Random clip from my life....

[gray_ghost]

Student: 'That question totally jacked my grade! That wasn't a fair question!'
Me: 'I mentioned the Central Limit Theorem in the review, and talked about it twice in class. And I only asked you to explain
your understanding of the theorem, not memorize the theorem. It was fair.'
Student: 'This is total crap! I mentioned all the main ideas behind it, and tried to string them together! You took 8 points off!'
Me: 'Another way of looking at that is that I gave you 8 points for mentioning something vaguely related to the normal
distribution.'
Student: 'But it was kinda close to the correct answer, wasn't it?'
Me: 'No...not really. I was being really really nice.'
Student: [Frowning look of death]
Student (petulant tone): 'So what would you have put?'
Me: [Explain again frog pond example for millionth time]
Student: [look of a dour Puritan getting psyched to start burning some witches]
Me: 'Next question!'

*sigh* - I really think I'm going to miss this particular student next semester.

Comments

[elizabuffy.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad to see that there isn't a surfeit of students willing to put blame on their teachers for their bad grades: it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside ;)

But anyway, those types of conversations just make me want to roll my eyes.

~e!

[gray-ghost.livejournal.com]

I think she has a little problem with authority.
Of course so do I - so I tend to be a little forgiving. But of course now I'm on the other side of the equation so she's kind of a pain in the ass.

This is her third time taking the class. Now she's been doing really well in my class, so I was suprised that she failed the first two times. So either she finally started paying attention because it dawned on her that the university is happy to keep her on this treadmill until she's an old woman, or her past instructors failed her for being a pain in the ass (not for academic reasons, just because she pissed them off). Some of the east European and Asian instructors have a different and less enlightened view of the student -teacher relationship.