responsibility

This student and I had scheduled the meeting via text the day before - 7pm. I did not imagine it I swear. She had even texted back citing the exact time.

The day of the meeting about 6h50pm (I was at another meeting and then in transit from 6h45-7h so I  didn't see til I got to the venue) a text was sent to me: "what time are we meeting exactly?"

Now... the linguist must weigh in... Words/language is everything - "exactly" implies that it never was specified before, when we had most certainly specified.

I text back (at 7h05) "7pm. Do you need to resched?"

"No - i can be there in a few minutes - is that OK?"

"OK"

25 minutes later (no word in the meantime) she arrives.

Is NOTHING sacred anymore??

Texting ≠ meeting a responsibility!!!!!

And if you say "a few minutes" and it runs longer YOU SHOULD FUCKING LET THE PERSON KNOW! Especially as you've already illustrated that you are perfectly able and that you LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE to text rather than communicate voice to voice.

Sometime soon I'm actually going to reach an age where I don't give a shit and am going to just call every single person out on this kind of thing. Maybe no one is telling them anymore how to be a responsible human being? Guess it's time for me to step up. Worst case scenario is they'll say they're aware of it (whatever social moré they've disappointed) and then I can say, "Well then,

WTF????"

Of course the older I am at the time the better this will go over. Eventually I'll just be thought of as that crazy old language instructor who is Really Picky about people DOING WHAT THEY'RE FUCKING SUPPOSED TO FUCKING DO AND SAID THEY WOULD FUCKING DO.

And even that is giving them way too much credit.

gall

Here’s the memo I just typed to staple onto this person’s journals and gave to him while I was handing stuff back before the final exam...

For once, writing something on the spur of the moment while I was still quite pissed off didn’t backfire and I kept things fairly succinct I think – I do regret not reiterating in there somewhere how if he had just done the journals as requested they would probably have taken far less time (even just the copy/pasting is more fucking time-consuming than just doing it yourself in the first place – each individual journal required at most FIVE sentences) and didn’t have to be very good at all (my NFA even ended up with an 8/10 ave b/c the majority of her communication came thru despite language use errors... well I might have amped it a bit but it was definitely in the C range – and he, tho lazy and an asshole and an idiot, writes far better than she does). What I really wish is that I would have had time to scan his journal gradesheet and to print the letter on letterhead but oh well...


Note: this is the third time this person took 222 - all three times with me and both of the first two times he failed b/c of simple lack of fulfillment of coursework and excessive absence. His test average was low C range - plenty to pass if he had just got his act the fuck together.

9 aug 11 James,
 I really don’t know what to say. I’m astounded that the third time through you would have the lack of respect for your work and the course to use online (or perhaps in person) translation for the vast majority of your journals.
 Being very familiar as I am with the styles and pitfalls of online and/or mechanical translations, and comparing with your original writing sample and considering that I have known your writing now for three semesters, I can say unequivocally that it is impossible that you wrote these journals with only occasional dictionary use as the instructions direct.
 If you would like to dispute any of these journals you are welcome to come to the office after the exam and write a few more samples for me to prove that you are capable of writing at the level of these journals.
 Let me know before you leave the classroom if you are going to do this. I will be leaving campus right after the exam otherwise.
 Yours sincerely,
 ES

I resisted mentioning, in the first paragraph, his lack of respect for me in addition to the course and his work... This day and age I finally have stopped presuming they'll have an iota of that in the first place.

Seriously?! #417

Subject: course materials
Hello Professor S, I'm Hunter Borden and I'll be in your FR 222 class this semester, and I'd like to know what materials, such as binders or notebooks, I may need for your class.

I expected this to be about the book/s but no... this person isn’t even smart enough to know whether s/he might need to take notes?? or how s/he might want to organize any paperwork from the course...??

OR is this just me being old fashioned and/or are so many other classes on campus non-note-taking and non-paper now?? Do they really no longer know if they'll need paper products or which ones?!


I SO wanted to write back and remind him/her to bring his paint smock and a towel for nap time.

yeah, I wish I had internet, too

Student missed his exam.

Emails me before the next exam period asking what room we were to be in and to email him if I could please.

I wrote him back to let him know he had missed it but that he could take it with my other level in the next exam period if he wanted to - gave him the room number, etc. (See I'm not a total monster!)

Almost an hour later I have an email back: "Oh too bad. I wish I had a way to see internet on campus. I would have seen that message somehow before coming all the way back home. What can I do?"

Firstly, why did he ask for me to verify the room number if he supposedly wasn't going to be able to see it until he got home? (I answered that email within 2 minutes of its arrival in my inbox.) Nevermind that he ALWAYS has his Blackberry in class so, um, not being able to see emails? ha!

Secondly, what you can do is race your little behind back to campus b/c this is the last fricking day of exams and after this you are S. O. Fucking L.

I'm not sure what chance he has of passing anyway; he never did any homework and doesn't have a great average on quizzes and tests...

further proof

that that person who thinks she's the smartest person in my 8am, um maybe... isn't so much... sitting at the final in a non-exam row (strict seating protocols in my classes on exam days). In order to sit in the right spot she would be in front of the door but the door would still have room to open (assuming she scooched up a bit, which later she showed she was not intelligent enough to do either but whatever).

"Please get in the exam row," I said.
"I'll have to close the door."
"Yes you will."

Sigh.

Yes, it's finals week, aka high season on AH. Brace yourselves :)

can't wait

Heaven help us!

It dawned on me this morning as I was grading compositions and listening to the news about that lamo air traffic controller in Cleveland who was watching a movie and ignoring needy pilots up in the air that THIS is the kind of thing we were all afraid of when articles, etc., started coming out about Gen Y and how lame they were in college and wondering what the world would be like once they started entering the work force...

So now we know: at worst we will all die horrible deaths, at best we will be surrounded by media that is so badly written and organized and researched that no one will know what the fuck is going on anywhere.

My favorite thing in the whole wide world

This from someone who missed the oral today and for some reason I decided to be nice and let her make it up...

Figuring out times with a student via numerous emails, my favorite thing in the whole wide world.

Me: We need to do it today before 3h30 or tomorrow before noon or after 2h30. Let me know what time you're coming by; I'll be here til 5 or 5h30 tomorrow if tomorrow afternoon is the only time. 

Her: OK I’ll see you at 3h30 today.

Me:  I have to leave at 3h30 today. 

Her: Oh, OK, then I’ll come right before class tomorrow.

(i.e. 12h10 or 12h15, which was NOT one of the original options – I HATE having crap like that scheduled right before class because invariably they are late or something goes wrong or whatever, which is why I said “before noon”!!) 

Me:  It has to be before noon if you want to do it before then, not right before class. Alternatively we could do it right AFTER your class.

Still waiting to hear the next communication from the Brain Trust.

Stymied...

...by my third helicopter parent email of the semester. Last I heard, the US considers 18-yr-olds to be adults, administratively if not alcohol-consumption-wise. 


If I’d wanted to teach high school...

where to start...

I seriously don't know how many etiquette and/or just plain common sense rules this breaks, ridiculous albeit ballsy request notwithstanding. Of course I changed the student's name; you'll have to trust me (I am a linguist after all) that the new version is an accurate depiction of the syntax, nuance, language level, and utter stupidity of the original.

From: student
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:54:46
To: me
Subject: important 1 

i just emailed one of the girls in the class and was told we have both a quiz and a compo and i was wondering if there is any way that i can take it tomorrow in the morning?
~!*Sweetie P Simpson*!~

By the way, every email I got from this student all semester was marked "important," and included the cutesy moniker.

Hmmm. Apparently not important enough to sign off like a real person.

trade-off

I admit it – I haven’t done a new lesson plan for Fren1030 in 6 weeks – but what good is all this French teaching knowledge and all these years of putting up with increasingly big loads of student crap if not for just being able to plug yourself into a lesson and run with it so that at least the longer you go and the more students disrespect you and resent the course, the less you have to work?

the great fallacy of study abroad programs: that the students will somehow be more responsible

than the standard language classroom student just b/c they are interested in SA

har!

If it were a snake...

Seriously? HUGE stack of turned-in exams on the table in front of the classroom where I'm sitting waiting for them to finish and yet this one person EVERY SINGLE TIME holds her paper in front of my face waiting for me to grab it and --I don't know-- put it on the stack for her? I point to the stack each time and make her put it down. Usually I say, "Please put it here," or similar. Today I just pointed.

It's no wonder really that they don't do as well on the materials as they used to - they can't even figure out where to hand something in when a big obvious stack is right in front of them.

It's these little things that drive me the craziest I think.

I dare you to try to have fun

Stupid 2nd years of course – I gave them their composition assignment (we just read Petit Nicolas chapter where he talks about the soccer game raté) which was to describe a game they participated in when they were little... I told them they could write it and just describe it as usual or if they wrote from the perspective of a child, they could have EC...


400 million questions later b/c that is SUCH a fucking complicated idea. "Well do we still write in past tense then? Well do we pretend it happened yesterday or when? Why can’t we write in present? and the fave (absolutely true): How can it be from a child’s perspective if we’re adults? 


I finally broke into English and said this, verbatim:

“Oh I don’t know, it might end up ... oh, ... like a certain gigantic French text we just read which was of course written by adults, too.” (BESTEST sarcastic voice!)

What I should have done was just erase the fucking option from the board. Fucking hell.

Needless to say when I asked the perfunctory “vous avez aimé la lecture?” (Did you like the reading?) Every Single Person I called on either said “c’était long” (It was long) or if REALLY pressed for an opinion “comme ci comme ça” (so-so).

And this is the GOOD class!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am so fucking sick of this fucking shit I could fucking scream. I have no idea how I’ll last another couple of years til my bank statement or the economy is better.

Putain de merde.

You know they're in trouble when

they don't even know the material enough to understand the directions on the quiz.

petty (which comes from French, and which, yes, I do mean as a double-entendre... which comes from French also :)

So every time someone writes about fucking Quia (online workbook medium) it's because they got an answer wrong on an activity and later figured out their mistake but accidentally typed the same thing on the subsequent try, or they think it's being overly picky on something that wasn't crucial to the current language skillset, or (rarely) it really is grading that one answer wrong...

We're talking one answer out of maybe 8-10 on one activity out of about 25 actvities per chapter out of 5 chapters all of whose Quia homework adds up to a mere 10% of the final grade.

I did languages in college :) not math but I think that means that each individual answer is worth about 1/1000th of their final grade, a.k.a. just a hair more than Jack Shit.

It is a well-known phenomenon, beyond all this, that the people who complain the most about these insignificant teensy answers are the ones who (a) think they know so much French they don't have to pay attention in class and (b) probably do have a good enough average that a dorky answer problem here and there on Quia (or 50 such answer problems – or way more) –will never in a thousand years cause them to drop below the A or B range in which they are normally mired for the duration.

So imagine my satisfaction today when one such female student writes about one such answer on one such activity.... on Quia and asks me please to adjust her grade (I forgot to mention that just finding the activity they are talking about takes a few emails back and forth since they rarely give you enough info to find the activity in question). I decided to humor her because I had been feeling SO vitriolic towards her the other day I felt I needed to do some kind of penance so I can get my inner-thought karma clean again... kinda.

I finally find the activity she means and lo and behold it is one where I had ALREADY SET THE GRADING TO BE BASED ON COMPLETION ONLY not on accuracy.

It's one of those cases where you would have a hard time keeping a straight face if it was in person; one of those times when explaining what the person overlooked invariably sounds like sarcasm or mockery because the explanation is so incredibly basic.

Meredith, I think if you look at your grade for that activity you'll find it is only grading on completion anyway and that you already had received 10 out of 10 on it.

I will still endeavor to be nicer in my head, but next time she gives me that I'm-bored-and-you-are-nowhere-near-as-funny-as-you-think-you-are look, I'm just going to smile and remember that she is nowhere near as intelligent as either of us thought she was.

I guess I have to teach English reading now.

Sent this group msg out to the 1010s the other day:

Je m'excuse! The quiz on the syllabus for today is a typo. We will have a quiz Monday instead over Leçons 7 et 8. FYI.

A bientôt,

Mme S

10 minutes later, a reply comes - attached at the top of my earlier msg.

bonjour[sic] madame, do we have a quiz on monday?

Um, yes, we do. In addition to Leçons 7 and 8, it will also cover English reading comprehension.

ranting riff/riffing rant

I swear next semester I'm just going to have them pull up half-sheets of paper and write their fucking journals in class – what the fuck is the problem with just fucking doing something the way someone asks you to instead of trying to cheat deadlines, using translators, etc.????? not to mention how they have the technical acumen to deal with their telephones and twitter and all manner of other online shit but can't fucking handle clicking a button that says "post new entry"???????

someone with Quia question today who when I started to say "you need to try to pay more attention to detail..." interrupts me: "OH I guess you just have to be a genius to do Quia," and just walks out.

Yeah, I guess so. Or at least you have to be smart enough to take your instructor's advice and chill the fuck out and/or suck it up.

more shenanigans from Collegiality's No Man's Land

Specifically, love getting emails from colleagues with "URGENT URGENT URGENT" on them saying that you need to meet with them, then you respond (within 20 minutes of receipt) that you can't meet that day due to your back to back classes the whole fricking day (which this colleague, who happens to be the scheduler of our dept, should know) and you give them 2 different BIG HUGE SPANS OF TIME within which for them to pick ONE FRICKING TIME and instead of even responding, they barge into your office and start riffing at the top of their lungs on the aforementioned URGENT matter without even asking if you have a minute and even tho you are obviously working on something and (as they should know, again) have class in FOUR minutes – and when you say, "Roger, I am very sorry but as I said I do not have a moment to spare today and right now I am still finishing something for my class in four minutes" they huff and act like you are the one inconveniencing them.

He ended up scheduling a meeting (there were several of us he needs to meet with re our summer programs) but just schedules it willy-nilly during a time when some of us have class. Not that I mind letting my 2020s out early tomorrow but how about a little courtesy, not to mention civility? Two other people teach at that time, too, so he finally agreed he would stay "a little later" for them, i.e. until 5:30pm. I wish I had not already told my class we would be getting out a little early; I'd make sure to ARRIVE at the strike of 5:29, just out of spite.