Monday, June 25, 2007

Firefight Averted

My "semester" just ended, and it would seem there were no major casualties from that aforementioned grenade. Things were a bit tense, but the gentleman in question gave up emailing me after I gave him my final word on the matter (which was "It's my class, and if you don't like it, you can complain to the dean") and ended up with a decent grade despite his antisocial behavior on this point. I do think he's making some kind of complaint about me, or maybe just giving me a bad course evaluation, but frankly I don't much care; my dean already knows this whole story, and I have the entire conversation saved on my computer if I need to pull it out.

I'm just glad it's over. I felt guilty, because I know it could have been a better class than it was.... if I teach online again, I'll be far better at it. But there were some good elements to online as opposed to F2F lecturing, too. If I ever do the latter again, I may try to find ways to apply some of the discussion techniques I used in the online class (minus the crazy angry guy, of course.)

I'd go on further about little things, like how amazing the lightning bugs in my yard look tonight and every night in June.... But I'm tired, and I keep mistyping. So it's off to bed instead.

4 comments:

epiplectic said...

There's some cinders in the corner over there....er. um. check your email.....he's not done just yet.

The Wax Lion said...

yeah, i spoke too soon, dammit.

hhw said...

what happened?!?!? don't leave us in suspense!

The Wax Lion said...

heh. basically he sent me one more flaming email accusing me of giving him a low grade on his first paper (which was NOT a good paper) to punish him for his behavior in the forums, and accusing me of intentionally not sending him a course evaluation (which is not actually my job to do, it's handled by the department secretary. I wrote him an angry response, which I did not send but it made me feel better, and then emailed my supervisor and my dean about it. My supervisor stepped in to tell him that any further comments could be directed to her, and that his behavior was disrespectful to me and other students. I haven't heard from him since....