Given that we can’t do much about clueless students other than laugh, here are a few incredible anecdotes: http://philosophersanon.blogspot.com/2008/04/annual-bitch-about-grade-negotiation.html
My favourite:
I once had a student complain after having missed an exam that he didn’t *know* that the exam would be on the day he missed. I said, “the exam days are indicated on the syllabus.” He replied: “you never told us that we had to read the syllabus.”
Suppose the teacher had wasted his time and told the students that they had to read the syllabus. Could the student then get off the hook by saying that the teacher had never said that they needed to follow his instructions?
Sydney
Alan Schmierer
Any student with the guts to inform a professor that he or she didn’t instruct them to actually read the syllabus probably also has the guts to suggest that the professor didn’t instruct them to follow the syllabus too…
Sounds like a future law student to me…
I wonder if getting the student to read Lewis Carroll’s ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’ would help or if it would only make matters worse. It is, incidentally, one of the most charming philosophy papers ever written: http://www.ditext.com/carroll/tortoise.html