Oh, the student excuses I’ve heard
Across four classes, I’ve graded 1,000-plus assignments — short discussion posts, journals and the like, and there are still finals coming in. I designed some of these classes myself, so I have only me to blame, but short-burst assignments seem to get the point across better. I’ve learned to grade early in the morning, when I can think of new ways to respond to students’ work.
I woke up angry from a dream last week. In the dream, I took my car to a car wash (something I never do in real life), and when I pulled up to the booth, there sat a former student, grinning.
Before he graduated, this particular student was uniquely challenging. He spent more time dreaming up corners to cut than he did attending class.
I found him immensely entertaining, though I came to consider him — because of the extra work involved in shepherding him to his diploma — one of my prettiest babies. Prettiest Baby is not a category you want to fall into. Prettiest Baby means you take energy I sometimes don’t have.
In the dream, when I rolled down my window to say hello, Prettiest Baby said I owed $300 for the car wash. I argued. I thought it would cost me $30, tops, but no, that was the bill. I woke myself up to avoid paying.
I do not need your dime-store analysis of my dream. I have one already: I’m spent.
We are careening toward the end of our fourth pandemic semester, and we are tired, the students and I. This semester has been uniquely hard. I sometimes feel as if I’m engaged in a modern re-enactment of that old show, “Queen for a Day.” The student with the worst story gets a washing machine.
Medical accommodations aside, under what circumstances is it fair to allow a student extra time to complete his work? And is this student telling the truth when she ticks off the issues that kept her from doing her assignments? I struggle to think how I, a tepid college student, would have handled a pandemic. I suppose I would have loaded up the Pinto and headed home.
But what am I teaching students when I give them break after break? I don’t know. I do know that garden-variety goofing off takes on new weight in a pandemic semester.
My least favorite email is, “How can I get a better grade?” usually asked in the last weeks of a semester when all you can do is prepare to take your lumps. Without a pandemic, the answer would be: Build a time machine, go back to August, and do the work.
But how do you answer that during a public-health crisis that has asked so much from all of us?
I also dislike this email: “My computer crashed at 11:45 p.m. and that’s why I missed the 11:59 p.m. deadline.” Let’s rephrase that: You waited until the last minute to do the work, and technology let you down. But then I think of the student who all semester carried his laptop open because if he closed it, the top fell off. Laptops aren’t cheap. Neither is higher education.
Or an email asking for more detail on an assignment comes at 1:30 a.m., followed by a second one at 3:30 a.m. that asks if I got the earlier email. Yes, I did, but I was sleeping. Why are you doing homework in the middle of the night? Or should I ask, How many jobs are you working?
A colleague suggested recently that the pandemic has arrested our development, but it’s just more noticeable in freshmen and sophomores. Either that or the pressure of being ever vigilant during a pandemic has turned us all into Prettiest Babies.
I counted up this semester. Across four classes, I’ve graded 1,000-plus assignments — short discussion posts, journals and the like, and there are still finals coming in. I designed some of these classes myself, so I have only me to blame, but short-burst assignments seem to get the point across better. I’ve learned to grade early in the morning, when I can think of new ways to respond to students’ work.
And then I log in to yet another Zoom meeting, and I think back fondly to the days when I didn’t even know what that meant. But here I am, muting myself and settling in as a senior presents her honors thesis, which involves creating a website so that other students have a place to show off their long-form journalism. (The website has become home to some solid journalism, and we are all proud of her.)
In her presentation, she talks about what she’s learned and what she’ll take into the work world. She already has a job waiting for her. She also talks about the importance of people sharing their stories. She doesn’t mention the pandemic, but in March ’20, when we moved online, she never came back to campus for classes because she’s medically vulnerable. The senior, a first-generation college student, has done all of this online, and she will walk across the stage and get her degree on Sunday.
Without meaning to, I feel my shoulders relax. Maybe I get a little choked up. That’s probably just the exhaustion. Yeah. That’s it.
Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.