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[cc_alan]

Gah! I get one of these every year. The holiday doesn't start until Wednesday, and they KNOW that!.

I was looking over my flight information for Thanksgiving Break and saw that my flight leaves that Mon, meaning I would miss class on Tuesday. I tried changing my flight but it would be a $150.00 difference that I can't afford. Is there work I can make up so that my grades will not be affected by this absence?

"I was looking over my syllabus and saw that I don't have to give a !@#$ about when your flight leaves."

You might want to adjust the wording a bit...

Alan

[hegemony]

To be fair, sometimes parents make their kids' flight reservations.

[concordancia]

To be fair, sometimes parents make their kids' flight reservations.

So? Communicate with your parents about your schedule. My father doesn't really give a ball of wax what other people want, but if I tell him I have school, he gets it.

[peppergal]

To be fair, sometimes parents make their kids' flight reservations.

Yes, and when I was an undergraduate, my parents asked when the earliest possible time I could leave without missing classes would be.  If that meant flying home on Thursday morning, then Thursday morning it was.

[egilson]

I'll give just my half-real, half-imagined response to this student's e-mail. The parts of the response I wish I could have sent are italicized.

Extra credit is being offered in class, so attending class is important. Not texting throughout the entire class discussion is also important. If you would like to come by my office with your notes from lecture for us to review, then I would likely have some suggestions about how to prepare for examinations as well. My first suggestion is to stop having your girlfriend take your notes, since her grade is even lower than yours. I'd also suggest that groveling and begging for extra credit to raise your low D when, after you've blown off class for most of the semester, your athletics coach sees your progress report and hits the roof really does not make you "a hard worker."

You can likely recreate the student's e-mail yourself. For best effect, don't use capital letters.

[cc_alan]

To be fair, sometimes parents make their kids' flight reservations.

I think this post is in the wrong discussion thread. You might have meant it for the "Bang your head in despair..." one which is just down the hall.

Alan

[erictho]

Maybe this should be in another thread, but how often, and in how much detail, do you teach students about citation? I can't account for every single possible kind of source they might use, but I model common source documentation, in-text and in a works cited, and then refer them to the pages in the book that tell them how to do this. And still...they don't do it correctly. I'm thinking of ditching the lessons next semester and just saying, "Here are the pages in the book that tell you how to do this. You are capable of locating the title, author, page number, and publisher yourself." 
I don't remember ever being taught how to cite. Why on earth do they find it such an insurmountable task?

I remember way back when when I was a young grad student at a new university, coming upon 2 profs lamenting the fact that of all their grad students, I was the only one who know how to cite correctly. The grad students they were complaining about were, of course, formerly their own undergrads. The profs demanded to know how I knew how to cite. I explained that way back when I was a younger undergrad, a mandatory text for every single course was Our Uni's Guide To Citing Stuff, with detailed examples for correct citation for every single discipline. And woe betide any student who submitted papers lacking the correct commas, parenthesis, etc. I swear, our profs and TAs spent more time  and more red ink (none of this nonsensical "red ink is scary" stuff! our papers came back covered in red -- and I should point out that Grad Uni encouraged grading in pencil to be less scary) on the bibliography and footnotes than they did on the paper as a whole.

[topsitarian]

I have to say the citation discussion kind of shows that the whole citation situation is a big mess right now.
At my Undergrad Uni at Other Country, we all learned to cite a specific way. This was important to the profs, and they would mark our footnotes and bibliographies wrong if we didn't cite correctly according to that style.
So I learned all there was to know about the style, knew exactly where to place each comma and each period, each italic and each underline.... it was great.

Then I moved to American Grad Uni, and guess what? Turns out in my field in the US, we use a citation style that is different. Not completely different, but just different enough to cause problems. So I did my best to learn that style, though on occasion I still need to check to make sure I didn't accidentally use Undergrad Uni's style.

And to make things even more confusing, some - but not all -  of the journals in my subfield actually require a third style, which again is not entirely dissimilar from the former two - but just different enough to be confusing.

So now I've basically given up on ever really remembering exactly how each citation system works, and instead I just have to check every singly citation with the relevant manual (because, let's face it, Endnote often messes up the correct citation format of things).

I really wish they would just pick one style of citation, I don't care which one, and stick with it!

So while I certainly expect my students to cite in some coherent way, I do understand if they have a hard time knowing a specific format of citation. In lower level courses with many non-majors I usually just tell them to choose one style that they know well and use that one continuously throughout their writing.

[concordancia]

So now I've basically given up on ever really remembering exactly how each citation system works, and instead I just have to check every singly citation with the relevant manual (because, let's face it, Endnote often messes up the correct citation format of things).

Yes, you have learned how to use a reference guide. THAT IS ALL I AM ASKING. If you use the same reference guide over and over, you are likely to be able to do somethings automatically, but I am not asking anyone to memorize!

[profxfiles]

I understand students wanting to stretch the vacation, I just expect them to take the consequences.  My only question is: Why not leave the Friday before?

-+LR

Bingo! I am quite certain that if we let them, they would extend Thanksgiving through Christmas.  I get the same drill for Spring Break every single year....

[llanfair]

I got a similar question - thank goodness, in October - about Christmas break.  My student wanted to write our exam 3 days early so she could go home that much sooner.

Heroically, I didn't laugh.

[anon99]

Gah! I get one of these every year. The holiday doesn't start until Wednesday, and they KNOW that!.

I was looking over my flight information for Thanksgiving Break and saw that my flight leaves that Mon, meaning I would miss class on Tuesday. I tried changing my flight but it would be a $150.00 difference that I can't afford. Is there work I can make up so that my grades will not be affected by this absence?

If the flight leaves Mon, presumably it also arrives on Mon, so why won't they be in class on Tues?

[namazu]

Gah! I get one of these every year. The holiday doesn't start until Wednesday, and they KNOW that!.

I was looking over my flight information for Thanksgiving Break and saw that my flight leaves that Mon, meaning I would miss class on Tuesday. I tried changing my flight but it would be a $150.00 difference that I can't afford. Is there work I can make up so that my grades will not be affected by this absence?

If the flight leaves Mon, presumably it also arrives on Mon, so why won't they be in class on Tues?

I think the student means the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving, not after.

[anon99]

Ahhhhh, I was thinking it was the return flight on the Monday.

[msmicrobe]

Gah! I get one of these every year. The holiday doesn't start until Wednesday, and they KNOW that!.

I was looking over my flight information for Thanksgiving Break and saw that my flight leaves that Mon, meaning I would miss class on Tuesday. I tried changing my flight but it would be a $150.00 difference that I can't afford. Is there work I can make up so that my grades will not be affected by this absence?

If the flight leaves Mon, presumably it also arrives on Mon, so why won't they be in class on Tues?

I think the student means the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving, not after.

Correct, because as you all know, Thanksgiving break starts the Friday before the holiday and doesn't end until students feel like coming back to campus. Usually some time after Tuesday. Why? Because the first Monday after Thanksgiving is often the first day of deer hunting season, you know, and then you need Tuesday to recover from sitting in a tree on Monday, and Wednesday to recover from taking your deer to the butcher shop on Tuesday.
We really should just end the fall term Nov 20th and avoid all this nonsense. Better yet, let's just end with Halloween so we don't have anyone in class in November or December.