[Sorry, but I'm at the library and I can't get the "title box" to activate.]
Student story from hades!!!

Perhaps because my last post was a positive student story, the karma gods have now smote me with a nightmare of a student encounter. I guess that'll teach me.

As always, there were a few students who, shall we say, were not exactly overjoyed with their grades this summer. One of them contacted me about extra credit, I told him no, that was the end of it. The other one, though, well he's a different story.

Here's the basic story: The guy struggled all semester, finally came to get help at the very end, unfortunately it was too late by then, and he made a D. He called me last week, as I was trying to get out of town, and I went into great detail about his grade and told him there was nothing that could be done. That should have been the end of it, but he kept me on the phone for half an hour arguing that he DESERVED a better grade. I didn't even bother asking him just why he deserved a better grade, but I told him, again, there was nothing to be done. I told him I was running late already, but he was welcome to call me back this week sometime if he wanted. I made sure, though, that I explained to him that it wouldn't change anything -- he had a D last week and he was going to have a D this week.

Well this week I stopped by the office on Monday, but then I didn't go back in until Friday -- because I'm not teaching right now. I found I had a message from him, wanting to know why I hadn't called him back like I said I would (I never said that). Plus, I found out he'd called my boss to complain about my unfair treatment of him. Well I called him back and left a message for him, in which I VERY clearly stated why he got the grade he did. I thought surely that would be the end of it all. I was wrong.

He called me back a few minutes later and launched into a 15 minute argument for a C. Again, I told him no. Finally, I think he got desperate. He wanted to get his last test from me because, he said, he had no way to know if I was even telling him the truth about how he did on it! That pissed me off, but I was trying to be patient with him. I told him he was welcome to come by and look at his test, but I don't return final exams to students. Fine, we made an appointment for Monday morning.

Not 15 minutes later he called back with a new line of reasoning as to why his grade should be higher. Again I told him no and then he launched into a rant about how he'd had lots of teachers over the years, but he'd never experienced one like me -- one that JUST DOESN'T CARE ABOUT HIS STUDENTS! Further, it was MY FAULT that he didn't do well in the class because I intentionally tried to trick him! Now that really got my blood to boiling, but I remained calm and mostly reasonable. Again we left it at he was coming to see me Monday morning, though he did say he figured by this point I wasn't going to give him anything. He was right about that, but that was true last week.

Approximately 10 minutes later, he called back YET AGAIN! He started into his new argument about his last test and I just stopped him. I asked if he was still coming Monday and he said of course he was. Fine, I said, we'll just talk about this latest argument then. He basically hung up on me at that point.

Needless to say, I am not looking forward to this meeting, but I did get my boss to agree to sit in on our little face-to-face. Most infuriating of all (to paraphrase on of my all-time favorite movies), I'm not even working the 2nd half of the summer!

Sigh.