Some of the students I have are "pretty tough" to deal with at times. Today's issue has to do with an email from my most challenging student. Last week, he was full of excuses such as: claiming to be unaware of the paper policy more than half-way through the quarter, that his paper was disorganized before the source material was disorganized, and he thought he spell-checked it but he must have given me the "other one", etc. etc.
So, he emailed his paper to me a day before class, with no comment. It was full of factual errors, misspellings, grammatical errors, and was disorganized to boot. I wrote back with some comments, a suggestion that he reread the syllabus to reconnect with the purpose of the assignment and the way I grade it, and some organizational methods he might use to improve the paper. In the response email, which was was poorly constructed, full of bad spelling and excuses and some "joke" whining, he included the sentence:
Boy. for someone so <blank> you sure are <blank>.
(insert the quoted words from the first sentence of this entry)
which, needless to say, did little to advance his case. Not that it will expressly hurt him, of course, but ugh.
The second draft paper that he turned in for the assignment had only the factual errors I specifically mentioned to him corrected, but has not been spellchecked or otherwise edited. Is it just overcommitment? A learning disability? Laziness? Some other issue? I will allow students to rework their papers, so I'm guessing if he really cares to improve it he'll do so later, but I am beginning to wish I'd never made that policy, even though I know it's not personal.
In contrast, two other students have approached me for help in reworking their papers and they seem really interested in improving their writing (and their grade), so it's not all bad, just irritating. I can tell that the class is responding to my comments, as their papers are getting better each week, and the class discussions are becoming more lively as well, which means that they're feeling more comfortable discussing their ideas aloud. So, hooray for the good.
