Apology Not Accepted

When I was a kid, things were simple. You screwed up, you realized it, you apologized, Mum forgave, you got a cookie. I don't think was such an uncommon thing, really - perhaps some of you out there learned this, too: Apologies make things right again.

Fast forward to the real world, in which apologies very rarely help, are almost never enough (at least by themselves - possibly a whole symphony of mea culpas while whipping oneself with olive branches can be acceptable for minor offenses), and never truly put things back the way they were.

Because this economy of "I'm Sorry" bothers me, I do try to accept apologies, according to my Mum's example, but I have a suspicion that not everyone sees them in the same valuable light as I do. For me, it means something when someone says he or she is sorry, and actually means it. It means, "OK, do-over; you'd be a jerk to still be mad - we'll discuss it some more if we need to, but, in general, the harm is salved."

There is one exception to this, however. One I have had to get hardened to in the past few years.

That sterling exception is the long, drug-out, heart-felt pleas for leneancy my students will often write at the end of their tests or quizzes or exams, explaining why they didn't do as well as they really could have.

I am not talking about the simple "Out of Time" that is always good policy for students to jot down if they can't finish (this lets the prof know that something was wrong with his or her test design in the first place if a bunch of students all had the same problem). Rather, I am talking about those who use the big ten dollar talk show words to describe how well they really intended to do, except for the fact that:

1) "Conditions out of my control prevented me from achieving success on this quiz..."
2) "The classroom environment did not suit my learning needs today" (i.e. too cold, too hot, too something or other)
3) "Things occurred over the weekend that did not facilitate my wish to study for this quiz" (i.e. St Patrick's Day?)
4) "I had other assignments this week that were more important" (always a favourite with profs)
5) and so forth, and so on...

I have always encouraged students with legitimate issues to see someone at the school or the prof to negotiate how to best succeed in the class - there really is no major occupation that takes such things into account as a university. Usually, they are far superior to "Real World" jobs, which don't really give a flying screw that your aunt died - for them, if your dad dies, they might consider a day off. For an aunt, you get pretty much zilch.

Of course I am usually more than sympathetic to students who are having difficulties in their lives. I, like many university educators, are fully aware that student debt and tuition costs are making more and more students work at jobs for more than 20 hours a week (and I know this is a crying shame, since any more than 10 hours a week harms their educations). Most profs do take such things into account when assigning reading and work loads, and are becoming less inclined to waste students' time with "Make-Busy" assignments.

We are well aware that every student likely has a five-class course load, and we know everyone has lives (for all intents and purposes).

BUT! Part of being in university is playing through the pain. We (TAs/profs) all went through the undergrad years in the exact same way. We certainly know how to read these apologies for what they are worth, and often they read like a "it's not my fault" that doesn't really ring true. Unless something is seriously wrong (at which time the problems are very rarely jotted down at the end of a test, but are communicated in a manner fitting their seriousness), apologies really can't do anything as a prof or TA marks something.

When the mark is out of 25, there is no space for "studied the wrong passage, even though we were told which one to study in three of the nine classes I did not show for this term and all the other students seemed to know which passage to do - be lenient."

The sad reality is here, folks, that apologies are not always good enough. Sometimes it was your fault, and sometimes the right thing to do is just accept that and move on. Dignity is a lesson, too, and it should cost far more than 10% of one class's final grade.

Sometimes you have to take the flunk and learn from it.