The Usual.

It's that special time of year. The heat is sweltering, the flowers are withering, the bugs are sweating... and the students are stressing.

Yes, progress cards went out today. And considering I have 7 A's in a class of 18, some students were happy. The other 11 are F's. So you can imagine how busy my office has been with pleading students (some of whom I'm pretty sure I have not seen before) are begging for a C+ so they can "graduate and get a job". While I explain to them how they can try (keyword) to achieve that, I'm wondering in the back of my head how a boss would respond to this particular student who came in 20 minutes late the three times he showed up over this 8 week course. Just... throwing that out there.

So many promises. "I will come to office hours and work this and this problem out!" "I will study really hard!" Yet here I am. Office Hours. Thirty minutes into office hours by the way. My office hours in fact are right after my class. And just downstairs from the classroom I teach in. Not a soul. Just me, the blog, and enough time to think up how I'm going to explain 11 F's to the Chair. Shouldn't be too hard with the grade and attendance sheet.

In case you think I've been overly demanding and mean to my students, you should know the following:
1) at this point those 7 A's could stop showing up to class, and still get a B+.
2) one of their major class projects consisted of cutting and pasting World Bank data into Excel, then graphing it. I gave them two weeks to complete this. Somehow, these 11 could not figure out how to do that in two weeks AND did not bother to ask me.
3) the homework is 10% extra credit. I don't mean that they get 10% on an exam, I mean if they do all the homework, that can turn a 70% into an 80%. The 11 students who are flunking have 0% on homework.
4) every problem on the exam has come out of the homework or the notes. That's just how I roll. It is all there, and 7 students got the hint, and consistently scored between 95 and 100 for both exams. Since I drop the lowest exam score, that means they don't even have to show for the Final. The others averaged a 35% on the first exam, and a 68% on the second. I have my doubts about their Final scores.
5) I have had a grand total of two "I just need to graduate, can I please get a C?" conversations this week already, and neither student has done anything to merit a D.

Today is the last day to drop.