A Crazy Cat's Life

I have a creepy student this summer session. He sits in the class, barely says two words a week, and broods for most of the day. Then this weekend, I get this bizarre e-mail from him claiming that I'm basically a racist bitch. Well, in not so many words but that is the summary. It seems that he is under this strange misconception that I have a prejudice against his particular ethnicity and that I am grading him unfairly due to this. This was a serious OMF WTF?!!! type of moment. Where did this come from? He claimed that he was doing--in his own demented mind--top notch work that deserved an A. So, just making sure I wasn't being too tough, I went over his papers a second time and said "nope, these deserve the C+ that he got." Today I had a few words with Creepy Student. I did not say anything other than "would you like to talk?" and let him ramble away. This is where it got really weird. He said that my profile picture on Facebook intimated that I...

During my first summer session, I had one class full of exceptionally bright and motivated students. I got a chance to see what it was like to teach students who were there because they wanted to be, not because their mommy and daddy told them it was either this or a job. Not surprising, the class average at the end of the session was one of the highest I've seen in years. It was an incredible pleasure to teach this fine young students. This summer session I am making up for it. Their first assignment was very simple. Take a quiz on Blackboard (the online learning environment) on plagiarism. It is a very common sense sort of quiz and I even provided them with a whole slew of information on the subject so there was no way they could fail it. The whole purpose of the quiz was to get them comfortable with taking an online assessment. An easy A, right? Well, over the past three days I have received a slew of e-mails from students that include the following: I was not made awar...

Back in the day when I was first studying psychology, I was reading about Elizabeth Kübler-Ross' five-stages of grief. It was a classic work that has undergone much scrutiny from the academic community over the years. At first the work was applied to those suffering from grief due to death but over the years it has come to represent reactions from any type of devastating news or personal loss. Each person reacts different to loss and not everyone goes through all of the stages nor in the same order. She listed them as such: Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance I personally find Kübler-Ross' stages to be accurate in my case though I only go through three of them in the following order: Depression Anger Acceptance Why am I mentioning all of this? Besides the educational lesson, I am definitely going through my stages of grief over not getting the job. I know you're saying "but that isn't a personal loss! You still have your current job." Aye, t...