Nibbled by Ducks

When I first began teaching, I felt nothing but disdain for the old burnouts in the department. I resented how their bad attitudes and behaviors tarnished the sparkling reputations of us young snots who had real enthusiasm for the job and believed that we made important, measurable differences in the lives of students. I got angry when administration enacted a new policy not because of something I did but because Gerry, the Civil War buff, was passed out drunk in the rotunda instead of teaching his 9 a.m. American Lit class.

Now, after 21 years in the classroom, 21 years observing academic politics, I am beginning to understand how the burnouts "crisped" over the years. The process is slow—maybe inevitable. One faculty member who has since retired described it as "being nibbled by ducks." I don't believe that certain unpleasant realities of academia are a good enough excuse to become a burnout, but every now and them, I lose a little more of my trust, my empathy, to the nibbling of those very ducks, and I understand why the burnouts turn off as they do.

I turned in grades a week ago. For the last seven days I have been enjoying the first week of vacation, playing with my new macro lens, cleaning closets, taking the basenjis for longer than usual walks. I have checked school email once per day, mostly because I don't want to return later this month with 150 messages that require answers. Until today, I had been pleased that no one had emailed to complain about a grade. I meet with all of my classroom students individually before the do-or-die, department-graded final exam to give them their averages, so they all knew what to expect. I had provided the online students with a grade worksheet so that they could easily calculate their averages before exams. The best surprise is no surprise, my motto.

This morning when I opened my school email account, I found a message from Latoya. The subject line was "Urgent Change of Grade" and the content read something like this:

From: latoya.tiller@_____cc.edu
To: sparky.lightbulb@_____cc.edu
Date: August 9, 2006 9:34 AM
Subject: Urgent Change of Grade

I was in your online research class and i should have a "B" as my final grade but after downloading my transcripts I have a "C" i need you to change this asap because it is messing up my financial aid please email me as soon as you can because the computer won't let me register for fall classes until you resolve this mistake.

Latoya

A little Latoya history is needed here. This student began the course by missing the first exam, giving her a big, fat zero. The first two or three writing assignments read like her email above—no punctuation, no capitalization, just verbal diarrhea—so I had to fail them as well. Then she pulled her shit together and began to produce average work—or her roommate, her mother, or her boyfriend wrote it for her. Latoya had emailed me late in the semester asking for her average, so I reminded her of the grade worksheet available at the course website and told her to do the math herself. In hindsight, that advice was a mistake; anyone who writes as poorly as Latoya probably can't do simple addition and division either.

Latoya's average was a 69.6 after the final exam. I use Excel as a gradebook, and the grade boxes are set to 30 pixels wide, so Excel rounds up all grades to a two-numeral number, in this case a 70. Latoya was way closer to a D than a B. I curtly replied that she had barely gotten a C in the class and that I had no intention of changing her grade. Later in the afternoon, I got a new message that she had "mistaken" me for a different professor and apologized.

At this point, I got curious which of my colleagues might be "ruining" Latoya's chance of financial aid, so I pulled up her transcript. I learned that she had earned 3 Cs and 1 B during the summer, giving her a 2.25 GPA for the semester. The only problem was that her overall GPA—reduced by a string of Ds, Fs, and WFs from previous terms—was a 1.95, not yet high enough to qualify for financial aid. I concluded that Latoya was probably emailing all of her professors to say that we each had made a grievous mistake and were frustrating her academic future, hoping that one of us would forget an entire semester of her dreary performance and boost a grade.

That she believed we were dumb enough to believe her is the "nibbling" for me. Next semester, convinced as I will be that another Latoya has registered for one of my classes, I will make a policy change that requires I become meaner or make more work for myself, which I will then resent. If Latoya was the only student who inspired such a change, that wouldn't be so bad. But there was Brian who convinced me that I would allow no more make-up quizzes, and Bethany who made me severely penalize work more than one week late, and a long list of other students who have changed me from easy-going to an instructor who sees things now only in black and white and who doesn't much care that someone's mother just got diagnosed with cancer.

I am looking forward to the fall semester. If it started this Monday, I would don a new shirt and slip on a new pair of shoes—all spiffy for a new academic year—and go off to teach, still convinced that I make important, measurable differences in the lives of my students. But I no longer see most of them as willing partners in the process—more like ducks I am herding to a pond.