Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The Dog Ate My Disk and Other Tales of Woe

     Carolyn Foster Segal’s essay was extremely funny. I loved this story. The excuses that some of her students made up in order to get of an assignment were really funny. I am pretty sure that it would have been easier for them to just do the work that was assigned to them. Her students became pretty clever when it came to their excuses. The funny part about this is that I have heard students use almost every one of these excuses before. Most students use the death of a family member excuse more than any other one because what teacher would be so rude as to make the student do school work when one of their precious family members has died. Maybe, just maybe, some of the excuses told by the students were true but most of the time, they probably were not. Student will do almost anything and think of almost anything to get out of writing a paper. I think that the students who think of the excuses spend more time working on the excuse than it would have taken them to write their paper. I love to hear a student babble out an excuse to a teacher when you can tell that they are obviously lying. I am sure that teachers get a good laugh out of hearing their students make up the wildest excuses. 

2 comments:

  1. Kathleen, I thought about the same thing as you. I think it is much easier to do the assignments than to give those absurd excuses. I’m impressed by the excuses made up by the students. I wouldn’t be courageous enough to tell a teacher that a family member died or that my dog ate my homework. I also found the passage very funny. Segal has interesting sense of humor when it comes to her students behavior. I’m sure every professor has many stories to tell about how far their students can go to get away with an assignment.
    Natassia Zielinski

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  2. I totally agree with you. It probably does take them more time to think of the excuse rather than if they had just done the assignment in the first place. I also thought this article was really funny. I got a good laugh out of it. It was interesting to see all the wild excuses that students can come up with just to get out of an assignment. As a teacher, I'm not so sure how I would handle that. Either way it must be entertaining like you said :)

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