I may be giving away too much information by ranting about this, but I gotta vent.
I advise the yearbook. That means I’m responsible for answering any questions the yearbook editor has, helping out where needed, and grading the students who have signed up for the yearbook course.
I stated in the syllabus what the requirements were in order to get a grade; I expected to give out a lot of easy A’s because the requirements weren’t that hard. Simply put, they were to send me a copy of whatever was contributed to the yearbook. You lay out a page, you print an extra copy and send it to me. You take photos, you send extra copies to me. You write something, you send an extra copy to me. Or you email any of these things. Whatever.
Simple, right? Easy A, right? So you’d think. Some students sent me nothing. So what other choice to I have? I can’t grade them based on happy thoughts. I warned them, I waited, then I turned in the grades. Those students did not receive anything close to an easy A.
I hate giving Fs. Mainly because every time I’ve given a student an F, I have to take an unbelievable amount of crap from people who refuse to accept the responsibility for their grades. Either I’m being mean, vindictive, or incompetent; anything to deflect the blame.
So I have students and an editor annoyed at me, and I can’t do a bloody thing about it until people start sending me stuff.
But other than that… My dad sent me an email about the history of the Scotch-Irish, which he claims we are.
What are the Scotch-Irish? Apparently, Scottish people migrated to Northern Ireland in the distant past (probably back when the English were conquering Ireland again) and eventually migrated to America. In order to distinguish themselves from regular Irish people, whom they considered to be white trash, they called themselves Scotch-Irish.
Great. More bigots in my family. I got more than enough of those.
Tsunami relief: Keep donating to the American Red Cross. People don’t magically get all better just because you sent them twenty bucks last week.