I’m sitting here trying to decide whether I should pretend not to notice that a certain student in my Advanced Spanish course didn’t hand in 2 of his labs which would allow me to give him a passing grade.
At that very moment, the student solved this problem for me by sending me an email starting with, “Ola professora!”
Now I’m sitting here trying to decide what bugs me more, “ola” instead of “hola” or “professora” instead of “profesora.”
Clarissa's Blog 
Semi-unrelated, but this reminded me of how in the beginning of the year my Wind Ensemble conductor told everyone that his email was different than another email, and how if you accidentally sent your email to the other professor by mistake, she would send it back to you with all your grammatical and spelling mistakes fixed in red. I guess if it was good she sent it to the professor to which you originally meant to send it.
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Still better than “Hey Clarissa!”
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And better than, “I need to know my grade email it 2 me pls.”
I got one like that last week and I responded with, “Dear Anonymous Correspondent . . .”
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He wrote to you in Portuguese, not in Spanish. Tell him it’s the wrong class.
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That’s in Portuguese??? OK, I’m very ignorant. 🙂 And I must have judged this student too harshly here.
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There’s no way you could have known. But yes, it’s Portuguese. That’s a very common mistake for a Portuguese speaking person because they are very similar.
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Why even contemplate giving such a slacker a break? They never deserve it, and in the end it’s (mildly) unfair to those who actually bother doing the work. You’re too forgiving, as demonstrated by the outcome. “Dear Anonymous Correspondent” is great.
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I know, you are right. But the student comes from very difficult personal circumstances and I don’t want to undermine his efforts, so I try to be understanding.
Of course, in the process, I undermine other professors who will have him in his future courses if I let him pass this one.
Yes, you are right, I’m an idiot.
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Hardly an idiot! But a bit of a softie with slackers, it seems. It’s true that if you pass them they will turn up to annoy others in future. We all have difficult personal circumstances to deal with.
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“Ola” is way worse than “professora”, in my humble opinion.
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It would be if only I hadn’t given an entire lecture on double consonants in this very course. 🙂
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