It's done

We had a meeting yesterday about the student in my class who is failing. And this isn't the "doing poorly" kind of failing, it's the "only turning in two out of nine homeworks" kind of failing. This student has lied flat out and also never followed through on the "I'm going to start working hard on this" statements that are spoken constantly.

He is an athlete, and well, because of this has a special "athlete advisor." The advisor, the chair of our department (who also has the student in a class of his), and I all met to discuss the fact that this student is not going to make it as a major in this department. The topic even came up that he would be in another class I am teaching in the fall, and the chair mentioned that I have a reputation for being very hard, even for the best students. I responded with, "Yeah, there's no way he'll survive that class."

It was a very sad meeting. I know that students come to college and not all of them succeed. Plenty of people do not get to do what they really want to do, but this was kind of sad. The student had always wanted to major in my field, and had very specific goals for his future. However, he wasn't willing to put in the extra effort to get this accomplished. The thing is that courses in my field are generally more time consuming than other courses, and the major itself requires 17 courses to get the degree (the average is 13-14 here), and that is in addition to the university-wide core.

I left the meeting feeling both angry and sad. Angry because of the fact that there are clearly people at this university would who like to help this student in every way they can (and I was one of those people), and he just didn't care. Or at least, he didn't care enough to put in the effort on his part. The sad part really came from the fact that the kid was failing miserably, and just didn't realize how hard the subject was.

And he didn't listen to anyone.