<p>Woody, I too would consider making the drive…and maybe consider bringing her home for a night away from it all. You can study for exams anywhere, and I’m sure there are trains or buses that can take her back. The toll of young grief and dawning mortality is just something one needs familiar (as in, knowing someone a long time…) faces to address and support and just “be” with.
Two years ago my freshman goddaughter was killed in a car crash after a night out near campus. Her best friend and another boy died with her – two of the kids in the vehicle survived. I cannot begin to tell you the ripples in the lives of friends, families, neighbors, and fellow students.
In my own son, months later he would still melt down at a school dance when they played “her” song from the funeral, and he was nowhere near the epicenter. </p>
<p>Trust your instincts. No one needs to “prove” they can handle sadness and loss without loving support. Sending you and d. the light, K.</p>
<p>D still thanks me for the letters I wrote her when she was an exchange student, particularly when things got really tough – she said she used to take those letters out and read them for the support and encouragement she needed to stick it through.</p>
<p>Today’s kids are so used to using electronic communications, but there is still an enduring comfort in a heartfelt letter.</p>
<p>Well, after a long video chat last night, we decided I shouldn’t drive up and she really couldn’t come down. She’s really OK. The boy’s fraternity held a vigil of sorts last night and she heard that his parents were in attendance. Kids are shocked but I realized during our conversation that they were supporting each other and it wasn’t the time for mama to come swooping in and try to make it all better - because you know what? I think there comes a time in parents’ lives when we can’t make it all better - as much as I would like to.
Some friends are going to see her race tomorrow and everyone seems to be staying close to each other. I can’t help thinking of those poor parents.
Well, we’re off to pick up S in NY in a little while. So glad his bus is coming in at 1AM!!
Thanks to all of you for your kind words and thoughts.</p>
<p>Woody… was there any word on what they thought happened to this young man? I cannot imagine the pain of those parents. Glad you had a video chat. Son won’t skype… bummer for all of us.</p>
<p>H is visiting his parents, D is at a 16th birthday party where they are sleeping over (which I usually don’t support in the least so this is a rarity - and mostly due to my own laziness because H has been gone all week and the carpooling has drained me). So I am watching the olympics… loved the men’s super G, but don’t understand ice dancing so much. What’s with the dance being over before the music is… they stop and the music just fades out a few seconds later mid song it seems… weird.</p>
<p>Woody, it sounds like you made a wise and thoughtful decision not to travel to see your D. A good lesson for all of us that there comes a time when swooping in to make things better isn’t the right choice. </p>
<p>Modadunn, I totally agree about the ice dancing!</p>
<p>S ended up with a C on the computer science exam because of a deep curve (the class average was a 43 and the professor left that as an F). He did much better than average, but is angry at the professor. He has lost all respect for him because he blamed the students for their horrible performance on his exam, while S says he never taught this material. This is not good. When S gets in these moods, he tends to shut down. </p>
<p>This feels like an old tape starting to run and it just makes me ill. I wish S could learn to control his temper/moods, because life won’t always go the way he wants. He only hurts himself when he goes off in a huff and stops trying because of some perceived wrong. I just don’t know if he is ready to change. I guess the next few weeks will really be the turning point of whether he can move past old patterns or not.</p>
<p>I will hold good thoughts for him Analyst. This sense of justice is hard to just let go of, and I would understand the frustration he must feel. My D16’s history teacher gave a test earlier in the year in which every kid did really poorly on one section of the test. When he returned the test he told them he took that part out of their grades and they’d review that material again since it was clear he didn’t teach it well. Tests, as a general rule, are a yard stick not only for student achievement, but also for teaching. I actually think, however, that the professors severe curving actually recognized it, otherwise, he just would have left it stand with a majority of the class failing. I honestly think his best retaliation, if you can call it that, is to just finish out the class as strong as he can, make a note to never take a class from the guy again and if the school has a site that allows you to review professor’s, give an honest appraisal of the unfair testing/teaching. If he manages to get through the class with a C, he will legitimize his argument. He doesn’t have to like him, he doesn’t have to even respect him (although obviously he has to treat him with regard to his position), but he has to get through it and he shouldn’t give a guy whom he doesn’t respect the opportunity (and permission) to derail him from college. I would strongly encourage him to get out of the moment and think a little long term. Get thru it. So what if you end up with a C. A C is passing!</p>
<p>I just think you can probably commiserate with the kid, agreeing that it would be frustrating, but also keep a larger focus on the bigger picture with a slightly longer lense, that this guy is but a blip. There are recourses, but you have to be in a position of strength and in this case, it’s passing. But I also think it’s relevant to point out that the guy didn’t HAVE to curve the exam. So I’d also offer to perhaps give the guy another chance and maybe he already knows he can do much better, even if he didn’t tell the class in words.</p>
<p>Dear Analyst: I know that fear. They can be so irrationally self-righteous and aren’t one bit realistic about the world in so many ways. But I do think sometimes they are mastering this out there–but still vent to us because it remains safe. And if we listen without reacting too much–but also don’t join them in it, sometimes they move on. Maybe telling you his “adolescent” feelings will let him move on into some more adult reality about it with time.</p>
<p>The Analyst, I know the feeling you are having. I think my S knows the feeling that your son is having too. Moda and mmaah give good advice. Understand the disappointment, commiserate to a point and then, one teacher, one instance, such is life, only a blip, move on. etc</p>
<p>Not for D’s sake, but I am helping the son of a friend with his 2nd quarter college general chem class (starts with thermodynamics)–the start of the weeding for pre-meds. The tests are multiple choice–25 of them in 70 minutes. And many of the questions require mondo calculations. The test is SOOO time pressured that it isn’t even funny. Ridiculous…and glad that I’m not taking the class for a grade.</p>
<p>TheAnalyst, maybe I’m biased because I’m a student, but I think your son has a legitimate reason to complain and report his professor. If the class average, a 43, was still given as an F, then that means that at least HALF of the students got an F on that exam. There is absolutely no reason for the majority of the students to fail ANY class, regardless of how hard the material is. The professor isn’t doing something right if he doesn’t curve that 43 into AT LEAST a C, if not a little higher.</p>
<p>Sounds remarkably similar to D’s Calc II class last term, Analyst. I hope AnalystSon is able to work through it - hard not to be angry, but you just have to soldier on.</p>
<p>Sabray–I’m still angry at my Calc II professor from almost 40 years ago. After the first test, the bottom half of the class dropped out and the guy still graded the class as if it were a normal distribution. A pox on him!! (I guess I still haven’t worked through it…)</p>
<p>Happily D survived the course and has an excellent prof for multi- they had a snow day that put them behind schedule so the prof adjusted the schedule and moved an exam because he didn’t feel they’d covered the material well enough for them to be tested. He stated that he wanted them to do well. Isn’t that great to hear? </p>
<p>My last math course was the Calc for liberal arts majors that my advisor encouraged me to take in the event I changed my mind and wanted to major in science. Right! Vivid memories of prof outlining the shape of a graph by waving his arms in the air while playing the Eagles “Take it to the Limit”. Yeah. I got a “C” and was glad to escape.</p>
<p>Thanks everybody. I hope I struck the right note of letting him know I understood where he was coming from while also letting him know that he needed to just move on. It will be a welcome sign of maturity if he does that. Generally, he has been so very happy and upbeat about school.</p>
<p>Analyst – That’s really tough, and I mostly agree with your son that any class where the median grade is an F is more a reflection of teacher than student.</p>
<p>But, this is where I’d get a little more tactical in the class: If your son sat down with a tutor in CS for a while and spent several hours reviewing the exam and the process for figuring out the correct solutions, he might learn some really important things:
He might gain a better understanding of some concepts he hadn’t understood so well, and the importance of that can’t be overstated: introductory CS classes are a lot like math classes - if you fail to understand some of the basics really well, you’re building a foundation of sand and you will feel the pain over and over again;</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The tutor can help him analyze what kind of test this professor likes, because the professor will more than likely do other tests in a similar vein. If the professor likes to give code snippets and wants to know what the code will produce given a certain input, understanding how to work with that kind of problem (which is different than figuring out how to write code yourself) is really important. </p></li>
<li><p>Does the professor like to choose tricky boundary conditions, or play with formatting of the code so that it is easy to misread the code? (Some professors like to play games with comments that had code embedded in them that some students didn’t notice wasn’t active.) Does the professor ask the student to analyze efficiency, or ask questions about data structures and algorithms? There are a lot of ways to structure tests, and in CS (and, I suspect) most other fields, spending some real time trying to understand what this means for future tests can really be helpful.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Unfortunately, many students take the Italian driver’s motto to heart when it comes to exams, “What is behind is of no importance.” My experience would dictate otherwise.</p>
<p>YMMV.</p>
<p>(And the one and only time I appealed a test grade in CS was when the professor built the problem around something to do with baseball that required some knowledge of baseball that wasn’t provided and that I didn’t have. There were very few women in CS at the time, and while he wasn’t happy, he did ultimately explain the baseball part I needed to know and let me take another crack at the problem on his whiteboard.)</p>
<p>I’m sympathetic to your son, but on the other hand, he will be better off when he learns that in college students should not be expected to be taught all the material. Some of it they have to learn on their own. Arabrab’s advice is excellent, particularly since everything Arabrab mentions (analyzing code snippets to see what they do, understanding tricky boundary conditions, understanding basic concepts, knowing data structures, understanding basic ideas about efficiency of algorithms) is in fact important and is something that students should be working with on their own until they understand it.</p>
Thinking of you both and sending hugs and positive thoughts and prayers her way.</p>