Much of my course is online. The syllabus, class notes, the entire quarter's homework assignments and the (locked) solutions to those assignments are all online. There are also links to related websites, interesting trivia, all kinds of good stuff.
Last night the server crashed. I know precisely the time at which it crashed, because I made it happen myself. From home. At 10:00 pm, right when Law and Order began. The kids have a homework assignment due today. No problem, I tell myself. I specifically told them, the first day of class, that these things happen and that they needed to plan ahead. I made a big fuss about it even. I related the story about how this happened last quarter the evening before the final. I had them laughing about the dreadfully clueless student who had demanded that the TA call me at home, after midnight, so that I could bundle up all the course notes (for the whole quarter, mind you!) and email them to everyone. So I went to bed and slept like a baby. I brought the server back up first thing this morning. Total down time: less than 10 hours.
Whereupon the mail spooler began spewing out a flood of desperate emails, all agonizing that for some mysterious reason the course website was inaccessible. How were they to do the assignment, they whined pathetically. What was I planning to do to fix this problem for everyone? One young woman came to my office pleading that I extend the due date for the assignment.
No. Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. Have a really nice day.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
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5 comments:
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
oh my god. you are a complete nightmare--and you pride yourself on it!
I love it- did they appreciate that it was a bonus "lesson in life" not even on the syllabus, free of charge? Probably not. Reminds me of the paradigm shift when I went from high school to a small Northern community college. Most were away from home, with big student loans, and living off campus. We were told only 1 out of 3 would be back for second year, so to look around and decide. No attendance, no nagging - we'd paid the money, the choices and consequences were now up to us. If we choose to goof off and miss all the notes, find a friend. Seemed a shock at first, but some (1/3) appreciated it later.
You sound like the kind of teacher I would have liked - even for statistics! I just "found" your blog today, but will keep an eye on it now.
If I didn't post all of the homework assignments for the entire quarter on the very first week of class, I might have felt badly enough about it to go in to work at 10 pm and restart the server. But, as my TA succintly pointed out, "We ain't Google."
Trust in things digital seems to be a generational thing. I still bring transparencies to conferences and only recently stopped bringing them to class as backup.
This reminds me of my freshmen year of college. We all had a student server, and we were all supposed to maintain a quota of something like 100 megs, (unless you paid extra for more) However, it was not strictly regulated, and needless to say people used way more space than they were supposed to. Nearing the end of the spring semester the harddrives that held the student servers got dangerously full, and waring emails were sent out everyday for few weeks warning everyone if they didn't get there server usage back to normal the drives were likely to crash. Most everyone ignore this, and like clock work, the last week of the semester the student servers crashed. I had to laugh (in a some what sadistic fashion) at everyone who'd lost a semesters worth of work because they were to lazy and irresposible to keep within their quota, and backup their work. I did not use my server space that year, so was unaffected.
In subsequent years people were far more careful when using the servers.
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