Try Again Next Semester
I’ve been a TA for a couple courses at my university, which is fairly competitive and the students are generally all top notch. Once in a blue moon, though, someone slips by the admission process. My worst experience was as a TA for a lower division math course.
She was a freshman student, and spoiled doesn’t begin to cut it. Her family was clearly loaded, and I suspect she went to some insanely expensive private school that wrote her application for her. This girl would be in designer clothes and on her phone or laptop the entire time in lecture.
Obviously everyone does this sometimes, but this girl was clearly just chatting with her friends and shopping for clothes all the time. When she failed to turn in the first four problem sets, I sent her a quick email to let her know that homework contributed to a significant portion of her grade.
I also said I’d still accept them. I never got a response. So she gets a blatant F on her first midterm. Like, it’s not an F that could be rounded up to anything significant. She was at a point where she should’ve just dropped out and try again next semester. I sent another email saying this.
This time I got a response, with her stating she could make the grade back next midterm. Alright, I think, suit yourself. So I continue through the rest of the semester. She’s still failing…until something absolutely ridiculous happens.
At the last meeting of my discussion section, SHE SHOWS UP! Not just that, but with her parents. Oh my god, it gets better. She stays after the session to introduce me to her parents, and then hands me a stack of papers and informs me that it’s all the homework for the semester.
Meanwhile her parents are sitting there all proud of their little girl. I take the stack graciously and, in my most professional voice, let her know that I’d be happy to take a look at it, but she won’t get any credit. Her parents’ faces completely fall. Her father starts to insult me.
So I show them everything: The abysmal attendance record, the 0% homework score, the low, low, low midterm scores. Now she’s starting to tear up and the parents are seriously fuming.
Not wanting to put myself in the middle of the rest of the storm, I mumble that I have a class to get to and sprint out of there…but not before I hear the student getting chewed up so loudly that people actually poked their heads out of classrooms. She never showed up for the final.