You can't make this shit up...

I'll get to writing about my own students in a moment, but first I want to relay a story told by one of my fellow tutors.

A student sat down with my colleague, very upset that she'd only gotten a 60 on her essay. The tutor very carefully went through the essay--which was a mess--and showed the student errors and problems. At the very end of the session, the tutor happened to glance at the name on the essay--and it was one letter different from the student's name. For the sake of the story, let's say the student's name was Ellen and the paper had the name Allen on it. The tutor thought that it was indicative of just how much trouble the student was in that she hadn't even noticed a typo of her own name, but since it was the end of the session, the tutor decided not to say anything. However, once the student left, the tutor decided to talk to the student's professor, who also works in the Center. As soon as she mentioned the name thing, the professor was stunned--because it turned out there is an Allen in that class, and his paper had mysteriously gone missing. The professor's habit was to simply put assignments to be returned on the corner of his desk and allow students to find their own and collect it--but Allen couldn't find his paper. On the other hand, the professor had no record of Ellen having submitted the assignment; in fact, she had never done it. When the professor confronted her with the fact, she first said how shocked she was that it wasn't her paper but explained she picked it up because her husband's name is Allen.

I'll give you a moment to let your head spin.

This boggles the mind on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start. 1. The student knew she had not submitted the assignment but still decided to collect one. 2. She collected another student's essay as if it were her own--apparently assuming that the name was close enough to count. 3. She was upset at the grade for an assignment she had not submitted. In point of fact, her grade was significantly lower than the 60 she was complaining about: it was a zero. 4. She sat with the tutor for 45 minutes going over an essay line by line and never thought or said, "Wait, this isn't my writing."

We have students with all kinds of delusions about the quality of their work, but to think that work somehow magically does itself, submits itself, and accidentally does so with someone else's name on it is a whole new level of "you have to be fucking kidding me." How does one even begin to address this with the student? The professor did ask her, "So, you can just pick up anything that has your husband's name on it, no matter where it is or who it might belong to?" But that's only a small portion of what's wrong with this picture.

Comparatively speaking, anything my students have done pales--even the two students who submitted identical essays, one in one section of 102, the other in my other 102. And that pales next to the same tutor's students who submitted essentially the same essay one on top of the other in the stack of essays for the same class.

One really does have to wonder what is going on in what passes for their minds.

Shifting gears to today's students: my first appointment was a no-show (which was particularly nice as I was a few minutes late). Then I had Annabelle. She spent slightly less time running off down rabbit trails--but I'm suddenly seeing a whole new and less pleasant side to her. At first, I thought she was very earnest, and in a way she is, as she keeps coming to the Center, but now she's starting to complain about how hard the research project is, how school is too demanding, how no one cares about lobsters (in response to David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider the Lobster") and no one cares about monarch butterflies (which is the topic of her "Consider the [whatever the student chooses]" research paper). She doesn't really want to read her sources to see what they have to say--even though she gets to choose the sources she uses. She kinda wants information but not enough to actually look for it, or to look very hard. As far as she's told me, she's allowed to use a basic Google search, but she told me she couldn't find anything about the stages in a butterfly's life. (I suppose the fact that she didn't know the word "metamorphosis" might have hindered her search, but still.)

Regular readers of my blog will know how infuriated I can get when confronted with the "I don't care about this; it's all boring and too hard" attitude.

Oh, yes: and she said that one day she wanted to print something and walked into one of the lab classrooms while a class was in progress. Seeing the professor at the front of the room, she asked, "Is there a class now?" He said--with some justification: "I'm sitting here, so I'd say that's a good indication." She said she "didn't really need his attitude." Excuse me, what? A. You asked a relatively stupid question (and yes, there are stupid questions), and 2. the appropriate response on your part, on seeing a professor at the front of the room (and quickly glancing to see that yes, the computer stations had students at them) would be to apologize profusely and get out. Attitude? And I realize that I have a strong bias here: attitude is something subordinates have, not authority figures.

Cleansing breath. Cleansing breath.

My second student--and the last of them for the day--is a complete delight. He's also a regular; I'll just call him Earning Honors. He was invited to join the honors program based on his work in a business course last semester, and although his writing is not honors level yet, he's truly devoted to getting it there. I think I've mentioned him before, as he tends to the periphrastic, a habit of his I'm working to break--and his writing has other basic errors that earned him a B on his first essay, though the professor told him his ideas are excellent, and if he simply corrects the mechanics, he'll get the A. I've helped him with a couple of scholarship essays, and today, as he was leaving, he told me that he just found out he got one, from the Economics Department, to the tune of $500. I was thrilled to bits for him. One of the things he said in his scholarship essay was that his father is paying all his expenses so he can focus entirely on his studies, and he wants the scholarships in part so he can relieve some of the burden on his father, as well as to make his father feel proud and that the son is worth his investment. I told my fellow tutors about that, and we all teared up. The student also wrote in his essay that he'd been a dreadful student in high school, but that one course at NCC showed him that he wanted to be a good student--and could be. I'm happy to give him all the help I possibly can. He earns it.

My final student encounter of the day was with the Zen Master, who wanted advice about undergrad programs. He clearly is the first person in his family to go to college, as he didn't know that a B.A. is an undergrad degree, nor that it is required before one can go on to grad school--which at the moment he thinks he wants to do. I mentioned a while back that he originally had thought he wanted to be a creative writing major, but now he wants to be an English major. Today he told me that he wants to do that because he wants to explore ideas more deeply--and he wants to be able to express his ideas beautifully. "I want to be an amazing writer," he said. I think he can be, if he puts the time and energy into it that he needs to--and I think the undergrad programs he's looking at will require that he up his game in that department. I suggested he do some research into what each program actually requires and decide from there which ones look most interesting. Mostly today's talk was about practical advice--and he didn't stay long, but that's OK.We both admitted to being tired and a little cranky, so just as well to keep it to the point.

Since he left, I've spent a tiny bit of time on the arduous task of beginning to clean out the bookshelves. I've pulled together two small boxes of books I'm going to donate to the campus library, assuming the head librarian thinks they'd be a benefit to the collection. Mostly novels I've taught, but I decided to also include a couple of textbooks that were still in marginally OK condition--and a few that were brand new (as I bought them to consider when I thought I'd be teaching Native American Lit in the fall). Looking at those shelves--which are double stacked--I think I'm going to need to bring in a bunch of book boxes and start sorting into "goes with me to Montana" and "nope: Paul and William get first dibs, but otherwise, outta my life." But I find that's surprisingly difficult when it comes to books. I do have pack-rat tendencies in any event (packing my apartment is a whole other mess to tackle), but books? When I started grad school, I had to explain to my then partner that the rule of "if a book comes into the house, a book has to leave the house" could no longer apply--and I've been hanging on to tons of books since. But really, as I was saying to Paul earlier, am I going to read Sartor Resartus again? Or anything at all by Roland Barthes? I know I'm probably going to hang on to some things I "should" let go, especially nature writing/environmental literature collections or criticism, but I still want to divest myself of as much book weight as I can.

But it is fun to realize I have some interesting DVDs on my shelf here, which can now come home with me. (Gosford Park, District 9...)

And on that note, I will toddle off into the evening. I am very much looking forward to having the day tomorrow in which to do pretty much nothing whatsoever. And I'll be back posting to the blog on Thursday. Until then, happy campers, stay happy.