Jeremy is going to drop his English class. He has one of those awful English teachers my students sometimes tell me about who are absolute nitpickers when it comes to what I view as unimportant matters such as margins and MLA format. As long as the students type the paper, offer some kind of margins, and put their names on the papers, I don't take any notice of that.
This is all the more unforgiveable in his case because he is a disabled student, and as a matter of fact, we do all of his typing for him because it is so hard and painful for him. We would have liked the DS&P office to have offered keyboarding lessons to him, but he of course did not tell them what his disabilities were. He didn't say anything about his reading either, and it didn't show up as a problem on the testing. Must have been a pretty cursory test, is all I can say since those in the past who have tested him certainly saw all kinds of disabilities around language processing and reading.
This teacher made me angry from the start. She added him late because he was placed in the wrong level of writing class, and she only agreed to take him if he didn't "make trouble." This was not even knowing anything about him. Apparently, anyone who was disabled was trouble as far as she was concerned. I met her once when I had to go turn in his paper and I had the impression that she was entirely clueless and inexperienced.
I am glad he is dropping the class, but I hope that he isn't going to let it stop him from trying again.
2 comments:
I admire a good margin, and MLA done according to the guidelines, well, a thing of orderly beauty. But that's just me. :D
But I'm sure you wouldn't refuse to grade a student's paper under those circumstances, especially when you knew it was a disabled student whose parents did the typing.
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