So I have this student, right?
And he's signed up for my class three times, the past three semesters. And every time, he attends for a couple weeks and then disappears totally - not even disenrolling, so he winds up with an F.
And I happen to notice on the sign-in sheet one of my colleagues has up for another class (people signing up for times to give a presentation), his name is there, but no time has been taken.
So I ask my colleague: "I see X is in your class. Has he been attending?"
"No," Colleague said, "It's the oddest thing. He showed up the first few weeks and then disappeared."
Now, because I am sometimes a suspicious wench, I thought: a-ha. Financial Aid scam. I've seen this before - people get their check to go to school and go out and buy stereo equipment or a used car and then leave town.
So I called Financial Aid. Read off his name and ID number and explained the situation. And the woman looked him up in the database.
"I'm so sorry, Dr. Ricki..." she said. "He doesn't get any aid from us. There's nothing we can do."
"You mean to say, he or his family pays for him to go to college, he basically drops out every semester, and no one's twigged to that fact?"
"Looks that way."
Dang. Daaaaaaaaang. If I had tried a stunt like that, my butt would be yanked out of school (by my dad) so fast, my head would spin.
Either this is someone who's independently wealthy, keeps thinking he wants a university degree, and then keeps changing his mind, or he has a rich relative he's skimming from. Or something. It's quite baffling.
Like I said to Colleague when I gave him the "rest of the story" - dude must be getting some money. There's not a lot you can do that's more interesting than going to college (At least, IMHO) unless you have a buttload of money...I would think sitting at home watching daytime tv would get seriously old seriously fast.
But what do I know, I'm one of those weird kids who became a prof....
Thursday, March 08, 2007
crazy, man
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3 comments:
My first boyfriend had been a kid like that. He had a huge trust fund, very little parental supervision (they basically were self-involved and into their own thing) - and spent his first years in college doing drugs, and not going to class. Oh, and also skiing and snowboarding 24/7 since it was in Colorado. Eventually he flunked out of school - was arrested for some drug-related crime - and was scared enough and humiliated enough that he totally got his act together. Quit drugs, re-committted to going to school - and became a type A maniac. (I probably would have liked him better in his wilder incarnation. He was way too type-A for me, too controlling). But still -he's now a lawyer, and an awesome success - doing the kind of law he wants to do, has a wife, kids, and is quite brilliant. But all of that happened mainly because he had so much money and so little parental care that he pissed away his entire trust fund and wasted 4 years of his life.
Eventually his behavior caught up to him - in a big bad way, involving the police - and for him it was the best thing.
My court reporter has an uncle who told his children that as long as they were in school, he'd pay their rent and make their car payments.
Guess how long they've been "in school."
Uh, careful. I had a situation like that once and sent the student a terse email message, asking him where he'd been and "requesting" that he contact the other students in his group. I got an email message about a week later from a strange address I hadn't seen. It was from his father. My student had disappeared because he'd been killed in a car wreck.
I felt really awful about that.
Just sayin.
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