No Good Deed...

Earlier in my blog, I talked about how I like online classes because the students are more open and more communicative.

Boy, has that come back to bite me in the ass.

Now, again, I am a communication expert. It's what all of my degrees are in, it's what I do for a living. This makes me a tad blunt. I'm not a big fan of bullshit or attempts to use communication for your own nefarious purposes, especially if I'm going to be the one caught in it.

A student from my online 8-week course sends me this scathing email message about how she has been trying to contact me about the drama going on in her life, and she is unimpressed with the level of unprofessionalism I have shown by not responding. She then goes on to give me all the reasons why her work has been late, telling me to go back and replace her 0s with the proper grades.

Now, first of all, this is a stanardized course. The state committee decides late procedures, and no late work is accepted after one week of the due date, regardless of reason, unless the professor okayed it before that one week deadline. Second, after scouring all of my emails and Blackboard messages, just to make sure, I had NEVER received any communication from this student before this email.

When I wrote her back, I told her all of this, and ended it by saying, "I feel as if you know from lack of participation that you are not going to do well, and so you're setting yourself up to be able to repeal your grade by setting me up to take the fall. Your disrespectful tone in your email does not help your cause, but hinders it. I will accept all work you submitted for last week and this week, and if you can show me proof of prior submissions to your other work, I will gladly accept it, but I can only grade what I have been given, and I've received no work from you since the first week."

She emailed me back, even more beligerent, telling me I was unprofessional, disrespectful, and immoral (still trying to figure that one out). After more ranting and raving, she "threatened" to tell on me to my boss.

I emailed her back, cc-ing my boss and the student affairs contact, to let her know that her threats were useless, and, essentially, repeated what I said before about what work I would accept and what I wouldn't, and told her that if she didn't mean to be disrespectful, as she claimed (ha!), then I appologized for my direct and blunt tone. In other words, I set out to diffuse a situation clearly getting out of control, not by telling the truth and being honest, but telling her what she wanted to hear, even if I choked on every word I wrote.

We shall see what my little star pupil has to say next.