And so it begins...

Maybe I should not have named this blog student e-mails. Maybe I should name it something else.

The complaints have started. Grades are due on Thursday and students have begun lining up to beg for points. As shitty as this already is, it is a little bit shittier for me since I am the head of my particular department. So not only do I get my own students, but if the poor little snowflakes don't get their way with another of the instructors that I am over then I get to hear their complaints. Today I had two, I think, it may have been more.

The first one was actually a retro-complaint, or something like that. I received an e-mail from my boss who had gotten a call from a student that is in one of my instructor's classes (I'll call him Mr. J.). It's difficult to explain, but I will try my best.

This is the first term that we have used the Classroom Performance System and there have been some problems. I'm not going to explain this particular problem, but it was not Mr. J's fault. The students took an exam last Thursday and the results got screwed up because of this "issue". Well Mr. J and I talked aobut what to do and he came up with a pretty good solution. At the next class meeting he let the students take the exam again, the same exam. Not a different exam, the same exam that they already took. Apparently there were a few individuals in the class that did not like this idea and flat out refused to take the exam. I'm assuming the unknown student caller was one of these students. Luckily my boss agreed with me and the case is closed for now, I guess.

I went and picked up something for lunch today, only to come back to a crying student sitting on the bench outside my office. She said that she was failing the class (her third time taking the class, she took it twice with me already) because her instructor (let's call her Ms. A) wouldn't let her make up some points for an assignment that she missed because she had to go to her father's funeral. I don't particularly like having one side of a story, and there's more to this story that I won't bore you with, but I took her to talk with Ms. A, or actually I went to see what Ms. A had to say. The first thing I asked was how many points the student has without the assignment...660-something out of 1000. The maximum amount of points that the assignment was worth was 35. The 35 points still wouldn't get her out of D range. She got up without a word and walked out.

I did have one student brighten my day. Actually it was a former student who is on a [NATIONAL GOLD MEDAL] Quiz Bowl team I advise. She brought me fudge (yummy, yummy homeade fudge) and a candle. There are a few of these good students, and I don't mean good because they bring me fudge. They are students who try hard, students who have to work for what they have, and students that excel at what they do. These are the students that I do this for, even if they are few and far between.