Thursday, February 05, 2009

Hm-m-m-m, did I remember to teach something important?

Periodically, students who miss class will e-mail with the reason and then they'll ask: "Did I miss anything important?" (Actual quotation from an e-mail this week).

I'm not really sure how to respond.

"In this class? Not a chance..."

"No, it was just the usual load of bull"

"I'll hold off on the important stuff till after the midterm"

Any suggestions?

5 comments:

Knumb said...

"Well, we went over the question for which the answer is 42."

Brad Wright said...

Very good...

Gruntled said...

Survey all your classmates and calculate the correlation. That's the important stuff. Unless they misunderstood.

Jay Livingston said...

I remember some years ago someone circulating a list of answers to this question. It included things like, "No, when we saw you weren't there, we just put our heads on our desks and had quiet time for an hour." And other smart-ass remarks. The trouble is that the people who I thought might have been the ones who sent me the list have no memory of it. Nor can I find it on the Internet. But when you Google "did I miss anything" you get 164,000 hits. Adding "important" reduces that to about 4500. So Brad, you're not the only one to be asked this (I've gotten the question a few times in my career), and you won't be the last."

Anonymous said...

This may be what Jay was thinking of.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wayman/poem5.htm

The url seems to be cut off there, but if you search for "Tom Wayman" &
"Did I miss anything" it will come up.