The kid I transport to school in the morning was distressed.
He found out that the school computer received none of the homework assignments he turned in over the last six weeks. He is normally an A-B student, more As than Bs, and he currently has about 35% in all of his classes.
His situation is a little harder to fix than many other students. He is off-campus taking college classes for most of the day. Consequently, it is tougher to schedule time with the high school academic counselor. The fact that he has so few high school classes also reduced the number of random chances that one of his instructors would bring up his plummeting grades.
He found out about it yesterday. One of his high school instructors told him he was flunking Physics. And he was informed via email that he was going to be dropped from his college program because of his high school grades.
Normally these issues would be uncovered at parent-teacher conferences but this kid lives 12 miles away and nobody in his family drives. It is a physical hardship for them to attend conferences.
Fortunately, he has all of his homework on the hard drive of his lap top. I hope the high school has somebody capable of recovering the time/date stamps to verify the kid's story.
I am 97% sure this story will have three happy endings.
- The school district will not let this train wreck derail this kid
- The kid will learn to not trust computers
- When it is important, the kid will always verify the that party being communicated to received and understood the information he thought he had sent.
Remember the TV show "The Paper Chase"? It ain't like that anymore.
ReplyDeleteIt's not likely he will get a response to any query he sends to school instructors much less one for each assignment he sends in. The new paradigm of instruction via internet works both ways to deprive students and professors of necessary interactions.
Universities are now mostly degree mills, much like health care is all about the HMO and not you.
My son in Australia just had his Structural Geology professor go off to Europe in the middle of the course. No replacement and he told me he's never gotten a response from the assigned TA's - or even seen them. His coarse still continues online - somehow.