Bored Panda reached out to Twitter user Charlsie, @charlsiekate, who shared an incident with a professor she had in her freshman year of college. “I missed the class twice the entire semester, once because my grandfather died. I got a C in the class because the teacher said it was her policy to drop people a letter grade for each absence regardless of the reason,” Charlsie tweeted in the thread.
It turns out, Charlsie didn’t understand that missing the class was such a big deal until the semester was over. “It was an honors class with nine people in it and we actually never got any grades during the semester. The class was Western Civ before 1500 and we did a lot of ancient geography research projects and wrote papers, and the final was a big paper that we turned in the last day of class.”
However, according to the former student, the class “never received any of our class work back and graded until the final day, and then it was only a couple of things. The professor throughout the semester claimed she could not grade things in a timely manner because of vertigo.”
Then the class finally received the grades, Charlsie got a C. “I was able to contest the grade through the honors program and the professor’s response was that I missed two classes and she dropped people a letter grade for every missed class. As a side note, no one in the class got an A, everyone else got a B, in a class where she had not graded any of our classroom.”
Charlsie did what she felt she had to and provided all the info, “because I definitely brought her the obit for my grandfather earlier in the semester—showing that I had to miss one class to attend my grandfather’s funeral in a town five hours away.”
The dean of the Honors program stepped in to tell the teacher that she had to change Charlsie’s grade. Since that, the only interaction Charlsie had with the teacher was during a meeting on changing her grade. “She told me I absolutely did not deserve the grade change and that she was only changing it because she was being forced to do so, not because I earned it,” the former student recounted.
When it comes to professors' mean behavior, Charlsie believes that there’s some overall confusion that “that professors are supposed to be your friend or your mentor, but they aren’t your friend, and a lot of them see themselves more as your boss, as the gatekeeper.”
In addition, she said she had the feeling that this particular professor didn’t want to be at that state university, and “she hated the football team and the Greek life and the focus on sports and the nightlife.” Having said that, Charlsie doesn’t think that being a professor is “the cushy job it once was, and a lot of professors end up places they never imagined or wanted to be, and they take it out on their students.”
The former student also stressed out that the incident happened a long time ago and it was the worst professor experience she had in college. “Most of my professors were wonderful,” Charlsie said, remembering her freshman year.
