Topic: Bang Your Head on Your Desk - the thread of teaching despair!

[mamselle]

"Miasmas and fogs,"

(...actually the 19th c.medical rationale behind closing colonial burying grounds for public health reasons...)

M.

[Caracal]

Student who needs to pass my class to graduate and GO AWAY - and is a long shot to do that, just emailed me that he got himself suspended for the last week of the semester.

Like he can't go to class? Is that a thing?

[RatGuy]

Student's essay on "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" argues that the greatest fear of the town residents was "airborne pathogens" and I wonder which story she read instead.

I'd guess it comes from the line "There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land."

Yeah, we discussed that passage (and the one later where Knickerbocker says that even visitors aren't immune to the drowsy atmosphere of that sleepy region). In class I approached it from the vantage point of Irving's concept of mutability, and explaining why a place like Sleepy Hollow would stick to its local folklore while the rest of the country progressed after the Revolution. But the student doesn't quote the line in her essay, and she seems to think that the story is about a town beset by a plague. In another paragraph, she references Charles Brockden Brown, so I'm wondering now if she's confusing this story with Ormond, without bothering to double-check the texts themselves.

[FishProf]

Student who needs to pass my class to graduate and GO AWAY - and is a long shot to do that, just emailed me that he got himself suspended for the last week of the semester.

Like he can't go to class? Is that a thing?

Yes, exactly.  He has a hearing today, and a final Friday...

[Caracal]

Student who needs to pass my class to graduate and GO AWAY - and is a long shot to do that, just emailed me that he got himself suspended for the last week of the semester.

Like he can't go to class? Is that a thing?

Yes, exactly.  He has a hearing today, and a final Friday...

Unless, the suspension is for dangerous or disruptive behavior in classes, that seems like a really bad policy. I know it isn't your policy...

[Istiblennius]

ARG! This one is on me. I have two class sections - they have different meeting schedules, which means the University-posted final exam times are different for them. I always give them 24 hours surrounding the posted time to do their final in the LMS. But... I screwed up the LMS programming and accidentally programmed both sections to have the same timing. So students in one of the sections went to start their final last night (because of course they did) and discovered it was locked down. Cue panicked emails streaming in while I blissfully slept. I fixed the problem by apologizing profusely and giving them an extra 24 hours beginning this morning as soon as I saw their emails, but they didn't need that extra stress (neither did I).

[Puget]

ARG! This one is on me. I have two class sections - they have different meeting schedules, which means the University-posted final exam times are different for them. I always give them 24 hours surrounding the posted time to do their final in the LMS. But... I screwed up the LMS programming and accidentally programmed both sections to have the same timing. So students in one of the sections went to start their final last night (because of course they did) and discovered it was locked down. Cue panicked emails streaming in while I blissfully slept. I fixed the problem by apologizing profusely and giving them an extra 24 hours beginning this morning as soon as I saw their emails, but they didn't need that extra stress (neither did I).

This gave me flashbacks to last fall, when we used testing in the LMS because students were half remote. I set the LMS to give them access only during the assigned final exam block. In the middle of the final exam, the system suddenly kicked them all out of the test, saying their time was up. Cue mass panic. It turned out what had happened was an LMS server went down, and for some reason no one ever explained to me, the back-up server they switched to *had the wrong clock time*. I frantically re-set the system to give them a second attempt building on the first, with extra time added to make up for the delay and panic. Then it happened *again* half an hour later. Again, no one could ever explain why. We got through it, but I think it took several months off my life. So glad to be testing on paper this semester-- nothing can go wrong with paper technology (well, except students forgetting to bring pencils, that always happens).

[Biologist_]

When I teach the large intro class, I often bring extra pencils to exams. I collect leftover mechanical pencils from the teaching labs and keep a bundle of them sitting around. Then I just throw it in the box with the exams and answer sheets.

For exams in upper division classes, I always bring a couple of extra calculators.

[the_geneticist]

I bring pencils and boxes of tissues.  I leave the tissues in the classroom for the next set of students.

[Langue_doc]

Stu who plagiarized at least three assignments and who hasn't bothered to respond to emails from the Academic Integrity office has, guess what, plagiarized again. Almost the entire discussion is from a website from which Stu plagiarized an earlier assignment.

At least Stu is consistent.

Yup. Just saw that the above-mentioned Stu has copied and pasted several sentences from the same website on yet another assignment.

Under the bludgeonings of chance [repeated plagiarism]
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

[marshwiggle]

Student who needs to pass my class to graduate and GO AWAY - and is a long shot to do that, just emailed me that he got himself suspended for the last week of the semester.

Like he can't go to class? Is that a thing?

Yes, exactly.  He has a hearing today, and a final Friday...

Unless, the suspension is for dangerous or disruptive behavior in classes, that seems like a really bad policy. I know it isn't your policy...

Suspended is a pretty big deal, so it's not necessarily a bad policy. It's probably intended to bring the student's studies to a screeching halt until the issue is resolved.

[FishProf]

Marshwiggle - you just made an inadvertent pun.

The student says he was arrested and towed for doing burnouts in the parking lot.  Maybe.

If I ever am allowed to know the truth, I'll pass it on.

[marshwiggle]

Marshwiggle - you just made an inadvertent pun.

The student says he was arrested and towed for doing burnouts in the parking lot.  Maybe.

If I ever am allowed to know the truth, I'll pass it on.

Cool. Maybe I have psychic abilities I didn't know about.

[arcturus]

My "it's from google" plagiarist is back: hu would like to be given an extra credit opportunity since "...you took [X] points off of my final project and that took away a lot of points that I did not have originally."  Hu seems to be missing the point of sanctions for academic misconduct...

[Caracal]

Marshwiggle - you just made an inadvertent pun.

The student says he was arrested and towed for doing burnouts in the parking lot.  Maybe.

If I ever am allowed to know the truth, I'll pass it on.

Cool. Maybe I have psychic abilities I didn't know about.

Ha. That almost has to be true right? If the student did something worse they didn't want to tell you about, they would surely never make up such an embarrassing lie?

I still think the school suspending students from class over disciplinary issues is a stupid policy unless there are safety issues with allowing students to come to class or to be on campus.  I can't really see the argument for not letting someone come to classes if the school is fine with them hanging out on campus. Suspension should be for something like starting fires where there's reason to believe the student's presence in the building might be dangerous to everyone else.