Life is worth living again, because at least I don't have students like Jeremy. The Stapler Lady has taken a stand, and - while it's not mine - I respect her for it.
- I hope you stapled the little bastard's ass to the wall. Laughing and running away? It's YOUR problem? That's 15% of his grade blowing in the wind and YOU'RE supposed to pick it up? Geez, that looks like a big fat zero to me.
- If you had taken Jeremy's stack of papers and realized upon, beginning to grade them, that they were in fact filled with homework for another class, or did not meet the terms of the assignment, or whatever, you would not be required to give him credit just because he handed you the papers and you accepted them. If your syllabus and policies state that work must be stapled, then he has not met the terms of the assignment, and you can assess any penalty that your policy allows. It's up to you how far you want to try and push that--if he decides to go to the dean, you're going to end up having to back down--but you needn't feel the list bit of compunction if a couple of pages got lost in that breeze. If they'd been stapled, they'd have been safe; since they weren't, it's only his word that they were there in the first place.
- I don't know what this says about me as a human being but I live for moments like the one that the Stapler Nazi had with young Jeremy. Here's my advice to her. Pick up as many of the papers as you reasonably can and return them in the next class period, unmarked and unrecorded. When the little darling boy protests, remind him that you never actually said you were accepting them and even questioned him about the stapling. That kid should know that shoving things in a professor's hands and running away is a little different than turning things in. If he wanted special treatment, he probably should have started by helping you pick up his papers. Then, optionally, call him a "a little fucker," just for emphasis (Warning: perform this step only if you have tenure).
- ...and of course your only rejoinder to his idiocy is to yell across the quad "Print me a new copy, MoFo, and have it in my hand, STAPLED, within X hours [you make that call; my work here is done.]!
- Stapler Nazi Nancy better have just let lame-ass Jeremy's papers fly on the breeze! The little punk handed in papers, was asked to staple them as per the syllabus, refused, then watched them flutter off in the autumn breeze. He even had the audacity to smirk and run off and claim he handed them in?!?!?!? No, punk, you didn't. F! F! F! Zeroes on everything! Let him moan. Let him wail. Let him file a complaint! Let him tell someone that he ran off after his papers flew on the breeze because he refused to take them back when he didn't get them stapled after trying to hand them in late...outside...on a breezy day. That's an F worth getting fired for. Guess what Jeremy's unaware of: He has to prove he did the work. He also has to prove he handed it in. It's not Stapler Nazi Nancy's problem that the papers got lost. That's what the fucking staple was supposed to prevent! Oh, and a big heaping pile of zero for "participation" too. Fail the fucker.
- Like the Stapler Lady, I have given up on so much in my classes. I'm so tired of the fight over the tiniest things - like the stapling! But this post has given me courage. Baby steps, of course. But I'm going to tell them that I'm through with them coming in wearing slippers from now on. It's not pedagogically significant, perhaps, but let them at least start treating my classroom as something other than an extension of their dorm room. That's a start. Staples next semester. Doing their own work in 2011. What a renaissance I'm heralding.
