Warning for grandparents of college students

Parent Cafe
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<p><a href=“http://i.imgur.com/qP4jj.png[/url]”>http://i.imgur.com/qP4jj.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>WTH? (H = politer letter of the alphabet than what I was thinking)</p>

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<p>Very funny! (I was originally afraid to click on this, thinking it would be a link to an advertisement or something worse.)</p>

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<p>Thanks for your post whatever.
I, too, was afraid to click the link.</p>

<p>Chuckling at all the extension requests due to ‘grandparent demise’.</p>

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Ooohhh! Now I get it. </p>

<p>Guess I’m slow this morning. I totally did not get that!! That is funny. Scratch my above rude response. Sorry MyLB :o :o</p>

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<p>Thanks for the much needed laugh! Two of my kids five grandparents would laugh at this… ironically it’s my mom, and my dad’s second wife!! :)</p>

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<p>My brother sent it to me (and sorry–the link does look weird). It took me a while but then totally cracked me up. Thought we could all use a laugh! (And yes–my mother thought it was hysterical.)</p>

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<p>Thanks for the explanation - I’m slow today, too!</p>

<p>:o</p>

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<p>Yup, I have had students with sick grandparents all semester. There was a very sarcastic article in “The Chonicle of Higher Education” some time back called “The dog ate my homework and other tales of woe” where a college prof goes through a few of the MANY excuses she has heard and categorizes them. Her main point was that she found it odd that anyone would seek out her most irresponsible students for help.</p>

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<p>LOL, 10char.</p>

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<p>Best laugh of the day I’ve had so far!</p>

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My cat actually does eat mine. True story. (Well she gets PO’d that it is in my lap where *she’s * supposed to be and starts tearing at the papers with her teeth - I have several semi shredded papers as souvenirs - I keep meaning to keep a camera handy to catch her in the act so I can post it on facebook - or attach one to a paper when I hand it in - would that go down well? OK, I admit it - crazy cat lady here).</p>

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<p>^^^You and me both! Okay. I’ll click, since y’all say it’s not a virus!</p>

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<p>Ah, the dead grandparent is so…common. My husband had a student some years ago who called to say he had to miss the final because he had just been diagnosed with syphilis.</p>

<p>I was the one who answered the phone and took the message, and it was hard not to laugh.</p>

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<p>Many years ago, while a T.A., I got 6 “dead grandparent” excuses. We started to ask for proof, like newspaper announcement.
It was so refeshing to have a student present a paper as a first draft, and ask for the evening to make it “good”.</p>

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<p>This really happened to S…of course it was the year he had a teacher with zero sense of humor. The other teachers thought it was funny.</p>

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<p>My father did pass away a few months ago, and DS flew up for the funeral, missing some classes. I hope his professors didn’t think he was making it up :(</p>

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<p>My mother passed away two years ago, and the funeral was 700 miles from S’s campus the weekend before classes started. He ended up missing the first day of class. He called the Dean’s office before the funeral to let them know and find out what to do. The woman was very sympathetic and told him he needed to provide the obituary from the newspaper when he returned to campus, and then the office would issue a Dean’s excuse.</p>

<p>Earlier that month S had done a 3 day job-shadow with an alumna who was an executive at a major bank, she was also a trustee of his college. She mentioned that she would be on campus the weekend before classes start for a board meeting and perhaps he could say hello. As it turns out, he was at the funeral that weekend. For various reasons, S didn’t get around to writing the thank-you note for the job shadow until after the semester started. He also apologized for not meeting up with the trustee when she was on campus. But being 20 and not sure of etiquette, he merely wrote the delay in the thank-you and not meeting her was “due to circumstances beyond my control,” which he knew sounded lame but he didn’t want to sound like he was asking for sympathy. I told him later that a simple statement of the truth would have been so much better! “I regret that I was unable to meet with you the weekend of Jan 20th. Unfortunately I was in Tennessee, attending my grandmother’s funeral.” Now he’s job hunting - so far with no luck - but he won’t even contact this trustee at all, because he believes that she thinks he blew her off. She probably does think that. </p>

<p>It drives me nuts that he had such a great contact and totally blew it with the “circumstances beyond my control” line. If he didn’t know what to write, why didn’t he just ask me or his father for advice??? :(</p>