College Kids Say the Darndest Things…

This past academic year, I’ve been getting an interesting assortment of excuses from my undergrad students re why they are missing class. These excuses keep getting more and more elaborate, almost to the point of TMI. I don’t know whether there’s some undergrad manual floating about that advises students to get extra-specific in their emails to their professors, but at least they make for an entertaining read.

One student sent me a pic of his plane stub a few hours before class. The flight was from Denver to Boston, set to land long after the class was over. (Why he didn’t think to give me the heads-up before he boarded the plane is another story entirely.)The plane stub was accompanied by a breezy email: “thought I would be able to return by tonight, but it does not appear that will be in the cards.” I found the switch to the passive in the latter clause of that sentence to be extremely irritating, as if he were freeing himself from blame. If you’re going to be absent, just own up to it like a responsible human being.

Here’s an email I got today from one of my ESL students: