Never mind what the class is. I just want to know if the cookies have raisins.
It’s not a matter, though, of whether they buy the books or not. I don’t give a flying fuck if my students buy the books. If they want to fall behind from the very beginning of the semester, that’s their business.
What i mind is them sending me emails asking me about things that they should already know, that have been covered in detail during the class meeting, and that are available on the class website.
In an ideal world, i could simply ignore the stupid emails. But if i don’t answer them, even to simply say “Read the fucking syllabus,” then my class evaluations at the end of the semester suffer, especially in the sections related to instructor responsiveness.
Because when the course evaluation asks students to assess how responsive the instructor was to questions and problems, it makes no distinction between relevant and important questions and problems, on the one hand, and retarded and stupid questions and problems, on the other.
If some student is too oblivious or stupid to read the syllabus, and i fail to reply to his email asking me to help him find his ass with both hands, then he will ding me on the evaluation, because all he knows is that i didn’t help hoim when he asked for help. The fact that it was something he should have known is irrelevant to his sense of entitlement.
Knees suck. I inherited my Dad’s chronically bad knees, he was heading for replacement on both of them when he passed away.
I had been feeling pretty good, boyfriend gave me a bottle of glucosamine and it was actually working for me.
Then Friday at work I tried to get up out of my chair in the lunch room and my left knee buckled under me and I hit the floor.
At first nothing was really hurt except my pride, but by last night my knee was all swollen and I could barely put any weight on it.
I’m on vacation this week, I really don’t want to spend the whole time icing down my knee. Of course it’s a holiday weekend too, so I can’t call doctor until Tuesday. I could go to urgent care clinic, but they’d just tell me to go see regular doc.
Dammit. I’m trying to make it to 40 with all of my original parts (minus wisdom teeth) and no major surgeries. I still have some time to go, it’s not looking good.
We are now into month 10 of the house guests from hell.
I’ve got blisters on my lips and tongue because she fucking drenches the house in air freshener. I swear I am going to shove the can so far up her ass she will have to open her mouth to spray it.
I found a place to move, a bit more than I can afford but hell I’d work 80 hours a week if I had to. My mother asked me not to go and cut my rent in half to stay. I know she doesn’t want them here anymore, she’s had enough of my sisters mouth and her bratty dogs. She finally told her to shut up or get out.
My sister actually had the nerve to give my mother shit for using the front burners because her dogs might burn their paws when they jump up at the stove. WTF? Teach your goddamn dogs some manners. My sisters idea of correcting them is to use her little sing song voice and say ‘get down my little pookie wookie the stove is hot, it’s hot hot! and you might burn yourself, you know you’re not supposed to do that, so get down, get down’. If anybody dares to use a stern voice my sister gets all pissy because her precious little ookie wookums just aren’t used to raised voices and it hurts their widdle feelwings and their little tummies get upset. WTF eveh!
So they jump up and put their feet on the stove, and on the counters when people are cooking and sit and cry and beg at the table and bark at you if you don’t share. We have to put the trash up so they don’t get it because their poor little sensitive tummies can’t handle it and OMG the day I left a piece of chicken on the counter I got my ass chewed because her dog almost got it and it would have made her little precious foofoo sick. Their little tummy wummies are so sensitive you know.
Too bad air freshener doesn’t make them sick.
They both know I work from home at a call center. I have to have a quiet background, no tv, no barking dogs, no screaming kids. etc. Goddamn if my sisters bratty dogs don’t bark when I am working and she says it’s an accident. Bullshit! I’ve caught the bitch holding up dog biscuits and saying ‘who wants a treat, tell mommy if you want a treat, awww good boy do you want a treat. tell me tell me’. My fucking bil stands outside my bedroom door and yells to my sister or stands there coughing so bad he sounds like he’s hacking up a lung. I am so lucky I haven’t gotten a complaint, yet. Even if the customer doesn’t hear it, and sometimes they have, it still distracts me from doing my job.
I hope the fucker doesn’t need too much sleep to do his job, because I might just have to start staying up all night. After all that is when the call center needs me the most. They want to fuck with my job, bring it on bitches because I think it’s time I started fucking back.
I have a friend who is a college professor and the stories he tells me, it’s just amazing. He had one irate mother call him up wanting to know why her precious baby failed his class, uh because he never showed up for class and never turned in any assignments. He catches students plagiarizing all the time and they get pissed at him for catching them. Then their parents call pissed off because he fails them. He tells them they are lucky that all he does is fail them. He has gotten term papers copied and pasted right off of web sites. One student turned in a term paper in which the subject was misspelled 27 times. How do you misspell the subject 27 times?
I would have died of embarrassment if my parents had ever called a professor when I was in college. I never would have expected to pass a class if I never showed up or turned anything in. I had a few that as long as you passed the mid-term and final you could pass, but they were very few and most professors were not that easy. With my parents footing the bill I never would have dreamed of wasting their money by flunking a class.
Hmm.
Would it be cricket to announce a policy of public shaming at the beginning of the semester?
That is, if a student comes to you for assistance with finding his ass with both hands, you have the right (verified by a signature you collected at the first class session) to announce to the class that you had to help him on an ass-finding expedition. Plus, you get to be rude to him in any email responses you give…
I think I would be tempted to give a quiz on the contents of the syllabus. Stuff like: List the books and reference materials needed for the class; where can class information be found other than the syllabus?, etc. Of course, I would also announce to the class that passing the quiz would be a substantial portion of the students final grade, and put a disclaimer in the actual syllabus to the effect that only what is listed in it is binding. Cause I’m an asshole that way.
IANA teacher, but I have stayed in a Holiday Inn Express.
Actually, a parent on the phone or over email is pretty much the easiest thing in the world to deal with.
All you have to do is say something along these lines: “I’m sorry, but federal privacy laws prevent me even from confirming that the person you are referring to is in my class. I certainly cannot give you any information about any of my students, nor can i discuss their progress in the class. If you do indeed have a son or daughter in my class, and would like to talk with me about their grade, then your child has to fill out a privacy waiver and hand it to me personally, and i will also need to see some identification proving that you are the person named in the waiver.”
That usually deals with the issue. A few come back, blustering that they pay for little Johnny’s education and have a right to know what’s going on. I tell them that students’ financial arrangements are also none of my business, and that i’m not violating FERPA and risking my job.
It’s tempting, but no. I’ve been known, on occasion, to make some rather caustic comments to students in private, or over email, if they ask really dumb questions. I prefer not to do it in class, because that, too, would be rather unprofessional. The only time i do it in class is if the person actually asks the dumb question right there in the classroom. In that case, i’ll answer them, “The exam date is written right there in the syllabus. You can look it up.”
What i will sometimes do, rather than call out individuals, is say something in class like, “Despite the fact that i went over the syllabus in detail last week, i’ve had four people email me asking what book to buy. The book list is right there in the syllabus, and on the course website, and at the bookstore. Any emails i receive asking me about something that is clearly stated on the syllabus will be ignored.”
One of my colleagues does exactly that. And, in her courses, the syllabus quiz is actually worth a couple of percent of a student’s final grade.
Curse you, biochemistry! I want to lose weight, and my period makes me want to eat everything.
Sorry, been at church and a foodie festival and playing soccer and drinking beer (not all at the same time, sad to say), so I have to catch up on the teacher stuff here.
My response to parents: “I can’t discuss ‘Litttle Timmy’ or his grades, but that’s actually good, because in my experience, the students whose parents fight their battles for them are the ones who end up never quite succeeding. So tell Tim to call or email me himself, and we’ll straighten it out.” Usually, I never hear from ‘Litttle Timmy’ again…
Btw, I teach Graphic Design (Art School, so College-age), where students do great at the “cool stuff” like Photoshop, but not so good at the mundane things like reading the syllabus or “label your files with your name; last name first”.
Oh, and the oatmeal cookies can have raisins or chocolate chips if Kaylasdad signs up for the class (hmm, wonder what his reaction’ll be when he learns that to get into class on Potluck Thursdays, he’ll have to bring a treat instead of just mooching off me).
You are SO good!
Honestly, going by what people have said here…I’m starting to reconsider my decision to keep Steve. I do love Bill, and he deserves to feel safe in his own bed. Or my bed, that one is his as well. Besides…he has reconsidered his decision to buy a bagger because of my fear. That’s the official reason, at least.
I forgot to pit everyone for their advice about that issue, btw. After paying attention to everyone, I asked some of my friends to come over for lunch and to share stories with Bill. When Bill flew in for the weekend, we went shopping and bought him protective gear. By the time we got home, we were so tired that no wild monkey sex happened.
The next morning, we were getting happy and comfortable when we heard bikes coming up my driveway.
One of the guys was on a 300 Honda that had been modded and then became the learning bike to pass around between parents for when their kids wanted to learn how to ride. Its light, and not fast or quick.
Bill was really offended that we expected him to put on his kevlar riding outfit, helmet, boots and gloves to learn how to ride it, but he did it. We showed him how to work the gears and brakes and offered up advice until he got tired of it and rode off. Bill fell over at the stopsign. From what I saw, he was using his front brake in gravel.
We picked him up and off he went again. And fell over about a mile away. This time it was not enough front brake.
Third time is a charm, right? Not in this case. Bill got going fast enough that he couldn’t stop and ran into the culvert. We called a halt to it because he had scuffed his helmet up so much that we didn’t trust it anymore…oh no…that’s not it. We called a halt to the exercise because we wanted to eat lunch.
After everyone left, Bill was so beat up that all he wanted to do was soak in the tub. He could barely move from the tub to the bed, so there was an entire weekend without hawt monkey sex and I blame you all!!!
But…he hasn’t mentioned wanting an 850 lb bike since then…
That is GREAT! Congrats on having friends that’ll help Bill learn his limits without killing himself. It takes a village…
You so missed the point! I only have limited amounts of time to get sex…and because of all of you…I didn’t get any that weekend! Geeze, where are your priorties?
mutters and grumbles…then confesses that I’m very happy that Bill has learned that he’s not ready for something that big.
How rude of us us, picturing Bill crashing a BigAssBike, ending up as a shmear on the blacktop… instead of your hawt monkey sex.
In fact, I think I speak for many here that we’d rather picture anything else …
It’s long run thinking. By missing the hawt sex this weekend, you will have much more hawt sex over a longer period of time, instead of mourning a smear on the road in the near future.
I pit looking for a place to live. Especially for a family and we may or may not have my 20 year old step daughter living with us. She is coming for a visit and “looking for work and seeing how it goes” toward the end of the next month. There are a bunch of reasons we are looking for a new place, but it is tedious, tedious tedious. If she comes out and stays, it will be worth the extra to have a 3 bedroom place. If she doesn’t it increases our options. But we won’t know for sure till the time we want to move. Even if she stays, does she want to live with us long term or short term? (She might go to school, then she will stay with us, but she has been more or less on her own for two years, so living with Dad and stepmom might cramp her style?)
We are looking at a 2 bedroom + den on Tuesday night. Might be a good fit. It is in our price range, and a neighbourhood I like. But I hate looking for places to rent.
(carried over from August)
Dude, what on earth did you do that ten years later, you still need to speak to the Dean in person about it? I’m guessing this was little more than “hitting reply-all to a campus wide email”?
This is more of a :rolleyes: than a rant, but what the hell…
Hauled to the Battlefield yesterday morning for a trail ride. When I got there the place was utterly deserted, for a miracle. All the good people were in church, I guess. I pulled way up to the end to leave plenty of room for the usual weekend crowds. When I came back, there were a few other trailers there. This is what I found:
Parking lot, from in front of my rig
And
The other side of my rig
:dubious:
.
Okay, the Second Rule of Mini-Rants Club is: If you mini-rant, and anyone asks for details, you have to humor them. Even if it turns into a maxi-rant.
If it involves explosions and/or public nudity, do not wait for someone to ask.
The last two weeks have been a blur. I haven’t even met the students I teach yet because I had to have subs take over for me during the first week of college classes, and I don’t even know when I can go back.
My mom had knee replacement surgery and she is 86 years old. It has been a real ordeal for her and for me as well since I was doing most of the caregiving.
She is improving but it is going to be a long road.