N. asks why I agreed to accept the final exam after the deadline. It isn’t out of kindness or anything like that, to be honest. I just figure that grading the final and changing the grade online will allow me to be done with this entire issue today. Otherwise, I will be stuck dealing with this for the next few weeks. The student will keep sending whiny emails to everybody in sight, I will have to give explanations, old emails will have to be resuscitated and compared. No, people, life is too short for that. I’m not this student’s Mommy and I’m not willing to sacrifice my time to teach him any life lessons.
4 responses to “It Isn’t Kindness”
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Yeah, I used to feel I had to try to save the world, but nobody was listening to me anyway, and nobody wants to be saved. Now I understand that if I don’t like someone’s behavior, I should just let them go ahead and do what they were going to do anyway. If they want to whine that things are too difficult for them, let them take it easy. They should have the world exactly as they want it — which means few people will want to associate with them on the basis of their merits. There is much more wisdom in “not doing” than in intervening.
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Exactly. Nothing really fantastic awaits a person who can’t even get his shit together to hand in the final exam on time, but that is SO not my problem.
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Actually, you could argue it is kindness, but towards yourself. 🙂
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This is similar to why I allow unlimited rewrites (up to a certain deadline). People think I’m being too nice but the truth is that very few students take advantage of it, and it seriously reduces the amount of grade grubbing at the end of the term.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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