Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Wow

So the teaching period finished four weeks ago. Over last three weeks, the students had their final exams, and in upper-level courses, final projects and essays were due. Last week and this week everyone was frantically marking marking marking until—phew—it's done.

Then last night, an hour before final grades were due, one prof in our department emailed all faculty:


Dear all,

In my [undergraduate] course on [X] this semester, I was glad to find the [20] students wrote excellent final essays on interesting topics. I attach scanned copies of them all, as I'm sure you will find them worth the read.

Regards,
Prof. Optimistic.
I wish I lived in his universe, where, after marking all the final essays for your own course, you are eager and excited to read everyone else's as well.

8 Comments:

KaosSmurf said...

that sounds more like he's being a braggart than that he wants to read other peoples essay results.

my suggested course of action is to scan all of your class, and ask for his opinion on them. you had a massive first year class right?

Anonymous said...

All I can say is, WTF????

Ianqui said...

That makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

Inside the Philosophy Factory said...

I want to live in his world where he only has 20 papers to grade... or, at a minimum, where he got 20 good ones... I got 20 crappy ones on Capital Punishment today...

Nicola said...

He scanned 20 x maybe 10 sides = 200 pieces of paper? The man is dedicated!

The essays I'm marking have turned out quite well. (I put it down to my having learned how to set questions ;-)

StyleyGeek said...

The Scientist, I did wonder whether it was a subtle way of saying, "My students are better than yours". But I don't think this particular prof has that streak in him. I think he honestly did think people would want to read these essays. He caught me in the corridor and raved enthusiastically for half an hour about the contents of a couple of the essays in particular.

Jana - our photocopier/scanner has a feeder, so you can remove the staples and then just feed in a stack of documents to scan. So not so much dedication after all...

Anonymous said...

I want to read them!!!

StyleyGeek said...

Seriously??? I mean, he got permission to make them public, so I could send them to you if you liked, but I find it hard to believe!