Monday, June 18, 2007

Three Beautiful Things 06/18/07: Dan Loves Chocolate, Nicole, Grace Period

1. My next door fellow instructor, Dan, lost his grade record sheet for one of his classes. Anne McGrail brought chocolate cake left over from her wedding shower. Dan was panicked, looking high and low for his grade record sheet. I went to the faculty are to sample the cake. I could see Dan had had some chocolate cake before me. His grade record sheet sat unbothered by the cake.

2. Nicole came to my office to retrieve her Shakespeare final and ask for a letter of recommendation. She has many wonderful possibilities ahead of her, including having been accepted at Loyola-Marymount. She's an intelligent, grounded student with an inquisitive philosophical mind, largely inspired by her Christian faith. She loves Shakespeare and wrote beautifully about his plays.

3. One by one, students who needed a little more time to work on essays are getting them in. This small grace period makes things so much easier: no incomplete form to fill out, no change of grade form to fill out, no unnecessary retaking of a course, possibly taking a future seat from someone who needs the class, when giving the student a weekend and a couple of days to finish was all they needed. A little grace really does clear up a lot of clogging.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And - your not annoyed by the slackers.

JBelle said...

LMU? I dunno, Raymond. She could suffer from over exposure to the sun. They have palm trees there, too. Jus' sayin'....

Pinehurst in my Dreams said...

Boy, I wish my teacher's had been lenient with me. . .Guess in those times they thought that "teaching us a lesson" in punctuality was more important than working with our schedules (read: social life.)

I actually left college a month early my second year for a summer job at Sunshine Mine. I dropped 2 classes, finished one, and took 1 incomplete. All this to discover that the job didn't start until another girl finished her sememster at UI! I could have finished sooner, but ended up taking another full year to get my Associate's.