The Pissed Off Professor

Today, I go to my classes to perform tasks completely devoid of anything close to teaching: I am returning recent work and collecting more.

Days like this make it hard to go to “the office,” but as the end draws near, it is merely a part of the process.

I have the last of the formal essays to return to my students, and it was a mixed bag: of course, it generally is, but the really good papers were dangerously close to being overshadowed by the ill-conceived works that scream shrilly at a teacher when she is at the end of the term. (That screaming is present but not nearly as annoying when these mistakes are made at the beginning of the term.)

I am most concerned by some of these last essays because today is the day the students’ research papers are due. (For the record, these are research projects they were assigned fifteen [15] weeks ago, and my students have completed two pre-paper assignments designed to keep them working gradually on the paper.)

These research papers were originally due Monday, but I bumped the due date to today as I won’t start my grading until tomorrow anyway. I even cancelled Monday’s class to give them a chance to work on their papers and/or ask me questions.

Between Friday of last week and yesterday afternoon, I received three e-mailed questions about the research papers. Not surprisingly, these questions dealt with odd citation issues or the best way to integrate a source, or whether the ten-page limit was firm, and they came from “A” students.

When I got up this morning, I had almost thirty new e-mailed questions piled up in my class-related IN box. (Several were duplicates containing small tirades from students who had e-mailed me a question at 11:30 pm and who were miffed that by 1:00 am I had not responded.)

The volume of last-minute questions scared me, and reading some of them—well, obviously there are going to be a few more failing students than I had hoped this semester.

More troublesome than the stupid questions—and yes, sometimes there are stupid questions—are the family deaths / emergencies.

I have become just jaded enough to have answered one of my students as follows:

I am very sorry to hear about your loss. I believe that makes two relatives and one family pet who have died this semester—that is a serious string of bad luck. It’s good you won’t be able to get to class today to turn-in your paper: I’d be worried you’d get hit by a bus.

Under the circumstances and given everything you’re dealing with right now, I’m certain the failing grade I have to assign to you isn’t relevant.

I wish you the best, and again, I am sorry for yet another loss in your life.

I presume from the context, you get that this student is suffering from a major case of liar-liar-pants-on-fire.

The reason I dread going in today—short of the fact that I have no teaching to look forward to—is the students who will come to my office bearing excuses. Some will be teary-eyed; others will be flippant; but none will simply admit they put their papers off to the very end, and just as I had warned would be the case, they find themselves facing a due date they weren’t responsible enough to meet.

Thank goodness the end is near.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 2:41 pm and is filed under College, English, Students, Teaching, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.