My wife teaches high school.
She hears a lot of excuses.
SHE, however, is expected to turn in her grades by thus-and-such a time, a task made difficult by students who wanna turn their work in late.
But the students have REASONS the work is turned in late.
Today, my wife came home in a blue fury. She’d heard one excuse too many. She decided to write an open letter to her students, explaining why their grades would not be ready at the agreed-upon time
Upon reading this document, I was frankly in awe of her fury and her eloquence… and, yes, her knack for generating excuses. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. She’s heard enough of 'em.
There’s no way any of her students are ever really going to read the thing, though. Still… should any of you require any excuses for much of anything in the near future, I offer you this cornucopia of reasons why things did not get done…
First of all, let me apologize from the very bottom of my heart for the fact that your grades for the semester are not yet complete, none of your assignments are graded, and that you are all going to fail this semester.
You see, much of my day is taken up with teaching. I can’t grade papers when I am teaching, so I teach instead of grading papers. Unfortunately, much of my teaching work involves giving out assignments, MORE assignments, assignments that I will have to GRADE, which increases my workload as I go along.
It is true, I do have a conference period, and in that conference period, I am supposed to have time to grade things. Unfortunately, the State Legislature has cut back my conference time due to the budget crunch, and I had a choice: I could grade papers, or I could make lesson plans for the next two weeks. So… I decided I would make lesson plans, and then I would grade the papers later.
Unfortunately, there is a limit as to when I can do this. You see, my husband is a vicious and cruel man; he demands that his supper be hot and on time at 5:00 p.m., every day, and if it isn’t, he becomes very angry and does unspeakable things. So I have to be home at LEAST by four-thirty in order to prepare some kind of food that will calm him down and make him put the crowbar away.
I had hoped that my daughter would help me out a little by grading some of your papers, or perhaps helping with supper, but she does not care about anything I do unless it has something to do with Elijah Wood or the musical “Cats”.
After I fix dinner for my uncaring and cruel family, I must then see to the cat. I have several cats, but one of them – Mr. Moofles, the oldest – has cancer. This is a very sad thing to happen to a cat, and because of her chemotherapy, she is often very sick, and won’t eat unless I pick her up and pet her and spoon-feed her a jar of Gerber’s baby food. She likes pureed ham, by the way.
Now, keep in mind that I also have a second job. I have to, since my husband does not work, and we have bills to pay. Every night, I put in a couple of hours at the laundry. I am a “lint picker” there; my job involves removing the lint traps from the coin-operated dryers and cleaning the lint out. My boss then saves it all up and once or twice a month, he has all the lint pickers feed it into a carding machine that combs it out, and then we put it up on a loom and weave new fabric out of it, and make little souvenir pillows which are then shipped out all across the country to Stuckey’s roadside convenience stores and sold for extremely high prices. He does not pay us for carding and looming – only for lint picking – but if we do not put in the extra hours once or twice a month, he will fire us, and what would I do without the extra job and extra money?
So, yesterday, instead of grading your papers, I mapped out lesson plans, and then went home and made supper for my husband. Just in time, too, since he was already angry, and was beginning to play with the wood chipper. He really likes that wood chipper, and last time I was late, he fed my Queen Anne footstool into it. But this time I was not late, and I made him a nice tuna casserole.
I had to hurry, though, because last night was the Carding and Looming night at the laundry, and the boss swore he’d fire me if I was late again. So I rushed through feeding my poor half-dead kitty her ham pudding, and then ducked out to the laundry. We had to work for three hours because there was apparently a big demand for souvenir sofa pillows this summer in Vermont, for some reason.
I didn’t get home until after eleven, so I was very tired. Unfortunately, when I had made my husband his supper, I had forgotten the dessert, so he flipped out anyway and trashed the house, broke all the windows, and fed two lamps, the sofa, and one of the cats into his beloved wood chipper. Fortunately, Mr. Moofles had been hiding. The bad news is that the thing Mr. Moofles had been hiding under was the sofa.
So, I was very sad. But I knew that my students were counting on me for their grades, and I was determined not to disappoint them. So I stayed up until three A.M. grading papers, and then booted up the computer to enter grades. Unfortunately, the computer wasn’t working too well. My husband had tried to feed it into the wood chipper, too, but the tower case wouldn’t fit, so he settled for peeing into the CD-ROM drive. Unfortunately, the computer was still plugged in when he did this, and he had apparently gotten an electric shock, which knocked him cold and may have done him some kind of damage. My daughter had paused her CATS video long enough to call 911 to come and get him, for which I was very grateful she had not let her poor father die.
Anyway, the computer was acting kind of temperamental, and I didn’t like it, but I had no choice; it was four-thirty in the morning, and it was now or never, so I entered the grades and backed them up on a floppy disk, just to be safe. By the time I did this, it was six a.m., and almost time to get ready for work. By now, my husband was home from the hospital and in a very bad way due to the electric shock, and I had to serve breakfast to both him and poor Mr. Moofles, who was even worse now for his trip through the wood chipper. Luckily, they both like pureed ham, but I was slowed down a bit by the fact that my husband refuses to be fed with the same spoon as Mr. Moofles.
Unfortunately, while all this was going on, my daughter did not have any breakfast, so she ate all of your assignments. This could have been very bad, but fortunately, I had entered all your grades, and backed it all up on disk, so I felt very secure. I finished up breakfast, the dishes, the laundry, and taping cardboard over all the broken windows, and then I dropped my husband’s crowbar into the wood chipper, just to be on the safe side if he tried to turn the damn thing on again. Then I showered, got dressed, and came to school.
When I got to school, though, and tried to download the grades off the disk, I encountered a problem. Apparently, the weird malfunction my computer was undergoing made the programs incompatible, and the computer refused to open the file. What was I going to do? My kids needed their grades!
So I immediately ran out of class, jumped in my car, and drove home at top speed, to open the disk and figure out some way to do the grades. Luckily, MY computer would still open the files, so I opened the grade file and tried to print out. Unfortunately, just as I was doing all this, my poor wounded bandaged husband was dragging himself out to the shed with his lips; he hadn’t much cared for breakfast, and was trying to get to the wood chipper. Just as I turned on the printer, he managed to flip the chipper’s switch with his tongue, and the internal shredding mechanism closed on the crowbar I’d dropped in there earlier and launched it like a missile. It shot out of the loading hopper, punched through the wall of the house and impaled my computer printer like a cocktail shrimp on a toothpick.
This was very bad. Now my printer was broken. How was I going to print out the grades?
Luckily, our internet connection still worked. I just attached your file to an email, and then EMAILED the file to my email account at the school! Then I ran outside, turned off the wood chipper, dragged my husband in and tied him to the bed, and jumped in my car to drive back to school. Unfortunately, the car wouldn’t start. Apparently, the crowbar had punched through the right fender and ricocheted off the engine block before going through the wall of the house, and something was wrong with the engine. So I had to leap out and run to school as fast as I could, clear across town.
By running just as fast as I could, I arrived at school just as my first class was beginning, and so I couldn’t print out the grades; I had to teach my class!
Finally, my conference period came around, and I was able to use my computer in peace. I opened my email, and the file was safe, and I was able to download and open it.
But… when I hit PRINT… the computer said, “Toner Cartridge Is Low. Please Replace Toner Cartridge. Print Job Cancelled.” I could have cried. What was I going to do?
Wait a minute – there was another printer in the building. I could just send the print job to THAT printer. About then, though. Mrs. Jones from the next classroom and some of her students came in to ask a favor.
I replied that I was very sorry, but I could not help them; I had to get my students’ grades printed out, and the papers collected, and the final grades entered into the school’s master computer, so that my students could pass the year and become noble and respected sophomores instead of lowly freshmen.
And then I got a surprise. Mrs. Jones and her students pulled off their masks, revealing that they were, in fact, NOT Mrs. Jones and her class, but they were actually Nazi paratroopers! They shouted at me about the secret documents stored on my computer!
I tried to tell them that there were no secret documents on my computer, just my poor students’ hard-earned grades, and what had they done with Mrs. Jones and her class, anyway? But they didn’t listen, and they took out their Nazi cocobolos and beat me senseless. When I came to, they had rifled my computer files and deleted everything in sight except the Reversi game, which they had tried to play, and lost two games out of three.
And that’s what happened to your grades. I’m sorry. Unfortunately, the state laws on these matters is very firm: if grades are not entered at the end of the semester, you all fail. I’m sorry. It’s not my fault, really.
Oh, and no late work will be accepted.
(Amybeasts are like that, you know.)