But they aren’t your fault! From what you said, it looks obvious that both students screwed up.
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Can the rest of your students be proud of their hard-earned grades if they know you won’t fail the students who deserve it?
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The high-airing students are also your "fault"to the same extent.
That double standard – failed students are the teacher’s fault, successful students are because of the students’ hard work – really annoyed me back when I taught. And you’re at the university level. They’re supposed to be more independent by that point.
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That does teach them an important lesson, though. Sometimes we need to get Fs.
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I have only known one teacher (and my sister knew another) where that could apply. In my case, 80% of his students failed the provincial exam (yet I, one of his “worst” students who was “too stupid” for his class (his words) got 80% on that same exam). The 20% who passed? Ignored him 100% of the time.
So the only way it would be your fault would be if those were the two that passed and it was everyone else who failed. You did not fail to teach. They can’t be handheld through everything. That is not your job.
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It’s just past 7pm here, it’s my last working day in 2017, and I’m still in the office! This is why:
I worked all day Sunday to update a document. My VPN from home kept dropping signal, which meant Sharepoint (where we’re supposed to edit from) kept giving me those stoopid “hi User Name, you can’t edit this file because User Name has it locked for editing” messages. So I copied it to my office network drive. When I was done, I e-mailed it to the reviewers and copied it back to Sharepoint. OK cool.
This morning the reviewers gave me feedback – pretty straightforward. I had a lot of meetings, but I got the last of the updates done at 4:30.
And then I went to show them to my vacation backup… and he noticed right away the document on Sharepoint had a date stamp of 3 December. The Sunday upload and all of my edits from today were gone. Thankfully I hadn’t deleted the version from the network drive yet. Something glitched when I checked in the document.
So now I am just finishing re-doing them. Grrr.
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Sharepoint. Enough said.
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We had a student and Mom combo show up last night, during our staff & faculty xmas potluck and demand to speak to our Chair, the Academic Advisor, and the Accounting prof who flunked said student. /sigh
This is a 3rd year class. You have to pass the midterm and final to pass the course, student did not. Student is complaining that its “not fair” that they “worked their asses off” and thus should be allowed a make up exam.
I don’t understand how a parent can sit in that room and say “yes I know my child failed both the midterm and the final but they deserve to pass the course” - that is some amazing entitlement.
Also, not your fault.
I tell this to all my instructors: stop bending over backwards, let them fail, they need to learn how to fail more than the actual course material!
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Whoa. Third year UNIVERSITY class? !!! I’ve heard about it with frosh, but IMHO that’s the problem right there.
I wish uni admins could tell Mom “we only speak to the students here”, unless the student is actually underage, which since that’s 18 in Canada would be rare. Then the student would have to learn how to behave like a fucking adult.
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Oh we have to get it in writing from the student that we’re allowed to talk to the parent (FIPPA yay!) but they always do it.
I have parents show up all the time. Or call. Or email. Complain that their child was embarrassed in class that day (because they weren’t prepared for their presentation and failed) and they need to talk to the Dean now about their special snowflake. We have one super rich kid in our class (from a famous Canadian family!), and he’s now on a “no-email” contract. Because he was a keyboard warrior and would send essays and essays and essays complaining about everything under the sun and demanding explainations about everything (Why can’t I take class on Tuesday? Its full. How is it full, who decides the count, why is that section full, on and on and on). It got so bad his Mom came in… and then she spent two hours yelling at my Chair about everything under the sun. So, at least that kids comes by it honestly…? I’d like to say its money that does it, but we get this from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
I blame the parents. Which, ironically, are all my age! These are my peeps! All these terrible parents are GenX! Its amazeballs!
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Which is such a contentious thing. Students have always been under their parents’ control; now, just when they’re old enough to be on their own, it’s easy to convince them they can’t do it by themselves.
I’m not surprised Gen Xers do it. We’re the ones who saw the first milk carton kids and got endless lectures about stranger danger, while at the same time Robin Leach was telling us all about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. And a lot of the anarchy ethos of punk got watered down into, “school sucks, amirite?”.
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No way to “heart” that one. Heart breaking, more like it.
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You know what today needs? More wolves.
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That’s brilliant. I knew there was a way to solve my wolf overpopulation problem!
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My company has not provided me with the contractually required social insurance (which includes my health insurance, my main concern) for more than a year now. In addition, I haven’t been able to get my flight to China refunded because they keep changing the rules about the flight documentation required. (The latest requirement is a receipt for the flight sent from the airline via actual physical mail.)
The State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (who it took months to get a response from) said all they could do was to issue working licenses for foreign people and they probably could do nothing about my case.
Who the fucks job is it then? Who must I see? WHO DO I HAVE TO FUCK, KILL, or MARRY IN THIS GODDAMNED PLACE?
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First work day of the year. I missed the last two days of last year thanks to the side-effects of my meds. Dropped the dose today to ensure I could make it through work.
So, ten minutes after starting, I get whacked by jumper ants again. At home, numb lips, chest pain, itchy all over, trying not to puke.
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Vaccine fight with relatives. “Be compassionate,” they say, “You don’t know the struggle of parents whose children have autism. Let their unvaccinated kids cough allllll over your daughter and your pregnant self.”
I have plenty of compassion for parents who find schools ill-equipped for their childrens’ needs, who find a hostile and unwelcoming public for their autistic kids, and who generally are finding their parenthood experience very different than they thought. But where is their compassion for immunocompromised people, the young & super old, cancer patients, and people who cannot be vaccinated for other reasons? Why must my compassion be so great for the parents of autistic kids, but zero for sick people?
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…not to mention the questionable/debunked connection to autism against the fundamental link between nasty diseases killing people.
The only anti-vacc argument that makes sense to me is a response against the current practice of stuffing children full of jabs all at once rather than allowing parents to space them out. The reason for not letting up on the jab regime is cost savings on the number of visits. Kind of a different issue than the typical conspiracy thinking. It’s always best to go with the autism conspiracy rather than go against the insurance adjuster. 
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Not vaccinating kids who are already autistic makes zero fucking sense even from an anti-vaxxer’s point of view. By anti-vax logic (such as it is) the damage has been done (we know it wasn’t, just following that train to the station).
This article does make some good points about all the sources of misinformation:
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Hey, maybe I misread that, but it sounds like congratulations are in order!! (Not the being coughed on part, obviously.)
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