Thursday, August 03, 2006

I'm singing, so it must be over.

Finals are all graded. Final essays are all scored.

I would love to be able to tell you that everybody passed with flying colors, but that would not be true.

Three of my students did not pass.

Oh, they did well on all the in-class work. But this was a HYBRID course: half over the internet and half in class. And these three never once accessed Blackboard to see the assignments.

One of them tried to tell me that he DID, and he even had a note from his mother assuring me that he had. But if he did, and he had, where are those nine short essays that were assigned via the 'net over the past eight weeks? He did turn in a final paper, but he hadn't followed the directions, and there are no citations at all.

I can track viewers on this website, and he wasn't one of them.

The other two who failed? At least they didn't try to maneuver their way out of it with lies and a note from Mommy. As they left together that last evening, one of them wished me a good summer and hoped I'd be in a good mood when I graded her last paper.

But you see, my mood has nothing to do with it. At this level, things are graded very strictly, and a college-level class is not a good place to turn in a formal essay about how she discovered that her cat preferred dry cat food over the more expensive wet stuff. Even with citations.

The rest of my students passed, some with flying colors, and some by the skin of their teeth. I have nothing but admiration for them; some of them are trying to get an education in spite of heartbreaking odds.

But the three slackers? Not so much.

I'm not going to tell you which three they were, but one of them doesn't even know how to write in cursive.