Random thoughts at the end of the semester

Every time I give oral exams to my students (midterm and final), I'm impressed by how nice and interesting many of them are. I give them half a dozen general questions and half a dozen related to units we have studied, and they have to choose questions from each group and talk for ten minutes. I find out all sorts of things about them: part time jobs they have/had and whether they like them, places they have traveled (North America, Europe, Asia), things about their families and hometowns, hopes for the future. I have had students who have trekked Nepal and wandered through India. Some do charity work. They are often thoughtful and sensitive.

(What happens to them after they go into the military, graduate, and/or get jobs in big companies is beyond my comprehension and will probably be the subject of another rant at some future time.)

At any rate, I've always liked teaching students here.

I submitted my grades yesterday, so I'm officially on vacation now. In the past, I've always had one or two students email me asking for higher grades; however, that hasn't happened so far this time. Perhaps knowledge of my consistent refusal (and inability because the school computer forces us to give no more than 30% A and 40% B) to bump up grades has gotten around. I did have one student ask me to lower his grade. We have an odd policy at the university that allows students who get a C or lower to retake a course. So, one of my C+ students emailed me and asked me to reduce his grade to a C (I did it). I will have to ask my students next semester what the majority of Korean professors do. I'm assuming that they never give C+ grades but I'll have to double check. I think we have a policy that everyone works around thus defeating the policy.

Last semester, I had a student email me and tell me that he needed and A+ (not an A or and A-). He said that, if I didn't give him an A+, his company would fire him and he would never for the rest of his life be able to get a good job. This is the same company which had hired him one month before school ended and expected him to get an A+ average while missing a quarter of his classes and his final exams (a common occurance which drives me crazy). I had given him a chance to do the work outside of class and submit it by email, but he never did it. At any rate, I never replied and I didn't change his grade. I never heard from him again, so I don't know whether I really did destroy his life or if he was just yanking my chain. These students are irritating but, fortunately, few and far between.