Great convo: Bar near the train station.

So a few Mondays ago I had a meeting with a graduating senior to inform him that he could no longer receive credit for the class; I had extended help on multiple occasions and thought he was finally working, but he didn't follow advice on 2 major writing assignments and cut corners on things that I had explicitly flagged he should do, resulting in me being blindsided with the fact that suddenly 2 out of 3 major writing assignments were unacceptable, in addition to the huge ongoing problems with the weekly cumulative assignment (and we were then entering the 7th of 14 sessions).

I had consulted with multiple profs I know about how to handle a situation like this, and I re-examined his assignments, the reminders/advice that I had given him, and realized I had done everything right and I had in good faith extended more than enough opportunities for him to improve, and it really was the student who had let things snowball.

So, like my faculty mentor at the institution recommended, I sent the kid an email informing him that he could no longer receive credit for my course.

The kid requested a meeting, and so I said that if he wanted, I'd be able to meet with him to explain why it was no longer possible for him to receive credit.

In preparation, I made copies of his 2 corrected writing assignments and printed out our email correspondence (it took me like 30-40 minutes on an already busy day), and that last part was helpful for me, since I realized that even with the weekly cumulative assignments, he hadn't taken some of my advice seriously, even after we had met and he said he was serious about improving.

In any case, I went through all of that with him (I had marked "Reminder #1" through "Reminder #6" and "Explicit Request #1" through "Explicit Request #3" in the margins, as well as a few "?"s next to the emails where he claimed that emails had been lost), then he kept asking for another chance, I had to tell him straight up "No", he cried, I had to email his advisor to make sure someone reached out to him, and it made my day pretty shitty, esp. since our meeting went over and I was 6 minutes late to class.

So, after class and doing administrative stuff, I went barhopping downtown.

At the pizza place by the train station, I sidled up to the bar, where a (middle-aged) (black) woman was sitting there with a glass of water and a pint glass of some mixed cocktail that was a bright hot pink.

Me and her started chatting (she thought I gave the kid enough chances), and it turns out that she was an Amtrak worker on layover from another state, and her daughter was a graduating senior from a state school there who was doing really well and had gotten some good scholarships to a local middle-tier law school (tuition was reduced to just $10,000 a year).

She just kept gushing about her daughter's achievements, and how as a little kid her daughter even used to ride the trains with her.

"She toddled on those trains, she grew up on those trains, she damn near did everything on those trains but get conceived on one, and sometimes," she was like - and at that, she leaned back slack in her barstool with her eyes rolled up in a position like she was getting fucked, and she jerked her body and esp. her pelvis up in a one-two beat like she was going over train tracks  - "Sometimes," she was like, "I'm not even so sure about that."

"What a cool kid," I was like, and I raised my beer bottle to toast about her daughter, and the woman picked up the hot pink drink.

"Is that alcoholic?", I was like.  "It's bad luck to toast with a non-alcoholic drink."

"That," she said, pointing to her water, "Is the only non-alcoholic thing I drink."