So, I just received an email from the disgruntled parent of one of my university students. The initial reason for her writing to me is absolutely my fault. I made not one, but two mistakes with her grade that gave her a failing grade in my class. After going over her grades as soon as school started again this semester and the student came back from vacation, we have determined that she actually got a C, so I am doing a change of grade form for her. Her mother was so frustrated, maybe because I wanted to see the actual assignments with the grades I wrote on them before doing the grade change, that she sent the following email to me and I have to admit, it made me laugh because it is so dripping with uninformed impotent ichor.
The mother wrote:
I was very disappointed to learn of the disorganized state of your records as they pertain to the above-referenced student. I can only assume that others have suffered at your hand, as well. I intend to report this to your superiors, as it is unacceptable, and certainly beneath ______ standards. I also intend to report comments I understand you have made in class related to people's political and sexual orientations. This is not in keeping with professional behavior expected of one in your position, and certainly not in keeping with ________ standards. I regret having been placed in this position, but in order to prevent another student being put in the position my daughter has been put in, I feel it is the right thing to do, and anything less would be dishonorable.
Even though I refuse to deal with parents, just the students (for legal privacy reasons as well as ethical reasons), I did answer with the following (as near as I can remember):
So sorry you feel the need to be so mean hearted. Sometimes parents get over-excited and say things they later regret. Unfortunately, email allows people to say things they would never dream of saying to a person's face. Your daughter is a grown-up and is handling this situation in a mature manner. We have come to an equitable solution. All it requires is a grade change form and each of us taking responsibility for our own mistakes.
I could have said, but did not, that a part of the reason she got the bad grades is that she didn't turn in all assignments and she wasn't in class all the time and another part is that the last week of school I was sick enough I should have stayed home, but I had to finish out the semester, so the mistakes probably occurred because of my illness. The combination was a bad one, but no lasting harm done once the change of grade form is turned in. I also didn't say that the daughter was behaving in a more mature manner than her mother and her mother's behavior bodes ill for her daughter's continuing maturity. I'm not terribly worried, because this is the first time in many years of teaching that anything like this has happened, but I will be interested to see if my department chair wants to talk with me. He probably gets way too many disgruntled parent emails.
The part of the email that made me laugh right out loud is the sentence on talking about politics and sexual orientation in class. Right. It was a literature class and we discussed formalism, structuralism, reader response theory, postmodernism, deconstructionism, culturalism, neo-historicism, and here's the kicker, Marxism, feminism, and gender theory. Since the last three are legitimate literary theories, it would have been remiss not to discuss them and I cannot imagine how we could not talk about politics or sexual orientation, although I was careful not to state a political position of my own.
This entry is getting too long, so I will post another crazy parent's email in another post.
No comments:
Post a Comment