Monday, October 20, 2008

You're Kidding, Right?

Two weeks ago I taught two sessions in a quantitative methods course on Excel and how to make charts and graphs and junk. I taught these sessions because there is a homework assignment on using Excel and making charts and graphs and junk that is due tomorrow (Tuesday).

This was a quick, crash course leading to much frustration for my poor students. But I gave them a cheat sheet online. I gave them my email. I conducted two tutoring sessions on campus during Fall Break (yes, that was 6 hours of my Monday and 6 hours of my Wednesday). I gave them my cell phone number. All of this in the hope of helping them through this.

Cut to last night when I got 7 emails from students who just starting on the assignment. ARGH! Today, I have gotten 9 emails from similarly timely and organized undergraduates. I just got an email at 5:00 pm the night before the assignment is due from a student who still hasn't downloaded the damn thing! And finally, a student just called my cell phone to double check that they could create all the charts and graphs and junk by hand and turn it in....

Yup. I was just teaching you Excel to hear myself talk about something reeeeeaaaaaalllllyyyy boring for fun.

4 comments:

athena said...

Excel is NOT boring!

Eris said...

I know. I love it! But some of my students didn't share my enthusiasm.

The Numismatist said...

Once again, not my genes.

Muriel said...

You should see the spreadsheet I created of all of our books alphabetized by author, then by title, then by genre.