Reply to What do you think of nit picky teachers? 6th grade

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "What do you think of nit picky teachers? 6th grade"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Better to learn to follow directions now.

I teach college and last year I had a student hand in an essay that completely missed the purpose of the assignments. She was a great student, had been doing very well in the course, was a lovely person but for whatever reason she just went completely off base on her final term paper. She wrote a great paper and obviously put a lot of work into it but it wasn't the paper that was assigned.

I graded using a rubric and there were parts of the rubric that I couldn't even apply to her paper. I gave her marks where I could and her final mark was around 40%.

She contacted me immediately asking to meet. She came to my office and she looked like she had been through something awful. She told me she couldn't sleep or eat, that she had never failed anything and she didn't know how to cope with this. She started sobbing in my office and it was a bit heart wrenching. I could see that she really didn't know how to cope with this. She pleaded and pleaded to let her rewrite it or to grade it differently or do a bonus assignment or anything because she couldn't accept a failing grade. I said no to all and she was honestly almost traumatized. I really think this was the most difficult thing that she had gone through (as a high achiever). I had to get her support from a friend to leave my office. [b]Her mom called me a couple days later [/b]pleading with me to do something as her daughter was not coping well and this had impacted her mental health.

I met twice more with the student helping her to learn to cope and build resilience and never changed her mark. That would have been the easy out for me and made her happy but this was a life lesson she needed to learn and it was what was fair. She never fully understood. She did pull herself back together and did fine in my class (above the class average but lower than her usual marks). It would have been much much better for her to learn this when she was younger. [/quote]

Wait.  Her MOM called you?  Is this a thing now?  I am floored that parents now think it is OK to call their child's university professors to plead for special favors (or for any reason).  I would have been absolutely mortified if my parents had done this.  [/quote]

The number of times parents called and made appointments to discuss their kids grades is far, far greater then most people know. And the argument that you paid for college so you deserve to discuss your child's grades will never fly. Your child is an adult and my student. I am not allowed to discuss his/her grades or progress in class. And the student never agreed to release information to their parents, mainly because the student knew that I took attendance, even though I didn't count it in their grade, and that I had the grade book for all the assignments that they missed. And I still had the assignments that they failed and never picked up. It was far easier for the child to tell the parent that they failed because I was a bitch and an awful Professor, trust me I heard that more then once, and not because they didn't attend class or do the assigned work. I had one student who sat in on a meeting with her parents and authorized the conversation. The meeting did not end in her favor.

And this was 20 years ago. I can only imagine that it has gotten worse.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics