Bride of Wacky Student Time

Last week was a pretty hellish grading week for me. I had around 150 intro exams to grade, as well as a batch of upper division papers. In my capacity as judge, jury, and executioner, I had a couple of interesting interactions with some wacky students.

One was an intro student who is in Army ROTC. He emailed me at 1:00 AM in the morning the day of the exam (I am sure he thought of it as the night before) to ask if he could take the exam a week late. Why? Because he was waiting on some kind of promotion, and he couldn't concentrate until he got the news. My reaction was twofold:

A) No.

B) Are you fucking kidding me? This is cannot be how the Army wants its officers-in-training to behave. Grow up.

Of course, my response contained only reaction (A); I omitted reaction (B) in the final draft. In an ironic denouement, the student actually did better on this exam than he did on the one prior.

The other was a student who submitted a paper in which he objected to the hedonistic theory of value promoted by a philosopher whose last name is 'Kant' and whose first name is 'Frankena'. Boy, oh boy. It's downhill from there.

--Mr. Zero