This year has been a bad one for illnesses. I have had many more students than usual who have racked up a number of absences due to illness. These absences come in groups and are typically verified by a parent. Some of the students manage to make up the work; others, not so much.
One of my students, lets call her Little Miss Needy (I'm sure I could make an entire picture book about her), has had this particular problem this year. She has made some noises about making up her work, but has not managed to complete anything. She makes meetings -- and then skips them. She asks for help -- and then leaves. She whines a whole lot -- but never steps up with the work.
She asked for some missing work last week, so I gave it to her. She emailed me because she was going to be absent again and needed some help. So I emailed. She wondered if there was anything she could do to pass.
I explained that she had a 25% and it was highly unlikely that she could do anything to change her F. She asked again in class today. Couldn't I just give her an essay to write, or something? An essay to replace a poetry unit, a rhetoric unit, The Crucible, and The Scarlet Letter, plus some incidents and accidents, mind you. No, I said, there was nothing that could replace all of that. (We are less than two weeks from the end of the semester and the deadline for late work was last Friday.) She humphed out of the classroom, exclaiming, "Well, I'm going to stop trying in here."
Help me, out, Little Miss Needy. That would be different from what you've been doing so far because...?
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2 comments:
Because in her mind, she was trying and now you told her not to. Because now she can blame the system and not herself. It's not easy. But it's real, and it happens all the time....
good luck
Really, she's just expressing her frustration at doing such an excellent job of failing. She knows that she hasn't done the work and has not proved she'd learned a semester's work of material. In return, I am expressing my frustration at her semester-long neglect of my class.
:-)
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