Wilting

My stamina is diminishing rapidly. I'm slogging through the revisions (and a few teeny bits of homework) for RB; I have seven more to do (only seven--seven too many), and I'm trying to persuade myself that I should do as many as I can bear tonight, so tomorrow I can turn my attention to final grading, not backlog. The current frustration is with the students who did not cite sources even when they were told in no uncertain terms that, without the sources, they were guilty of plagiarism. It's just inattention leading to "accidental" plagiarism--I know they don't intend to cheat--but accidents can be deadly. If we had more time in the semester, I'd give them all zeroes and make them revise again to show me they know what to do. As is, they need to take some kind of grade hit, but what? I was talking to Paul about this earlier: I think I'll have to take a full letter grade off the first version mark--but I'm also writing notes to them saying they must see me: they will have zeroes until they do. On the one hand, I'd like to turn this into a teaching moment (especially because a few of them are good students who should be able to get this)--but I'm also frustrated and tired of trying to help. Argh.

About the students in 229: one of them apparently disappeared entirely. She wasn't in class on Monday or today--and I'm disappointed, as she had been in one of my classes several semesters ago and withdrew relatively early. It's sad that she made it this far, only to bail again. The student with seven absences didn't seem angry; I did offer him three choices, not two, tossing an incomplete into the mix at the last moment--but he chose to withdraw, even though it will probably mean he can't play whichever sport it is he wants to play. He said his GPA was more important--and I think he realized he wouldn't get a decent grade in any event, so the W will hurt him less in the long run.

The student who thinks he can write the paper without reading the book swears he is reading it (I don't have evidence of that yet--and if he is reading, he isn't understanding, so it's rather a moot point). He also argued with me about whether he had a thesis, saying that his sister/cousin/whoever is an adjunct at Queens College and told him he does have a thesis. I said no, what you have is a statement of fact. So what? He got very heated about it, but as I poked him with questions, he at last came up with something that would make a thesis. And he promptly lost the idea. I told him to write it down, and we went over it again; then he tried to restate it to me--and lost it again. I went over it with him a few more times and told him to type it up and think it through a little more fully. He just e-mailed it to me--and he's lost it again.

But he is at least in the neighborhood of the ballpark, so I'll approve the proposal, mostly because he's so desperate to finish the class. When I walked in to class, I asked him if he'd gotten my e-mail about his proposal. He said, very defensively, "Yes, and I know what you're going to ask me next and the answer is no." Since I was going to ask him whether he understood my comments and thought he could revise the thesis, I was rather surprised, so I said, "What am I going to ask you?" He said, "You're going to ask me to withdraw, and I won't. I'm not going to do it." Turns out, his family has told him that if he doesn't pass this semester he can't continue to go to college. I hate to say it, but his family is probably right: I'm not sure his interests are best served by his attempts at a college education. He might do much better finding another avenue to making a decent living. But he is (as my father would have said), very "ego involved" in being a college student, so I'll let him finish the course and will give him a mercy D. It won't transfer, but it will let him graduate from Nassau--and maybe let him salvage a little pride and keep his family supportive of his attempts.

While I was struggling with that poor kid over his thesis, James (super student extraordinaire) was sitting there waiting to talk to me about his paper for 101. When No Thesis left, James asked if he has Asperger's syndrome. I said no, that wasn't the problem (he doesn't have the social problems that are the hallmarks of anything in the autism spectrum), but that probably No Thesis has some kind of learning disability. He may, but in all honesty, I think the disability is simply that he isn't very smart. And I'm being tactful and politic at that. James and I talked about it a bit: James wants to be a teacher, so he's very interested in observing the teacher-student dynamics and seeing how I handle difficult cases like this. I didn't say so to James, but the awful truth is, some people just are not smart. It's not a matter of functioning differently (which is what I believe defines a learning disability); it's a matter of not being able to function at all. No Thesis is by no means the worst case I've seen, but a proportion of students here (everywhere, I suspect) simply do not have sufficient intelligence to make it in academia. That doesn't make them less valuable as human beings, but it does make them dead weight in a classroom. Sad (and decidedly un-PC of me to say so), but true.

But in writing that paragraph, I found I kept shying away from saying that they are stupid, or dumb. Those are such hurtful words--especially in my profession--but in my deepest heart of hearts, those are the words I mean. So as un-PC as I was, I was still more PC than I really feel. Poor, sad things.

In any event, off I go to chip away at a few more of the RB revisions. I'd give a lot right now for a miracle that would make them disappear. ("I'm terribly sorry that I can't grade or return your revisions: they were sucked up into an alien spacecraft....")