Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

David and I had a meeting with one of the parents of the students after our last lab session last Friday. In fact it was the same student whom I had a meeting with before in the Dean’s office.

It seems that in the interim the Dean had told him to drop all but two of his subjects. This was because the boy already had 18 units of accumulation from the first two terms alone, and he says he was told that if he did not get a four-point-zero in P.E., that he would become ineligible to enroll in the next term.

I don’t think this has as much to do with his accumulation as the fact that freshmen who have a grade point average of less than one-point-zero at the end of their first year are considered ineligible to enroll. I also think it doesn’t have anything to do with erasing some of his accumulation, which only needs a minimum grade of two-point-five.

But the fact that he isn’t even attending P.E. says a lot already.

So he was left with two subjects, Trig and Robotics. For my part I told his mother that he has a chance of passing the subject because his first quiz had a percentage of eighty-nine, which makes me reluctant to fail him without giving him a fair chance. He was already asking for one or two special exams to make up for the ones he missed, which I had no intention of giving him. I just told him to take the finals.

For Robotics they tried the same tactic. They were asking for a special project to make up for the five out of eight group experiments that he missed. David even said that he wasn’t the only one with missed requirements, and mentioned the names of some of the less industrious students in David’s class.

The student immediately said he didn’t want to rely on those students. He started contradicting himself first saying that another student was kind and would help him, and later say that that same student tells the maids to say he’s not home when visited at his house for help.

I can only presume that he doesn’t want to make up all five experiments in one day (tomorrow is the day David gave him). He also made up excuses that not everyone he knew could understand the experiments fully. The engineering students got the circuitry part, while the computer science students breezed through the programming part. This was true, but I did not like him using it as an excuse to not make the effort to catch up on several weeks work in one day.

I told him, “Show me that you’ve exhausted all the possibilities first before you start rejecting all our suggestions without even leaving the room.”

Another option I gave him was dropping Robotics also, which he had a lesser chance of passing that my subject. This, his mother rejected. All or nothing, she seems to be thinking, even though it was already obvious her ultimatums weren’t working otherwise her son would have gone to classes diligently after her first visit.

They also used the boy’s social ostracism as an excuse, but I said that it’s a natural part of college life. It’s very difficult to pass college without any peer support.

And they can’t do this at the end of every term, asking for extra dispensations.