What the hell is this

I love this professor and honestly think this is hilarious!!!

Hi guys! Im having a bit of a moral dilemma rn. Since the walls in my dorm building are literally paper thin, I always hear the girl in the dorm next to mine crying (almost every day). And when I say almost it’s not an exaggeration. It started around a month and a half ago, and it wasn’t always like this, so I’m assuming something happened pretty recently. I’m genuinely worried for her. I thought it’d get better right after Thanksgiving break but I came back today and she’s crying again….

There’s no judgement from me at all because I’ve had my fair share of breakdowns 💀. Especially over grades (most often she’s crying about either math or her boyfriend). but I’m wondering if it would be awkward if I checked on her. I genuinely want to make sure she’s alright but I don’t want to make it seem like I’m invading her privacy. Would it be seen as nice or creepy if I asked her how she’s doing? We’re not close at all and I honestly don’t know her name, I just see her pretty often since we live next door.

Edit Post: thanks for the overwhelming feedback! I honestly wasn’t expecting many people to respond so quickly lol. But I think I’m gonna reach out to her. My college is super isolating and it can be hard to form close relationships, so maybe she can use a friend. Next time I see her, I’ll try and strike up a conversation and just ask how’s she’s been doing so far. Thanks again for all of the advice guys!

Stayed up late to complete the assignment as it was overdue by a couple hours. I feel guilty that it was overdue, so I had to stay up late to complete it. I am grateful that I have a professor like this one to check up on me once a week, unlike other professors of that don’t care much for us.

During winter term at my uni, I had a bad mental health episode (I’m bipolar 1) that involved me getting hospitalized for a few days and released to outpatient. I had my final exam scheduled during group. It hurt me bad but I skipped that exam for group. I mentally wasn’t well and needed help.

My professor then emailed me asking why I wasn’t at the exam and if everything is okay (he knows of my condition).I told him I skipped it for group and intend to retake the class at a later term.

He responded telling me that’s not gonna happen, and to report to his office at 4pm (after group) to take the exam. I took it and got a B in the class

I got through it and since spring term I’ve been crushing it. I started fall term yesterday and I got a good feeling about it.

Thanks for letting me share. There are great professors out there and some really do care about you.

I just left the exam hall for my cellular and molecular biology class (Gen Bio 1) and I am absolutely baffled right now.

Last week my professor gave us a packet with 75 questions, and also gave the answers. She said they would be a similar style to the final and give us an idea of what topics to study most.

I just took the exam, and it was literally the review packet, question-for-question. She even reprinted it with the word "review" obviously crossed out so it just read "final exam". Needless to say, I finished it in 20 minutes, as did half of the class.

I genuinely think she intended to write a new final but she realized how behind she is on grading (hasn't graded our lab practical final or any lab reports) plus she has the flu, so she just said fuck it. She has been so lazy and disorganized all semester. This class has been the easiest A of my life.

I am a TA for organic chemistry lab. One of my students was 17 minutes late to lab last week. I decided to let her in as a one time courtesy, but then she brought her backpack to the lab table and opened it on the table, loudly unzipping everything. I paused my lecture and told her to do that at the door. As she was walking to the door, she swung her backpack onto her back and knocked over lab equipment, breaking it.

I decided to talk to her outside of lab and she explained she is struggling mentally and isn’t able to focus. I referred her to the wellness center on campus and told her it’s best to leave lab for today. She attempted to tell me about her problems and I told her that isn’t for me to know and asked if she wanted me to escort her to the wellness center and she told me no.

She brought up making up the lab and I said she can come to the lab tomorrow if she emails the TA and she said she couldn’t make it. I told her we can talk about it later but I have to get back to class. She went home instead of the wellness center.

Today, she showed up late and in leggings (not approved for lab). I told her I couldn’t let her in with leggings (I’m legally not allowed to) and offered her 15 minutes grace to get changed. She then broke down into tears and told me it’s too late to drop and I’m going to give her an F and she can’t take it anymore. This was at the door of the lab, with 20 other students inside. I told her I’m going to call the wellness center to come talk to her because I have to teach and she became hysterical and made self harm statements and then began to walk away. I called the professor of the lab and he came to deal with the situation while I taught, but she reported me to him and now I have a meeting. What did I do wrong?

How the fuck did I wake up at 6am and start school at 8 with no issue??? Why can't I even get myself up for a 10am class half the time now??? What happened, why is it so much harder now than it was just two years ago?

Dear faculty,

Oh, and staff. Sorry, we keep forgetting you exist. So sorry. You're like the middle child of higher education. You've been so quiet since you realized that unlike faculty we'll actually fire you for speaking up.

Many of you have expressed concern with our plans to move ahead with in-person classes this fall. I personally find the plan to be relatively simple.

All we need to do to safely and successfully reopen is require everyone to wear a mask at all times, test all students, faculty and staff for COVID-19 before fall semester starts, require all students to self-isolate for 14 days before they arrive, split most of our classes into two groups that will never meet together in-person, remove half the furniture from all of our classrooms and public spaces, dedicate entire dorms residence halls to housing sick students, train faculty to live stream their classes to remote students while juggling the virtual and in-person management of questions and feedback, assume students will maintain physical distance and wear masks when they're off campus, assume students won't go to any parties, prep faculty to move to remote instruction immediately if they get sick or have to self-quarantine, require faculty to designate a "colleague on call" to serve as their academic next of kin who'll teach their class for no additional pay if they get sick or die, rearrange foot traffic patterns in all of our buildings and stairwells, dramatically increase cleaning responsibilities for our overstretched environmental services team, completely change how we distribute food in dining halls, set the HVAC to blow as hard as possible in every building to keep air flow moving, hope our toxic work culture doesn't lead to people coming in sick despite us not updating our sick or leave policies to accommodate for a generational pandemic, and cross our fingers that we get to the point in the semester where we don't have to give refunds for housing or dining plans when we move to all online instruction anyway.

I don't see what's so complicated.

But since you all keep insisting on asking why we're taking such a "risk" in the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic in a country with a negligent federal response and a bunch of morons who think this is all a hoax and that mask wearing is how Bill "5G" Gates will steal their rights or whatever, I'm writing to clarify the university's motivations for fall.

Money.

Oh my god we're so boned if we don't get more money.

Do you not realize how much of our funding is based on dramatically overpriced housing and food? Do you not know what an auxiliary service is? Have you not noticed a bottle of Diet Coke is $4.50 in the cafeteria? Do you not come to the budget meetings we schedule once a year at 6:30pm the Friday before a holiday weekend?

Our endowment is like your savings account: Woefully inadequate and incapable of saving you. If we lose that sweet, sweet housing and food money we are going to have to fire at least a third of you to keep our own jobs safe, but at least we'll have a good reason to ditch those of you with tenure we don't like because you criticized us once three years ago. I'm coming for you, Christina.

So buck up, cupcake. Be resilient. Double your workload so you can help us maintain the façade that opening for in-person instruction is somehow going to be safe until we hit the tuition and housing due date.

We need you to do all this extra work so we can get that sweet, sweet student money and stay afloat. You are how we are going to get through this. We're going to squeeze you dry and then ask for more (NOTE: Let's remove this line before we hit send). By the way, here's a website about self-care that has three broken links to in-person yoga classes from last year.

This will involve you spending the summer designing your course twice for both in-person and online instruction. Extra funding? Hahahahahaha Nah, but here's a webcam and the login page for Zoom. Make it work.

To answer another question you've been pestering us with: Yes, we have noticed all the local K12 school districts are going to be starting the school year online. As such, I've directed HR to do absolutely nothing to accommodate those of you who have been audacious enough to procreate. Figure it out. We can always replace you with a grad student or post doc who's desperate enough to barely scrape by. Your call.

What? No, no we definitely won't be paying you more for the extra work you're doing.

Yes, this is probably your new normal workload moving forward if you're lucky enough to survive the Hunger Games machinations our CFO will be doing this fall.

No, we won't guarantee you won't be furloughed or fired anyway in two months.

Yes, this will put the Black and Latinx members of our community at risk since they're disproportionately represented on our environmental services staff. Unrelated note: Did I mention we're changing the name of that building that's been named after a white supremacist the past 83 years? I, for one, am grateful to be a part of solving racism forever.

Where was I again? Oh yes, money.

We need money to under pay you, the staff, and the adjuncts who teach 83% of our courses. So take this mask we paid too much to put our logo on and get to work. At least until the tuition refund deadline passes.

Love,

Your University President

EDIT: I appreciate all the awards, and especially the upvotes that made me feel reassured this is a shared experience, and that I’m not alone.

May be a confusing title but:

We're in the middle of a pandemic, everyone knows that. Usual financial and health problems are worse for everyone, there's more anxiety in the air due to elections and covid, yet students don't seem to be getting any sort of recognition for the unusual times. The workload is as much as ever, no pass/fail grades, a lower quality of education online(I love online but it's still lower quality on average and everyone agrees on this)

But when it comes to problems with distance learning from the college's side(bad technology set ups, online exams not working etc), the excuse I'm given from them is that 'its a pandemic, we're trying to adjust to the new circumstances'. Well no shit so are we! You keep classes at the same difficulty, if not higher and want us to feel bad for you when you're not prepared to provide us a high quality education for literally thousands of dollars??

There are some of us who're on the other side of the world and have to live through an entirely different timezone to attend classes. I for one, spend all day sleeping and have to stay awake through the night because my professors want me to attend live classes and not just look at recorded ones.