Friday, March 05, 2010

From the "other" side of the tracks..

... comes a NEW student exam excuse..

I've been teaching for kind of a long time (7 years at BNCC alone) -- every year I have 400-500 students..

I've never had one tell me that she couldn't make the exam because, an hour before the exam, her mother got hauled off to jail, so she had to arrange bail money.

Yep -- her mom went to jail.

I don't know what for -- and I don't want to ask.

I believe her -- she's friends with my tutor, and apparently called the tutor from the car on the way to the jail...

Wow.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ooof. And still she had the wits to call en route. Impressive.

CenTexTim said...

I've had a couple of similar excuses. In one, it was the student himself in jail (verified, so I gave him a make-up).

The other is reproduced below, in all it's grammatical glory. I accepted this one as well, because it meets all my criteria for excuses. It's compelling, verifiable, unlikely to reoccur, and best of all, entertaining.

"It happened 2 weeks ago but I had been [out of town] since. When i got the call they told me that there had been a fight and that [my brother] had gotten stabbed. I had to rush home to see how he was doing, but as it turns out it was him that did the stabbing. He had been on the run for a while, but gave himself up to autorities. I know it won't happen again because he's gonna be in jail for quite some time."

mrc-w said...

This semester, two police officers came to my classroom and asked for one of my students. Curiously enough, the student in question was absent that day. This same student missed a class earlier in the semester because he was arrested. Now he's not coming to class anymore and I wonder if the cops caught up to him...