so i'm considering choosing a new favourite professor...
2006-03-09 | 12:15 a.m.

I'm feeling a tad outraged tonight, and more than a little confused.

I was about five minutes late getting to class this morning. When I got there, one of my classmates was out in the lobby. She said, "Hey, Susan is looking for your assessment report."

This would be the assessment report that I and my partner were supposed to email off to her yesterday. The assessment report that nearly didn't get sent due to two completely independent sets of computer-related complications, one at her place and one at mine. The assessment report that I dashed off to the library to finish off and email in right before my meeting with one of my other profs yesterday.

So, I was thinking, crap, I went to all that trouble to send it in and the system ate it? What a piss-off. That'll teach me to rely on crappy McGill Webmail. But I figured I'd just talk to the prof at the break and we'd get the whole thing straightened out. Hell, I had a copy of the report with me, on my USB key.

It did occur to me to wonder how this particular classmate knew that the prof hadn't received my report.

After I went into the class and sat down, I discovered that several other people in the class also knew that the prof hadn't received my report. In fact, it looked like the entire class knew.

Call me crazy, but I think that telling an entire class that one of their classmates has failed to hand in an assignment, while said classmate isn't even there is just a smidge unprofessional.

Anyway. I talked to her at the break and went up to her office at lunch, and offered to copy the report onto her computer from my USB key. She said not to bother, just to email it again when I got home, and she'd look at it on Friday.

So, a little while after getting home, I opened up my email so that I could resend the file.

Waiting for me in my inbox was an email from the prof.

Oh, good, I thought. She found it. I am vindicated, and plus I don't have to resend it.

So I opened up the email. Sure enough, she'd received the report. And read it -- which surprised me a bit, because she'd said she wouldn't have time to look at it until Friday. Not only had she read it, but she'd provided a list of comments, and a grade (lower than I would have liked, but fair).

Then she suggested my partner and I meet with her after class tomorrow to go over her suggested corrections.

Wait, wait, I thought. That can't be right. We don't have class with her tomorrow.

So I checked to see when the email had been sent.

It was sent last night.

So, to summarize:

She told the entire class that I hadn't done my assignment, when I wasn't even there to defend myself, this in spite of the fact that I had done the assignment, and not only had she received it, but she had read, commented on, and graded it, less than a day earlier.

Did I mention that the class I'm taking with her is the only one she teaches? Or that only two groups were supposed to hand in reports yesterday? How could she have forgotten?

All year, I've thought of her as the best professor in the department. But I'm at a loss here. It just seems so ... I don't know. It makes absolutely no sense.

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