This is why, in an ideal world, they provide teachers with three month's paid vacation.

A STUDENT who disappeared in Week Four appears during the office hours SEK is holding in Week Ten.

STUDENT: Hi Scott!

SEK: Do I know you?

STUDENT: I'm from your afternoon class!

SEK: I know everyone in my afternoon class.

STUDENT: I may not have been there in a while.

SEK: Define "while"?

STUDENT: Some stuff that happened.  Also things.

SEK: How many classes did stuff and things cause you to miss?

STUDENT: I was there for that class about how cameras work.

SEK: Which one?

STUDENT: The directors'?

SEK: Which one's?

STUDENT: Camera?

SEK: Is that a quesiton?

SEK can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, he only wishes he couldn't.  It's just that some complaints are as inevitable as Phil Collins bringing bombast to fanfare, and this particular complaint most certainly pulls a pure Phil Collins.

STUDENT: I don't know.  I'm confused.

SEK: As am I.  Who are you again?

STUDENT: I'm in your afternoon class!

SEK: Then why don't I know you?

STUDENT: Because some stuff and things happened and I stopped attending in Week Four.

SEK: I'm sorry you had to go through stuff and things.  Life is tough.  What can I help you with now?

STUDENT: What do I need to do to pass the class?

SEK: Which one?

STUDENT: Yours.

SEK: The one you didn't attend?

STUDENT: But I have a draft of my Rhetorical Analysis that I wrote to make it up to you.

SEK: Make it up to me?  This isn't about you making it up to me.  It's about—

STUDENT: Can you at least take a look at my draft?

STUDENT hands SEK a draft of her "Rhetorical Analysis."  As he thought, it was a "Rhetorical Analysis" as performed by someone who had no idea what a rhetorical analysis is.

SEK: This isn't a rhetorical analysis.

STUDENT: It's about a horror movie.

SEK: That wasn't really the focus of the class.

STUDENT: It was called a horror class.

SEK: The emphasis was on the creation of suspense.

STUDENT: Saw II was suspenseful.

SEK: Suspenseful torture porn, which if you were paying attention during the few classes you actually attended, you'd have remembered that that's a genre I repeatedly specified we'd be avoiding.

STUDENT: But I heard you talking about it so it still meets your requirements.

SEK: No, it doesn't.

STUDENT: Yes, it does.

SEK: How?

STUDENT: I analyze the effect of a horror film.

SEK: One I explicitly banned.

STUDENT: That was the assignment.

SEK: That was not the assignment.

STUDENT: But it was!

SEK: Then how come no one else in this class produced a similar document?

STUDENT: You'd have to ask them.

SEK: But they're not here now, so I'm asking you: how did twenty-four students aim their arrows at the same side of the same barn and strike it (with varying degrees of thump and wobble)?

STUDENT: Some teachers don't push 'em hard enough.  Who has 'em aiming at barns and all when they could be shooting at aliens and shit?

SEK: Just so I have this straight: in Week Four you decided to up the rhetorical ante by chasing aliens and what you captured were the barely legible fears of a child forced to rewatch SAW II until someone produced an essay you deemded "college enough" to turn in.  Am I missing something here?

STUDENT: But is there still something I could to do pass the cl—

SEK: No.

STUDENT: But what if I—

SEK: No.

STUDENT: I have a friend—

SEK: You're going to need one—

STUDENT: And she said when you do this two quarters in a row they have to pass you.  She said I'm on "Bemusement Leave" now and can only—

SEK: You're on "Bemusement Leave"?  I suggest you take it.  Now.

Comments

[Nick]

Where do you get these people, Scott?

[SEK]

Vegas odds, I wager: about 170 students per quarter, multiply by four quarters per year, that's 680 per year, and I've been teaching 10 years, so that's about 6,800 potentials. I think I should be rewarded for keeping down the number of head-cases statistical analysis suggests we ought to be dealing with.

[KWK]

Maybe I'm the impatient sort, but I think my conversation with such a student would have been considerably shorter:
"Granted, stuff and things can often suck a lot, and I'll help in any way one random stranger can help another. But in my capacity as your teacher it is my professional opinion that you and your stuff and your things are why the concept of The Incomplete was invented. Hopefully your life has much less stuff and many fewer things when you have another go at rhetorical analysis NEXT QUARTER."

[Rich Puchalsky]

I always identify more with the students than with the instructor in these stories. Why shouldn't the student skip six weeks of class? Class is boring. I skipped a lot more than that, and when I came in after long disappearances, I never bothered to make up "stuff and things" excuses. Admittedly, these were generally science and math classes where the teachers didn't know any students anyways and in which the test scores were what generally mattered. My main concern was identifying when the midterm would be so I could come in on that day, although once I missed it and made it up the next day.

I think that Student's problem is this case was that they just didn't have the skills (i.e. imitative facility and general intelligence of the kind that academia values) to pull this off. They actually got you to look at their make-up essay. If it had been above-average, you probably would have let them skate by.

[Shane In Utah]

@KWK: An incomplete? Really? I see an incomplete as intended for the student who does all the work all semester long and then has an emergency in the last week of class that prevents him/her from completing the final paper. This student is why the concept of the F was invented...

[Rich Puchalsky]

Wondering what the Phil Collins bit was about, I followed the last link which led to a previous example of student complaint which in turn made me realize that I'd already written the perfect parody doggerel for the occasion.

This Is Just To Say

I have wasted
the brain cells
that were in
my head-box

and which
you were probably
training
to write things

Forgive me
I do not understand
so tired
and I want a better grade

[Sisyphus]

I agree with Shane in Utah. Actually, this case was why attendance polices were invented for composition classes. Unlike what Rich is describing in math/science classes (which I don't agree should be the case either), comp classes are like foreign language classes where practicing every day to keep up skills and fluency is important. I wouldn't even have looked at the draft, just shown the place in my syllabus that says the student will have an F after so many absences.

[Fritz]

I just had a student who wrote a term paper for a Constitutional Law course that asked him to analyze the antecedents and consequences of a seminal SCOTUS case that didn't mention constitutional law or one SCOTUS case. What amazes me is that he's very confused as to why he didn't pass the class.

A closely related phenomenon is the student who is there for every day of class, who turns in all assignments, and participates in class, but just doesn't have what it takes to pass. I was that student once and I have a "D" in sophomore macro-economics to prove it.

Please post the outraged entry at ratemyprofessor when you get the chance.

[alkau]

This student not only wasted his time by not coming to class and so he did not learn or master the skills needed to take other classes. He wasted your time and I can't believe he thought he could plead his case and you would cave-in and give him a grade. I guess he did not know your reputation - coming to class after getting hit by a car; coming to class ill and coming to class after kidney stone surgery. Having other instructors cover for you so that students get the attention you feel is necessary for them to get what they paid for - an education necessary to continue their education. I am proud of the person you have become and they way yu impact students.

[KWK]

@Shane, Sisyphus: My comment granted the student's premise that "stuff and things" was an actual legit reason for missing a large chunk of the quarter--like being kidnapped for weeks 5 through 9, say. If that were actually the case, then allowing the student to make up a quarter's worth of work in the next quarter seems reasonable. In the absence of a legit reason, of course an F is what one earns when one blows off a course in such spectacular fashion. But my main points were that in neither situation is it reasonable to expect to make up a quarter's worth of work in Week 10, and furthermore that I almost certainly would not have had the SEK-like forbearance required to engage in an extended discussion with the student about it.

[EJ]

I think you should have passed her purely on the basis that "Bemusement Leave" is hilarious.

[Kathryn]

At some point in that exchange, did the thought of how Al Swearengen would have handled this cross your mind? Now I want to write this conversation "Deadwood" style. The phrase "None of that is anything to me" would have come up early on, I'm thinking.