Grade grubbing

Hey prof,

I just checked my grade for the first time this semester and saw that I have a 57% in your class. Despite only attending half the lectures and failing to submit practically any work, this came as a shock to me. You see, I’ve had a bit of a rough semester.

In a tragic freak accident that occurred exactly 12 minutes before I was going to walk into our final exam, all eight of my grandparents died. Yeah, you read that right. Eight. After the divorce, both of my parents remarried, so I ended up with four grandmas and four grandpas. Obviously, I had a pretty tough home life (vis-à-vis the whole broken home/double stepparent situation), and I think, on principle, that entitles me to at least a baseline B- in your class. Holidays were hard, okay? And then Grandma, Grammy, Granny, MawMaw, PawPaw, Pops, Grandpa and Grandpappy all up and died! I’d really rather not discuss the nature of their passing since it’s still pretty fresh, and I haven’t hammered out all the details yet. 

I’m also concurrently grieving the loss of my pet chameleon, Chameleonardo DiCaprio. Unlike all of my grandparents, he’s not dead. I just can’t find him. Chameleonardo DiCaprio has a bad habit of shirking his emotional support lizard duties by escaping from his reptile tank every two to four weeks, or whenever my roommate forgets to close the tank lid after feeding him Cheeto puffs. The last time Chameleonardo got loose, I was so besotted with grief, I couldn’t attend a single one of your classes until he was found 18 days later, his weird little lizard mittens clamped around one of my drumsticks. Recognizing his innate musical talent, I naturally had to pick up my guitar and join him. That jam session lasted another 18 days. 

Something else you may or may not know about me is that I struggle with left-handedness. Does that make typing essays on a computer particularly challenging? No. But being a southpaw does mess with my self-esteem. Did you know that in the Middle Ages and during the Inquisition, left-handed people were often accused of being witches? Put yourself in my shoes for a minute. Imagine, in this day and age, having to walk around, living in fear that someone might accuse you of having the Devil’s mark! (I actually wrote a very lengthy paper about this for my history class, which I find much more interesting and personally enriching than your class. Maybe you’d like to read it sometime when you’re not busy grading other students’ work?)

At this point, I know what you’re probably thinking. Even if I hadn’t missed the final exam, that wouldn’t make a difference because I didn’t submit almost any other work throughout the entire semester, blah, blah, blah. (I’d make a Charlie Brown teacher voice joke here, but since I’m Gen Z, I don’t get the reference.) What matters is that I COULDN’T submit any of the homework! An extremely localized EMP completely wiped out all internet connections at literally only my home address, in my bedroom, for precisely 3.5 months. The government officials who were sent to investigate were stupefied. And don’t even get me started on what happened before that. 

Back when my computer still worked and wasn’t obliterated by what was likely Russian cyber terrorism, every time I saved a homework file, it completely disappeared into the ethers of my motherboard. It’s not that I have absolutely zero idea of how to follow a file path once I save a document. The problem was that I had to photonically transport myself into the software world of my mainframe (yes, exactly like in Tron), then fight off digital bad guys in order to save my homework and the world. By the way, you never once said thank you for rescuing humanity. Rude af. 

As for the paper homework, I ran into some trouble with that, too. I’m not gonna give you some dumb “my dog ate my homework” line. Because it was my cat. What happened was that every time I took notes for your class in my notebook, Pawdrey would eat the pages and then puke them all up in a messy hairball. Being the dedicated student that I am, I dissected those hairballs like I was extracting bones from an owl pellet, but Pawdrey Hepburn is insatiable for knowledge. She’d always digested all the really important parts by the time I got to it. Yeah, you could say that Chameleonardo DiCaprio and Pawdrey Hepburn have a bit of a competitive streak when it comes to disrupting my studies. 

Anyway, I know I had all semester to bring up my grade, and you basically begged us students for the love of god please submit any missing work, please, but I didn’t think you were deadass about it. And now I really need to pass this class. So I’m wondering if there’s any way you could round my F up to an A? 

Oh, I’m also attaching a very real photo of my wrist with a hospital bracelet on, just in case none of the above excuses work. 

– Thanks in advance, 

That one student you’ve literally never seen before